India’s moon rover has successfully steered around a small crater and carried on exploring uncharted territory near the south pole, while its mothership lander has transmitted its first scientific data, as the Chandrayaan-3 mission approaches its halfway point.

Four hours after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) spacecraft landed on 23 August, and once the sun had risen on the landing site, the six-wheeled Pragyan rover – which weighs just 26 kilograms – rolled off the Vikram lander and onto the lunar surface.

The rover sat near the lander while ISRO engineers carried out tests and waited for its solar panel to begin producing power, before it set off across the surface. On 27 August, Pragyan came across a 4-metre-wide crater, requiring a change in course. The rover is now “safely heading on a new path”, ISRO tweeted on 28 August.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission has also provided its first useful scientific data, with a device on the lander called ChaSTE (Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment) sampling the temperature of the moon dust below the surface. At a depth of 20 millimetres, the temperature was around 40°C (104°F), but this dropped off rapidly because the dust is a poor thermal conductor, with the temperature falling to -10°C (14°F) at a depth of 80 millimetres.

This means there could be liquid or frozen water just beneath the surface, with huge implications for crewed missions, as water can be drunk by astronauts or used to create breathable oxygen and rocket fuel.

John Bridges at the University of Leicester, UK, says that due to the low pressure on the moon it would be unlikely to find liquid water near to the surface – even in areas where the temperature was above freezing point so water would not be trapped in ice – because it would boil away, although at lower depths the pressure could rise enough to allow liquid water. But he says that it’s too early to interpret readings from Chandrayaan-3.

“But it’s fantastic they’re getting data,” says Bridges. “You can’t help comparing it to certain other space agencies; engineers are just getting on now and doing it. They’re sort of overtaking Russia.”

A significant portion of the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s official lifespan has already passed: both the lander and rover are expected to operate for one lunar day (equivalent to 14 Earth days), which began on 23 August. This is limited by sunset cutting their ability to harvest energy from solar panels, but also by the freezing temperatures that the equipment will have to endure overnight, dropping as low as –238°C.

ISRO didn’t respond to a request for comment, but mission operations director M Srikanth told the Times of India that engineers are currently “confident” that the rover and lander will revive after the coming lunar night.

“Our priority is to ensure that the project objective of getting scientific data for one lunar day is achieved. We’re focusing on rover mobility and payload operations. This will continue for another seven days after which they (systems) will go to sleep when the Sun sets,” said Srikanth. “So far, all margins are looking good and we are confident of the lander and rover coming back to life when night ends. If that happens, that will be a bonus and in case that cannot be achieved, the mission is still complete.”

If the hardware isn’t damaged by the cold, both the rover and lander are designed to harvest solar power when available, boot up and resume transmission with Earth. The rover will be parked in a position prior to sunset that will give it the best chance of achieving this when the sun rises again, said Srikanth.

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Also:  INDIA PREVENTS MOON ROVER FROM FALLING INTO HOLE

Firefighters have been battling the flames for 11 days in northeastern Greece which have killed at least 20 people and pose an "ecological disaster".

Eleven planes and one helicopter from the EU fleet have been sent to help Greece counter the fire, north of the city of Alexandroupoli, along with 407 firefighters, spokesman Balazs Ujvari said.

The EU's civil protection service said the fire has burnt over 810 square kilometres (310 square miles) – an area bigger than New York City.

"This wildfire is the largest in the EU since 2000, when the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) began recording data," the service said.

Since it began on August 19, the bodies of 20 people have been found, 18 of them migrants including two children that were discovered in a region often used as an entry point from neighbouring Turkey.

Greece's fire service told AFP that the blaze was "still out of control" in the northeast region's Dadia National Park, a major sanctuary for birds of prey.

A large fire previously hit the park in 2011, forest ranger Dora Skartsis said, lamenting that "everything that was regenerated since has been lost" in recent days.

"We're talking about a huge ecological disaster. The image is tragic," said Skartsis, who also heads a biodiversity protection group in the region.

The forest also plays a vital economic role in supporting logging, beekeeping and tourism activities in Evros, one of the poorest regions of the country.

In Alexandroupoli alone, at least 4,000 sheep and goats have been killed in the blaze and warehouses containing animal feed destroyed, according to Kostas Dounakis, who heads the local cattle breeders' association.

Deadly impact

The European Union currently calls on a fleet of 28 aircraft – 24 water-dumping planes and four helicopters – supplied by member countries to help battle blazes in the bloc and in nearby neighbours.

It is working on creating a standalone, EU-funded air wing of 12 aircraft that will be fully in place by 2030.

"We do know that fires are getting more severe," Ujvari noted.

"If you look at the figures every year in the past years, we are seeing trends which are not necessarily favourable, and that calls for, of course, more capacities at the member states' level.

Greece has been ravaged by numerous fires this summer which the government attributes to climate change.

The EU air deployment "underscores our commitment to swift and effective collective action in times of crisis," the EU's commissioner for crisis management, Janez Lenarcic, said.

Looking beyond the fire season, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met several ministries on Tuesday to discuss the necessary reforestation of the region once the blaze is extinguished.

Environment Minister Theodoros Skylakakis also announced that work must begin on flood prevention to prevent landslides along the now barren terrain when rains return in the autumn.

© Agence France-Presse

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On Monday, Virgin Galactic announced that it will conduct its next commercial spaceflight, Galactic 03, as early as September 8. This will be the company's third commercial spaceflight, and it will carry three as-yet-unnamed passengers who bought their tickets on the company's space plane back in the early 2000s.

Should the flight occur in early September, it will mark the company's fourth spaceflight in four months, an impressive cadence after a fairly long downtime. Such a flight would also cement Virgin Galactic's leadership in the suborbital space tourism race with Blue Origin, which has been grounded for nearly a year after a launch accident with its New Shepard System nearly a year ago.

To understand why there was such a long downtime after Sir Richard Branson's flight on Virgin Galactic in 2021 and to learn how the company has reached a monthly flight cadence, I recently had a long interview with Mike Moses, the company's chief of operations and president. Moses came to Virgin Galactic in 2011 from NASA, where he worked as a flight director and then as a senior leader of the Space Shuttle program.

In this interview, we discuss how long the company's current spacecraft, VSS Unity, can keep flying, plans to introduce a new Delta-class family of spaceships, and why there probably will always be pilots at the controls of Virgin Galactic. This conversation has been edited lightly for clarity.

Ars: You came to Virgin Galactic in 2011. Can you tell me a little about your decision to leave NASA? Was it because the shuttle program was over but you wanted to continue to do human spaceflight?

Mike Moses: That's kind of it in a nutshell. It was an honor and a privilege to be there at the end of the shuttle program and kind of lead that team through. Bittersweet to be closing it out, but we know we finished strong, and everything went really, really well. I was contemplating what was next.

I was probably going to head up to headquarters with Gerst [NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier] and Bill Hill and work on what is now Artemis. And when I looked at that—it was a long way away, even back then, when they were being very optimistic with the pacings. I just wanted to keep doing operations. I had a very big heart-to-heart conversation with Gerstenmaier, and he didn't push me out the door, but he said, 'Don't feel bad about leaving. You're going to do as much for commercial space as you would if you stayed here. Take these lessons and go.' That was the little confidence boost I needed to make the switch into commercial space.

Ars: What do you think about the commercial space industry at the time?

Mike Moses: Back then, they were just getting ready with Commercial Crew. They [commercial providers SpaceX and Orbital Sciences] hadn't even flown cargo yet. So that's where the suborbital market was, and I thought they would probably be the first ones to make it, before the orbital stuff. It turns out that's not the way it played out.

Anyway, I contemplated that and felt if I was gonna stick around and do orbital stuff, I would have probably stayed at NASA for it. This was a chance to come try something that really is about giving people experiences. In the government, that's not really what you do, right? You're doing a service. So it was kind of a unique challenge for me. I think I was the sixth employee in the operations team. We had a procurement person, a safety person, and a medical person in, then me. I was going to help build it from scratch, and that was a huge appeal to me.

Ars: So it's been 12 years. From an engineering standpoint, what has been the biggest challenge of getting a relatively small vehicle to space and back?

Mike Moses: One of our challenges is the air launch capability. It's a great benefit of our system, but we have to be very careful with it. We transition through a large number of flight regimes. If you think about it as an airplane, we separate away; we're very heavy when we release Unity from the Mothership. And we're subsonic with a very back-heavy center of gravity when we light the motor. We're basically like any rocket in that we're half propellant.

Within 60 seconds, we've lost half our weight, we transition supersonic, we go vertical, and now we're on our tail. Then, when we come back down, you've got to break the sound barrier. You're in a feathered configuration, and now you're a very light, forward center-of-gravity aircraft. To optimize the flight-control systems, to be able to handle all of those regimes, you really have to get some flight test data in each of them and then put it together and optimize.

We had laid out some plans and we had options, but we really didn't know how fast it was going to go until we started getting that data. And that turning of the vertical is not as simple as you might think it is. You have to balance Mach numbers, angles of attack, air speeds, flutter considerations, and all of that stuff. We had to dial that in, and that took us a little while. It didn't help with the accident, and we had some damage along the way that we had to repair. That kind of slowed us down a bit.

I think our biggest technical challenge at the beginning of the program was getting the rocket motor dialed in with Scaled Composites. And then, for us, it was basically exploring that transonic flight envelope. Most rockets just punch straight through it. They don't have to try to fly and maneuver as they're going transonic. Again, I love this system, and that's its most complicated part, and we wanted to make sure we got it right.

Ars: When were you doing a lot of that work?

Mike Moses: In 2017 and 2018, we were finishing our glide program and our partial duration burns. We flew about four or five flights with less than full-duration burns of the motor that were non-space flights. That's where we were intentionally getting into that transonic envelope at different configurations to try to gather the data. Then we put it together, went to space in 2018, and went to space in 2019, and we were ready to tune it. We had some damage to the ship that took us a while to replace the H-stabs (horizontal stabilizers). That kind of slowed the program down again, and then we picked back up. And then we started flying again after COVID.

Ars: Based on what you know now, what is your confidence in the life span of VSS Unity?

Mike Moses: Pretty highly confident. One of the nice things about this is we now know its envelope, and we fly in that envelope. Our controllability and our reliability in that envelope is really high, and it's one of the things that's enabling us to turn frequently. We're flying once a month because I fly the profile I flew last time. So I can look at the data, look at the trajectories, look at the temperatures, and they're exactly what they were. We just do it again and again. Basically, you design a vehicle to be operating out here, you've tested here, and then you actually fly it here, and that's what we're doing right now. We're just staying right in this soda straw and flying, and it's performing really, really well.

Ars: But the Space Shuttle obviously had lots of wear and tear. Of course, they were going to orbit for a couple of weeks and back. But the Falcon 9 goes up and flies again. It's got wear and tear. So, from a life-span perspective, how many missions do see with this airframe?

Mike Moses: We actually think it's 500 to 1,000. It's a 10-year life span. We designed for 10 years, flying once a week, so that's roughly 1,000 flights. The new Delta fleet will be the same, a 10-year life span. When you talk about reusability, Dragon is doing amazing things, and Falcon is doing amazing things. They're still in the 10s and 20s, and we're shooting for hundreds and hundreds of flights.

There are going to be parts that wear out, that we've got to replace, and we've designed for that. You know, a lot of the metallics, you want to look for fatigue and change them out after so many flights. But the carbon fiber is really meant to be that durable. And it's one of the reasons that the mod period [modifications to VSS Unity and the Mothership VMS Eve from mid-2021 to early-2023] was both a blessing and a curse. We needed it to beef up the system so that we don't have to look at the vehicles every time. So we get that reliability of a fatigue life. But it took us longer to complete than we meant, so we were out of the flight test world for a while there. Obviously, we would have liked that to grow faster, but it did what it was supposed to do. Some places I can now inspect after every five flights instead of every flight.

Ars: What are like the major changes that are being made to the Delta-class ships to make them more manufacturable?

Mike Moses: One is manufacturing. When we laid up Unity and Imagine, you have a mold tool, and you lay down the carbon fiber, bake it in the oven, then take that part out and bond it to another one. Each tool became the fitting for the next one. You build a lower wing skin, and then you'd go build the ribs and glue them in the lower wing skin tool. You were basically assembling like if you were building a Lego Star Destroyer. Layer by layer, you build the ship. Delta-class is going to be built in modules. So there will be a forward fuselage, an aft wing, and a feather. You make those things in their own jigs, and they'll come together as one unit. And it's much more like how airlines assemble their planes—modular build-to-print, plug-and-play fittings. If you're only going to make two or three spaceships, you wouldn't invest in that type of manufacturing ability. We want to make a couple dozen.

Ars: What gives you confidence that the Delta ships will be able to fly weekly?

Mike Moses: The maintenance. Right now, on Unity, if I need to do some inspections behind the main oxidizer access panel, it's a big giant panel that's got 35 fasteners, which sometimes get stripped and then have to be replaced. It's very labor intensive because it wasn't built for this. On an airplane, there would be three quick-turn fasteners. A panel comes off, and it goes right back on again.

Delta is going to have that stuff built in. The ships also have critical joints. Unity is glued together; it has bonded joints. On Delta, we'll have them fastened with fasteners. Again, from an inspection perspective, I don't have to go bring an X-ray scanner in and determine the health of the glue joint. I have fasteners that have life on them, and I just have to know when I need to check them. It's much faster, and that's what gives us the confidence in the weekly turn rates for Delta.

If you apply that to Unity, we'd be able to turn it weekly as well. With the ship itself, things like loading a rocket motor or mating it to the Mothership—all that stuff supports a three-day turn even on Unity. It's the fact that I have to go inspect bonded joints in the wings that takes time. Somebody has to physically go in [and] bring an ultrasound scanner or an X-ray machine. We don't have to do it every flight, but we do it a lot. It's our fleet leader, and we want to be looking at it.

Ars: When do you plan to begin manufacturing the Delta ships?

Mike Moses: The tooling is being built now. Parts will start coming out by the end of this year, sub-component parts at the vendors. Major assemblies are being delivered, I think, at the middle to end of 2024, and then final assembly in 2025. Were showing first-flight capability at the end of 2025 and then moving into flight test and then into commercial service in 2026.

The benefit there is that we're keeping the same outer mold line, so I already know my aerodynamics, my loads, the thermal, all of that stuff, it's all set, I don't have to go learn it again. The structure underneath it, I'm going to change, but what it's reacting to externally, I already know. Whereas if I was starting clean sheet, making that timeline I just told you, you would be a little skeptical, right? But we already know the environment we're about to put it in, and that's a huge benefit to us.

Ars: How much of the engine is reusable, and how much do you have to replace?

Mike Moses: We have helium and oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases on board. You obviously have to fill those back up. The nitrous oxide tank is liquid, so we have to refill that every time, but it's a reusable composite overwrapped pressure vessel, so the tank itself is reusable.

The rocket motor cartridge, the fuel, is the only thing we change out every time. It's a lot like an Estes motor rocket. It's a casing that has solid fuel poured into it. We wrap it with a rubber bladder and then wrap it with Kevlar and carbon fiber to give it structure. The nozzle is integral to the back of it. That whole thing is one use. You burn it from the inside, out to the outside of the case, and the nozzle is ablative and sheds material to dump heat. It's not reusable at that point. It takes us about four hours to take an old motor out and put a new one in, so it's not that hard to change one out. Currently, we make them two to three a month. There is a high cost per unit because we're using our research and development test stand.

But we've laid out a new set of test stands in Mojave, where we can make about 20 motors a month if we need to. When we get to the Delta class, we're going to need to build a bigger facility. We're going to do more of an assembly line, and then the unit cost per motor just drops dramatically at that point. It's not that expensive, and it's not that labor-intensive. And to be honest, from a consumer perspective, I really love that it's a very durable, simple system. I have six of them stored out here in the hangar, and they're not a hazard.

It's just simple and plain, but that's a good thing in a consumer product. I call it a station wagon. Richard (Branson) likes to talk about it being a sports car. It's a station wagon. I just want it to do simple, reliable things regularly. You're not going to go to the Moon on a hybrid rocket motor. You're not going to go to Space Station on a hybrid rocket motor. But you want to do suborbital tourism? It's a really great choice for that.

Ars: How many more Motherships do you think you're going to need?

Mike Moses: Let's say our goal is to fly daily. We round that up and say 400 flights a year. Everybody asks where we got the 400. Just take 365 and round up. So once-a-day operations, plus a couple extra. If a spaceship can turn on three to five days, I need probably four to eight of those, so I have one ready every day. A Mothership can turn every other day, so I probably need two Motherships alternating in parallel. Three would be nice to have. We basically need two flying Motherships, and that's the model to be able to handle daily flight. That requires a mothership that can fly a little more frequently than Eve.

Ars: I've heard there are some pretty high maintenance requirements for Eve.

Mike Moses: We've done a lot of work on that. The mod period was mostly focused on Eve. Unity got some work, but most of it was aimed at Eve. We're on roughly weekly centers with Eve now, and we have more work planned [meaning] that we can get a little better than that. Then we'll be building new Motherships that will be able to do more and more reliable flights. Our biggest challenge with Eve is that it was built back in 2008. At the time, it was the largest all-composite aircraft, and some of those lessons learned are still in it.

Ars: I don't think these vehicles were optimized for reuse, were they?

Mike Moses: They weren't optimized for that. We've been modifying them over the years... Folks who come to our company [often] say the same thing, that Scaled Composites built these vehicles as prototypes. Yes. But we spent the last 10 years changing it from a prototype into a low-rate operational vehicle. That was the point of all the maintenance we've been doing on them.

Ars: You've obviously got a great group of pilots. And coming from the shuttle program, I'm sure you have great confidence in the people flying the vehicles. But we're in an industry now that's moving toward automation. New Shepherd and Crew Dragon are automated. I could go to orbit in Dragon, I think. The astronauts don't touch it. But it seems like you're putting a lot on your pilots every flight. Is that sustainable?

Mike Moses: It's a really good question. In the model of keeping everything simple and redundant and reliable—those initial prototype vehicles, you want them human-flown. Because you're not exactly sure what environment you're going to see in a test program. Going back to pros and cons, it's great to have a human-flown vehicle. That means the very first flight has to have humans on it. The system had to be very reliable back then, so it was a high workload at the time.

Now that we've dialed it in, we've been slowly making changes to the flight control systems. We spend most of our energy not on automation but on information display and simplicity of guidance to the pilot. They get simple guidance on what to do, with simple actions they can take from that based on the flight test history. Just the way we turn into that gamma turn—there are actuators out there that drive the H-stabs up and down. During the last down period, we doubled the size of the motors, and we can drive them much faster. The pilots make less inputs, so there's less variability in what they do.

We have also changed some of the energy display so they have better details. We keep making little tweaks like that. I have very high confidence in it because we were driving that workload lower. Eventually, we will start adding digital systems, kind of like Shuttle had, so I could say, "wings level hold," and an autopilot would do that. We don't have it right now, but we have all the systems in place that we can activate in the future with some software upgrades.

We're adding in the ability to kind of bootstrap once we've gathered enough flight data and can move that into a more automated system. I don't think we'll ever go pilot-less. There's a huge benefit, I think, in a consumer product to having people with you. You get to go to space together. You're part of a crew. You have confidence in that crew. We have very highly trained pilots. We'll probably keep that for quite a while. I don't think I'll run out of people who are willing to fly the spaceship any time soon.

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This August, government airplanes and helicopters have been dropping tiny parcels from the sky for raccoons to find. Each one is about the size of a ketchup packet and contains an oral rabies vaccine that coats the mouth of the animal that bites into it. The vaccine is the United States’ best bet at limiting the spread of rabies—one of the world’s deadliest diseases.

The bait-drops along the Eastern US are part of a massive effort to stamp out rabies, which originally infected domesticated dogs brought to North America by European settlers in the 1700s. Until 1960, dogs accounted for a majority of the rabid animals in the US. Today, raccoons, bats, skunks, and foxes are the most common carriers.

In the US, human cases are rare—typically, only a few are reported every year. But the viral infection, which is spread through the bite of an infected animal, remains a threat because it’s nearly always fatal once symptoms appear. The virus is transmitted through saliva and causes inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. “The rabies virus does something very unusual. It seeks out the nerves, and the virus moves up the nerves toward the central nervous system,” says William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “It's a very feared infection.” Very few people have survived rabies without treatment, and worldwide it causes about 59,000 deaths annually.

Its high fatality rate is why, every year, the US Department of Agriculture blankets the Eastern Seaboard with more than 9 million vaccine-laden baits. Between the end of July and October, the baits are scattered by low-flying planes over rural areas and by helicopters over suburban neighborhoods. The packets move across a conveyor belt inside the aircraft to ensure they’re evenly dispersed, then fall out of a tube. In cities, teams drive around and toss the baits into bushes, culverts under roads, and dumpsters behind restaurants—common dwellings for urban raccoons.

“Any area that looks like a raccoon habitat, we stop there,” says Kathy Nelson, a wildlife biologist at the USDA, which oversees the National Rabies Management Program.

About 75 baits are distributed per square kilometer in rural environments and 150 per square kilometer in urban areas. In places where there are likely to be few raccoons, such as spruce forests in northeastern Vermont, only about 37 baits per square kilometer are dropped. Nelson says vaccinating about 30 percent of raccoons in an area is enough to stop the spread, and 60 percent is enough to eliminate rabies from an area.

The vaccines come in two flavors that are particularly tasty to raccoons: fishmeal and vanilla. Skunks and foxes are also meant to be tempted by the bait because they can carry rabies, albeit at lower rates than raccoons. Sometimes, animals that aren’t meant to eat the baits end up snatching them. Opossums and gray squirrels, for instance, are frequent thieves, says Rich Chipman, the program’s coordinator. It’s a waste of bait if the packets end up in the mouths of non-target animals, so government researchers are studying ways to make the vaccines less attractive to them.

Since 1997, the US Department of Agriculture has been distributing millions of oral rabies vaccines every year

targeting raccoons, skunks, and foxes.

Photograph: USDA

It takes eight to nine months of planning to determine where the baits should be dropped and to draw up flight plans, according to Chipman. The calculus is based on where cases of human and animal rabies occurred in previous years and the threshold of rabies immunity among animals in a certain area. “In order to refine where we're dropping our baits, we need to be very strategic about making sure we know exactly where that front is,” Chipman says, referring to the line between an area with rabies and one without it.

Five to six weeks after the bait drops, government biologists determine whether immunity has been established in an area by going out into the field to trap live raccoons, skunks, and foxes and sample their blood. The animals are released and the samples are tested for antibodies against rabies, which are generated in response to the vaccine and signal a protection against the disease.

The first US case of raccoon rabies was detected in Florida in 1947. From there, it spread to Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina. It reached northern states by the late 1980s and early 1990s, when rates shot up after raccoon hunters unwittingly relocated rabid animals from southern states to Virginia and West Virginia to restock depleted populations of local raccoons. “It was by far the largest-scale explosion of a rabies variant in the world,” Nelson says. Today, rabid raccoons can be found from Florida to Maine.

State laws forbid transporting and relocating raccoons because of the rabies risk, but Chipman says it still happens all the time. Just this month, raccoons that were trapped and ear-tagged in Ontario, Canada, showed up in a nuisance wildlife control operator’s trap in Rhode Island. “How that raccoon got there, we don’t know,” he says.

The National Rabies Management Program was established in 1997 to prevent the further spread of wildlife rabies. In 2007, canine rabies was eliminated in the US thanks to mandatory vaccination and licensing for dogs, but the risk from wild animals remains.

The baits have effectively stopped the westward march of rabies in raccoons, and the number of raccoon infections has declined since the large-scale rollout of the oral vaccine. But rabies is rising in another wild animal: bats. In 2021, the last year for which national surveillance data is available, bats were the most frequently reported rabid wildlife species, making up 34 percent of all animal cases, followed by raccoons, which accounted for about 28 percent.

For people, the risk of getting rabies from bats is also rising. In September and October 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks human cases, reported that three people in the US died of rabies after exposure to bats. Before that trio of cases, there had been just three bat-associated human rabies deaths in the previous four years.

None of the three received treatment, which includes a dose of antibodies against rabies, plus the rabies vaccine. (People at high risk of acquiring rabies, such as laboratory workers and veterinarians, get the vaccine as a preventive measure.) Because the virus takes time to travel to the brain, these treatments can thwart it if given soon enough. “If you can stop the virus from moving on, then you prevent rabies,” Schaffner says. Known as post-exposure prophylaxis, it is almost always effective.

If you are bitten by a bat, raccoon, or other animal that may have rabies, Shaffner advises washing the bite area with soap and water and going to the nearest emergency room as soon as possible for treatment. But not everyone realizes that they’ve been bitten. “If a bat does choose to bite you, their incisors are so small and so sharp you may never feel it,” Schaffner says.

In January 2021, an 84-year-old man in Minnesota died six months after waking up in the middle of the night with a bat in his room. He had no visible wounds, but when the bat was later tested for rabies, it was positive. He died even after receiving treatment, the first documented such instance in the western hemisphere. Public health officials suspect the man was immunocompromised; his case was detailed earlier this year in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

“The one species that is really emerging and causing more cases of rabies is bats,” says Jorge Osorio, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “As you can imagine, it’s difficult to find a vaccine that actually can be applied to them,” he says. After all, bats eat insects and fly, so they don’t pick up the baits meant for terrestrial animals.

One solution that Osorio and others are working on is a topical vaccine in the form of a paste or gel that could be applied to a bat that’s caught and rereleased into the wild. Because bats groom and feed one another, researchers think this could be a way to spread a vaccine throughout a population. Another idea is to spray a vaccine into caves or other bat habitats. But these approaches are still in the early stages and haven’t been thoroughly tested.

Charles Rupprecht, former chief of the CDC’s rabies program, says a bat vaccine would not only be expensive to develop, but testing could pose ecological and ethical questions since many bat species in the US are in severe decline or endangered.

He thinks eradication in raccoons is possible but would likely require more resources. “We've been able to prevent raccoon rabies from moving westward,” he says. “What we haven't been able to do is eliminate it from any state where raccoon rabies currently exists.”

Chipman says the government’s goal is to eliminate raccoon rabies by 2063. That’ll take a lot more bait.

Source

• Exxon projects oil, gas to be 54% of world’s needs in 2050

• CO2 emissions in 2050 to double IPCC's desired scenario

HOUSTON, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Oil and natural gas are still projected to meet more than half of the world’s energy needs in 2050, or 54%, Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) said on Monday, with the world failing to keep global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius.

The largest U.S. oil producer projects the world will reach 25 billion metric tons of energy related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2050, according to its energy outlook published on Monday.

That is more than twice of the 11 billion metric tons the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say would be needed on average in its Lower 2°C scenarios.

"An energy transition is underway, but it is not yet happening at the scale or on the timetable required to achieve society’s net-zero ambitions," the producer said.

Exxon produces less than 3% of the world's daily crude demand and in May its shareholders overwhelmingly rejected calls for stronger measures to mitigate climate change.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has been saying since 2021 that much greater resources have to be directed to clean energy technologies to put the world on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Only two of the 55 technologies needed to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 are “on track,” Exxon said citing the IEA. Emissions will decline only by 25% by 2050 as lower-emission options grow, the company said, below desired scenarios.

Overall, Exxon projects energy-related CO2 emissions will peak at more than 34 billion metric tons sometime this decade as economies and energy demand grow, and then decline to 25 billion metric tons in 2050.

Exxon is investing $17 billion over a six-year span through 2027 in lower carbon emissions technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration and hydrogen. The company says these two technologies, currently not commercial, are a significant promise for hard-to-decarbonize sectors in IPCC Lower 2°C scenarios.

Most of the capital is directed to reducing carbon emissions of its operations and of third parties. Unlike its European peers, Exxon has stayed away from consolidated renewable sources such as wind and solar power. It expects wind and solar to provide 11% of the world’s energy supply in 2050, five times today’s contribution.

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Our bodies host trillions of bacteria that we can't live without – with the highest density in our guts. But are we permanently damaging this crucial part of our body every time we take antibiotics?

"The gut microbiome is a complex network of microbiotic lifeforms and all the things they need to sustain themselves in the niche of the body," says James Kinross, a consultant colorectal surgeon at Imperial College London.

The gut microbiome plays a huge role in maintaining our health, including regulating the immune system and aiding digestion. And experts argue that antibiotics are one of the biggest threats to our gut microbiomes.

Antibiotics, commonly prescribed to treat and prevent bacterial infections, are a cornerstone of modern medicine. But in the process of targeting the infection-causing bacteria in our bodies, antibiotics can also inadvertently wipe out the other bacteria in our bodies.

There are growing concerns among scientists about the health implications of our increasing reliance on antibiotics; between 2000 and 2015, global prescriptions of antibiotics increased by 65%. The problem with this rising use of antibiotics is two-fold: the damage caused to our gut microbiomes, and growing bacterial resistance towards antibiotics.

Antibiotics have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, but there are increasing concerns around overuse (Credit: Getty Images)

"Antibiotics disrupt the intricate ecosystem of our gut microbiome, and, in doing so, put the surviving bacteria at greater risk of donating their resistant genes over to pathogens," says Gautam Dantas, professor of laboratory and genomic medicine at Washington University's School of Medicine in St Louis in the US.

We know that the more diverse our gut bacteria population is, the better. But every course of antibiotics disrupts this population because antibiotics aren't targeted enough to only kill the pathogenic bacteria causing the infection. Instead, they go after all bacteria in our guts.

"There's collateral impact," says Dantas. "Think of a forest where you're trying to get rid of one weed infection; the way we deploy antibiotics is to carpet-bomb the forest, killing the good and the bad."

When scientists have looked retrospectively at the microbiomes of people who have had an infection followed by a course of antibiotics, they've found that microbiome diversity largely recovers within a few months, Dantas says. But in some people, some good bacteria never show up again, he adds.

Dantas and his team of researchers have studied faecal samples collected from children treated at the paediatric hospital connected to his laboratory. These samples were collected routinely, before any infections and antibiotics, which allowed his team to see the changes in children who get an infection and are given antibiotics later on.  

Dantas has used these samples to compare changes to the gut microbiome after antibiotics in two groups of infants – pre-term babies, who are born before 36 weeks, and term infants, born after 36 weeks.

We're losing diversity in our guts and crucial microbes that have sustained us for hundreds of thousands of years – James Kinross

"What we know happens in adults after antibiotics happens more dramatically in babies: a lower diversity of the microbiome, and huge spikes in drug-resistant genes," he says.

While the effects differ from person to person, and depend on our age, the consensus among scientists is that the effects of one course of antibiotics can be permanent.

"Some people are very susceptible to damage in [their] microbiome from antibiotics, and their ecology of their microbiome will change dramatically and never return to what it was before the antibiotic dose," Kinross says.

"We're losing diversity in our guts and crucial microbes that have sustained us for hundreds of thousands of years [are being lost] on an unprecedented time scale."

But scientists are still trying to work out the long-term health consequences of antibiotic use on our gut microbiomes.

Pathogenic bacteria may pick up resistance from benign bacteria which survive a antibiotic treatment (Credit: Getty Images)

"We know that antibiotics have the capacity to affect every single domain of microbiome function." Kinross says. "They don't just lead to a depletion in the number of bacteria, but they also effect the function of microbes in complex, individualised ways that we don't understand well."

It's not just the impact on the gut bacteria that is causing concern, but also secondary consequences on the development of the immune system, Kinross adds.

Studies show that taking recurrent doses of antibiotics has a cumulative effect, and the impact is also greater if you take a take a more broad-spectrum dose. This is often referred to as the "multiple hit hypothesis".

"Those random extension events, every now and again, will hit a critical bug," says Dantas. "This is the weird evolutionary experiment we're running on ourselves every time we take an antibiotic."

Resistant bacteria can migrate from the gut to other areas, so what happens in the gut has an impact on the rest of our body – Craig MacLean

The other consequence of long-term antibiotic use is the risk of resistance. When a population of bacteria is exposed to an antibiotic, those that lack the genes for antibiotic resistance tend to die off. But ones which do have them – either genes they have picked up from their environment, or mutations that have arisen spontaneously – will survive. In this way, the drugs actively select for bugs that are antibiotic-resistant. This becomes a problem when pathogenic bacteria reap the rewards of this adaptation.

"Every time we deploy antibiotics, it increases the proportional risk of the gut microbiome being enriched for drug-resistant genes, so that next time the pathogen comes around, it might be able to pick up some of these selective resistant genes from the gut," Dantas says.

And this process isn't confined to our guts, says Craig MacLean, professor of evolution and microbiology at the University of Oxford. "Resistant bacteria can migrate from the gut to other areas, so what happens in the gut has an impact on the rest of our body," he says.

Scientists say the indiscriminate use of antibiotics can have long-term effects on both gut health and the wider immune system (Credit: Getty Images)

The harmful and life-saving impact of antibiotics is one of the biggest conundrums troubling scientists around the world. While there is no one solution, there are approaches which could mitigate the harmful effects of antibiotics on our health.

"Antibiotics are amazing medicines that have saved millions of lives. They're very precious resources and should be used, but we need to understand how to precisely target them," says Kinross.

Scientists are now looking at antibiotics that are more targeted towards parts of the body, as well as ones that target specific bacteria, MacLean says, with the idea of only getting rid of the bacteria you want to get rid of, and leaving beneficial bacteria in the gut intact.

But the biggest tool currently at our disposal, says Anthony Buckley, associate professor in gut microbiology at the University of Leeds, is our diets. "Nutrition is one of the biggest drivers behind establishing the human microbiome," he says.

The University of Leeds' healthcare associated infections research group has been testing the effects of antibiotics on the microbiome for the last two decades.

It's much better to not have to rely on antibiotics – James Kinross

The highest variety of foods we eat is usually associated with a higher variety of microbes in the gut, and fibre in particular seems to have a really positive impact," says Ines Moura, a research fellow at Leeds University's faculty of medicine and health, who is currently testing the effects of different nutrients on the gut microbiome and how they can reduce the negative effects of antibiotics.

Dietary fibre is particularly important because microbes in our body digest it and produce short chain fatty acids, which provide energy to the cells lining the colon, says Buckley.

"When you have antibiotics, the microbes that produce short-chain fatty acids get depleted and take time to recover. Our theory is that, by ingesting dietary fibre, they're providing a substrate for those microbes to grow on and produce short-chain fatty acids, and hopefully establish balance again," he says.

Eating a diet high in fibre is thought to help creative a gut environment more beneficial to healthy bacteria (Credit: Getty Images)

The irony underlying the use of antibiotics is that, with each course we take, we potentially lower our body's ability to fight infection, and, therefore, increase our reliance on antibiotics.

"It's much better to not have to rely on antibiotics," Kinross says, "And instead focus on the bio-resilience of our internal ecology by eating healthily, particularly in a person's early life, since this is when antibiotics cause the most damage."

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Scientists have measured just how fast members of the witch hazel family can shoot their seeds thanks to spring-loaded fruits.

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Japan aims to launch the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) into space by mid-September with a lunar landing seen starting as early as January 2024.

Japan would become the fifth country to achieve a moon landing after the United States, the former USSR, China and now India. The success of India's Chandrayaan-3 moon exploration mission this month contrasts with recent setbacks in Japan's space missions.

WHAT IS JAPAN'S LUNAR MISSION?

More than two decades in development, the SLIM project is focused on using advanced, image-based navigation technology and lightweight hardware to achieve a high-precision landing.

Dubbed "moon sniper", SLIM is designed to land no more than 100 metres from its targeted site. That's a giant leap from the conventional accuracy of several kilometres for lunar landers, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

By building a lightweight lander, JAXA aims to reduce launch costs and allow more frequent missions. SLIM weighs a little more than 700 kg (1,540 lb) at launch, or less than half of India's Chandrayaan-3.

It uses an efficient chemical propulsion system and includes miniaturised electronic devices.

SLIM's overall development cost about 15 billion yen ($102 million) as of this year. India launched its lander with a budget of about $75 million.

WHY IS THE TECHNOLOGY IMPORTANT?

The "pinpoint" landing technology enables a more granular search of rocks and water resources and boosts the spacecraft's chance of survival by helping it select the best location for solar power generation and avoid rough terrain, JAXA says.

SLIM is set to land on the slope of the Shioli crater near lunar sea Mare Nectaris. The site was selected based on high-resolution images from lunar orbiters.

SLIM employs "vision-based navigation" to recognise where it is flying during the landing phase, JAXA says. That allows the craft to match real-time images from its camera with existing ones of the lunar surface.

WHY IS JAPAN'S SPACE PROGRAMME IMPORTANT?

Although 14 Japanese astronauts have been into space - the fourth most after the U.S., Russia (including the former Soviet Union) and China - Japan's space missions have focused on developing launchers and space probes and have relied on the United States and Russia to carry astronauts.

Japan aims to send an astronaut to the moon's surface in the latter half of the 2020s as part of NASA's Artemis programme.

Japan's advanced image technology, like that used in SLIM, is seen as a key part of its response to China's growing military presence in space.

WHAT ABOUT RECENT SETBACKS?

The launch of SLIM was delayed for a few months after JAXA manually destroyed the initial model of the new medium-lift H3 rocket due to engine ignition trouble after launching in March.

JAXA also failed in the launch of an Epsilon small rocket in October 2022, followed by an engine explosion during a test last month.

The government says private-sector projects should play a bigger role. Start-ups including ispace (9348.T) and orbital debris-removal firm Astroscale have entered the market and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, on top of traditional industrial heavyweights such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011.T).

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely mental pictures bubbling out of the imagination. Brain scan studies have repeatedly found that seeing something and imagining it evoke highly similar patterns of neural activity. Yet for most of us, the subjective experiences they produce are very different.

“I can look outside my window right now, and if I want to, I can imagine a unicorn walking down the street,” said Thomas Naselaris, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. The street would seem real and the unicorn would not. “It’s very clear to me,” he said. The knowledge that unicorns are mythical barely plays into that: A simple imaginary white horse would seem just as unreal.

So “why are we not constantly hallucinating?” asked Nadine Dijkstra, a postdoctoral fellow at University College London. A study she led, recently published in Nature Communications, provides an intriguing answer: The brain evaluates the images it is processing against a “reality threshold.” If the signal passes the threshold, the brain thinks it’s real; if it doesn’t, the brain thinks it’s imagined.

Such a system works well most of the time because imagined signals are typically weak. But if an imagined signal is strong enough to cross the threshold, the brain takes it for reality.

Although the brain is very competent at assessing the images in our minds, it appears that “this kind of reality checking is a serious struggle,” said Lars Muckli, a professor of visual and cognitive neurosciences at the University of Glasgow. The new findings raise questions about whether variations or alterations in this system could lead to hallucinations, invasive thoughts, or even dreaming.

“They’ve done a great job, in my opinion, of taking an issue that philosophers have been debating about for centuries and defining models with predictable outcomes and testing them,” Naselaris said.

When Perceptions and Imagination Mix

Dijkstra’s study of imagined images was born in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when quarantines and lockdowns interrupted her scheduled work. Bored, she started going through the scientific literature on imagination—and then spent hours combing papers for historical accounts of how scientists tested such an abstract concept. That’s how she came upon a 1910 study conducted by the psychologist Mary Cheves West Perky.

Perky asked participants to picture fruits while staring at a blank wall. As they did so, she secretly projected extremely faint images of those fruits—so faint as to be barely visible—on the wall and asked the participants if they saw anything. None of them thought they saw anything real, although they commented on how vivid their imagined image seemed. “If I hadn’t known I was imagining, I would have thought it real,” one participant said.

A 1910 study by the psychologist Mary Cheves West Perky found that when our

perceptions match what we are imagining, we assume that their inputs are imaginary.

Photograph: DOI/Quanta Magazine

Perky’s conclusion was that when our perception of something matches what we know we are imagining, we will assume it is imaginary. It eventually came to be known in psychology as the Perky effect. “It’s a huge classic,” said Bence Nanay, a professor of philosophical psychology at the University of Antwerp. It became kind of a “compulsory thing when you write about imagery to say your two cents about the Perky experiment.”

In the 1970s, the psychology researcher Sydney Joelson Segal revived interest in Perky’s work by updating and modifying the experiment. In one follow-up study, Segal asked participants to imagine something, such as the New York City skyline, while he projected something else faintly onto the wall—such as a tomato. What the participants saw was a mix of the imagined image and the real one, such as the New York City skyline at sunset. Segal’s findings suggested that perception and imagination can sometimes “quite literally mix,” Nanay said.

Not all studies that aimed to replicate Perky’s findings succeeded. Some of them involved repeated trials for the participants, which muddied the results: Once people know what you’re trying to test, they tend to change their answers to what they think is correct, Naselaris said.

So Dijkstra, under the direction of Steve Fleming, a metacognition expert at University College London, set up a modern version of the experiment that avoided the problem. In their study, participants never had a chance to edit their answers because they were tested only once. The work modeled and examined the Perky effect and two other competing hypotheses for how the brain tells reality and imagination apart.

Evaluation Networks

One of those alternative hypotheses says that the brain uses the same networks for reality and imagination, but that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans don’t have high enough resolution for neuroscientists to discern the differences in how the networks are used. One of Muckli’s studies, for example, suggests that in the brain’s visual cortex, which processes images, imaginary experiences are coded in a more superficial layer than real experiences are.

With functional brain imaging, “we’re squinting our eyes,” Muckli said. Within each equivalent of a pixel in a brain scan, there are about 1,000 neurons, and we can’t see what each one is doing.

The other hypothesis, suggested by studies led by Joel Pearson at the University of New South Wales, is that the same pathways in the brain code for both imagination and perception, but imagination is just a weaker form of perception.

During the pandemic lockdown, Dijkstra and Fleming recruited for an online study. Four hundred participants were told to look at a series of static-filled images and imagine diagonal lines tilting through them to the right or left. Between each trial, they were asked to rate how vivid the imagery was on a scale of 1 to 5. What the participants did not know was that in the last trial, the researchers slowly raised the intensity of a faint projected image of diagonal lines—tilted either in the direction the participants were told to imagine or in the opposite direction. The researchers then asked the participants if what they saw was real or imagined.

Dijkstra expected that she would find the Perky effect—that when the imagined image matched the projected one, the participants would see the projection as the product of their imagination. Instead, the participants were much more likely to think the image was really there.

Yet there was at least an echo of the Perky effect in those results: Participants who thought the image was there saw it more vividly than the participants who thought it was all their imagination.

In a second experiment, Dijkstra and her team didn’t present an image during the last trial. But the result was the same: The people who rated what they were seeing as more vivid were also more likely to rate it as real.

The observations suggest that imagery in our mind’s eye and real perceived images in the world do get mixed together, Dijkstra said. “When this mixed signal is strong or vivid enough, we think it reflects reality.” It’s likely that there’s some threshold above which visual signals feel real to the brain and below which they feel imagined, she thinks. But there could also be a more gradual continuum.

To learn what’s happening within a brain trying to distinguish reality from imagination, the researchers reanalyzed brain scans from a previous study in which 35 participants vividly imagined and perceived various images, from watering cans to roosters.

In keeping with other studies, they found that the activity patterns in the visual cortex in the two scenarios were very similar. “Vivid imagery is more like perception, but whether faint perception is more like imagery is less clear,” Dijkstra said. There were hints that looking at a faint image could produce a pattern similar to that of imagination, but the differences weren’t significant and need to be examined further.

Scans of brain function show that imagined and perceived images trigger similar patterns of activity, but the

signals are weaker for the imagined ones (at left).Courtesy of Nadine Dijkstra/Quanta Magazine

What is clear is that the brain must be able to accurately regulate how strong a mental image is to avoid confusion between fantasy and reality. “The brain has this really careful balancing act that it has to perform,” Naselaris said. “In some sense it is going to interpret mental imagery as literally as it does visual imagery.”

They found that the strength of the signal might be read or regulated in the frontal cortex, which analyzes emotions and memories (among its other duties). But it’s not yet clear what determines the vividness of a mental image or the difference between the strength of the imagery signal and the reality threshold. It could be a neurotransmitter, changes to neuronal connections or something totally different, Naselaris said.

It could even be a different, unidentified subset of neurons that sets the reality threshold and dictates whether a signal should be diverted into a pathway for imagined images or a pathway for genuinely perceived ones—a finding that would tie the first and third hypotheses together neatly, Muckli said.

Even though the findings are different from his own results, which support the first hypothesis, Muckli likes their line of reasoning. It’s an “exciting paper,” he said. It’s an “intriguing conclusion.”

But imagination is a process that involves much more than just looking at a few lines on a noisy background, said Peter Tse, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College. Imagination, he said, is the capacity to look at what’s in your cupboard and decide what to make for dinner, or (if you’re the Wright brothers) to take a propeller, stick it on a wing and imagine it flying.

The differences between Perky’s findings and Dijkstra’s could be entirely due to differences in their procedures. But they also hint at another possibility: that we could be perceiving the world differently than our ancestors did.

Her study didn’t focus on belief in an image’s reality but was more about the “feeling” of reality, Dijkstra said. The authors speculate that because projected images, video, and other representations of reality are commonplace in the 21st century, our brains may have learned to evaluate reality slightly differently than people did just a century ago.

Even though participants in this experiment “were not expecting to see something, it’s still more expected than if you’re in 1910 and you’ve never seen a projector in your life,” Dijkstra said. The reality threshold today is therefore likely much lower than in the past, so it may take an imagined image that’s much more vivid to pass the threshold and confuse the brain.

A Basis for Hallucinations

The findings open up questions about whether the mechanism could be relevant to a wide range of conditions in which the distinction between imagination and perception dissolves. Dijkstra speculates, for example, that when people start to drift off to sleep and reality begins blending with the dream world, their reality threshold might be dipping. In conditions like schizophrenia, where there is a “general breakdown of reality,” there could be a calibration issue, Dijkstra said.

“In psychosis, it could be either that their imagery is so good that it just hits that threshold, or it could be that their threshold is off,” said Karolina Lempert, an assistant professor of psychology at Adelphi University who was not involved in the study. Some studies have found that in people who hallucinate, there’s a sort of sensory hyperactivity, which suggests that the image signal is increased. But more research is needed to establish the mechanism by which hallucinations emerge, she added. “After all, most people who experience vivid imagery do not hallucinate.”

Nanay thinks it would be interesting to study the reality thresholds of people who have hyperphantasia, an extremely vivid imagination that they often confuse with reality. Similarly, there are situations in which people suffer from very strong imagined experiences that they know are not real, as when hallucinating on drugs or in lucid dreams. In conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, people often “start seeing things that they didn’t want to,” and it feels more real than it should, Dijkstra said.

Some of these problems may involve failures in brain mechanisms that normally help make these distinctions. Dijkstra thinks it might be fruitful to look at the reality thresholds of people who have aphantasia, the inability to consciously imagine mental images.

The mechanisms by which the brain distinguishes what’s real from what’s imaginary could also be related to how it distinguishes between real and fake (inauthentic) images. In a world where simulations are getting closer to reality, distinguishing between real and fake images is going to get increasingly challenging, Lempert said. “I think that maybe it’s a more important question than ever.”

Dijkstra and her team are now working to adapt their experiment to work in a brain scanner. “Now that lockdown is over, I want to look at brains again,” she said.

She eventually hopes to figure out if they can manipulate this system to make imagination feel more real. For example, virtual reality and neural implants are now being investigated for medical treatments, such as to help blind people see again. The ability to make experiences feel more or less real, she said, could be really important for such applications.

It’s not outlandish, given that reality is a construct of the brain.

“Underneath our skull, everything is made up,” Muckli said. “We entirely construct the world, in its richness and detail and colour and sound and content and excitement. … It is created by our neurons.”

That means one person’s reality is going to be different from another person’s, Dijkstra said: “The line between imagination and reality is just not so solid.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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On a balmy Saturday in July, at approximately 15:30 hours, the first signals come in over the radio receiver. Its faint dip dip dip is barely detectable as a small team of engineers and scientists scramble to their stations and listen, trying to decipher the message, delivered through Morse code. They have 72 hours and time is ticking. What was once an auxiliary room above a garage in suburban Maryland is now command central.

Dip dip dip, the code repeats, before fading once again, absorbed by a whoosh of static.

“Did anyone reach out to Los Alamos?” asks someone.

In what sounds like a scene ripped from the movie Oppenheimer, which coincidentally had its premiere the day before, is instead part of the Maritime Radio Historical Society’s Crypto Event. From their own radio station, KPH in Inverness, California, MRHS crypto coordinator Kevin McGrath is transmitting a message based on one sent 81 years ago, by Kapitänleutnant Hartwig Looks, commander of the German submarine U-264. That message was intercepted by the British destroyer HMS Hurricane in the North Atlantic in 1942.

Back then, however, the codebreakers in Bletchley Park were unable to decrypt U-boat radio traffic, due to the introduction of the newer and more complex four-rotor Enigma code machine, an upgrade from the three-rotor model. The “Looks Message,” as it has become known, remained unbroken until 2006 when a dedicated team of Enigma experts deciphered it using modern computers and advanced cryptographic techniques. 

Tim Koeth, a professor and nuclear physicist in the department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Maryland, just so happens to have an original three-rotor Enigma machine. Of the 145 participants in this year’s Crypto Transmission Event, Koeth is the only one using an Enigma machine. Now, if he can just get it to work before time runs out.

A primer: An Enigma is a device used by the German military command to encode strategic messages before and during WWII. From the outside, it looks a lot like a courtroom stenography machine. Inside is a whole other story, involving a complex system of letter keys and plugboards and rotors. The important thing—and what Koeth is trying to gather—is information about the starting position, the order of the three rotors, and how to position the plugs in the board. The whole system relies on the sender and receiver setting up the same pattern. If not, Koeth essentially will be decoding gibberish.

“I need total quiet,” he says, moving between two of the three radios he’s set up in preparation for the event. He adjusts some knobs and waits for another call sign from Inverness. In total, the message will be sent four times: twice in Morse code, twice in radio teletype.

Jim “Jimbo” Krutzler, an electrical engineer from Flemington, New Jersey, sits in front of the third radio, an open box of Snickerdoodles by his side. Krutzler and Koeth met as undergrads at Rutgers University, at an activity fair for the ham radio club. It’s also where Koeth met his wife, Michelle Koeth, who is downstairs entertaining around 50 guests who have shown up for the couple’s annual High Voltage Weekend. Later, partygoers will take turns standing inside a Faraday cage as a Tesla coil sparks before them like crazy.

“What am I supposed to see?” Krutzler asks, staring at his screen and bouncing his knee like he has a baby on it. His T-shirt reads “Defense Nuclear Weapons School.”

“You’re supposed to see a little ladder,” explains Koeth. “Like DNA strands.”

A few minutes go by before the transmission begins again. This time, it sounds a bit different. Koeth gives the thumbs up. Holly Wilson, a student of Koeth’s who graduated with a bachelor’s in physics in 2023, gets enlisted to transcribe the code into a yellow-lined legal pad. She’s wearing a faded Fleetwood Mac T-shirt and has a massive tattoo of an octopus wrapping her arm. Wilson writes down OKTOBER 7 and DBK WSE before the signal fades.

“That’s it, that’s it!” shouts Koeth. He consults the page from the German Army Staff Machine Key Number 28 book, provided by MRHS in a link on its website. He’ll need to obtain the key setting for the Enigma machine, the first step in decoding the message. The team has been at it for almost an hour.

At last, Koeth opens the wood cover of the Enigma. Although it’s possible to purchase one for between $300,000 to $500,000, Koeth received his as a loan from a collector in California, a WWII buff who has an exact replica of Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, in his backyard. (Ensuing calls from concerned neighbors.)

Koeth’s own workplace might be cause for similar concern. A faculty member at UMD since 2009, his second-floor office holds an impressive collection of radiological antiquities such as Fiestaware, Vaseline glass, and, under lock and key, some Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Rings, cereal prizes from the 1950s that contained a small amount of polonium 210.

Koeth removes two rotors from the machine, turns one to 6 and the other to 12, and plops them back inside.

“We gotta do the plugboard next,” Koeth announces before closing the lid. He begins to plug and unplug a series of tubes in a way that recalls Ernestine, Lily Tomlin’s immortal phone operator.

“No wonder the Germans lost the war,” says Larry Westrick, an electrical engineer from Opelika, Alabama. “It takes too long to communicate.”

Luckily, tenacity is part of Koeth’s job description. When he was 10, Koeth laid out plans to build a nuclear reactor in his parents’ basement in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Next, entering the code in cyphertext, Koeth pushes some of Enigma’s buttons, which in turn moves the rotors like the inner workings of a clock; a lampboard lights up a corresponding letter in plaintext. “It’s a guessing game,” he says, turning quiet. “Just think,” he says after a while, “they had to do this every day.”

Krutzler, Westrick, and a few newcomers gather around Koeth and his machine. There are 100 letters in the message and so far, none of them seem to make any sense.

“Something is wrong,” they say in unison. A joke goes around that the secret message is “Drink more Ovaltine.”

Koeth refers to a set of instructions. “Basically, you key in the first set of letters, and they should match the second set of letters. Which they don’t.”

The room is stifling, and Koeth, who proposed to Michelle by tapping “Will you marry me” in Morse code on her knee (“He always wanted to propose like Thomas Edison did.”), appears stymied.

Koeth: “They had Enigma school back then.”

Krutzler: “They had nicotine back then.”

The group finally decides to review the procedures once again, unsure they are reading the Army’s daily key settings correctly. Like the last line in an optometrist’s eye chart, one of the letters might be “R.” Or it might be “P.” It’s a sticking point, this fuzzy letter.

“The Germans wouldn’t do that to us, would they?” cracks Koeth.

Eventually, even codebreakers have to eat. Michelle Koeth calls for dinner and the team reassembles in the kitchen for deli sandwiches and microbrews. When the sun sets, the party—which includes a randy bunch of Koeth’s students, curious neighbors, a few high school teachers, a lanky surplus dealer, and a retired FBI agent—moves outdoors for some high-voltage demonstrations.

For this year’s 25th annual gathering, someone will shoot a metal ring through the center of a pulsed magnetic coil, sending it up into the skyline before returning to Earth and nearly missing Raven, the Koeths’ standard poodle. Another, using a Styrofoam cup, will replicate the pressure experienced by the submersible on its tragic voyage to the Titanic. (The cup, instead of being flattened, is miniaturized.) The grand finale is a turn in front of the Tesla coil.

Early the next morning, a master codebreaker arrives in the form of Koeth’s PhD student Noah Hoppis. It’s the first day he’s allowed out of Covid quarantine. It’s he who will figure out that the fuzzy letter is an “I.” Later, Kevin McGrath will email Koeth a clean recording of the message. He and Hoppis will work late into the night, and at 01:04 hours on Monday morning, they will correctly decode the message as:

DONITZ FROM LOOKS 

FORCED TO SUBMERGE DURING ATTACK X DEPTH CHARGES X
LAST ENEMY POSITION GRID AJ NINE EIGHT SIX THREE X
I AM FOLLOWING X

Instead of saving the world, they will receive a certificate from the Maritime Radio Historical Society. And the glory of a job well done. “I was obsessed,” says Koeth, before heading off to bed.

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Of five sites monitored in the Bellingshausen Sea region, all but one experienced a 100 percent loss of chicks, they reported in Communications Earth & Environment, a Nature journal.

They called it a "catastrophic breeding failure".

"This is the first major breeding failure of emperor penguins across several colonies due to sea ice loss, and is probably a sign of things to come," lead author Peter Fretwell, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, told AFP.

"We have been predicting it for some time, but actually seeing it happening is grim."

Last year's southern hemisphere spring—from mid-September to mid-December—saw record-low sea ice in the Southern Ocean, especially along the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, a prime breeding ground for the world's largest penguin species.

The precocious break-up of ice that forms over open water adjacent to land proved fatal for thousands of hatchlings not yet mature enough to cope with frigid ocean waters.

A baby emperor penguin emerges from an egg kept warm in winter by a male, while the female in a breeding pair embarks on a two-month fishing expedition. Upon returning to the colony, she feeds hatchlings by regurgitating.

Emperor penguin chicks, victims of the melting Antarctic sea ice.

To survive on their own, chicks must develop waterproof feathers, a process known as fledging that typically starts in mid-December and lasts a couple of weeks.

But the ice in Bellingshausen Sea colonies started to give way last year in late November.

"The ice will break up, disintegrating or breaking into floes which float away," Fretwell explained.

"Chicks that go into the water will likely drown, but even if they manage to get back out they will probably freeze to death," he added.

Penguin poo

"If they manage to stay on icebergs, we assume most of them will drift away and starve as the parents will not be able to find them."

Emperor penguins have been known to find alternative sites in response to unstable sea ice, but the accelerating impact of climate change in Antarctica threatens to outpace their capacity to adapt.

To survive on their own, chicks must develop waterproof feathers, a process known as fledging.

"Such a strategy will not be possible if breeding habitat becomes unstable at a regional level," the study concluded.

As with the polar bears at the other end of the planet, global warming caused mainly by burning fossil fuels is the only factor threatening the long-term viability of the iconic emperor penguin.

Other large animals facing extinction are primarily threatened by habitat loss and over-exploitation.

Emperor penguins, aka Aptenodytes forsteri, number about a quarter of a million breeding pairs, all in Antarctica, according to a 2020 study.

The Bellingshausen Sea colonies account for less than five percent of that total.

"But overall, around 30 percent of colonies were affected by sea ice loss last year, so there will be many more chicks who did not survive," said Fretwell.

In mid-February, Antarctica's sea ice extent shrank to two million square kilometers (nearly 800,000 square miles), about 30 percent below the 1981-2010 average.

An iceberg near Antarctica.

he five colonies covered by the study—Rothschild Island, Verdi Inlet, Smylet Island, Bryan Peninsula and Pfrogner Point—were all discovered with medium resolution satellite imagery over the last 14 years, and their populations were counted using high resolution imagery.

The colonies are visible from space thanks to the distinctively pink-brown hue of penguin poo, or guano, which covers a broad area over the course of the nine months penguins are in residence, even if the colonies themselves are not always visible.

Only Rothschild Island has been visited by scientists, and of the other sites only Smylet Island has been seen by aerial survey.

Male and female emperor penguins are similar in plumage and size, reaching a meter tall and weighing up to 20 kilos.

In the dead of winter, they huddle together to protect against wind chill, taking turns using their bodies as shields.

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Seeing what lies ahead, climate scientists have been at pains to show us how climate change will intensify such that today's youth will bear the brunt of climate impacts in years to come.

Yet all over the world, people are already witnessing extreme and deadly weather events fueled by rising temperatures that once seemed unfathomable.

So just how much climate change have people already experienced in their lifetimes? And who has weathered the most warming so far?

Those are the questions Andrew King, a climate scientist studying extreme events at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues set out to answer in a new study.

In local temperature records, they looked for a clear signal of human-caused climate change emerging from the background noise of shifting weather patterns.

As past research shows, signals of human-induced warming have emerged earlier and stronger in the tropics, while the world's oceans and polar regions have absorbed much of the heat.

King and colleagues wanted to add to those analyses by examining people's experiences of local temperature changes up to 2021 and computing those changes in a timeframe everyone can understand: their lifetime.

"It's important we understand people's experience of climate change locally to see who is most affected by the changes that humanity's greenhouse gas emissions are causing to the planet," King told ScienceAlert.

To avoid recollection bias, the researchers calculated the physical warming people have experienced in their local area, not the broader changes they might have perceived.

They also only quantified local warming, not the impacts of prolonged heatwaves, sea-level rise, storms, droughts, and wildfires – though that could be the focus of future work, King says.

"This is the first analysis that attempts to estimate the emergence of local climate change signals experienced by the population of the world, young and old, rich and poor," King and colleagues write in their paper.

Local annual temperatures have changed so much for the global population that the analysis found almost half of the world's 15–84-year-olds are now experiencing an 'unfamiliar' climate that is significantly different from when they were born.

Nearly 90 percent have experienced temperature changes that equate to an 'unusual' climate.

"We need to do more work to see if this also means they've experienced stronger changes in extremes like heatwaves and to better understand whether the worst impacts line up with the biggest climate changes," King told ScienceAlert.

As for age groups, the analysis found middle-aged people between 40 and 60 years old, particularly those living around the equator, have experienced the clearest signal of warming, accrued over their lifetime.

The signal in older age groups was diluted by their early life years of relative climate stability, while younger people's experience of warming varies greatly depending on where they live.

Those living in tropical areas have, worryingly, weathered about the same amount of warming in their much shorter lifetimes as older, wealthier populations.

"It was really remarkable to find that even with a much more youthful population in tropical low-income regions, the typical experience of warming is, on average, similar to the experience of wealthier regions with much older populations," King said.

While some of us have lived on this planet longer than others, the point of the study isn't to point fingers but to convey just how fast Earth's climate is now changing. But we know we can stabilize the climate if we slash emissions.

"It's imperative that substantial climate action is taken to avoid local climates becoming unrecognizable within human lifetimes," the researchers conclude.

The study has been accepted for publication in the journal Environmental Research Climate.

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Following the successful moon lander mission, ISRO is gearing up for another significant endeavour: the launch of a solar exploration mission. This mission, dubbed Aditya-L1, is designed to unravel the Sun’s mysteries. The Aditya-L1 spacecraft is engineered to provide both remote observations of the solar corona and in situ examinations of the solar wind at L1, the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point situated approximately 1.5 million kilometres from our planet.

Date of launch

Aditya-L1 mission is expected to be launched within a week, possibly on September 2, news agency PTI reported. Notably, this will mark the first dedicated Indian space mission for solar observation, orchestrated by the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Payloads aboard

With the objective of studying the Sun from an orbit encircling the L1 point, the Aditya-L1 mission is equipped with seven payloads. These instruments are tailored to observe various aspects of the Sun, including the photosphere, chromosphere, and the outermost layer, the corona, across different wavebands. Aditya-L1 embodies a fully indigenous effort, fostered by the active participation of national institutions, an ISRO official told PTI.

Under the leadership of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bengaluru, the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph payload spearheads the mission’s development. Similarly, the Solar Ultraviolet Imager payload is a product of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune.

Aditya-L1’s capabilities are diverse and encompassing. It has the capacity to observe the corona and solar chromosphere using the UV payload, and to scrutinise solar flares through X-ray payloads. The integration of particle detectors and a magnetometer payload empowers the mission to provide insights into charged particles and the magnetic field enveloping the halo orbit around L1.

Having been constructed at the UR Rao Satellite Centre, the satellite arrived at ISRO’s spaceport in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, two weeks ago. An ISRO official has indicated that the launch is most likely scheduled for September 2, the PTI reported.

An uninterrupted view

The spacecraft’s trajectory is carefully charted to position it in a halo orbit around the L1 point of the Sun-Earth system. This strategic positioning offers a significant advantage: an uninterrupted view of the Sun, free from the hindrance of occultations or eclipses. ISRO emphasises that this vantage point enables continuous observations of solar activities and their influence on space weather in real-time.

Benefiting from this unique perspective, Aditya-L1 employs four payloads to directly observe the Sun, while the remaining three payloads engage in in situ studies of particles and fields within the L1 vicinity. This comprehensive approach promises pivotal scientific insights into the propagation of solar dynamics within the interplanetary medium.

Aditya-L1 Mission Objectives

ISRO underscores the mission’s significance, projecting that Aditya-L1’s payload suite will yield critical information to comprehend coronal heating, coronal mass ejections, pre-flare and flare activities, space weather dynamics, and the dissemination of particles and fields.

Exploring solar upper atmosphere

The primary scientific objectives of the Aditya-L1 mission encompass a thorough exploration of the dynamics within the solar upper atmosphere, including the chromosphere and corona. The mission also aims to decode processes such as chromospheric and coronal heating, the physics of partially ionised plasma, the initiation of coronal mass ejections and solar flares, alongside understanding the dynamics of solar wind particles through in situ observations.

Uncovering origins of Coronal Mass Ejections

This mission aspires to unravel the complex physics governing the solar corona and its heating mechanisms, while also furnishing diagnostics for plasma properties, encompassing temperature, velocity, and density within coronal loops. Furthermore, Aditya-L1 seeks to uncover the origins, dynamics, and development of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), as well as elucidate the sequence of events leading to solar eruptive phenomena across various atmospheric strata.

This ambitious undertaking also contributes to comprehending magnetic field topology and measurements within the solar corona, shedding light on the drivers behind space weather, including the origin, composition, and dynamics of solar wind. Aditya-L1’s suite of instruments is finely tuned to observe the solar atmosphere, with a focal point on the chromosphere and corona, while in situ instruments are attuned to analyse the local environment surrounding the L1 point.

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A research group from Japan has developed a method to produce highly active mRNA vaccines at high purity using a unique cap to easily separate the desired capped mRNA. This ‘Purecap’ technique extracted up to 100% pure Cap2-type mRNA, which showed 3-4 times better production of the protein that stimulates the immune system. These results open up the possibility of purer vaccines with a lower risk of inflammation caused by impurities. Their findings were published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

Potential of mRNA Vaccines

mRNA vaccines have been used successfully as therapy against variants of the coronavirus. This has given researchers hope for their future use as a cancer vaccine. However, the purity of vaccines hinders this goal because impurities can trigger the immune system. This may cause inflammation around the injection site, a common side effect of vaccination.

Understanding Vaccine Impurities

Impurities in mRNA vaccines are often introduced in the capping stage. During this stage, a cap structure is added that improves the translation of mRNA and protects and stabilizes it. Caps can only be added to single-stranded mRNA, so ideally a vaccine should contain 100% pure single-stranded mRNA. However, unwanted double-strands of mRNA may be present, reducing its purity.

As single- and double-stranded mRNAs have different properties, they can be separated using a technique called reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC). This technique separates mRNAs on the basis of their hydrophobicity or hydrophilicity, i.e., their repulsion to or attraction to water.

Research Methodology and Findings

A research group led by Professor Hiroshi Abe, Project Assistant Professor Masahito Inagaki, and Project Associate Professor Naoko Abe of the Graduate School of Science, Nagoya University, in collaboration with Tokyo Medical and Dental University, used a unique PureCap method to introduce a hydrophobic tag at the capping stage. The tagged mRNA was easily separated at the RP-HPLC stage. The tag was then easily removed by light treatment, resulting in a 98%-100%-pure vaccine.

“We were very excited about the result when we saw on the chart that the RP-HPLC process had separated completely the capped and uncapped RNAs,” Hiroshi Abe said. “For a coronavirus mRNA, which is 4247 bases long, we successfully used the PureCap method to produce capped mRNA with over 98% purity.”  

The research group paid particular attention to a group of cap structures that exist in animal and plant cells, called Cap0, Cap1, and Cap2. Although Cap2 is found in animal and plant cells, the evaluation of its function has been difficult because there was no way to obtain pure capped mRNA to ensure a fair test.

“The Cap structure used in mRNA vaccines has so far been limited to Cap0 and Cap1 types. However, we used our technique to manufacture Cap0, Cap1, and Cap2-type structures,” Abe said. “Highly purified Cap0, Cap1, and Cap2-type mRNA synthesized using the PureCap method showed lower immunostimulatory activity compared to mRNAs synthesized using conventional techniques showing their potential use in pharmaceuticals.”

As viruses mostly produce Cap1 mRNA, the immune system is less stimulated by Cap2. This suggests that a vaccine that uses Cap2 would be less likely to cause unwanted side effects such as inflammation when it is injected. However, it would still be able to create viral proteins when transcribed that make the vaccine effective.

Benefits of the Cap2 Structure

The group used Purecap to create Cap2 mRNA and analyzed its protein synthesis capacity. They found that Cap2 mRNA produced 3-5 times more protein than Cap1 mRNA, which would enhance the immune response. They also showed that their Cap2-type mRNAs caused lower stimulation of the inflammatory response than mRNAs synthesized using conventional techniques.

“Conventional mRNA vaccine production methods could not prepare capped mRNA with high purity, raising concerns about reduced protein synthesis and impurity-derived inflammatory reactions,” Abe said.

“The PureCap method solves these problems by selectively purifying only capped mRNA. Furthermore, the Cap2-type structure created using this technique is more efficient in protein synthesis and less irritating to the immune system. This technique has the potential to improve the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines. It is a revolutionary advance toward the practical application of mRNA medicine, as well as deepening our understanding of the fundamentals of mRNA science.”

Source : https://scitechdaily.com/the-future-of-vaccines-japans-breakthrough-in-100-pure-mrna-production/

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The landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) compels tech companies to better police content to protect European users against disinformation and hate speech.

And it also demands the firms are more transparent about their services, algorithms and how ads are targeted.

The first phase of the regulation came into force on Friday, affecting 19 "very large" digital platforms including social media networks, websites and online retailers with at least 45 million monthly active users in the European Union.

They are: Alibaba AliExpress, Amazon Store, Apple AppStore, Booking.com, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, Google's Maps, Play, and Shopping, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter (rebranded as X), Wikipedia, YouTube and Zalando as well as Bing and Google Search.

Many inside and outside of the EU hope the DSA will be a beacon for other countries to take similar action and bring more regulatory oversight of big tech worldwide.

"These systemic platforms play a very, very important role in our daily life and it is really the time now for Europe, for us, to set our own rules," the EU's top tech enforcer, industry commissioner Thierry Breton, said in a video posted online.

Questions over compliance

"The DSA is here, here to protect free speech against arbitrary decisions and, at the same time, to protect our citizens and democracies against illegal content," he said.

"My services and I will now be very, very rigorous to check that systemic platforms comply with the DSA. We will be investigating and sanctioning them, if not the case."

Companies will come under annual audits and those that breach the law could face fines of up to six percent of annual global turnover.

One of the burning questions in Brussels is whether the social media network formerly known as Twitter, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, will comply with the EU's rules.

Twitter was among five social media platforms that undertook a "stress-test" this summer to gauge whether they were compliant.

Breton warned Musk he needed more resources to moderate dangerous content, but after the billionaire's takeover, he unleashed a wave of firings.

Musk on Friday posted on X his company was "working hard" to comply with the DSA.

Under the rules, companies must provide an easy-to-use system for people to report illegal content and give users the option to opt out of seeing content on their social media feeds based on profiles created by monitoring their personal web use.

There have already been legal challenges from Amazon and German clothing retailer Zalando against their description under the DSA as "very large".

Both companies must still comply with the law but Amazon scored a small victory when an EU court suspended the requirement to give information on adverts for an ad repository, one of the stipulations under the DSA, an EU official said.

The Friday deadline is the date after which the 19 platforms must give their risk assessments, and two months later publish transparency reports.

The DSA will apply to all digital services from February 2024.

A wave of companies include Google, Meta and Bing and LinkedIn owner Microsoft made announcements this week detailing the changes they made including greater transparency over targeted ads and giving users more control over their feeds.

Taking on big tech

Brussels has also identified more "very large" platforms but the EU official would not say when the companies would be named.

The focus will soon be on another milestone law when the EU names which tech companies are "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by September 6.

Brussels said in July the companies which say they meet the threshold are Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, TikTok owner ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft and Samsung.

The DMA subjects internet giants to tougher regulation to ensure competition and avoid big companies manipulating their power to keep users in their ecosystem.

The laws are not the EU's first strike against tech firms.

The mammoth GDPR data protection law came into force in 2018, triggering a slew of fines worth billions of euros against major players like Meta and bringing closer scrutiny over their access to and use of people's data.

And the bloc is moving full steam ahead with plans for the world's first comprehensive law to regulate artificial intelligence by the end of the year.

© 2023 AFP

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IN FEBRUARY, A dermatologist in New York City contacted the state’s health department about two female patients, ages 28 and 47, who were not related but suffered from the same troubling problem. They had ringworm, a scaly, crusty, disfiguring rash covering large portions of their bodies.

Ringworm sounds like a parasite, but it is caused by a fungus—and in both cases, the fungus was a species that had never been recorded in the US. It was also severely drug-resistant, requiring treatment with several types of antifungals for weeks. There was no indication where the patients might have acquired the infections; the older woman had visited Bangladesh the previous summer, but the younger one, who was pregnant and hadn’t traveled, must have picked it up in the city.

That seemed alarming—but in one of the largest and most mobile cities on the planet, weird medical things happen. The state reported the cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the New York doctors and some CDC staff wrote up an account for the CDC’s weekly journal.

Then, in March, some of those same CDC investigators reported that a fungus they had been tracking—Candida auris, an extremely drug-resistant yeast that invades health care facilities and kills two-thirds of the people infected with it—had risen to more than 10,000 cases since it was identified in the US in 2016, tripling in just two years. In April, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services rushed to investigate cases of a fungal infection called blastomycosis centered on a paper mill, an outbreak that would grow to 118 people, the largest ever recorded. And in May, US and Mexican health authorities jointly rang an alarm over cases of meningitis, caused by the fungus Fusarium solani, which seemed to have spread to more than 150 clinic patients via contaminated anesthesia products. By mid-August, 12 people had died.

All of those outbreaks are different: in size, in pathogen, in location, and the people they affected. But what links them is that they were all caused by fungi—and to the small cadre of researchers who keep track of such things, that is worrisome. The experts share a sense, supported by incomplete data but also backed by hunch, that serious fungal infections are occurring more frequently, affecting more people, and also are becoming harder to treat.

“We don’t have good surveillance for fungal infections,” admits Tom Chiller, an infectious disease physician and chief of the CDC’s mycotic diseases branch. “So it’s hard to give a fully data-driven answer. But the feeling is definitely that there is an increase.”

The question is: Why? There may be multiple answers. More people are living longer with chronic illnesses, and their impaired immune systems make them vulnerable. But the problem isn’t only that fungal illnesses are more frequent; it is also that new pathogens are emerging and existing ones are claiming new territory. When experts try to imagine what could exert such widespread influence, they land on the possibility that the problem is climate change.

Fungi live in the environment; they affect us when they encounter us, but for many, their original homes are vegetation, decaying plant matter, and dirt. “Speculative as it is, it's entirely possible that if you have an environmental organism with a very specific ecological niche, out there in the world, you only need a very small change in the surface temperature or the air temperature to alter its niche and allow it to proliferate,” says Neil Stone, a physician and fungal infections lead at University College London Hospitals. “And it's that plausibility, and the lack of any alternative explanation, which makes it believable as a hypothesis.”

For this argument, C. auris is the leading piece of evidence. The rogue yeast was first identified in 2009 in a single patient in Japan, but within just a few years, it bloomed on several continents. Genetic analyses showed the organism had not spread from one continent to others, but emerged simultaneously on each. It also behaved strikingly differently from most yeasts, gaining the abilities to pass from person to person and to thrive on cool inorganic surfaces such as plastic and metal—while collecting an array of resistance factors that protect it from almost all antifungal drugs.

Arturo Casadevall, a physician and chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, proposed more than a decade ago that the rise of mammals over dinosaurs was propelled by an inherent protection: Internally, we’re too hot. Most fungi flourish at 30 degrees Celsius or less, while our body temperature hovers between 36 and 37 degrees Celsius. (That’s from 96.8 to the familiar 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.) So when an asteroid smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago, throwing up a cloud of pulverized vegetation and soil and the fungi those would have contained, the Earth’s dominant reptiles were vulnerable, but early mammals were not.

But Casadevall warned of a corollary possibility: If fungi increased their thermotolerance, learning to live at higher temperatures as the climate warms, mammals could lose that built-in protection—and he proposed that the weird success of C. auris might indicate it is the first fungal pathogen whose adaptation to warmth allowed it to find a new niche.

In the 14 years since it was first spotted, C. auris has invaded health care in dozens of countries. But in that time, other fungal infections have also surged. At the height of the Covid pandemic, India experienced tens of thousands of cases of mucormycosis, commonly called “black fungus,” which ate away at the faces and airways of people made vulnerable by having diabetes or taking steroids. In California, diagnosis of coccidioidomycosis (also called Valley fever) rose 800 percent between 2000 and 2018. And new species are affecting humans for the first time. In 2018, a team of researchers from the US and Canada identified four people, two from each country, who had been infected by a newly identified genus, Emergomyces. Two of the four died. (The fungus got its name because it is “emerging” into the human world.) Subsequently, a multinational team identified five species in that newly-named genus that are causing infections all over the world, most severely in Africa.

Fungi are on the move. Last April, a research group from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis examined the expected geographic range in the US of what are usually called the “endemic fungi,” ones that flourish only within specific areas. Those are Valley fever in the dry Southwestern US; histoplasmosis in the damp Ohio River valley; and blastomycosis, with a range that stretched from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and as far east as the Virginia coast. Using Medicare data from more than 45 million seniors who sought health care between 2007 and 2016, the group discovered that the historically documented range of these fungi is wildly out of step with where they are actually causing infections now. Histoplasmosis, they found, had been diagnosed in at least one county in 94 percent of US states; blastomycosis, in 78 percent; and Valley fever in 69 percent.

That represents an extension of range so vast that it challenges the meaning of endemic—to the point that Patrick Mazi, an assistant professor of medicine and first author on the paper, urges clinicians to cease thinking of fungal infections as geographically determined, and focus on symptoms instead. “Let’s acknowledge that everything is dynamic and changing,” he says. “We should recognize that for the sake of our patients.”

Without taking detailed histories from those millions of patients, it can’t be proven where their infections originated. They could have been exposed within the fungi’s historic home ranges and then traveled; one analysis has correlated the occurrence of Valley fever in the upper Midwest with “snowbird” winter migration to the Southwest. But there is plenty of evidence for fungal pathogens moving to new areas, via animals and bats, and on winds and wildfire smoke as well.

However fungi are relocating, they appear to be adapting to their new homes, and changes in temperature and precipitation patterns may be part of that. Ten years ago, CDC and state investigators found people in eastern Washington state infected with Valley fever, and proved they had acquired it not while traveling, but locally—in a place long considered too cold and dry for that fungus to survive. A group based primarily at UC Berkeley has demonstrated that transmission of Valley fever in California is intimately linked to weather there—and that the growing pattern of extreme drought interrupted by erratic precipitation is increasing the disease’s spread. And other researchers have identified cases of a novel blastomycosis in Saskatchewan and Alberta, pushing the map of where that infection occurs further north and west.

The impact of climate change on complex phenomena is notoriously hard to prove—but researchers can now add some evidence to back up their intuition that fungi are adapting. In January, researchers at Duke University reported that when they raised the lab temperatures in which they were growing the pathogenic fungus Cryptococcus deneoformans—the cause of a quarter-million cases of meningitis each year—the fungus’s rate of mutation revved into overdrive. That activated mobile elements in the fungus’s genome, known as transposons, allowing them to move around within its DNA and affect how its genes are regulated. The rate of mutation was five times higher in fungi raised at human body temperature than at an incubator temperature of 30 degrees Celsius—and when the investigators infected mice with the transformed fungi, the rate of mutation sped up even more.

Researchers who are paying attention to rising fungal problems make a final point about them: We’re not seeing more cases because we’ve gotten better at finding them. Tests and devices to detect fungi, especially within patients, haven’t undergone a sudden improvement. In fact, achieving better diagnostics was top of a list published by the World Health Organization last fall when it drew up its first ranking of “priority fungal pathogens” in hopes of guiding research.

Multiple studies have shown that patients can wait two to seven weeks to get an accurate diagnosis, even when they are infected with fungi endemic to where they live, which ought to be familiar to local physicians. So understanding that fungi are changing their behavior is really an opportunity to identify how many more people might be in danger than previously thought—and to get out in front of that risk. “Patients are being diagnosed out of traditional areas, and we are missing them,” Mazi says. “All of these are opportunities to achieve better outcomes.”

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The globe hums with thousands of languages. But when did humans first lay out a structured system to communicate, one that was distinct to a particular area?

Scientists are aware of more than 7,100 languages in use today. Nearly 40 percent of them are considered endangered, meaning they have a declining number of speakers and are at risk of dying out. Some languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, while more than half of the world’s population uses one of just 23 tongues.

These languages and dead ones that are no longer spoken weave together millennia of human interactions. That means the task of determining the world’s oldest language is more than a linguistic curiosity. For instance, in order to decipher clay tablet inscriptions or trace the evolution of living tongues, linguists must grapple with questions that extend beyond language. In doing so, their research reveals some of the secrets of ancient civilizations and even sparks debates that blend science and culture.

“Ancient languages, just like contemporary languages, are crucial for understanding the past. We can trace the history of human migrations and contacts through languages. And in some cases, the language information is our only reliable source of information about the past,” says Claire Bowern, a Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. “The words that we can trace back through time give us a picture of the culture of past societies.”

Language comes in different forms—including speech, gestures and writing—which don’t all leave conclusive evidence behind. And experts use different approaches to determine a language’s age.

Tracing the oldest language is “a deceptively complicated task,” says Danny Hieber, a linguist who studies endangered languages. One way to identify a language’s origins is to find the point at which a single tongue with different dialects became two entirely distinct languages, such that people speaking those dialects could no longer understand each other. “For example, how far back in history would you need to go for English speakers to understand German speakers?” he says. That point in time would mark the origins of English and German as distinct languages, branching off from a common proto-Germanic language.

Alternatively, if we assume that most languages can be traced back to an original, universal human language, all languages are equally old. “You know that your parents spoke a language, and their parents spoke a language, and so forth. So intuitively, you’d imagine that all languages were born from a single origin,” Hieber says.

But it’s impossible to prove the existence of a proto-human language—the hypothetical direct ancestor of every language in the world. Accordingly, some linguists argue that the designation of the “oldest language” should belong to one with a well-established written record.

Many of the earliest documented examples of writing come from languages that used cuneiform script, which featured wedge-shaped characters impressed into clay tablets. Among these languages are Sumerian and Akkadian, both dating back at least 4,600 years. Archaeologists have also found Egyptian hieroglyphs carved into the tomb of Pharaoh Seth-Peribsen that date to around the same historical period. The inscription translates to: “He has united the Two Lands for his son, Dual King Peribsen,” and it is considered the earliest-known complete sentence.

Historians and linguists generally agree that Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian are the oldest languages with a clear written record. All three are extinct, meaning they are no longer used and do not have any living descendants that can carry the language to the next generation.

As for the oldest language that is still spoken, several contenders emerge. Hebrew and Arabic stand out among such languages for having timelines that linguists can reasonably trace, according to Hieber. Although the earliest written evidence of these languages dates back only around 3,000 years, Hieber says that both belong to the Afroasiatic language family, whose roots trace back to 18,000 to 8,000 B.C.E., or about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. Even with this broad time frame, contemporary linguists widely accept Afroasiatic as the oldest language family. But the exact point at which Hebrew and Arabic diverged from other Afroasiatic languages is heavily disputed.

Bowern adds Chinese to the list of candidates. The language likely emerged from Proto-Sino-Tibetan, which is also an ancestor to Burmese and the Tibetan languages, around 4,500 years ago, although the exact date is disputed. The earliest documented evidence of the Chinese writing system comes from inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones that date back to about 3,300 years ago. Modern Chinese characters weren’t introduced until centuries later, however.

Turn the clock back an additional one or two millennia, and the linguistic record becomes especially murky. Deven Patel, a professor of South Asia studies at the University of Pennsylvania, says the earliest written records of Sanskrit are ancient Hindu texts that were composed between 1500 and 1200 B.C.E. and are part of the Vedas, a collection of religious works from ancient India. “In my view, Sanskrit is the oldest continuous language tradition, meaning it’s still producing literature and people speak it, although it’s not a first language in the modern era,” Patel says.

Some linguists, however, argue that the appearance of Sanskrit was predated by Tamil, a Dravidian language that is still used by almost 85 million native speakers in southern India and Sri Lanka. Scientists have documented Tamil for at least 2,000 years. But scholars have contested the true age of the oldest surviving work of Tamil literature, known as the Tolkāppiyam, with estimates ranging from 7,000 to 2,800 years. “There are disputes among scholars about the precise date of ancient texts ascribed to Tamil and whether the language used is actually similar enough to modern Tamil to categorize them as the same language,” Patel says. “Tamil [speakers] have been especially [enthusiastic] in trying to separate the language as uniquely ancient.”

Disagreements about the age of Sanskrit and Tamil illustrate the broader issues in pinpointing the world’s oldest language. “To answer this question, we’ve seen people create new histories, which are as much political as they are scientific,” Patel says. “There are bragging rights associated with being the oldest and still evolving language.”

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