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The Indian Space Resource Organization's (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 launched last month and made a soft landing on the Moon's south pole at approximately 8:34 AM ET on August 23.

The mission is set to begin exploring an area of the Moon that is of extreme interest, but Chandrayaan-3 is the first to visit this area in-situ.

The lunar south pole is thought to contain water ice that could be a source of oxygen, fuel, and water for future missions, or perhaps even for a future lunar base or colony.

The Chandrayaan-3 team celebrates after the mission successfully landed on the Moon's south pole. (ISRO webcast)

The landing comes just days after a Russian lunar mission failed, and four years after the ISRO's Chandrayaan-2 lander crashed on the Moon on September 6, 2019, due to a last-minute guidance software glitch.

Shortly after landing, the spacecraft sent back its first images from the lunar surface, as well as images captured during the descent:

"The entire mission operations right from launch until landing happened flawlessly, as per the timeline," said the mission's project director P. Veeramuthuvel following Chandrayaan-3's successful landing.

"I take this opportunity to thank navigation guidance and control team, propulsion team, sensors team, and all the mainframe subsystems team who have brought success to this mission. I also take the opportunity to thank the critical operations review committee for thoroughly reviewing the mission operations right from launch till this date. The target was on spot because of the review process."

A team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been providing navigation and tracking support for ISRO through NASA's Deep Space Network since the launch on July 14, 2023, as well as mission support during the years leading up to launch.

NASA and ESA also are providing deep space communication support to the Chandrayaan-3 mission.

Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander will deploy a rover named Pragyan to help gain insights into the lunar surface composition and look for the presence of water ice in the lunar regolith, while studying the history of impacts on the Moon and the Moon's atmospheric evolution.

The mission is expected to last for one lunar day (14 days on Earth), and the rover will carry out a number of scientific experiments including a spectral analysis of the minerals on the lunar surface.

"This will remain the most memorable and happiest moment for all of us, for our team," said associate project director Kalpana Kalahasti, during a livestream following the landing.

"We have achieved our goal flawlessly, from the day we started rebuilding our spacecraft after the Chandrayaan 2 experience. It has been breath in breath out for our team! This has been possible only because of the immense effort from our Chandrayaan-3 team. Thank you for all the help that has been provided from all the departments."

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi tuned in to the livestream of the landing, and addressed the team.

"All the people of the world, the people of every country and region: India's successful Moon mission is not just India's alone … this success belongs to all of humanity," Modi said, speaking on the ISRO webcast of the event. "We can all aspire for the Moon, and beyond."

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ISRO chief S Somanath said, “We have achieved a soft landing on the Moon. India is on the Moon."

Recently, moon's South Pole has gained relevance and importance among scientists due to discoveries about traces of water ice on the moon.

In 2019, India attempted a lunar South Pole landing, however, a software failure caused the Chandrayaan-2 mission to crash into the surface.

Prior to Chandrayaan-3′s landing, Russia had attempted to land its first spacecraft on the moon in almost 50 years, but the Luna-25 mission smashed into the lunar surface on Saturday.

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I’ve made a cup of coffee, written my to-do list and now I’m wiring up my ear to a device that will send an electrical message to my brainstem. If the testimonials are to believed, incorporating this stimulating habit into my daily routine could help to reduce stress and anxiety, curb inflammation and digestive issues, and perhaps improve my sleep and concentration by tapping into the “electrical superhighway” that is the vagus nerve.

From plunging your face into icy water, to piercing the small flap of cartilage in front of your ear, the internet is awash with tips for hacking this system that carries signals between the brain and chest and abdominal organs.

Manufacturers and retailers are also increasingly cashing in on this trend, with Amazon alone offering hundreds of vagus nerve products, ranging from books and vibrating pendants to electrical stimulators similar to the one I’ve been testing.

Meanwhile, scientific interest in vagus nerve stimulation is exploding, with studies investigating it as a potential treatment for everything from obesity to depression, arthritis and Covid-related fatigue. So, what exactly is the vagus nerve, and is all this hype warranted?

The vagus nerve is, in fact, a pair of nerves that serve as a two-way communication channel between the brain and the heart, lungs and abdominal organs, plus structures such as the oesophagus and voice box, helping to control involuntary processes, including breathing, heart rate, digestion and immune responses. They are also an important part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs the “rest and digest” processes, and relaxes the body after periods of stress or danger that activate our sympathetic “fight or flight” responses.

In the late 19th century, scientists observed that compressing the main artery in the neck – alongside which the vagus nerves run – could help to prevent or treat epilepsy. This idea was resurrected in the 1980s, when the first electrical stimulators were implanted into the necks of epilepsy patients, helping to calm down the irregular electrical brain activity that triggers seizures.

As more people were fitted with these devices, doctors began to spot an interesting pattern. “They noticed that even if the device didn’t help their epilepsy, some of these patients started to have a better outlook on life,” says Kevin Tracey, a professor of molecular medicine and neurosurgery at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York.

Today, vagus nerve stimulators are increasingly being investigated as an alternative to antidepressants in patients with treatment-resistant depression. Surgically implanted stimulators are also an approved treatment for epilepsy – although they only seem to work in a subset of patients.

Using electrical stimulation to treat brain disorders such as epilepsy and depression makes intuitive sense – nerves and brain cells communicate using electricity, after all.

However, in the late 1990s, Tracey and his colleagues made a surprising discovery. They were testing an experimental drug that they expected to dampen inflammation in rats’ brains, but when they injected it, it dampened inflammation throughout the body.

This was puzzling, because the brain is physically separated from the rest of the body by the blood-brain barrier – a tightly packed layer of cells that regulates the passage of large and small molecules into the brain, to help keep it safe. Tracey and his colleagues tried severing the vagus nerve and repeated the experiment. This time, the drug’s anti-inflammatory effects were confined to the brain.

It was an extraordinary discovery: conventional wisdom held that there was no connection between the nervous and immune systems – but the vagus nerve appeared to provide that link. Further research revealed that the brain communicates with the spleen – an organ that plays a critical role in the immune system – by sending electrical signals down the vagus nerve. These trigger the release of a chemical called acetylcholine that tells immune cells to switch off inflammation. Electrically stimulating the vagus nerve with an implanted device achieved the same feat.

Tracey immediately recognised the therapeutic implications, having spent years trying to develop better treatments for inflammatory conditions such as sepsis, arthritis and Crohn’s disease. Existing drugs dampen inflammation, but carry a risk of serious side effects. Here was a technique with the potential to switch off inflammation without the need for drugs.

Tracey’s discovery also caught the attention of mind-body practitioners, including the Dutch motivational speaker and “Iceman” Wim Hof, who claimed that he could control inflammation in his body through a combination of breath work, meditation and cold water immersion. “He wanted me to study him,” Tracey says.

They devised an experiment that involved drawing blood from Hof before and after practising his techniques, and analysing them for markers of inflammation. To their surprise, it seemed Hof really could reduce inflammation in his body, although they required more evidence to be convinced his techniques would work in others.

Picking up the baton, Matthijs Kox at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands recruited 12 volunteers to attend Hof’s training camp in Poland, where they spent 10 days swimming in icy water, rolling around in snow, meditating and learning his breathing exercises – which are characterised by a period of forced hyperventilation followed by a period of holding your breath.

Afterwards, the researchers tested the volunteers’ ability to suppress their immune responses by injecting them with a component of bacteria that triggers inflammation and flu-like symptoms. Compared with volunteers who had not undergone Hof’s training, their levels of inflammation were lower and they experienced fewer flu-like symptoms.

But were they really hacking their immune systems by tapping into the power of their vagus nerve? Yes and no. Although the volunteers were able to dampen inflammation, they released large amounts of adrenaline in the process – a key component of the fight or flight response. “This is pretty much the opposite of what you’d expect if Hof’s techniques were working through the vagus nerve,” says Kox.

Adrenaline also suppresses the immune system, but through a different mechanism. And Kox warns that repeatedly triggering these fight or flight responses could be dangerous for people with cardiovascular conditions.

Hof’s aren’t the only techniques being espoused as ways to regulate anxiety, depression and improve general health by tapping into the vagus nerve.

Search “vagus nerve hacks” on TikTok, and you’ll be bombarded with tips ranging from humming in a low voice to twisting your neck and rolling your eyes, to practising yoga or meditation exercises.

Researchers who study the vagus nerve are broadly sceptical of such claims. Though such techniques may help you to feel calmer and happier by activating the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve is only one component of that. “If your heart rate slows, then your vagus nerve is being stimulated,” says Tracey. “However, the nerve fibres that slow your heart rate may not be the same fibres that control your inflammation. It may also depend on whether your vagus nerves are healthy.”

Similarly, immersing your face in cold water may also slow down your heart rate by triggering something called the mammalian dive reflex, which also triggers breath-holding and diverts blood from the limbs to the core. This may serve to protect us from drowning by conserving oxygen, but it involves sympathetic and parasympathetic responses.

Electrical stimulation may hold greater promise though. One thing that makes the vagus nerves so attractive is surgical accessibility in the neck. “It is quite easy to implant some device that will try to stimulate them,” says Dr Benjamin Metcalfe at the University of Bath, who is studying how the body responds to electrical vagus nerve stimulation. “The other reason they’re attractive is because they connect to so many different organ systems. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that vagus nerve stimulation will treat a wide range of diseases and disorders – everything from rheumatoid arthritis through to depression and alcoholism.”

In 2016, Tracey and his colleagues published the results of a study of 18 patients with rheumatoid arthritis – an autoimmune condition that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in joints – who were still experiencing symptoms despite taking immunosuppressive drugs. The patients were fitted with a vagus nerve stimulator that was used to target the fibres in their necks that are thought to control immune activity in the spleen. This led to an improvement in their symptoms and was associated with reduced levels of tumor necrosis factor, an inflammatory protein that is a leading target of drugs for rheumatoid arthritis.

Preliminary data also suggests that the technology might be effective in patients with Crohn’s disease, another inflammatory condition, which affects the digestive system.

In all of the medical conditions discussed so far, the device is implanted into the patient’s neck, where it provides regular bursts of stimulation, with different frequencies blocking or activating different nerve fibres. Although this is relatively safe, some patients do experience side effects such as fatigue or headaches.

But there may be alternative ways of stimulating the vagus nerve. Prof Chris Toumazou at Imperial College London and his colleagues are investigating whether a microstimulator could be attached to a specific branch of the vagus nerve that tells the brain when the stomach is full or empty. This idea stems from the discovery that the hormones controlling appetite communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve. Cut the nerve, and these hunger signals no longer get through.

The team has been working on a device that could eavesdrop on this chemical chatter, and send an electrical signal to the brain in response to the release of hunger hormones by an empty stomach. “The device will be able to send an opposite signal to the brain to say: ‘No, you’re full,’” Toumazou says. “We’re not completely cutting those signals off, but controlling them, which could be a much better means of obesity control than a stomach bypass.”

The device that I’ve been clipping to my ear, called a Nurosym, could provide an alternative means of stimulating the vagus nerve, and, unlike implanted stimulators, does not require surgery.

As well as organs and structures in the chest and abdomen, there’s a branch of the vagus nerve that terminates at the outer ear, known as the auricular branch.

“It projects to the brainstem and then to different regions of the brain, and that leads to vagal signalling that projects down to the heart and other organs,” says Nathan Dundovic, co-founder of London-based neurotechnology company Parasym, which develops and manufactures the Nurosym device.

Although this is primarily a medical device designed for patients with chronic health conditions that affect involuntary processes such as heart rate or digestion, Dundovic believes that healthy individuals like me may also benefit from auricular stimulation – albeit to a lesser extent.

Many of the company’s employees use the device to promote relaxation and sleep, and to potentially reap some of the cognitive enhancing effects that early clinical studies have hinted at – such as improvements in short-term memory.

Clipping the device to my tragus, the fleshy chunk of cartilage in front of my ear, I feel a gentle pulsating prickle when it is switched on. I can’t claim to have been transformed into a hyper-efficient, calmer version of myself – yet – but I’m willing to persist and see.

Not everyone is convinced that this kind of auricular vagus nerve stimulation will be clinically effective. “Because the vagus connects to so many different organ systems, it can still be a challenge sometimes to make sure that we are only stimulating the right part of the nerve,” says Metcalfe.

“The idea that you can place electrodes completely outside the body and still selectively stimulate nerve fibres, I find that very hard to believe.”

However, Parasym’s device is currently being tested in trials for various heart and brain-related disorders, including postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (Pots) – a condition characterised by an abnormal increase in heart rate upon standing – and long Covid, by reputable research institutions across North America and Europe.

The idea that auricular stimulation could benefit long Covid patients is being investigated by other teams as well. Already, there is some evidence to suggest that it may help to alleviate the fatigue associated with an autoimmune disease called Sjögren’s Syndrome.

Encouraged by such findings, Dr Mark Baker at Newcastle University is now exploring whether it could also benefit patients with post-Covid fatigue.

An earlier study identified abnormalities in several areas of the nervous system – including an imbalance in the part that regulates involuntary physiological processes. “It looks a little bit like an under-functioning vagus nerve,” says Baker.

It is early days, but if researchers can find an effective way to tap into the vagus nerve – be it surgically, or through the skin – the benefits could be great.

The word vagus derives from the Latin for “wandering” – a nod to the complex and meandering path it takes through the body, and the diversity of physiological processes under its influence. Rather than popping a pill to alleviate illness, perhaps someday it will be possible to breathe, hum or zap our way to better health.

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CANADIAN FIREFIGHTER SCOTT Rennick knew this summer would be bad. It was May 2023 and Rennick was commanding one of British Columbia’s six incident management teams, or IMTs, specialized crews tasked with managing the most complex fires. His 18-person crew had just arrived in the northeast city of Fort Saint John to fight an aggressive bushfire. The province’s wildfire service was still in the midst of hiring, training, and recruiting when the human-caused fire was discovered on Saturday, May 13. By Sunday, flames had spread over 7,000 acres. By Monday morning, it had multiplied fivefold and now covered an area roughly the size of Staten Island. But the worst was yet to come.

Drought had already rendered the land hot and dry. The third ingredient for a natural-disaster-level fire was wind. That came Monday afternoon as a cold front pushed directly into its path, creating gusty 25 mph winds. In a few hours, the blaze spread 9 miles in various directions, approaching Fort Saint John, British Columbia’s oil and gas capital with a population of 21,000.

Rennick says the terrifying glory of a firestorm—ferocious fires fueled by powerful winds drawn into the flames—never ceases to amaze, even after 30 years on the job. It sounded and moved like a freight train, sucking up tens of thousands of pounds of oxygen as it swallowed everything in sight. For 18 straight hours, Rennick and his crew fought alongside dozens of firefighters and heavy equipment operators to create firebreaks wide enough to catch flying embers. Then, exhausted, they rested.

At the ad hoc incident command post, Rennick looked up the three-month forecast on his laptop. Western Canada was covered by a deep red blob—low precipitation, warm temperatures. Later, as the commander relayed the weather report to his crew, someone asked him how many deployments he predicted that season. A typical summer is four. Rennick held up six fingers. “Hopefully I’m wrong,” he added.

As of this week, Rennick’s crew were returning home from their fifth deployment, tackling one of 1,050 active wildfires in Canada—fires becoming bigger, hotter, longer lasting, and more frequent than ever before. He’s already gearing up for his sixth deployment, and with up to six weeks left in the wildfire season, a seventh is likely.

Rennick, who grew up in the city of Vernon in British Columbia, has battled fires most of his life—as did his father and grandfather. “This is just a very different environment we find ourselves in now,” he says. “People who don’t believe in climate change can come talk to me.” At the time of writing, British Columbia is in the midst of a province-wide state of emergency. Up to 200 buildings are estimated to have been destroyed by wildfires in the Okanagan region. And the fires are still burning. “In that kind of extreme situation, it’s no different than trying to put your hand in front of a tsunami or a hurricane and say, ‘Stop,’” says Rennick. Two years ago, during a record-breaking heat wave, he watched a grassfire engulf the town of Lytton, annihilating it in 23 minutes. And yet the intensity and frequency of this summer has exceeded anything Rennick thought possible.

An aerial view shows charred remains on the side of the road beside the highway in Enterprise, Northwest Territories, Canada, on August 20, 2023. Enterprise and Hay River were put on evacuation orders prior to the city of Yellowknife.PHOTOGRAPH: ANDREJ IVANOV/GETTY IMAGES

In June, Rennick’s second deployment of summer 2023 took him to the town of Edson in Alberta, where his IMT joined hundreds of firefighters from as far afield as Australia in a battle against a campaign fire. This type of inferno, once rare but now alarmingly common, is so large and so powerful that it can take months of aerial and ground operations to contain. Campaign fires can even survive a Canadian winter, smoldering under the snow as temperatures fall to minus 60 degrees Celsius before bursting back to life as zombie fires in the spring. At one point, smoke from the fire near Edson formed pyrocumulonimbus clouds that injected a plume of soot 31 miles up into the stratosphere, which then traveled around the globe.

Formed by only the extreme wildfire conditions, pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs, are a firefighting nightmare. They can generate lightning, thus igniting more fires; they create windstorms that spread the blaze; and, though rarely, they can create “firenados,” pyrogenic vortex columns that can reach heights of 3,000 feet and speeds up to 140 mph. Like campaign fires, pyroCbs were a once novel phenomena more often associated with volcanic eruptions. The US Naval Research Laboratory only started tracking them a decade ago. A typical year sees 40 or 50 worldwide. The previous record, set in 2021, was 100. By August of 2023, Canada alone had generated 133 of 153 pyroCbs observed by the NRL. “This,” says Rennick, “is the most unprecedented season in the history of the country.”

Unprecedented doesn’t even begin to describe what Canada is up against. Close to 6,000 fires have scorched 34 million acres, an area the size of New York State, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. That’s three times bigger than anything ever recorded in the US, and 10 times the 10-year average for Canada, which, historically speaking, was already well above average. Over 150,000 Canadians are currently displaced, including two-thirds of the population of Northwest Territories and, at the time of writing, 35,000 people in British Columbia.

The speed of change is being driven by a warming world. A warmer world means more moisture is sucked from the ground, resulting in drier fuels. The drier the fuel, the easier it is for a fire to start and spread and burn with greater intensity. That moisture being sucked from the ground also creates more thunderstorms. With this comes more lightning, which is responsible for starting half of Canada’s wildfires. These fires, due to their remoteness, account for 90 percent of the area burned in Canada. Many of these fires aren’t just hard to reach—they’re hard to even detect. This gives them more time to spread, with many fires in remote areas of Canada monitored rather than extinguished.

So much of Canada is burning, and so quickly, that the seed banks needed for forest regeneration work could be stripped bare within years. But disappearing forests won’t mean fewer wildfires, as repeatedly scorched land will become fire-prone grasslands and shrublands. If this summer becomes the norm, rather than the exception, the ecosystems that humans depend on for clean water, pollinators, and food will be altered—with unknown consequences. “We don't really know where it’s going, and that is very frightening,” says Daniel Perrakis, a fire research scientist with Natural Resources Canada.

People sit in Bryant Park amid a smoky haze from wildfires in Canada on June 7, 2023 in New York City.PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID DEE DELGADO/GETTY IMAGES

WITH FIRE COMES smoke. As wildfires have torn through Canada, much of North America has choked under a cloud of noxious air. To date, Canada’s fires this summer have emitted 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, a quarter of total global fire-carbon emissions so far this year. This has made Canada, a country of 40 million people, the world’s fourth biggest polluter. In 2022, Canada ranked 10th on that list.

That smoke affects the health and well-being of the whole planet. But it poses a particular risk to those living in some of North America’s most populous cities, who have experienced unprecedented levels of air pollution in recent months. As a result, Canada’s firefighting competence is being scrutinized as nations deploy hundreds of their own firefighters to the country, while also pressuring Ottawa to get a grip on the crisis.

In June, the east coast of North America struggled through days of dense smoke pushed south from Quebec. Toronto’s CN Tower vanished, and Manhattan was painted a dense, Blade Runner-esque orange. The smog was so thick that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey limited driving speeds on bridges.

The smoke, which originated from fires burning 750 to the miles north, soon covered an area of North America home to more than 145 million people. Across much of the Northeast of the US and southeastern Canada, the Air Quality Index, which government agencies use to measure pollutant levels and health risks, shot from between 50 and 70, a healthy to normal range, to over 400—on a scale that maxes out at 500.

Emergency health warnings persuaded many people to stay indoors. Stock prices at air filtration manufacturers rose by as much as 15 percent.

The wildfire smoke from Quebec sat in the atmosphere for weeks, spanning the Atlantic Ocean and dimming skies as far away as Portugal. For many on the east coast of North America, the orange skies of June were a wake-up call. For more than a decade, increasingly severe wildfires had ravaged North America’s West, from California in the south to Alaska in the north. Now, the age of flames had arrived in the east.

When it comes to wildfire smoke, the biggest danger is PM 2.5, the fine particulate matter that gives the sky a haunting orange hue. “When you breathe these very small particles, they can make it deep into the lungs, right down to the alveolar oxygen exchange region,” says Sarah Henderson, the science director for the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health in Canada, who’s been studying the health effects of wildfire smoke for more than 20 years. “Then we get inflammation that can affect all organ systems in the body.”

There are still many unknowns about the long-term consequences of inhaling wildfire particles, Henderson says, in part because sustained exposure is a relatively new phenomenon. A 2022 Lancet article examining Canadian data over 20 years linked wildfire exposure to slightly higher rates of lung cancer and brain tumors; however, the researchers said more data was needed.

Still, there’s reason to believe that even occasional exposure can have repercussions that last a lifetime, especially in children. By examining the long-term effects of other sources of air pollution, Henderson says there’s reason to believe that wildfire smoke might affect respiratory, neurological, and prenatal health. A Stanford Medicine study of children from Fresno, California, who were exposed to smoke from two large wildfires in 2014 found negative effects on immunity-related blood cells and genes.

“We have to go into every wildfire season with the idea that it might be the worst season we've ever seen—and that includes both wildfire risk and smoke,” says Henderson. “That is the reality of the changing climate and the wildfire regime in Canada.” To that end, she thinks officials may need to consider rewriting building codes to insulate against indoor smoke penetration.

Homes sit on Kalamalka Lake in smoke while wildfires continue to burn in Lake County, British Columbia, and surrounding regions on August 20, 2023.PHOTOGRAPH: PAIGE TAYLOR WHITE/GETTY IMAGES

Mike Flannigan, science director of the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science and a professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, calls this summer a “wake-up year” for Canada, which has struggled to curb its wildfire crisis due to a lack of a nationwide strategy, funding, and political willpower. “We're going into uncharted territory. And we're going faster than I would have thought possible,” he says.

As a result, Canada needs firefighters—lots of them. With 5,500 wildland firefighters, about 5.5 per fire at the moment, Canada has called in international fire crews from the southern hemisphere and the Pacific Northwest of the US to help. But even with the assistance of thousands of foreign firefighters, Canada has struggled to procure enough air tankers to water-bomb new fires in the critical first few hours. And so the officials tasked with fighting Canada’s wildfires have been forced to choose, allowing many fires to spread unless they pose an immediate threat to human life or critical infrastructure.

This week the Globe and Mail reported that Canada’s foreign workforce was 680 firefighters, down from 1,754 in July. That fall has been attributed to contracts expiring, but also to firefighters needing to return home to fight fires raging in their own countries. Flannigan believes Canada needs to hire 2,500 more wildland firefighters within its borders to meet current needs. But this is an industry plagued by high attrition rates, due to mental burnout and a predominantly seasonal and volunteer workforce. A 2016 report from Ontario FireRanger, the province’s wildland firefighters, found that the organization was “stuck in a cycle of continuously reiterating basic training” due to high turnover.

Things haven’t improved much since. On top of working 12 to 16 hour days for weeks on end, this year Canadian firefighters have faced extraordinary danger. On-site fatalities are almost unheard of in Canada, but four firefighters have died this summer, including two young men in British Columbia. Rennick says the unrelenting season has made it difficult for his colleagues to process the emotional toil. “Once myself and my colleagues stop and they go back to their regular jobs or part-time jobs, the full gravity of the season will hit us,” he says.

In a normal year, Rennick would expect a staff turnover of 20 percent, but next year will certainly be higher. To that end, Natural Resources Canada recently allocated CA$37.9 million ($27.9million) to recruiting, training, and retaining firefighters in high-risk zones. But several experts and politicians, including Flannigan, want federal officials to go further and are calling for the creation of a national firefighting service.

At present, there’s no single national strategy guiding wildfire management in Canada. A patchwork of provincial, territorial, and national park units instead share resources via the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. But the center, founded in 1982, has been overwhelmed by the scale of the current crisis. Historically, Canada’s wildfires were staggered across both time and geography. Now, huge fires are occuring well out of season and in regions previously less affected, including the Maritime Provinces and Northern Quebec and Ontario, all while the country struggles to increase and update its fleet of aging water bombers.

“We're going into uncharted territory. And we're going faster than I would have thought possible.”

MIKE FLANNIGAN, SCIENCE DIRECTOR OF THE CANADIAN PARTNERSHIP FOR WILDLAND FIRE SCIENCE

Coordination between woodland and urban firefighters is another challenge. In 2016, a fire at Fort McMurray in Alberta showed what happens when communication breaks down. The Beast, as it came to be known, took locals by surprise, resulting in a last-minute evacuation of 88,000 people on a single highway through flames and embers. An inquiry into the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history reported that local and provincial authorities weren’t even sharing the same radio frequencies. “This was particularly problematic when it came to air attack,” the report found.

“Alberta Forestry aircraft had no way to forward a direct message to municipal firefighters.” When the fire did reach the city, local emergency management learned about it from social media.

Such catastrophes, combined with this record-breaking summer, have also led Canada to consider the creation of a bureau similar to America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In June, Bill Blair, then Canada’s emergency preparedness minister, told the CBC that his government had begun discussions with the head of FEMA about creating a Canadian equivalent, as well as a joint agency similar to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, to manage cross-border emergencies—including wildfires.

Public Safety Canada, the country’s closest equivalent to FEMA, struggles to address large-scale events because of its broad focus, of which only a small part is dedicated to emergency management. The agency  spends just $4.70 per Canadian for national emergencies, compared to FEMA’s budget of $87.87 per American. Public Safety Canada’s primary role this summer has been to deploy the armed forces to assist in building fire breaks and assist in evacuations.

Wildfires have long been a part of the Canadian landscape, but urban development over the past 70 years, especially in the west, have created a new problem. Today, more people than ever are living right next to nature, with forests butting right up against new urban developments. The staggering destruction and death toll of fires in Paradise, California, in 2018, and this month’s tragedy on Maui, were partly attributed to the intermingling of urban development and vegetative fuels.

Despite its vast size, Canada faces similar problems. “We’re reaching a point where creation of some agency like FEMA has become a necessity,” says Ali Asgard, a disaster and emergency management professor at York University in Toronto. He adds that Public Safety Canada, or perhaps a future emergency management agency, also needs to do more to prepare communities for managing hazardous pollution levels. As smoke and flames cross the southern border, pressure is mounting on Canadian officials to ensure there isn’t a repeat of this summer—or worse.

Like the climate crisis itself, managing the wildfire crisis is politically complex. Though fire suppression tactics have changed over the past two generations, Canada is currently dealing with a fire deficit of 100 to 150 years. This has created an oversupply of tinder that should have been cleared long ago by healthier fire cycles.

Fire plays an important ecological role in the dense, carbon-packed boreal forests that cover more than half of Canada and 14 percent of the world, something many Indigenous people have long understood. Fires can help reduce pest infestations, open water channels, and improve soil health. But Canada’s woodlands changed with industrial techniques that extinguished fires with full force, resulting in more overgrown, homogenous, and flammable landscapes.

Some of the most effective prevention techniques are also highly unpopular, such as preemptive fire bans and forest closures during high-risk periods, because they interfere with camping, hunting, and other recreational activities. Even more controversial is the tactic of prescribed fires—literally fighting fire with fire, by ridding forests of flammable underbrush during low-risk times, or back-burning during active fires to prevent wildfires from spreading.

Controlled burns can be politically challenging, especially during an active firefight, when the public is sick of breathing smoke or concerned about prescribed fires going rogue. But, explains Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Metis scientist and Parks Canada’s Indigenous fire specialist, controlled burns are one of our best tools, because they essentially replace fires of chance with fires of choice.

A resident collects supplies after a supply drop during a wildfire in the evacuated town of Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, on Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023.PHOTOGRAPH: COLE BURSTON/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

Cardinal Christianson’s role at Parks Canada, the federal agency charged with protecting the country’s natural and cultural heritage, is to work on partnering with Indigenous communities to apply burning practices that have been suppressed by colonization. “Indigenous people have always been trying to push to be more involved in fire management in Canada and especially in having cultural fire on the landscape,” says Cardinal Christianson.

Such practices are often family-oriented, involving children and elders, and range from burning the underbrush while there’s still snow on the ground to burning an overgrown bush to protect a berry patch. Since colonization, government regulators have suppressed much of this knowledge, but many First Nations have never stopped treating the land with fire—they just went underground.

Today, many of Canada’s Indigenous people are frustrated with governments’ “two-tiered system,” which often prohibits cultural burning while appropriating Indigenous fire knowledge for use on massive prescribed fires. “There’s a lot of concern that agencies will come and extract the knowledge that they want and put it into their agency practices, but then Indigenous people still won’t be at the table,” says Cardinal Christianson.

The frustration among Indigenous Canadians is amplified by the disproportionate impact of wildfires on their communities. A recent study by Cardinal Christianson and her colleagues examined Canadian evacuations from all causes spanning 1980 to 2021. The researchers found that 37 percent of people on First Nations reserves have already survived at least one wildfire evacuation. Moreover, Indigenous communities comprised nearly half of all fire evacuations in Canada, and nearly all smoke evacuations, since 1980.

Across North America, many people are only now beginning to understand the threats from fire and smoke that people in the other half of the continent have faced for centuries, but with increasing and intensifying regularity. The prognosis is grim. More land will burn, more people will be displaced, many more again will breathe toxic air. But, beyond that, says Flannigan, if fires on this scale continue, the forest they are burning through will soon vanish entirely.

Yet the fires that have burned across Canada this summer, and continue to burn, won’t become the “new normal,” says Flannigan. Instead, he says, things will only get worse. “I often use Dante’s circles of hell,” he says. “I’m not sure what circle we're on—three, four?—but there's more circles below us, and that's where we're going.” This summer has made the urgency of the situation unavoidably clear: Canada, and the world, needs a plan—and fast.

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Cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke, is the leading cause of death globally. Multiple studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s established that antiplatelet therapy—including aspirin—can reduce the risk of a second cardiovascular event, such as a second heart attack or stroke, by about one-quarter.

Since then, daily aspirin has been recommended for this purpose. Daily aspirin therapy is also generally affordable. In the U.S., a monthly supply of baby aspirin (81 milligrams per dose) can cost from $2 to $8, depending on the retailer and the amount purchased.

"Survivors of heart attacks and stroke often face a high risk of having subsequent events," said first author Sang Gune Yoo, MD, a cardiovascular disease fellow in the Cardiovascular Division at Washington University School of Medicine. "In fact, many people die from having recurring attacks.

Aspirin offers one effective and relatively low-cost option for reducing the likelihood of additional events in individuals with established cardiovascular disease, and yet most people who could benefit from a daily aspirin don't take it."

According to Yoo, the new study can't explain why aspirin is so underused, but there likely are multiple intersecting explanations, including varying accessibility to health care in general, inconsistent messaging surrounding use of the drug, and the fact that aspirin is not always available over-the-counter, requiring a prescription in some countries.

Despite the benefits of aspirin, the study showed that in low-income countries, only 16.6% of eligible individuals—those who had experienced a first heart attack or stroke—were taking aspirin to prevent a second heart attack or stroke. In lower-middle-income countries this number was 24.5%. It increased to 51.1% for upper-middle-income countries, and to 65% in high-income countries, including the United States.

Myriad factors contribute to the risk of heart attacks and strokes such as smoking, diabetes, unhealthy diet, genetics, lack of exercise, obesity and even air pollution. Aspirin works as a blood thinner, preventing small blood cells called platelets from forming clots. These clots can block arteries and contribute to a reduction in the amount of oxygen-rich blood being delivered to vital organs. Such blockage also can cause other complications, including a heart attack or stroke.

The researchers, including senior author David Flood, MD, an assistant professor in the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Michigan, analyzed data from nationally representative health surveys that were conducted in 51 low-, middle- and high-income countries. The surveys included questions about people's medical history of cardiovascular disease and on aspirin use. The study included 125,505 individuals, with 10,590 self-reporting a history of cardiovascular disease.

An earlier study that was conducted by a different group of researchers, the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology cohort study, was published in 2011 and found similarly low aspirin usage. Despite international efforts to improve access to cardiovascular disease medicines, including aspirin, from 2011 through 2023, aspirin remains severely underused. Yoo said this lack of progress underscores the urgent need to continue developing and implementing interventions to promote aspirin use.

"We might expect that after 10 years there would be more widespread aspirin use, but things haven't really changed," Yoo said. "This research deals with a disease process that affects many people, regardless of where you live. We have to remember that this could benefit a tremendous number of people."

Interventions, according to Yoo, should take a multipronged approach and should consider the contexts in which they're being implemented. Such approaches could involve repurposing system-level strategies deployed to manage other chronic conditions, such as HIV/AIDS.

"Particularly in lower-middle-income countries, there is often a good infrastructure for caring for patients living with HIV or other endemic disease," Yoo notes. "We can think about restructuring that so that we can also address comorbidities of heart attack and stroke such as cardiovascular disease as part of those existing systems, instead of having to reinvent the wheel."

Interventions also could take place where aspirin is easily available, targeting pharmacies or primary care physicians to make the drug more accessible to eligible patients.

"In order to create interventions, we have to understand what is actually going on, which is what we're trying to establish in this study," Yoo said.

"Then we can start to think about how to develop strategies to increase evidence-based aspirin use in order to save lives."

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Berna Gomez, a former science teacher from Spain, became a scientific subject herself in 2021. After being blind for 16 years, she took part in an experiment to restore her ability to perceive light.

Gomez, then 57 years old, was fitted with an implant in the area of the brain responsible for visual processing. The implant consisted of an array of 96 microelectrodes.

Brain signals

With the microelectrodes linked to a video camera on a pair of glasses, Gomez was able visually to decipher the signals being communicated to her brain. She could discern the outline of objects, identify left from right hand gestures and even play maze-like video games.

While her case marked a noteworthy advance, researchers are taking another step forward by making electrodes smaller so that a greater number can be fitted into any blind person. This work is improving visual prostheses.

"The more electrodes, the higher the visual resolution," said Professor Shih-Chii Liu of the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Liu coordinates a project developing high-performance electrodes that are around four times thinner than a human hair.

Called NeuraViPeR, the initiative began in September 2020 and is due to run until the end of February 2025.

Steady progress

In 2019, a Global Burden of Disease study ranked vision impairment including blindness as the third-leading cause of years lived with disability.

Europe has more than 2.5 million residents who are blind, according to a leading advocacy group.

Leading causes of blindness include cataract, whereby the lens of the eye becomes opaque; glaucoma, which impairs the optic nerve; and age-related macular degeneration, which harms the retina. Other causes are diabetes-induced damage, genetic conditions, accidents and infections.

Some of these conditions could be treatable with brain implants.

Because medical remedies for blindness are currently limited, the best help for blind people is often a guide dog, a cane or personal assistance.

In the 1990s, scientists began taking baby steps towards an artificial eye for blind patients by implanting electrodes in the brain part—the visual cortex—that deals with vision. These miniscule metal contact points can interact with brain cells to convey visual information.

The difficulty was that the electrodes were still relatively bulky and only a limited number could be implanted into brain tissue.

More electrodes

For all its success, the implant in Gomez lacked the number of electrodes needed for her to recognize objects or to regain enough sight for use in daily life. She had the implant for six months.

Today, advances in neurotechnology have made it possible to reduce the size of electrodes so that around 100 of them can be surgically implanted into the brain. But this is still too few for the needed resolution.

To be able to discern a face or enough of the outlines of objects in the real world to navigate, say, a room, a blind person would need to have between 1,000 and 2,000 electrodes inserted surgically into the visual cortex.

"Normal vision has a resolution of 1 million pixels," said Liu.

The implants being developed under NeuraViPer contain thousands of electrodes embedded in flexible strips. This will significantly increase visual resolution and improve the safety of the implant by reducing the risk of scarring or a negative immune response.

Information highway

Increasing the electrode count is only part of the solution. If visual prostheses are going to restore sight to the blind, they'll also need to be able to transfer much more information than is currently the case.

In short, the capacity of the electrodes needs to be increased to stimulate the brain and effectively communicate the images captured by the camera.

"Blindness is really a huge problem," said Peter Janssen, professor of neurosciences at the Leuven Brain Institute in Belgium. "We have almost no therapeutic options for these people."

Janssen is leading a separate project investigating ways of improving the stimulation patterns of electrodes so that they're able to convey more information to the brain's neurons. Called HyperStim, it began in November 2022 and will run for four years.

Current visual prostheses use very simple stimulation patterns. HYPERSTIM is seeking to apply more sophisticated ones for available electrodes. The aim is to obtain a resolution of at least 20 times the number of electrodes physically present, and as a result, fundamentally improve the quality of vision that it may be possible to achieve.

Learning curve

The first blind people to receive a visual prosthetic in the brain, connected to an external camera, won't suddenly have their vision fully restored, according to Janssen. That's because the brain itself needs time after an implant to decode the message received from the camera.

"The brain has to learn how to interpret the electrical stimulation," Janssen said.

Instead of fully restored vision, a rough black and white image with contours and outlines of objects is likely to be created in the brain—enough nonetheless to give the person greater mobility and independence.

All in all, advances in medical technology spurred by projects such as HyperStim and NeuraViPeR mean the prospects for people who have lost their sight are improving all the time.

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Living longer and obesity are both major contributors.

"With the key drivers of people living longer and a growing world population, we need to anticipate stress on health systems in most countries," said study author Jaimie Steinmetz, lead research scientist at Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle.

"There is no effective cure for osteoarthritis right now, so it's critical that we focus on strategies of prevention, early intervention, and making expensive, effective treatments like joint replacements more affordable in low- and middle-income countries," she said in an institute news release.

The research was part of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021, and used 30 years of osteoarthritis data, from 1990 to 2020, in more than 200 countries.

The study found that cases increased rapidly over the past three decades because of aging, population growth and obesity.

While around 256 million people had osteoarthritis in 1990, that number jumped to 595 million people in 2020, a 132% increase.

The study found that obesity was responsible for about 20% of the disability of osteoarthritis in 2020.

For people aged 70 and older, osteoarthritis ranked seventh in causes for years lived with disability.

The condition is expected to increase by 2050 by 74.9% in knees, 48.65% in hands, 78.6% in hips and 95.1% in other joints, including the elbow and shoulder.

Osteoarthritis impacts women more than men, and that's expected to continue to be true.

In 2020, 61% of osteoarthritis cases were in women compared to 39% in men.

"The reasons for gender differences in osteoarthritis prevalence are being investigated, but researchers believe that genetics, hormonal factors and anatomical differences play a role," said senior author Dr. Jacek Kopek, professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia.

The role of obesity increased during the study period. In 1990 obesity was tied to 16% of the disability due to osteoarthritis and rose to 20% in 2020.

If obesity can effectively be addressed in the global population, the osteoarthritis burden would decrease by an estimated 20%, the authors said.

"Health care systems and governments have an opportunity to engage and participate in identifying vulnerable populations, addressing drivers of obesity, and developing management strategies to prevent or slow down the progression of osteoarthritis," said study supervisor and co-author Liane Ong, lead research scientist at IHME.

"The role that physical inactivity plays in obesity and pain associated with osteoarthritis can have opposite and unintended negative cycles," Ong said in the release. "For example, being physically active can prevent injuries earlier in life and can even be beneficial for someone with joint pain. It's counterintuitive but having joint pain doesn't mean we should remain sedentary."

The study was published Aug. 21 in The Lancet Rheumatology.

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The national research project, involving researchers from Murdoch Children's Research Institute and published in The Lancet Regional Health—Western Pacific, highlighted how the unseasonal increase in case load across the southern hemisphere adds to the need for a safe and effective vaccine against Strep A.

The common deadly bacteria causes sore throats, scarlet fever and skin sores. Strep A infections affect about 750 million people and kills more than 500,000 globally every year, more than influenza, typhoid or whooping cough. Strep A can also cause severe life-threatening infections including toxic shock syndrome and flesh-eating disease as well as the post-infectious illnesses of acute rheumatic fever, rheumatic heart disease and kidney disease.

Strep A infections disproportionately affect young children, the elderly, pregnant women and Indigenous Australians. Rates of acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease among Indigenous populations in northern Australia are some of the highest in the world. Currently, there is no vaccine available to prevent Strep A.

For the study, the Paediatric Active Enhanced Disease Surveillance (PAEDS) Network collected data of children, under 18 years, admitted to five major Australian pediatric hospitals with severe Strep A infections. Strep A in Australia increased sharply from mid-2022 after a reduction in cases during 2020 and 2021. Cases jumped from 23 in 2020 to 107 by 2022. The incidence rate among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children was twice that of non-indigenous children.

Murdoch Children's Dr. Yara-Natalie Abo said Australia had followed similar trends in the UK, US and western Europe during 2022, despite differences in climate, seasons and circulating viruses.

"Increases in Strep A cases have been reported around the world, occurring during, and outside of, typical spring peaks," she said. This increase is likely due to a combination of environmental factors and viruses in circulation and more research is needed into whether new strains might be responsible.

"Strep A most commonly causes mild symptoms like sore throat, but in some children it can cause life threatening sepsis which requires early recognition and treatment. The global burden of Strep A is an unmet public health challenge."

Dr. Abo said reduced social contact during the COVID-19 pandemic may have also impacted on children's immunity to Strep A.

"Children normally get seasonal exposures to colds and common infections like Strep A, but lockdowns and other restrictions such as mask mandates during the COVID pandemic limited social contact for almost three years," she said. "This may have contributed to a lowered immunity and a spike in invasive Strep A infections as we emerged from lockdowns."

The hospital data showed the extent of symptoms among children admitted with Strep A, including toxic shock syndrome and aggressive skin infections.

Sandeep Kaur's daughter, Gursirat, 1, spent almost two months in intensive care earlier this year after contracting a Strep A infection.

"Gursirat had a mild fever, but otherwise was fine, so we gave her pain relief and kept an eye on her," Sandeep said. "But three days later she fell suddenly very ill. Her hands, lips and feet turned blue and her skin was discolored."

Sandeep said after she was admitted to hospital, Gursirat's condition worsened. She was diagnosed with kidney failure, a liver infection, and necrosis on seven of her fingertips, all linked to the Strep A infection.

"It was such a difficult time, our baby had drains in her leg, needed two operations and required dialysis for 12 days," she said. "Thankfully, her fingertips were saved but she is yet to fully recover. I hope that a vaccine can be made for Strep A so no other child has to endure this."

Murdoch Children's Professor Andrew Steer said the study found more children were presenting with severe symptoms as a result of Strep A infections.

"More research is required into the causes of this spike and how we can prevent future surges," he said. "With ongoing funding, we can begin to answer some of these complex questions and work towards an effective and accessible Strep A vaccine."

Professor Steer and his team are testing candidate Strep A vaccines developed by researchers in Australia and overseas in a first of its kind human challenge model.

The trials, which are planned to be conducted in Melbourne, involve about 50 participants receiving a candidate vaccine or placebo and having Strep A applied on their throats in a controlled environment.

"We hope this research will accelerate the development of a vaccine and move things forward to bigger field trials," Professor Steer said. A vaccine for Strep A will save hundreds of thousands of lives every year and prevent millions of infections that send children and adults to the hospital or doctor."

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A video taken on August 14 on the subway in Hefei in eastern China’s Anhui province showed the father asking passengers if anyone could spare some food for his son, who has cerebral palsy and had not eaten anything for a whole day, news site Houlang Video reported.

A kind woman offers the upset father some grapes on the subway after he has begged other passengers for help in desperation. Photo: Baidu

The unidentified father was holding a white plastic bag with CT scan images and told the commuters they had been at a hospital for the entire day and had not had a chance to eat anything.

“I still need to feed him, and he can’t urinate or defecate by himself,” said the father in tears to the other passengers.

A woman standing nearby took a bunch of grapes from her bag and asked the father if the boy could eat them.

“Fine. Fine. Thank you!” answered the father as he wiped away tears and took the fruit from the woman.

The father then helped his son remove his face mask, peeled the grapes, and fed them to him.

The video attracted the attention of millions on mainland social media, with many people shocked by the father’s predicament.

“For the sake of his son, the father didn’t care about his own dignity,” one person commented.

The loving father feeds his disabled son the grapes after carefully peeling each one in the touching video. Photo: Baidu

“He clearly had no alternative; otherwise, he would not beg for food in public,” said another person in sympathy.

“A thumbs-up to this good father. Hope life can treat them well,” said another online observer.

Stories of people facing life difficulties and receiving help from strangers often trend online in China.

In February, a jobless man who could not pay his mobile phone bill had to call the police for help and was given support and comfort by a kind police officer.

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DOING SURGERY ON the back of the eye is a little like laying new carpet: You must begin by moving the furniture. Separate the muscles that hold the eyeball inside its socket; make a delicate cut in the conjunctiva, the mucous membrane that covers the eye. Only then can the surgeon spin the eyeball around to access the retina, the thin layer of tissue that translates light into color, shape, movement. “Sometimes you have to pull it out a little bit,” says Pei-Chang Wu, with a wry smile. He has performed hundreds of operations during his long surgical career at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Kaohsiung, an industrial city in southern Taiwan.

Wu is 53, tall and thin with lank dark hair and a slightly stooped gait. Over dinner at Kaohsiung’s opulent Grand Hotel, he flicks through files on his laptop, showing me pictures of eye surgery—the plastic rods that fix the eye in place, the xenon lights that illuminate the inside of the eyeball like a stage—and movie clips with vision-related subtitles that turn Avengers: Endgame, Top Gun: Maverick, and Zootopia into public health messages. He peers at the screen through Coke bottle lenses that bulge from thin silver frames.

Wu specializes in repairing retinal detachments, which happen when the retina separates from the blood vessels inside the eyeball that supply it with oxygen and nutrients. For the patient, this condition first manifests as pops of light or dark spots, known as floaters, which dance across their vision like fireflies. If left untreated, small tears in the retina can progress from blurred or distorted vision to full blindness—a curtain drawn across the world.

When Wu began his surgical career in the late 1990s, most of his patients were in their sixties or seventies. But in the mid-2000s, he started to notice a troubling change. The people on his operating table kept getting younger. In 2016, Wu performed a scleral buckle surgery—fastening a belt around the eye to fix the retina into place—on a 14-year-old girl, a student at an elite high school in Kaohsiung. Another patient, a prominent programmer who had worked for Yahoo, suffered two severe retinal detachments and was blind in both eyes by age 29. Both of these cases are part of a wider problem that’s been growing across Asia for decades and is rapidly becoming an issue in the West too: an explosion of myopia.

Myopia, or what we commonly call nearsightedness, happens when the eyeball gets too long—it deforms from soccer ball to American football—and then the eye focuses light not on the retina but slightly in front of it, making distant objects appear blurry. The longer the eyeball becomes, the worse vision gets. Ophthalmologists measure this distortion in diopters, which refer to the strength of the lens required to bring someone’s vision back to normal. Anything worse than minus 5 diopters is considered “high myopia”—somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of myopia diagnoses around the world are in this category. In China, up to 90 percent of teenagers and young adults are myopic. In the 1950s the figure was as low as 10 percent. A 2012 study in Seoul found that an astonishing 96.5 percent of 19-year-old men were nearsighted. Among high schoolers in Taiwan, it’s around 90 percent. In the US and Europe, myopia rates across all ages are well below 50 percent, but they’ve risen sharply in recent decades. It’s estimated that by 2050, half the world’s population will need glasses, contacts, or surgery to see across a room. High myopia is now the leading cause of blindness in Japan, China, and Taiwan.

If those trends continue, it’s likely that millions more people around the world will go blind much earlier in life than they—or the societies they live in—are prepared for. It’s a “ticking time bomb,” says Nicola Logan, an optometry professor at the UK’s Aston University. She wasn’t the only expert I talked to who used that phrase. Because so much of Taiwan’s population is already living life with myopia, the island nation has already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us. And in a rare confluence, the country may also be the best place to look for solutions.

ON THE BULLET train south from Taipei, you can see the smog hanging over Kaohsiung from miles away, blurring the edges of the buildings. During the Japanese occupation, which ended in 1945, what had been a small trading port transformed into one of Taiwan’s biggest cities, a riot of heavy industry and shipbuilding. Over the next four decades, as Taiwan made the rapid transition from a predominantly agricultural economy to a manufacturing powerhouse, the lives of its citizens shifted too. Families flocked into cramped apartment blocks that still make up much of the urban housing. Education for children was mandatory and became increasingly intense. A network of after-school establishments called “cram schools” sprang up, making room for parents to work long hours without the childcare support from elderly relatives they would’ve had in the old society. At the end of the school day, some kids would board a bus, not to go home, but to ride to their cram school, some of which were open until 9 pm.

Pei-Chang Wu was born in Kaohsiung, at the height of the city’s transformation, in 1970. His grandparents, neither of whom were myopic, were farmers in central Taiwan. Both of his parents were teachers, and like many Asian parents, they put a huge emphasis on education as one of the few levers they could pull to move up through society. His father enforced a strict daily routine: up at 5 am for calligraphy and violin practice, school from 7:30 am to 4 pm. Once Wu got home in the evenings he had to complete his schoolwork. On the weekends, he participated in calligraphy competitions. By the age of 9, Wu had been diagnosed with myopia.

Across the modernizing world, this pattern repeated itself. For economies to continuously expand, education had to become central, and as this happened, the rates of myopia started to climb. But hardly anyone noticed, in Taiwan or anywhere else.

If current trends continue, it’s likely that millions more people around the world will go blind much earlier in life than they—or the societies they live in—are prepared for.

Then, during one summer in the early 1980s, a group of incoming college students gathered at Chengkungling, a military training facility in central Taiwan, for a ceremony to mark the beginning of their mandatory national service. The United States had recently cut diplomatic ties with the island and formally recognized the government in Beijing, and cross-strait tensions were high.

At first, the early morning ceremony went smoothly. A single cadet—tall, good posture—received a rifle on behalf of his classmates, symbolizing their duty to defend their country. As the ministers of education and defense rose to deliver their speeches to the young men they hoped would be the future of Taiwan, the sun also rose higher into the sky behind the stage. The government officials were dazzled by the glare reflecting back at them from hundreds of pairs of glasses. The ceremony was the seed for a joke about how to ward off an alien invasion—just ask Taiwanese students to look up—and the spark for the government’s fight against myopia.

The first step was to understand the scope of the problem. The president, alarmed by what had happened, asked health officials to begin a regular survey of myopia rates in Taiwan. It revealed a previously hidden epidemic, which seemed to be getting worse. By 1990, the myopia rate among Taiwanese 15-year-olds had risen to 74 percent.

By the time Wu started medical school in the early 1990s, he was seeing floaters—“strange animals in the sky,” as he called them—when he closed his eyes. At first, he dismissed them and focused on his budding career as an ophthalmologist. But during his residency, Wu examined hundreds of patients with retinal detachments who’d had the same symptoms. He grew worried about his own long-term vision. So he asked one of his professors to examine his eyes. “He found a break in my retina,” Wu said.

He was lucky. It was a small tear, minor enough to be fixed with a laser in five minutes. Shining a light through the pupil creates scar tissue that the retina can reattach to. “The laser saved me,” Wu said. “Otherwise I would be blind in one eye.” Wu decided he had a responsibility to rescue others from high myopia and its potential complications. “If I cannot save myself, we should save our next generation.”

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that a better understanding of what caused myopia—and what could prevent it—finally cracked open.

In 1999, the government convened a group of experts in medicine and education to try and fix the problem. Jen-Yee Wu, who worked at the Ministry of Education and had done his doctoral thesis on eyesight protection, was asked to write a set of guidelines for schools to address nearsightedness.

Later that year, he published a thin green book full of advice for teachers. It paid careful attention to desk height (to keep texts the right distance from the eyes) and room lighting, and advocated eye relaxation exercises, including a guided massage of points around the eyes and face. The book also advised giving children more space in their notebooks to pen the intricate characters that make up written Mandarin. And it formalized the 30/10 rule: a 10-minute break to stare into the distance after every half hour of reading or looking at a screen.

None of it worked. Nearsightedness rates continued to climb because, as it turned out, Taiwan, and the world, had been thinking about how to address myopia completely wrong.

HERE IS A non-exhaustive list of things that have been blamed for nearsightedness: pregnancy, pipe smoking, brown hair, long heads, bulging eyes, too much fluid in the eyes, not enough fluid in the eyes, muscle spasms, social class. “Any ophthalmologist who experienced a night of insomnia arose in the morning with a new and usually more bizarre theory,” wrote Brian Curtin in an influential 1985 book about myopia.

Folk theories have changed with technologies. Ask people today and they’re likely to blame smartphones and video games. Before that, it was sitting too close to the television and reading under the covers with a flashlight. Those activities all come under the broad umbrella of “near work”—using your eyes to look at something close to your face—which had been the leading scapegoat for myopia for centuries. In 1611 the astronomer and scientist Johannes Kepler wrote, “Those who do much close work in their youth become myopic.” In the mid-19th century, there existed a contraption called the “myopodiorthicon,” which was designed to gradually move a book backward during reading to strengthen the eye’s ability to adjust to objects at different distances. The Hygiene of the Eye in Schools, by Hermann Cohn, published in 1883, paid careful attention to lighting and advocated the use of headrests to physically prevent the eyes from coming too close to the text during reading.

In 1928, British ophthalmologist Arnold Sorsby surveyed Jewish boys in East London and discovered that they were more myopic than their non-Jewish peers. At first, he thought this was because of the extra time spent doing near work while studying holy texts. Eventually, though, he came to believe there was a genetic element to myopia. He conducted studies of twins that seemed to confirm this: The severity of myopia was more similar among identical twins than fraternal twins. The science of genetics was in vogue, and as Sorsby’s theory swept away Victorian concerns about the state of the schoolhouses, it became dogma for decades. Myopia became seen as a condition to be managed, not a disease that could be prevented.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that a better understanding of what caused myopia—and what could prevent it—finally cracked open. In these years, an Australian researcher called Ian Morgan stumbled on a scientific mystery that would consume the next 25 years of his life. Morgan, now a genial 78-year-old with sun-wrinkled skin and large dark-framed glasses, was working as a research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he was studying the neurotransmitter dopamine and its role in the eye’s signaling systems. Back then, he didn’t know much about myopia—he could barely tell you the difference between far- and nearsightedness.

Pei-Chang Wu with a patient. PHOTOGRAPH: AN RONG XU

But as a part of his weekly reviews of the latest scientific literature, he started to see some of the first evidence coming out of Asia about the growing myopia epidemic. He couldn’t understand how myopia rates could be close to 80 percent for kids leaving high school in East Asia and so much lower in his native Australia.

He soon found other research casting doubt on Sorsby’s genetic view of myopia. In Inuit and Eskimo populations, during the 1970s, myopia incidence increased from 5 percent to more than 60 percent prevalence in the span of one generation. Genetics couldn’t explain such a jump. The sharp increase in schooling among younger Inuits, however, might. In the early 1990s, researchers had found that ultra-orthodox Jewish boys are more myopic than their sisters—something that was likely due to the extra studying they have to do.

Morgan started to seek out a better understanding of what causes myopia, and by the early 2000s, he was convinced there had to be a behavioral reason for the boom. But if near work was really to blame, why hadn’t the interventions tried in China and Taiwan made any difference? In 2003, with colleagues Kathryn Rose and Paul Mitchell, Morgan began a two-year study of thousands of 6- and 12-year-olds in Sydney, looking for lifestyle differences that might explain their lower levels of myopia. They used a technique called “cycloplegic autorefraction,” in which the patient’s eyes are first relaxed with eye drops before a machine measures how light is focused on the back of the eye, providing an objective measure of the length of the eyeball.

The results, which were published in a landmark 2008 paper, confirmed Morgan’s suspicions. As expected, overall myopia rates among Australian 12-year-olds, at about 13 percent, were significantly lower than in Asia. Morgan and his team also surveyed the participants about their daily routines and hobbies and discovered a surprising relationship. The more time kids spent outside, the less likely they were to have myopia.

The next question was why. “This was where my background became really important,” Morgan says. It all came back, he thought, to dopamine—the neurotransmitter he had been studying before his detour into myopia research. “We knew that light stimulated the release of dopamine from the retina, and we knew that dopamine could control the rate at which the eye elongated,” Morgan says. (In 1989, an American ophthalmologist named Richard Stone found that he could induce myopia in chickens by manipulating light levels, and that there was less dopamine in the retinas of the myopic chickens.) “So once we had the actual epidemiological evidence that being outdoors was important, the mechanism was, to us, very obvious.” Without adequate exposure to sunlight, the eye keeps growing longer, images are focused in front of the retina, and vision becomes blurry. In August 2008—after a decade of research—Morgan published a paper that he believed contained the key to solving Asia’s myopia epidemic.

AROUND THIS TIME, Wu’s clinic was busy—his operating table often full, with a steady stream of parents with young children in tow seeking treatments for myopia. For instance, orthokeratology contact lenses improve vision by temporarily squishing the cornea into a different shape, reminiscent of how ancient Chinese soldiers are said to have slept with sandbags over their eyes for the same effect. Then there’s atropine—a muscle relaxant derived from the toxic nightshade and mandrake plants. Nightshade has been known as “belladonna” because women in Renaissance Italy—and maybe even as far back as Cleopatra—used it to dilate their pupils to make them appear larger and more beautiful. Atropine paralyzes the ciliary muscle, which controls the size of the pupil and, for reasons scientists haven’t yet pinned down, also seems to slow down the progression of myopia. (Since 2008, new treatments have become available: miSight contact lenses and MiyoSmart glasses, which arrest the growth of the eye by manipulating light patterns.)

In his studies in Taiwan, Wu observed the same phenomenon that Morgan had documented: More outdoor time equalled less myopia

But Wu knew that none of these treatments were dealing with the underlying cause of the problem. And as a newly minted member of Taiwan’s Vision Care Advisory Committee, a different group of academics behind some of the country’s well-meaning but ineffective attempts to tackle nearsightedness, he had adopted a determined, systematic approach to finding a solution. Every week, he gathered his colleagues to review the latest academic research on myopia. He even corralled his mother into making snacks as an added incentive.

During one of these Thursday sessions, with the smell of home-cooked food in the air, Wu discovered Ian Morgan’s research in Australia. It was a eureka moment. Were Taiwan’s classroom interventions failing because kids weren’t spending enough time outside? Wu decided to run his own version of the Sydney Myopia Study in Cimei, an island off the west coast of Taiwan. He observed the same phenomenon: More outdoor time equalled less myopia.

Around the same time, Wu chanced on an opportunity to go a step further than Morgan—to move from simply observing the myopia problem to fighting back. His son was starting elementary school, and the parents of incoming students had been invited to an orientation talk. They gathered in a classroom at the school, surrounded by small desks and kids’ drawings on the walls. At the end, the principal opened the floor to questions. Wu raised his hand and voiced his concerns about what Taiwanese schooling might do to his son’s vision. “Under your education system, will he become myopic or not?”

Other hands started going up. One woman had a daughter in the third grade who was already minus 2 diopters, and she feared for her son. Wu saw a chance to put Morgan’s theory into action.

At the time, the Taiwanese government was encouraging schools to switch the classroom lights off and send kids outside during breaks—to save electricity, not eyes. Wu convinced the principal of his son’s school to go further and usher the children outside six times a day, which added up to an extra six and a half hours of outdoor time each week. When Wu took measurements at the start of the program, in February 2009, the myopia prevalence among 7- to 11-year-olds at both his son’s school and another school, which he used as a control for his experiment, was around 48 percent. A year later, the control school had almost twice the rate of new cases of myopia as his son’s school.

Wu began to preach the gospel of outdoor time, appearing in the media and touring rural Taiwan. On many of the stops, Wu, on guitar, and his wife, on keys, play their own renditions of pop songs with new lyrics about myopia prevention. (A recent effort turned “Despacito” into a ballad about atropine). He wrote a book, Kids Could Be Free From Myopia, outlining the principles of good eye health and how he applied them to slow the progression of myopia in his own young children. “Sometimes,” he says, “we don’t appreciate the free things.”

Wu also worked on translating his research findings into a simple program that could be rolled out across the country. To do that, he needed to know how much time kids should spend outdoors. Wu thought back to Ian Morgan’s research, which had found that Australian kids spent an average of 13.5 hours a week outside. Another study suggested 14 hours. And so two hours a day became the cornerstone of Taiwan’s national myopia strategy, launched in 2010. It’s called Tian-Tian 120, which translates to “every day 120,” for the number of minutes children should spend outside each day.

At Mingde Elementary School in Kaohsiung, I watched as muzak blasted over the speakers and kids of all ages came streaming outside in their uniforms, grabbing balls and jump ropes. As the school’s principal, Ching-Sheng Chen, proudly showed off the array of outdoor equipment, a boy who couldn’t have been much older than 7 grabbed a unicycle and began riding laps around the playing field. At another school in northeast Taiwan, known for its changeable weather, the playground has been equipped with a giant covered area called “Sunny Square” so the kids can still spend time outdoors when it’s raining.

The results of the Tian-Tian 120 program were immediate and impressive. After years of trending upwards, myopia prevalence among Taiwanese primary school children peaked in 2011 at 50 percent, and then started to come down. Within a few years, it was at 46.1 percent. “You can see this very beautiful curve,” Wu says.

IN 2014, A young ophthalmologist in Yilan County, on Taiwan’s rugged northeast coast, began a project that he hoped would eradicate high myopia entirely.

Der-Chong Tsai—who wears round black frames and a white lab coat and shares Wu’s earnest energy—first became interested in eye health while training at Taiwan’s National Defense Medical Center. From there, he worked at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, and he’d come across Wu’s and Morgan’s work on nearsightedness after completing a PhD in epidemiology in the early 2010s.

He was impressed but had a hunch that intervening even earlier than primary school could make a significant difference—not only to slow down the progression of myopia, but to try and stop it from taking hold in the first place. It’s been found that for every year the onset of myopia is delayed, the ultimate severity of the condition is reduced by 0.75 diopters—catch it early enough, and you might be able to prevent a kid from ever needing glasses. “We thought primary school was too late,” Tsai said. “In terms of myopia prevention, the earlier the better.”

Taiwan finally seemed to be getting the upper hand in its long fight against myopia. Then Covid hit, and Wu’s beautiful curve began to invert.

Yilan County now runs one of the most ambitious myopia prevention programs in the world. Each year, Tsai and his team visit every preschool in the region, running screening tests to look for what’s called “pre-myopia”—the earliest signs of the eyeball getting too long. Tsai wants to catch children whose eyes are already too long for their age—who may not have myopia yet, but who might be at higher risk once they start formal schooling.

Today, Tsai screens more than 98 percent of preschoolers in Yilan County, and at a cost of just $13 per child, he’s found hundreds of cases of pre-myopia that wouldn’t have been spotted until much later, when it was more advanced. The children most at risk of developing myopia are prescribed atropine alongside their time outdoors, and the results have been spectacular. By the end of 2016, after two years, the Yilan program had driven down the prevalence of myopia in the region by 5 percentage points. Between the Tian-Tian 120 initiative, aimed at older kids, and the Yilan program, Taiwan finally seemed to be getting the upper hand in its long fight against myopia.

Then Covid hit, and a whole generation of kids were stuck inside for months at a time. Studies show that in China, Turkey, Hong Kong, and India, myopia worsened during the Covid lockdowns. Taiwan was no exception: Wu’s beautiful curve began to invert.

IN MARCH 2023, Taiwan lifted its final pandemic restriction, allowing international travelers to visit without having to quarantine. I arrived there half-expecting some mythical Land of the Blind scenario: pavements populated by people with white sticks stumbling into everything, a pair of glasses perched on every nose. It wasn’t like that, of course. Although there were seven eyewear shops within a 10-minute walk of my hotel in Kaohsiung, and the stylized eye logos of oculists all around, like the eerie billboard from The Great Gatsby.

There are long-standing cultural forces driving Taiwan’s myopia boom—the emphasis on education and a notion that paler skin is more attractive both conspire to keep people inside. Navigating the organized chaos of traffic snarls in cities like Taipei and Kaohsiung, I couldn’t help but think how difficult it would be for someone with impaired vision to get around, and how challenging it is to find safe outdoor spaces for children to play in the sun in such a dense metropolis.

But the pandemic has entrenched what was already a global problem. On our current trajectory, viral diseases, air pollution, and extreme heat are just some of the things that will continue to keep young children indoors. By 2050, according to the International Myopia Institute, 10 percent of the world’s population will have high myopia, and up to 70 percent of them will have pathologic myopia—the kind that causes blindness. That’s as many as 680 million people affected by vision loss or blindness, with catastrophic effects for economies and health care systems.

In that sense, Taiwan’s myopia boom is a blurry glimpse of a potentially blurred future: one where technology has to compensate for the societal changes that are driving nearsightedness. Ian Morgan has been involved in prototypes of glass-walled classrooms in China, enabling children to get the benefit of time outdoors without having to cut back on education. Other research suggests that shining a bright red light directly into the eye with a special machine may slow the progression of myopia. But many of the existing treatments are expensive, and they don’t work for everyone. Some ophthalmologists predict a future where bad eyesight, like crooked teeth, becomes a marker of an impoverished childhood. Others argue that myopia prevention should be publicly funded—that, like programs to encourage people to quit smoking or exercise regularly, a little funding now will save a lot in the future. “Prevention is better than cure,” is one of Pei-Chang Wu’s mantras.

While children in Taiwan’s Yilan County experienced the pandemic years much the same as kids everywhere—less time outdoors and more time watching screens—intervening when children are quite young has proven to be the best strategy: Across the county, myopia rates in preschoolers remained stable throughout the lockdowns. Technology and industrialization may have contributed to the myopia problem, but sometimes the best solutions are cheap and simple. Just go outside, and see.

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"One might think that the huge remote continent of Antarctica with its kilometers-thick ice sheet could withstand extremes brought about by climate change, but this is absolutely not the case," says University of Leeds glaciologist Anna Hogg.

The missing sea ice is currently the size of Greenland, a country that spans nearly 2.2 million square kilometres (836,330 square miles).

As a six sigma event, it should only occur once in 7.5 million years. But times are changing. New research led by University of Exeter geophysicist Martin Siegert suggests such extremes are now virtually certain to continue.

Reviewing changes in Antarctic atmosphere, weather, ice and the response from wildlife, Siegert and colleagues note concerning signs that many of these changes are now locked in. Particularly since we've now already added enough fossil-fuels to the atmosphere to hit the 1.5 °C Paris limit, and we're not yet even experiencing the impacts of about 0.4 °C (0.7 °F) of that yet.

For example, on top of the missing sea ice, last year Antarctica experienced the most extreme heat wave on record, reaching 38.5 °C (69.3 °F) above its average temperature.

"It is virtually certain that continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increases in the size and frequency of events," Siegert and team write in their paper.

This is because Antarctica's ice plays a massive role in keeping Earth cool. Its highly reflective white surface doesn't absorb sunlight, so the huge loss of ice we're witnessing means a big chunk of sunlight is now no longer being reflected back into space, triggering even more heating.

This guarantees increasingly extreme weather events and rising seas.

"Ice shelves are important because they provide buttressing support that stabilizes the rate of flow from the ice sheet on land," says Siegert.

"When ice on land is lost to the sea, it adds to sea-level rise."

Antarctic sea-ice concentration in February 2023. (European Space Agency)

The icy continent also shapes global ocean and atmospheric currents and we don't yet understand the full ramifications of messing with those.

"The feedback loops involved in the climate system are very complex and we still have much to learn," explains Hogg. "Satellites orbiting Earth such as the Copernicus Sentinel-1, ESA's CryoSat and missions to be launched in the future, are vital for measuring and monitoring this remote part of our world."

However the researchers conclude it is now "highly likely that with continued high levels of greenhouse gas emissions global sea level may increase by more than 1 meter this century and much more thereafter."

The review echoes a spate of recent studies and events all demonstrating climate consequences are happening faster than previous estimates.

And all this is only at 1.1 °C of heating. We're on track for much more.

"Antarctic change has global implications," says Siegert. "Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero is our best hope of preserving Antarctica, and this must matter to every country – and individual – on the planet."

Researchers are understandably frustrated as their warnings continue to be ignored.

"We've been saying this for 30 years," University of Colorado glaciologist Ted Scambos, who was not involved in the new research, told Melina Walling at Japan Today. "I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed. I wish we were taking action faster."

The research is published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

So far this year, Quanta has chronicled three major advances in Ramsey theory, the study of how to avoid creating mathematical patterns. The first result put a new cap on how big a set of integers can be without containing three evenly spaced numbers, like {2, 4, 6} or {21, 31, 41}. The second and third similarly put new bounds on the size of networks without clusters of points that are either all connected, or all isolated from each other.

The proofs address what happens as the numbers involved grow infinitely large. Paradoxically, this can sometimes be easier than dealing with pesky real-world quantities.

For example, consider two questions about a fraction with a really big denominator. You might ask what the decimal expansion of, say, 1/42503312127361 is. Or you could ask if this number will get closer to zero as the denominator grows. The first question is a specific question about a real-world quantity, and it’s harder to calculate than the second, which asks how the quantity 1/n will “asymptotically” change as n grows. (It gets closer and closer to 0.)

“This is a problem plaguing all of Ramsey theory,” said William Gasarch, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland. “Ramsey theory is known for having asymptotically very nice results.” But analyzing numbers that are smaller than infinity requires an entirely different mathematical toolbox.

Gasarch has studied questions in Ramsey theory involving finite numbers that are too big for the problem to be solved by brute force. In one project, he took on the finite version of the first of this year’s breakthroughs—a February paper by Zander Kelley, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Raghu Meka of the University of California, Los Angeles. Kelley and Meka found a new upper bound on how many integers between 1 and N you can put into a set while avoiding three-term progressions, or patterns of evenly spaced numbers.

Though Kelley and Meka’s result applies even if N is relatively small, it doesn’t give a particularly useful bound in that case. For very small values of N, you’re better off sticking to very simple methods. If N is, say, 5, just look at all the possible sets of numbers between 1 and N, and pick out the biggest progression-free one: {1, 2, 4, 5}.

But the number of different possible answers grows very quickly and makes it too difficult to employ such a simple strategy. There are more than 1 million sets consisting of numbers between 1 and 20. There are over 1060 using numbers between 1 and 200. Finding the best progression-free set for these cases takes a hefty dose of computing power, even with efficiency-improving strategies. “You need to be able to squeeze a lot of performance out of things,” said James Glenn, a computer scientist at Yale University. In 2008, Gasarch, Glenn, and Clyde Kruskal of the University of Maryland wrote a program to find the biggest progression-free sets up to an N of 187. (Previous work had gotten the answers up to 150, as well as for 157.) Despite a roster of tricks, their program took months to finish, Glenn said.

To lessen their computational load, the team used simple tests that prevented their program from pursuing dead-end searches and split their sets into smaller parts that they analyzed separately.

“If you start at a random place, you actually do better,” said William Gasarch.

Photograph: Evan Golub/Quanta Magazine

Gasarch, Glenn, and Kruskal also tried several other strategies. One promising idea leaned on randomness. A simple way to come up with a progression-free set is to put 1 in your set, then always add the next number that doesn’t create an arithmetic progression. Follow this procedure until you hit the number 10, and you’ll get the set {1, 2, 4, 5, 10}. But it turns out this isn’t the best strategy in general. “What if we don’t start at 1?” Gasarch said. “If you start at a random place, you actually do better.” Researchers have no idea why randomness is so useful, he added.

Calculating the finite versions of the two other new Ramsey theory results is even more vexing than determining the size of progression-free sets. Those results concern mathematical networks (called graphs) made up of nodes connected by lines called edges. The Ramsey number r(s, t) is the smallest number of nodes a graph must have before it becomes impossible to avoid including either a group of s connected nodes or t disconnected ones. The Ramsey number is such a headache to compute that even r(5, 5) is unknown—it’s somewhere between 43 and 48.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

In 1981, Brendan McKay, now a computer scientist at Australian National University, wrote a software program called nauty, which was intended to make calculating Ramsey numbers simpler. Nauty ensures that researchers don’t waste time checking two graphs that are just flipped or rotated versions of one another. “If somebody’s in the area and is not using nauty, the game is over. You must use it,” said Stanisław Radziszowski, a mathematician at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Still, the amount of computation involved is almost incomprehensible. In 2013, Radziszowski and Jan Goedgebeur proved that r(3, 10) is at most 42. “It took, I think, almost 50 CPU years,” said Goedgebeur, a computer scientist at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

If you can’t compute an exact Ramsey number, you can try narrowing down its value with examples. If you found a 45-node graph without five nodes that were all connected and without five nodes that were all disconnected, that would prove that r(5, 5) is bigger than 45. Mathematicians studying Ramsey numbers used to think that finding those examples, called Ramsey graphs, would be simple, Radziszowski said. But it wasn’t so. “There was this expectation that nice, cool mathematical constructions will give the best possible constructions, and we just need more people to work on it,” he said. “My feeling is more and more that it’s chaotic.”

Randomness is both an obstacle to understanding and a useful tool. Geoffrey Exoo, a computer scientist at Indiana State University, has spent years refining random methods to generate Ramsey graphs. In a 2015 paper announcing dozens of new, record-beating Ramsey graphs, Exoo and Milos Tatarevic generated random graphs and then gradually tweaked them by deleting or adding edges that reduced the number of unwanted clusters until they found a Ramsey graph. Exoo’s techniques are as much an art as anything, though, Radziszowski said. They sometimes require him to combine multiple methods, or to use judgment about what kind of graphs to start with. “Many, many people try it, and they cannot do it,” Radziszowski said.

The techniques developed to generate Ramsey graphs could be more broadly useful someday, said Goedgebeur, who has worked on producing other kinds of graphs, such as graphs that represent chemical compounds. “It is not unlikely that these techniques can also be transferred and adjusted to help generate other classes of graphs more efficiently (and vice versa),” he wrote in an email.

To Radziszowski, however, the reason for studying the small Ramsey numbers is much simpler. “Because it’s open, because nobody knows what the answer is,” he said. “The trivial cases we do by hand; a little larger, you need a computer, and a little larger, even the computer is not good enough. And so the challenge emerges.”

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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The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. 

As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.  

For many years, scholars couldn't figure out how, exactly, a boomerang flew. Yet, in the last 50 years, scientists have realised that boomerangs are designed in a similar aerofoil manner as aeroplane wings, with each side or "wing" of a boomerang curved to give it aerodynamic lift. Therefore, whether intentional or not, the boomerang may have been a pivotal Indigenous predecessor to modern flight.

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Before fires ripped through Lahaina, the craftsman-inspired home at 271 Front St. didn’t stand out much in the neighborhood. The nearly 100-year-old structure had been lovingly restored in recent years, but it was one of many charming homes lining the waterfront of one of Hawaii’s most historically important towns. 

Today, the house is unmissable: A red-roofed structure in seemingly pristine condition, surrounded by piles of ash and rubble for blocks in every direction.

“It looks like it was photoshopped in,” homeowner Trip Millikin said of the house, which stands in such contrast to the surrounding ruins that images of the home have gone viral in recent days.

Millikin has spent much of the last week — in between anxious calls to check up on friends and neighbors — puzzling over why his house was somehow spared.

Maybe it was just luck. Maybe the wind shifted at just the right moment. Or maybe it was a series of serendipitous choices made during a recent home renovation that helped prevent flying pieces of burning wood and debris from doing little more than scorching small patches of his yard and bubbling the paint on one wall. 

Experts say it was likely a little bit of all the above, but that one element of the home’s recent renovation is actually the most affordable and important thing people can do to try and protect their homes.

A Painstaking Renovation

Millikin and his wife, Dora Millikin, fell in love with the Front Street house several years ago, although it was vacant and had fallen into a state of disrepair.

The home, known as the Pioneer Mill Co./Lahaina Ice Co. Bookkeeper’s House, is believed to have been moved to Front Street in 1925 from a nearby plantation. For decades, it was used to house management-level employees.

The Millikins, who started living in Lahaina more than a decade ago, used to bicycle by the house and talk about what it would take to fix the sagging roof, the rotting lanai, the peeling paint.

“The house was an absolute nightmare, but you could see the bones of it,” Millikin said.

The Front Street home had been vacant and on the market for several years when Trip Millikin and his wife bought it and embarked on an extensive restoration project. (Courtesy: Trip Millikin/2023)

Millikin and his wife bought the property in 2021, working with the county on a historic preservation plan before embarking on a nearly two-year renovation project. They did much of the work themselves, along with a local carpenter and the help of neighbors.

The effort was a source of neighborhood pride, Millikin said, with people walking by and frequently talking to the couple as they hand glazed the 500 window panes in the structure, painstakingly repaired the termite damage, dug out the mushrooms growing in the downstairs ohana unit.

The house is what’s known as a craftsman-inspired “plantation vernacular” dwelling, a style of homes constructed mostly by sugar and pineapple plantation companies in the early 20th century.

This home, overseen by a Native Hawaiian carpenter who headed most construction projects for the Pioneer Mill Co., was built from California redwood, Millikin said, which has some natural fire-resistant properties. But so was the historic house next door, which burned completely in the Aug. 8 fire.

Dora Millikin glazing some of the 500 window panes in the home at 271 Front St. (Courtesy:Trip Millikin/2023)

During renovations, Millikin installed a commercial-grade steel roof, something that definitely would have provided better protection from flying embers than shingles. At first, Millikin thought this might have made the biggest difference in why his home was spared.

But Michael Wara, the director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Wood Institute for the Environment, said it was likely the Millikins’ decision to dig out the existing landscaping directly surrounding the house and replace it with river stones that made the biggest difference.

“What folks in the wildfire business call the zone zero or the ember ignition zone, is kind of a key factor in whether homes do or do not burn down,” Wara said.

Having nothing combustible in the 5 feet directly around a house is enormously important.

Millikin said the decision to install river stones for about a meter around the house was not actually aimed at fire prevention. He wanted to prevent runoff from landscaping from creating water and termite damage. But it may have saved his home.

Regulations in California have typically focused on a 30-foot perimeter around homes known as “Zone A” in firefighting. But Wara said that research on the thousands of homes that have burned in California in recent years has shown that it’s really what’s installed in the immediate few feet of a home that makes the biggest difference.

In fires like the one in Lahaina, there are enormous amounts of flaming embers that are flying through the air. And if there’s something next to the house that is combustible — a wood fence, a bush, dry grass — that’s often what will ignite the structure, Wara said.

In the instance of the Front Street house, there was also a considerable amount of luck involved, he said. Because even the most well-prepared house can catch fire when the homes next to it are burning.

“Basically, the houses start catching each other on fire,” Wara said, which is why encouraging homeowners to remove landscaping and install rocks or granite walkways around homes is so important. “If enough of the homes have that kind of preparation then that chain reaction doesn’t get started.”

A Struggle To Make Use Of Luck

Millikin, who was on a trip to Massachusetts during the Lahaina fire, said the last he heard from his immediate neighbor on Aug. 8 was that the whole neighborhood was burning and his home was unlikely to make it.

He went to bed feeling physically ill out of fear for the fate of his friends, his neighborhood, and his home.

In the morning, a friend called and sent them a picture from a helicopter flyover of Lahaina. Every structure had been destroyed in the area. But there, in the midst of the destruction, was the seemingly untouched red roof of Millikin’s home.

Millikin said he and his wife were overcome with emotion.

“We started crying,” he said. “I felt guilty. We still feel guilty.”

Trip and Dora Millikin’s home is the only structure standing for blocks in every direction. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2023)

Millikin said he has friends who have lost homes in California in recent years, and when he’s seen stories about other “miracle houses” left standing in the aftermath of destructive fires, he’s always thought: “Boy, I’m glad I don’t own that one. I wouldn’t want that. I would feel guilty.”

Now, Millikin said, “that’s our house.”

Millikin is hoping to channel his luck — and his feelings of guilt — into community action. He’s been told by neighbors that it’s best to stay put outside of Lahaina while he can so as not to take up much-needed resources for other survivors.

But when he and his wife are able to go back, he’s hoping to set up his home as some sort of a community hub for people trying to rebuild theirs.

“Let’s rebuild this together,” he said. “This house will become a base for all of us. Let’s use it.”

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Sunday, 20 August

• Who: Chinese National Space Agency
• What: Long March 4C
• Where: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre
• When: 5:45 p.m. UTC
• Why: It’s unclear what the payload is but it could be the Gaofen 12-04 radar satellite.

Tuesday, 22 August

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• Where: Vandenburg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 4 - viewable on the SpaceX website.
• When: 6:00 a.m. UTC
• Why: 21 Starlink v2 Mini satellites are being launched into a low Earth orbit. The satellites are designated as Starlink Group 7-1.

Wednesday, 23 August

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• Where: Space Launch Complex 40, Cape Canaveral - viewable on the SpaceX website.
• When: 12:47 a.m. UTC
• Why: 22 Starlink v2 Mini satellites are being put into a low Earth orbit. This group will be known as Starlink Group 6-11.

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Soyuz 2.1a
• Where: Baikonur Cosmodrome
• When: 1:08 a.m. UTC
• Why: It will launch the 85th Progress cargo delivery to the crew up at the International Space Station (ISS).

• Who: Rocket Lab
• What: Electron
• Where: LC-1B, Mahia, New Zealand - viewable on Rocket Lab’s website.
• When: 11:30 p.m. UTC
• Why: Rocket Lab will launch the first Arcadia series satellite dubbed Acadia 1 for Capella Space. The Acadia synthetic aperture radar satellites will be used for snapping images of the Earth.

Friday, 25 August

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9 B5
• Where: SpaceX LC-39A, Florida - viewable on the SpaceX website.
• When: 7:49 a.m. UTC
• Why: SpaceX will launch Crew-7 on the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. The mission is part of NASA’s commercial crew program. The crew includes NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov.

Saturday, August 26

• Who: JAXA and NASA
• What: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA
• Where: Yoshinobu Launch Complex LP-1
• When: 12:34 a.m. UTC
• Why: JAXA and NASA will launch the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) to perform high-res X-ray spectroscopic observations of the hot gas plasma wind that travels through galaxies in the universe. It will help us learn more about the composition and evolution of celestial objects. Also hitching a ride is JAXA’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM). This payload will test out precision landing technology on the moon.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was a Long March 3B carrying the L-SAR4 01 satellite from Xichang Satellite Launch Centre. It will be used to provide remote sensing information services.

• Next, a Kuaizhou 1A rocket was launched carrying five HeDe-3 satellites from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre. They will be used as part of a new VDES maritime communication system.

• Finally, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched 22 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit where they will provide broadband services. The group is known as Starlink Group 6-10.

That’s all for this week, there will be a break next week with TWIRL hopefully returning the week after.

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WHEN JAY BULCKAERT answered his phone, he was standing in a fire break clearing brush in Kam Lake, just outside of Yellowknife, the capital city of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Just miles away, a massive wildfire is stalking the city and threatening to move closer as the winds shift.

Thousands of people have left Yellowknife since an evacuation order was announced Wednesday evening. Not Bulckaert, though, nor the other volunteers who showed up Friday morning to do whatever they could to stop the fire from razing the city of 20,000. “It’s all hands on deck,” he says.

They divvied up tasks as soon as they met up Friday. Doing admin work, driving buses and tractors, operating chain saws, feeding the crew—everyone brings something to the table. “Right now we’re clearing brush. Probably next we’ll be moving sprinklers. We’re just a rag-tag crew of locals that showed up here and volunteered to help the effort. We’re going to do whatever they ask us to do,” says Bulckaert, who normally works as a filmmaker.

Bulckaert doesn’t plan to leave, and won’t until officials force him to. He’s part of Yellowknife’s last line of defense. “This is my town,” he says. “I’m here until the bitter end.”

Yellowknife is in the southern portion of the Northwest Territories, sitting on the shore of Great Slave Lake, the deepest in North America and the world’s tenth largest by area. It is named for people of the Dene First Nation, a group of Indigenous peoples who together represent 28 percent of the territory’s population.

The city is surrounded by boreal forest, the world’s largest intact forest ecosystem, stretching from the tip of Newfoundland and Labrador in the east to Alaska in the west. In the part within the Northwest Territories, a collection of conifers—spruce, firs, pines—and other native plants are home to hundreds of species of wild animals, including bears, bison, beavers, wolves, ravens, and porcupines. At night, it’s not uncommon to see the Northern Lights dance across the treetops.

PHOTOGRAPH: JAY BULCKAERT

Two million hectares—more than 8,200 square miles—of this pristine wilderness has burned since May, in what is now the worst year on record for forest fires across Canada. More than 1,000 wildfires are currently burning across the country. This season, a total of 5,767 fires have been recorded. Together, they’ve burned 14 million hectares, an area roughly the size of the US state of Alabama, or the total area of Greece.

The Northwest Territories alone have 236 active fires right now. The one closest to Yellowknife—the territory’s only real city—is named ZF015. That fire, along with another closer to Ingraham Trail, a local highway, have “encircled” the city in flames, says territory information officer Mike Westwick. Across the North Slave region, thousands of people have been forced from their homes and into evacuation centers, strangers’ spare bedrooms, and camping trailers across Alberta, the closest province to the south of the territory.

On the phone from a rest stop in Grand Prairie, Alberta, nearly 1,200 kilometers from Yellowknife, recent high school graduate Naledi Ndlovu describes her family’s drive out of the city.

On Wednesday evening, they left the city in a convoy of three cars, just before the formal evacuation was ordered. Ndlovu says smoke and fire laced the edges of Highway 3, the only road out of town. Frantic wildlife, including bears, ran alongside the road, while others lay dead on the shoulder, having not been able to escape.

Ndlovu’s father gripped the steering wheel as the sun set and the sky darkened. The highway was packed with scared, frustrated drivers weaving from exhaustion through an endless haze of smoke. “At some point it got so smoky that we couldn’t see the cars in front of us,” Ndlovu says.

“People were just panicking during that drive. People are trying to make it to the safety area as fast as they can—overtaking other people really fast.”

Along the way, the family’s Toyota Tundra pickup got rear-ended—not the only accident as people rushed to overtake others on the undivided highway. Then, a tire blew. When they got out to examine the truck, they discovered that all four of their rubber tires had deformed due to the heat of the road.

Ndlovu’s family will have to get a new set of tires before continuing to Calgary, another seven hours’ drive south.

Yellowknife is not the only community in the region under an evacuation order. The Dene communities of N’dilo, Dettah, and Kakisa were told to leave over the past week, as have the people of Hay River, Enterprise, Fort Smith, K’atlodeeche First Nation, and a handful of other towns.

Garth Carman left his Hay River home on Sunday afternoon, just as the evacuation order was issued for the town.

He and wife Linda had taken in five cats from people in Fort Smith when their evacuation order came in the day before. He loaded the cats into his new Jeep—along with his own three cats—and hit the road, with Linda following behind in her Subaru Legacy station wagon. As they made their way three hours east to Fort Resolution, a wave of flames rolled over the highway. Trees exploded. “Boom, boom, boom. They were coming towards us faster than you can run,” he says. “Instantly the air got super hot and humid, like looking into a kettle of boiling water.”

Trucks and trailers careened as they spun around to escape. In the chaos Carman lost track of his wife. Poor cell service and even worse internet connectivity made it impossible to find her. Only when he saw her Subaru in the Hay River airport parking lot did he learn she’d been sent to Alberta. Reunited since midweek at a friend’s house near the town of Valleyview, the pair are now taking care of 16 cats.

Back in Hay River, Ginger Murphy reckons a fifth of the town’s population, roughly 500 people, stayed behind despite the order to leave.

Each day since the town was evacuated, Murphy has woken by 8 am, grabbed a coffee, and checked in on people’s loved ones and pets. Once everyone has been accounted for, she heads over to Enterprise to look for the missing pets that displaced owners are fretting over. That town, about a half-hour drive south from Hay River, is about 90 percent destroyed, save for a handful of homes and city buildings. “Enterprise looks really bad,” she says. “A lot of it got burned.”

More than half of the Northwest Territories’ 45,000 people left their homes this month because of the threat of fire, and that number will only increase as more people heed the warnings of Yellowknife officials.

PHOTOGRAPH: JAY BULCKAERT

According to local officials, just over 5,100 vehicles have crossed over the Deh Cho bridge, which crosses the Mackenzie River about 300 kilometers south of Yellowknife. Another 1,500 people left Yellowknife by plane on Thursday, and near-hourly flights on military, charter, and commercial planes on Friday had room for 2,000 more. Airlines are asking people to crate their animals. It’s a lot to ask for many Yellowknifers, who tend to let their cats live a cage-free existence.

One of them is Theo, a handsome gray tabby with jade-colored eyes. As people left Yellowknife en masse, Megan Cooper, Theo’s owner, spent most of the week desperately trying to get back home to rescue him and her pup, Dandelion.

She’d been on vacation in Europe, but hadn’t been having a great time the past few days. Instead, she was glued to her phone, barely sleeping and desperately scrolling for information about the fires, about a possible evacuation, about how to get her pets to safety. Online, rumors swirled about the fire and what the city was doing about it, adding to the stress. She was wracked with guilt, unsure Theo would come if a stranger called him out of the brush.

She decided to hop on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris and then board a nine-hour flight to Calgary, with every intention of making it back home to Yellowknife in time to pack her animals up in her van and head south. By the time she landed in Alberta, a friend of a friend—a total stranger—had lured Theo out by shaking a package of cat treats. Cooper will soon travel to Edmonton to be reunited with her pets who, at the time of writing, are en route to the city.

Cooper is trying to remain optimistic by reminding herself of the collective resilience of Yellowknife. The community is one stitched together by a mutual love for nature, adventure, and isolation. “It’s a capital city with people from wildly different backgrounds—a relatively large immigrant population, a mining town, a community on traditional Dene territory, and a hub for the Western Arctic,” she says. “Yellowknifers love being out on the land and are especially self-sufficient and capable people who trade easy access to some modern conveniences for the freedom and adventure that offers,” she says.

On the outskirts of Yellowknife, the city and private entrepreneurs have installed massive fuel breaks measuring 100 meters by 15,000 meters in efforts to stop the fire in its tracks. Firefighters from across Canada and from as far away as South Africa are working to suppress the fires closest to population centers. Ignition operations—setting intentional fires to eliminate fuel sources—have also been deployed alongside a maze of sprinklers and a coating of fire retardant.

The community and its allies are working shoulder to shoulder to save Yellowknife as the fire inches closer. It’s likely to hit the edge of the city this weekend if the weather continues to be uncooperative.

“The idea of it burning down is devastating,” says Cooper. “Nowhere can replace it.”

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