If you haven’t already, go and read the WIRED feature article “A Vast Untapped Green Energy Source Is Hiding Beneath Your Feet,” which details the quest to tap into geothermal energy using drilling techniques originally developed for fracking gas.

WIRED senior writer Gregory Barber followed Joseph Moore, a geologist at the University of Utah, on his quest to work out how to drill down thousands of feet into hot, dense granite, before using water to extract geothermal energy.

I asked Barber to tell me more about the story, and whether “enhanced” geothermal systems (EGS) are really going to uncork a clean-energy bonanza.

Will Knight: I really enjoyed the story. Tell me how you first came across the technology at the heart of it.

Gregory Barber: I initially heard about it because I was looking into geothermal heating systems. These are much shallower, easy-to-access systems that directly heat homes and businesses using warmed-up water. They're getting much more popular as people try to kick natural gas, especially in Europe. But anyway, in the course of learning about this, I heard about a big Department of Energy experiment focused on electricity generation using enhanced geothermal systems, which requires much more expensive, deeper drilling to access higher temperatures. And they'd just picked a team out in Utah to take it on.

Why is it happening now? As you say, geothermal energy has been a thing for decades.

I think it reflects the confluence of a few things. One being 20 years of the fracking boom, which yielded big improvements in the art of drilling deep down and cracking open rocks—especially the hot and hard rocks relevant to making geothermal systems. It used to be that you'd spend millions of dollars drilling down and then crack the rock and realize—oops!—the cracks didn't open fully, or you drilled into a hidden fault and lost your water or even worse, triggered an earthquake. Nowadays the risks of that are much lower.

You are writing a lot about efforts to mitigate climate change with alternative energy and solutions like carbon capture. How optimistic are you about these projects?

I think there are useful applications, but the battle is always in how those fuels will be used and how they're produced. There's a perennial debate around biofuels, for example, which add to greenhouse gas emissions by taking up land that could be wild. And what if they simply forestall the electric transition? For carbon capture, it's a similar story. So far, outfitting coal plants with that technology has been ludicrously expensive—it's much better to just shut them down and put up solar panels. Plus, past experiments have failed to fully capture the carbon coming out of them. And you've gotta be sure that whatever gas goes underground is going to stay there for centuries. Sometimes it reminds me a little bit about the debate around underground storage for radioactive waste. It's hard to guarantee things over generations.

Given that solar and wind require less cost upfront, do you think the more continuous nature of EGS is enough for it to take off? Or do we simply need every approach possible if we're going to kick fossil fuels?

That's really the question. Most experts agree that baseload power that can be turned on 24/7 is necessary moving forward. Solar and wind are pretty space-intensive, and building them out is going to get trickier as we run out of optimal places for them. While batteries help, it's not the most efficient way to do things.

The question is whether EGS will be more or less practical than building a nuclear plant or a dam or installing carbon capture at a natural gas plant. There are good reasons to think it will be—especially if you factor in safety and ecological concerns presented by the alternatives—but it's early.

I'd also note that the big promise of EGS is that you can do it "anywhere," but of course, certain areas will be more geologically appealing than others, at least initially. So while it promises to be less ecologically destructive than existing geothermal plants, which can dry up hot springs and harm unique species, it's not inherently free of those conflicts.

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FILE - Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese briefs the media during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz after a meeting at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Monday, July 10, 2023. Albanese said Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023, his g...

It’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere, when ice typically forms around Antarctica. But this year, that growth has been stunted, hitting a record low by a wide margin.

The sharp drop in sea ice is alarming scientists and raising concerns about its vital role in regulating ocean and air temperatures, circulating ocean water and maintaining an ecosystem crucial for everything from microscopic plankton to the continent’s iconic penguins.

“This year is really different,” said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and an Antarctica expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It’s a very sudden change.”

A continued decline in Antarctic sea ice would have global consequences by exposing more of the continent’s ice sheet to the open ocean, allowing it to melt and break off more easily, contributing to rising sea levels that affect coastal populations around the world.

Less ice also means less protection from solar rays, which can raise the water temperature, making it harder for ice to form.

At the end of June, ice covered 4.5 million square miles, or 11.7 million square kilometers, of ocean around the continent, according to NSIDC data. That’s nearly a million square miles less than the expected average from approximately 40 years of satellite observations.

The clear departure from previous years is startling, since sea ice around Antarctica has been slower to respond to climate change than ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Antarctic sea ice also set a record low in 2022, but this year’s ice cover is almost half a million square miles smaller.

“The Antarctic sea ice extent low in 2023 is unprecedented in the satellite record,” Liping Zhang, a project scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, wrote in an email.

The record low might signal a shift in the sea ice system to a new, unstable state where extremes become more common, but Dr. Zhang cautioned that scientists are still investigating this question.

Sea ice around Antarctica typically freezes from February to August and then melts until the next Southern Hemisphere winter. Several ocean and atmosphere patterns influence how much ice grows or shrinks, and the overlapping interactions between these forces are complicated.

On top of these natural, short-term patterns is the long-term influence of humans burning fossil fuels that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Some researchers suspect that we are finally seeing the effects of this slow burn on Antarctica’s previously resilient sea ice.

This year’s change, within the context of several years in a row with less sea ice, is “very, very concerning,” said Marilyn Raphael, a geography professor and director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at University of California, Los Angeles. “That is not within natural variability,” she said.

Dr. Raphael has been working to extend the historical record of Antarctic sea ice past the 1970s, when satellite observations began. She and her colleagues recently published a new data set going back to 1905, using weather observations to reconstruct the extent of sea ice during earlier years.

While it’s still limited data, the longer record captures more cycles of natural variability. Dr. Raphael and other experts think that the ocean, which warms up more slowly than the atmosphere and has absorbed much of the heat from the burning of fossil fuels, may have reached a point where that heat is affecting Antarctic sea ice.

Melting icebergs near Horseshoe Island along the Antarctic Peninsula during the Antarctic summer in February.Credit...Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images

Sea surface temperatures have broken records this year, and there are currently three patches of unusually warm water around Antarctica. While other factors are also at play, these hot spots line up with the areas on the coast where sea ice has been unusually slow to form, said Dr. Scambos.

The sea ice’s decline is causing real consequences both locally and globally.

Both of Antarctica’s native penguin species rely on sea ice. In some parts of the continent, Adélie penguins eat exclusively krill, a tiny crustacean that thrives in icy water. Less sea ice means less krill and less food for Adélies. Larger emperor penguins, recently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, depend even more directly on sea ice: they lay their eggs and raise their young on these floating habitats. When sea ice melts earlier in the season, before emperor penguin chicks develop waterproof adult feathers, the chicks can drown.

Sea ice also serves as a protective, frozen moat around Antarctica — shielding the continental ice sheet and its glaciers, which have already been destabilized by climate change, from the warmer ocean and the eroding force of wind and waves. If this shield disappears, more land ice could flow or fall into the ocean, though some of this loss could be counterbalanced by more snow falling onto the continent. The amount of ice Antarctica loses to the ocean is one of the biggest factors in determining sea level rise.

Even when Antarctic sea ice reaches its maximum extent around September, it could remain at a record low for that time of year, said Xiaojun Yuan, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who maintains a seasonal forecast of Antarctic sea ice. Dr. Yuan’s forecast shows less sea ice than usual around most of Antarctica at least through early 2024.

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Wikipedia is one of many tools used by the US liberal establishment and its allies in the intelligence community to wage “information warfare,” the site’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, has told journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Speaking on Greenwald’s ‘System Update’ podcast, Sanger lamented how the site he helped found in 2001 has become an instrument of “control” in the hands of the left-liberal establishment, among which he counts the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies.

“We do have evidence that, as early as 2008, that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” he said. “Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?” 

Activity by the CIA and FBI on Wikipedia was first made public by a programming student named Virgil Griffith in 2007. Griffith developed a program called WikiScanner that could trace the location of computers used to edit Wikipedia articles, and found that the CIA, FBI, and a host of large corporations and government agencies were scrubbing the online encyclopedia of incriminating information.

The word for it is ‘propaganda’: Wikipedia co-founder says website has morphed into playground for rich and powerful manipulators

CIA computers were used to remove casualty counts from the Iraq War, while an FBI machine was used to remove aerial and satellite images of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. CIA computers were used to edit hundreds of articles, including entries on then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China’s nuclear program, and the Argentine navy.

Some edits were more petty, with former CIA chief William Colby apparently editing his own entry to expand his list of accomplishments.

“[The intelligence agencies] pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger told Greenwald.

“A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online,” he continued, “on websites like Wikipedia.” 

Earlier this year, X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk released a trove of documents showing how the platform’s former executives colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also admitted that Facebook, the biggest social media platform on Earth, censored accurate information that was damaging to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign at the direct request of the FBI.

thepressunited.com

It was 1998 and Mr Ahmad Zaharil was a lawyer in his 30s.

One day, he was alone in a courtroom after handling a case when a 50-something Malaysian-Indian woman, who worked as a cleaner, arrived in handcuffs accompanied by the police.

“Seeing her in distress, I felt compelled to approach her to ask how she ended up in court.

“She explained that she had stolen a pencil box from a supermarket.

“The pencil box was meant as a gift for her 10-year-old son, her only child.

“She said that she had promised to get her son a pencil box if he became the top student in class,” Mr Ahmad Zaharil, now 57, recounted.

The boy, who was in Year Four, had passed his exams with flying colours, emerging first in his class.

However, his poor mother had no money with her and so she stole the RM18 (S$5.30) pencil box from the supermarket and was caught.

In an interview, Mr Ahmad Zaharil said: “I thought to myself then that if she was jailed for the offence, who would take care of her son? So, I had to intervene.

“After speaking to the magistrate to postpone the case to a later time that day, I went to the boy’s school in Sentul to verify the mother’s claim.

“After speaking to the headmaster, it turned out to be true that the boy was indeed the top student in his class,” said Mr Ahmad Zaharil, who is a father of five.

He said together with the boy’s teacher, he quickly returned to the courtroom where he met the owner of the supermarket.

“I offered the supermarket proprietor double the price of the pencil box and pleaded with him to have mercy on the woman. However, he refused and wanted to proceed with the case,” said Mr Ahmad Zaharil.

He said when the woman’s case came up, he mitigated it on her behalf.

Based on the teacher’s testimony and upon weighing the case, he said the magistrate discharged the mother after binding her for over a year on a good behaviour bond.

“Before she left, we passed the hat around and collected a couple of hundred ringgit contributed by court staff, policemen and me.

“We handed over the money to the woman. She left after expressing her gratitude and I never saw her again,” said Mr Ahmad Zaharil, who specialises in cases related to narcotic crimes.

However, he said the case was always memorable to him throughout his three-decade career.

In 2018, while going about his routine in court, he was approached by a man in his early 30s.

The man told Mr Ahmad Zaharil: “Hello, Sir. You may not know me, but I am the son of the cleaner you helped 20 years ago. Remember the pencil box case?

“My mother saw you in the news on TV over a case you had handled and told me who you are.

“I searched for you and am so glad to meet you. I am a practising lawyer now, Sir,” said the younger man.

Mr Ahmad Zaharil said his eyes welled up at once and that he was overcome with joy.

Both he and the young lawyer hugged.

“I almost fainted when he told me who he was. It was heartwarming and one of the happiest moments in my life. We proceeded to visit his mother, who is now 76 years old.

“Since then, we have become close. He is like a son to me. We would visit each other during Deepavali and Hari Raya,” Mr Ahmad Zaharil said.

In recounting the fated 1998 encounter with the mother, he said: “I helped because she is a fellow Malaysian. Here in Malaysia, despite our diverse backgrounds, our differences are minute, but we have similarities. We can live in harmony as one big family.” THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK

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New research out of Caltech used a section of telecommunication fiber to sense and measure a magnitude 6 earthquake, repurposing the assemblies to extract sharper details about the temblor.

Zhongwen Zhan, professor of physics at Caltech, said the same fiber optic network used for internet and television can serve as a dense network of makeshift seismometers in a method called DAS, distributed acoustic sensing.

“If we can get broader coverage to measure seismic activity, we can revolutionize how we study earthquakes and provide more advance warning,” Zhan said. “Though we cannot predict earthquakes, distributed acoustic sensing will lead to a better understanding of the details underlying how the earth ruptures.”

The new study, published Tuesday in “Nature,” examined the light signatures traveling through a stretch of fiber optic cable in the Eastern Sierra Nevada during the magnitude-6 Antelope Valley quake in 2021.

Researchers said that section of cable acted like 10,000 seismometers and was able to provide detailed characteristics of the tremor. For example, it showed the 2021 earthquake was made up of a sequence of four smaller sub-events or ruptures, mini-quakes that could not be detected by a conventional seismic network.

“Using fiber optic cable as a series of seismometers reveals aspects of earthquake physics that have long been hypothesized but difficult to image,” Zhan said.

Imagine using an everyday backyard telescope and training it on Jupiter, he added. You can see the planet, but not its moons or any details.

“With a really powerful telescope, you can see the fine details of the planet and moon surfaces. Our technology is like a powerful telescope for earthquakes,” Zhan said.

There’s an economic advantage, too. Southern California has about 500 seismometers scattered across 56,500 square miles. Each one costs up to $50,000. Using fiber optic cables throughout the state would be like blanketing California with millions of ready-made seismometers. Access to more cables can lead to improved understanding of earthquake physics and better earthquake early-warning systems.

Zhan’s team got access from the city of Pasadena to use its fiber optic network for the study. They used laser emitters on one end of the cable to shoot beams of light through the long, thin glass strands that make up the cable’s core. Tiny imperfections in the glass reflect the light back to the source, where it is recorded. Each imperfection then produces a trackable waypoint or stopping place along the cable.

During an earthquake, seismic waves traveling through the ground causes the cable to wiggle, changing the travel time of light to and from the waypoints. The scientists used the information they gleaned from these imperfections to observe the motion of seismic waves.

Aside from Zhan, the Caltech researchers include Jiaxuan Li, first author; Nadia Lapusta, professor of mechanical engineering and geophysics at Caltech; graduate student Teaho Kim and scientist Ettore Biondi. The National Science Foundation paid for the study.

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A Tesla car drives through a tunnel in the Central Station during a media preview of the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop on April 9, 2021, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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• Australian federal workers have world's strongest WFH rights
• Employees globally want more WFH than their bosses - survey
• Office attendance remains far below 2019 levels - JLL

SYDNEY, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Before COVID-19 sent one-third of the global workforce home, the Melbourne property surveyor that employs drone operator Nicholas Coomber called its 180-strong staff into the office every day at 9 a.m. to hand out assignments.

Now that they work from home, the surveyors travel straight to the field as early as 7.30 a.m., enabling Coomber to pick up his children from daycare earlier than before the pandemic.

"If they were to say 'everyone back in the office', I would probably be asking for a raise," said Coomber, who still visits the office once or twice a week. "You get more family time. You can actually finish work at five, rather than finishing at five spending 45 minutes trying to get home."

As corporate leaders from JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to Tesla and Twitter boss Elon Musk call for an end to pandemic-era remote work arrangements, unions in Australia are setting a precedent and fighting back, taking to court the country's biggest bank and wrangling with the federal government to demand WFH, as it is known, to become the norm.

"All the deep changes in the Australian labour market have come out of crises. When you have a jolt, you never return to the way the world was," said John Buchanan, head of the University of Sydney's Health and Work Research Network.

"We're always ahead of the pack in the English-speaking world, say compared to the UK, US, New Zealand."

Empowered by the lowest unemployment rate in half a century, staff at Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA.AX) took the A$170 billion ($114 billion) lender to the industrial tribunal to challenge a directive to work from the office half of the time.

In April, the CEO of Australia's third-largest bank, National Australia Bank (NAB.AX), ordered 500 senior managers back to the office full-time. In July, NAB agreed to a union deal that gives all employees, including the 500 managers, the right to request WFH, with limits on grounds of refusal.

That same week, the public sector union struck a deal the which lets Australia's 120,000 federal employees request work-from-home an unlimited number of days.

By comparison, Canada's federal workers ended a two-week strike in May with a wages agreement that came without the WFH protections they wanted. And in the European Union, lawmakers are still negotiating updates to decades-old "telework" protections to fit a post-lockdown economy, where actual office attendance is down on 2019 levels anywhere from a fifth in Tokyo to more than half in New York, according to global real estate company Jones Lang Lasalle (JLL.N).

"The genie's out of the bottle: working from home is something that is staying well beyond COVID and the pandemic," said Melissa Donnelly, the Community and Public Sector Union secretary who negotiated the Australian federal agreement.

"What was possible around working from home has absolutely been transformed," she added. "This is what this deal achieves. It will have a flow on effect across different industries."

CBA and NAB say that even before the union deals, their policies allowed flexible working arrangements, which were widely used.

'HISTORIC CONFRONTATION'

Though the number of remote-work days sought by employees differs between country and industry, the gap between employee WFH demands and their bosses' return-to-office orders is a global constant, said Mathias Dolls, deputy director of the ifo Center for Macroeconomics and Surveys in Hamburg which polled 35,000 workers and employers in 34 countries as part of a project with Stanford University.

Among employees with WFH experience, 19% wanted to return to the office full-time, the survey found. Workers wanted two days a week of WFH, double what bosses wanted, and "the gap is not shrinking," said Dolls. "I don't think we will see WFH levels going back to pre-pandemic levels."

Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute, a think tank, said individual union deals would not necessarily end the stalemate since employers would get more bargaining power if unemployment rose, a widely-expected by-product of rising interest rates.

"The overall weight of opinion among workers is strongly they'd like to keep doing it and I think an emerging majority of employers are thinking, no, they want people back to work," Stanford said.

"That sets the stage for a historic confrontation."

CHANGED WORKFORCE

The shift to remote work, from as little as 2% of Australian hours worked in 2019 to a standard of white-collar employment, has already disrupted the business model of office landlords who report declining building valuations amid concerns about reduced floorspace being rented by companies.

About one-sixth of Australian capital city office space is vacant, a multi-year high, industry data shows, as in-person attendance remains at least a third below pre-pandemic levels.

While WFH spells pain for investors in bricks and mortar, employees like drone operator Coomber can only see benefits: flexible work arrangements recently allowed him and his wife to keep working for two weeks when their children were too sick to attend childcare.

"It just helps get through life a little bit easier," he said.

($1 = 1.4932 Australian dollars)

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As scientists continue to look for a vaccine to prevent people from being infected with Borrelia afzelii, Borrelia burgdorferi and Borrelia mayonii, bacteria that causes Lyme disease, others look for new ways to reduce the threat to a given populace. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a vaccine that can be given to a host animal that prevents ticks from spreading the disease.

The work by the team involved first engineering a harmless type of bacteria that causes an antibody response in a host, such as a person or a mouse. The type of antibody produced was designed to force changes to the microbiota of a tick, making it inhospitable to hosting the bacteria that cause Lyme disease.

The modified bacteria, in the form of a vaccine, was then injected into a test mouse resulting in a harmless infection. When a tick pierced the skin of the test mouse, the antibodies were transferred to the tick, which prevented it from hosting the harmful bacteria, thus preventing it from infecting anyone else.

Notably, if people, livestock or even pets were given such a vaccination, they would not be protected against Lyme disease, instead, they would be serving as a means for preventing others from being infected by reducing the number of infected ticks. The idea behind the approach is that if enough people, livestock and pets are vaccinated, the number of ticks in a given area carrying Lyme disease causing bacteria would be diminished, protecting the human populace as a whole.

The researchers suggest such a vaccine could prove to be an effective means for reducing Lyme disease in areas where there are very high numbers of infected ticks.

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Key to this newly discovered process is GRP78, and it's what's known as a chaperone protein. It's a type of protein that lends a hand in the folding or unfolding of larger proteins, basically building them up (or tearing them down), which then affects whether they're biologically active and functional.

A team led by the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US found that cancer cells can hijack GRP78, using the protein to spread further in the body and resist treatment.

The researchers determined that stressed cells acted differently. (Liu et al., PNAS, 2023)

This appears to happen because the protein migrates when under stress. GRP78 is usually found in the endoplasmic reticulum part of a cell, but this research shows it moving to the nucleus and changing the cell behavior.

"Seeing GRP78 in the nucleus controlling gene expression is a total surprise," says Amy Lee, a biochemist and molecular biologist at USC.

"When it comes to the basic mechanisms of cancer cells, this is something novel that, to my knowledge, no one has observed before."

The discovery came about by analyzing how GRP78 regulates the gene EGFR, previously linked with cancer. Advanced 2D and 3D imaging techniques – including confocal microscopy, where separate beams of light are used to increase resolutions, were used to confirm the migration of GRP78.

Cells with (top row) and without (bottom row) GRP78 – blue shows the nucleus, green shows cytoskeletal protein. (Ze Liu/Amy Lee)

Further methods, including RNA sequencing (taking a snapshot of cell activity), were then used to get a closer look at what the GRP78 protein was actually doing. It turns out that the key genes it was regulating were involved in cell migration and invasion.

Another important discovery made by the researchers was how GRP78 binds or interacts with another cellular protein, ID2. It seems that GRP78 stops ID2 from doing its regular job, which is limiting the activity of genes involved in cell migration, including EGFR.

While this might all seem very technical, once scientists understand how proteins like GRP78 operate regarding cancer metastasis, they can start thinking about ways to control them. By stopping GRP78 from moving around or blocking ID2, for example, we might be able to prevent cancer cells from spreading.

Getting to that stage will require a lot more research, but discoveries are being made on a regular basis when it comes to cancer growth – whether that's how they get into the blood or spread to the bones.

"This is a new concept," says Lee. "The protein itself is the soldier that does the job, but now we're thinking it's not just about the soldier, but also where the soldier is deployed."

The research has been published in PNAS.

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Researchers in the United States and Germany have followed up on a past study in Romania to show, for the first time, how a kid's upbringing might influence their brain power years down the road.

The famous study, called the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), began in the early 2000s and tracked the cognitive development of abandoned children in Romania.

Comparing the cognitive abilities of fostered and institutionalized children with those who grew up in home care when they reached 18 years of age, researchers found institutionalized children also had relatively lower IQs.

In this latest research, scientists found a relationship between brain wave patterns and those IQ scores in the same data.

"These findings demonstrate that experientially-induced changes in brain activity early in life have a profound impact on long-term cognitive development, highlighting the importance of early intervention for promoting healthy development among children living in disadvantaged environments," the researchers write.

Today, the way that a person's brain behaves at rest is thought to remain relatively stable across adulthood, even as active brain power fluctuates with age.

How this stable, resting activity is developed in early life, however, is poorly understood.

As the typical human child grows from a toddler to a 10-year-old, their resting brain activity is usually marked by fewer low-frequency, or slow, brain waves and greater high-frequency, or fast, brain waves.

The slow waves during rest tend to be associated with the pruning of unnecessary neural connections, which makes the brain more efficient when actively tackling mental tasks.

This is a key step in refining a child's cognitive development, but if it occurs too much or for too long, it can become detrimental.

If a young child doesn't receive enough emotional support or cognitive stimulation, evidence suggests it can affect their neurocognitive development, possibly by impacting neural pruning.

The current study, led by researchers at the University of Maryland, supports that idea.

An IQ assessment of 202 18-year-olds who had been enrolled in the Bucharest study revealed those with lower scores tended to have more slow wave activity as toddlers.

The results suggest that slow-wave activity in a child's resting brain can somehow mediate the effects of institutional rearing and the time of foster care placement.

The authors say the "significant correlation" they've identified is "particularly striking" given the long time span between measurements and the number of personal and environmental factors that can influence cognitive development in life's early stages.

Past studies have also found that slower brain waves are especially sensitive to environmental factors, like poverty or sociocultural disadvantages. But this research is the first to connect slow brain waves in childhood to long-term cognitive impacts in young adulthood.

Further studies among larger cohorts will be needed to confirm this correlation and scientists will need to investigate how slow brain waves might drive long-term cognitive changes in practice.

While there is still much work to be done, neuroscientists hope that one day, brain waves in infancy can help us "rapidly identify children at heightened risk for poor cognitive development and also help predict where early intervention may help children with learning difficulties so that they have better outcomes in later life."

The study was published in the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

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While checking out recently at the Warsaw Kroger store, I casually assisted a lady put some of her items on the belt. Following her, I began checking out, and was shocked to find she had paid for my purchases.

She may have identified me as a military veteran or not. In any case, I was completely bewildered she would do this and politely objected to her doing this. I have made a donation to the Food Bank of Northern Indiana with her in my thoughts.

Thank you, kind lady.

John Bullard

Claypool, via email

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Most of the trials will include 100 to 300 people with Long Covid and will start to enroll this year, officials said. One, a multiweek study of the antiviral Paxlovid, has started to sign up participants—it was announced last year but subsequently reduced in size and redesigned to give people a longer course of the drug.

The trials are part of NIH’s RECOVER initiative, which received more than $1 billion in funding from Congress in December 2020 and launched in early 2021. Since then, it has frequently drawn criticism for moving too slowly and not helping Long Covid patients in desperate need of effective care. RECOVER initially focused on defining the postinfection syndrome in part to help quantify the problem and identify risk factors, though RECOVER’s leaders acknowledged yesterday at a press briefing that they still can’t say how many people are affected in the United States

Although patient advocates and researchers expressed relief at the long-awaited list of trials, they also lamented some of the interventions slated for study. “We ask why the NIH is wasting $ studying computer games to treat brain fog, rather than treatments aimed at the underlying pathology of brain fog,” tweeted Dysautonomia International, which advocates for research into disorders of the autonomic nervous system, the peripheral nerves that control blood pressure, heart rate, and other involuntary functions of the human body. Few of the proposed therapies directly address suspected drivers of the syndrome, which has been tentatively linked to certain immune abnormalities, blood clotting, and a persistence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in some tissues.

Among the RECOVER trials are efforts to target neurologic symptoms with a web-based brain training program and a device for transcranial stimulation; treatments for autonomic dysfunction including immune globulin, a mix of antibodies given intravenously to bolster immunity, and a drug called ivabradine, which can lower heart rate; and melatonin, light therapy, and a stimulant for abnormal sleep patterns.

NIH also announced an overhaul of a larger trial testing the antiviral Paxlovid. One popular theory is that people with Long Covid have lingering virus in their bodies, and clearing it may help them. That study was first described last year, with a plan to enroll 1700 people evenly divided between Paxlovid and placebo for 15 days. The trial will now include 900 people, with one arm of the study getting Paxlovid for 25 days. “We were able to get some good feedback” from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration “and others to beef up the design,” said trial leader Kanecia Zimmerman of Duke University at the press conference.

“I’m glad to learn that one arm of the Paxlovid trial will now include 300 patients on the drug for 25 days,” says Amy Proal, a microbiologist at the PolyBio Research Foundation and co-leader of the LongCovid Research Consortium, which has been trying to jump-start research into the syndrome. She notes that some data suggest extended courses of antivirals, and possibly drugs that target immune dysfunction, may be needed to ease symptoms.

NIH officials, who also yesterday announced the launch of the Office of Long Covid Research and Practice, with funding for two staff members, said its other treatment trials should be open to patients within 3 months. Many advocates are now impatiently waiting to see whether the studies bear fruit. “We welcome the NIH’s efforts to finally fund much needed and long overdue trials,” The Long Covid Alliance said in a statement. But any results are likely at least a year off, the alliance predicted. “By then,” the group continued, “Long COVID will have been with us for over four years, an unacceptable wait for patients to see meaningful results from this billion dollar investment.”

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Conservation scientists fear more than one-quarter of forests in India could lose legal protection under controversial legislation that the nation’s Parliament could approve as early as this week.

The legislation amends India’s flagship 1980 Forest Conservation Act. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi says it will help India meet its commitments to combat climate change by planting trees, and “eliminate ambiguities” in rules that govern how officials legally define forests and regulate their use.

But researchers and others worry the measure—which has triggered nationwide protests—will irrevocably transform India’s landscape. They say the amendments will open forests to development, harm biodiversity, and weaken the rights of Indigenous people.

The legislation “is ecocide,” says conservation biologist Ravi Chellam, CEO of the Metastring Foundation, which makes policy relevant data publicly available. “People are gobsmacked by the brazenness of it all.”

Since Modi’s government first floated the legislation in 2021, it has attracted widespread criticism. Conservationists oppose provisions that would remove protection from vast swaths of forest that have not been officially recognized in government documents. They say the proposal would also make it easier to mine in protected areas, and build infrastructure related to ecotourism, including zoos and resorts.

Human rights activists have decried language that would reduce the need for developers to consult with or gain prior consent from forest-dependent communities, including Indigenous groups. Advocates also raised alarm about provisions allowing the government to waive reviews of projects that are within 100 kilometers of India’s border and deemed critical to national security. In some border states with high biodiversity, that exception would cover nearly all forested land.

“One could argue this is not just an Amendment but an entirely new Act,” more than 400 ecologists wrote last month to India’s environment minister after the government moved to present an unchanged version of the bill to Parliament. They asked the minister to delay any vote pending consultation with experts.

On 26 July, however, Parliament’s lower house took less than 20 minutes to pass the bill after almost no debate. As Science went to press, Parliament’s upper house was expected to follow suit.

The legislative rush has left many conservationists demoralized. “Things are already very bad with Indian forests,” says Ghazala Shahabuddin of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. Now, “whatever little we have remaining is under threat.”

Analysts estimate nearly 200,000 square kilometers of forest will lose legal protection under the bill. At particular risk, Shahabuddin and others say, are forests managed by local communities, which rarely enjoy formal recognition. The law will “ride roughshod” over the rights of people who live in and use these forests, the ecologists who signed last month’s letter forecast. For example, it “does not provide any clarity” about how officials should consider existing land rights claims filed by Indigenous groups, says Pranav Menon, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Minnesota and legal adviser to the Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sangathan, a youth-led Indigenous group.

The law continues a legislative trend of “reducing people to just rubber stamps,” Shahabuddin says, noting that Parliament has taken other steps to weaken public participation in environmental decisions.

India’s environment ministry argues the regulatory changes will support efforts to plant new forests and use trees, which absorb and store carbon, to fight climate change. And it asserts any loss of existing forests will be made up by creating new plantations elsewhere.

But, “The devil is in the details,” 
Chellam says, noting that if single-species plantations replace more diverse forests both biodiversity and the climate could suffer. “Functional, dynamic ecosystems will do a far better job of carbon sequestration than species-poor tree plantations,” he says.

Once finalized, the new law will likely face legal challenges. “The Supreme Court will be flooded” by lawsuits questioning the law’s constitutionality, predicts Debadityo Sinha, a climate and ecosystems specialist at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. One advocacy organization, the Environmental Support Group, is already arguing that the measure was “proposed in fundamental violation” of rules requiring coordination with India’s Ministry of Tribal Affairs.

In the meantime, researchers and conservationists are bracing for the worst. The policy changes are “so short-sighted,” Chellam 
says. “Everyone is aghast, not just about their lives, but about the lives of future generations of Indians.”

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The infectious disease primarily affects the skin and nervous system and can be easy to treat if caught early.

Leprosy has been historically uncommon in the United States, but has more than doubled in the South over the last 10 years. In a case report issued Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Central Florida has accounted for 81% of reported cases in the state and almost one-fifth of reported cases nationwide.

Of the 159 new leprosy cases reported in the United States in 2020, Florida was among the top reporting states with nearly 30 cases. The Florida Department of Health reported 19 cases from July 2022 to July 2023, with one South Florida case in Palm Beach County.

The CDC said if untreated, the disease can progress to paralysis, blindness, the loss of one's eyebrows, physical disfigurement, and even the crippling of hands and feet. Symptoms include loss of feeling in hands and feet, nasal congestion and possibly dry, stiff, sometimes painful skin.

The warning comes because of what health officials learned when examining patients diagnosed with leprosy.

"Whereas leprosy in the United States previously affected persons who had immigrated from leprosy-endemic areas, about 34% of new case-patients during 2015–2020 appeared to have locally acquired the disease," the CDC report says. According to the World Health Organization, medical officials report more than 200,000 cases of leprosy every year in more than 120 countries. While the reason behind the rising cases in Florida is unclear, there is some support for the theory that international migration to Central Florida of people with leprosy is fueling the locally-acquired transmission.

"Prolonged person-to-person contact through respiratory droplets is the most widely recognized route of transmission," the CDC report says.

When contact tracing cases in Central Florida, health officials found no associated risk factors, including travel, zoonotic exposure, occupational association, or personal contacts. "The absence of traditional risk factors in many recent cases of leprosy in Florida, coupled with the high proportion of residents who spend a great deal of time outdoors, supports the investigation into environmental reservoirs as a potential source of transmission," the report says.

Because Florida, particularly Central Florida, may represent an endemic location for leprosy, the CDC recommends that physicians consider leprosy if patients who recently have traveled Florida show symptoms.

2023 South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Why it matters: This isn't meant to start your day with doom and gloom. But focus your mind on how the threats of nuclear catastrophe, rising temperatures and all-powerful AI capabilities are spiking worldwide.

• It underscores the urgent need for smart people running government — and big companies — to solve increasingly complex problems at faster rates.

Climate: The danger is becoming impossible to ignore, Axios' Andrew Freedman writes.

• You just lived through the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The world’s oceans are absurdly warm, with temperatures in the 90s° around the Florida Keys, bleaching and even killing coral reefs in just one week.

• Antarctic sea ice is plummeting even in the dead of winter. Wildfires are raging.

• Climate scientists don’t relish saying, “I told you so,” but they've been warning for years that each seemingly incremental rise in global average temperatures would translate into severe heat waves, droughts, floods and stronger hurricanes.

• And the worst part is, we can't even call this our "new normal," because it's going to keep getting worse as long as carbon emissions keep increasing.

• This is a global problem that will require a global solution, but tensions between the world's top two emitters — the U.S. and China — are high, and getting the big global powers to abide by a sufficiently hardcore climate commitment has so far proven impossible.

AI: The technology's top architects say there's a non-zero chance it'll destroy humanity — and they don't really know how or why it works, Axios' Ryan Heath reports.

• AI — with its ability to mass-produce fake videos, soundbites and images — poses clear risks to Americans' already tenuous trust in elections and institutions.

Nukes: China has expanded its nuclear arsenal on land, air and sea — raising the likelihood of a dangerous new world with three, rather than two, nuclear superpowers, Axios' Sam Baker writes.

• "Beijing, Moscow and Washington will likely be atomic peers," the N.Y. Times reports. "This new reality is prompting a broad rethinking of American nuclear strategy that few anticipated a dozen years ago."

• Russian President Vladimir Putin said this summer that he moved some of his country's roughly 5,000 nuclear weapons into Belarus — closer to Ukraine and Western Europe. President Biden warned in June that Putin's threat to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine is "real."

The bottom line: Humanity has a decent track record of pulling back from the brink. No one has used a nuclear weapon since World War II. A more effective global climate agreement is still possible. Rules to govern AI absolutely can exist.

• The scariest problems don't have to reach their full potential — but it takes serious work by serious people to stop them from getting there.

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The Center published a research article in June asserting that X allowed explicitly racist and homophobic posts despite policies to the contrary, even after they'd been reported. However, X responded that the CCDH used poor methodology, and failed to study all 500 million posts on the service each day. It also maintained that the Center was taking funding from competitors or foreign governments as part of an "ulterior agenda," according to The New York Times. 

In a new blog post called "Protecting the public’s right to free expression," Twitter/X explained its reasoning for filing a legal claim against CCDH. "X is a free public service funded largely by advertisers. Through the CCDH's scare campaign and its ongoing pressure on brands to prevent the public’s access to free expression, the CCDH is actively working to prevent public dialogue," the post states.

It went on to note that the CCDH scraped its data, accessing it without authorization from Brandwatch, a Twitter partner that provides "consumer & market insights," "brand monitoring" and more. It added that CCDH's "'research' cited in a Bloomberg article 'contained metrics used out of context to make unsubstantiated assertions about X (formerly Twitter).'"

"That’s why X has filed a legal claim against the CCDH and its backers," it stated. It also accused the CCDH of "targeting people on all platforms who speak about issues the CCDH doesn’t agree with," "attempting to coerce the deplatforming of users whose views do not conform to the CCDH's ideological agenda" and more. 

In a letter published earlier today, the CCDH countered Twitter's earlier allegations. It noted that it never claimed to be conducting a comprehensive study, and documented the methodology it did use. It wrote that X didn't provide any specific examples, and said it doesn't accept funding from companies or governments. It further stated that it "will not be bullied," will continue publishing its research and that a lawsuit with "frivolous" claims could prove risky.

"The public has the right to know if and how @ElonMusk’s leadership has led to more hate speech on Twitter,” the nonprofit tweeted earlier. "By threatening us, Musk is trying to hide the truth about his own failures. Platforms must be held accountable for spreading hate & lies."

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You might have seen the rumors online, ironically enough.

Tales of an impending "internet apocalypse" have been circulating across social media in recent weeks, seemingly sparked by misleading reports of a NASA probe sent to allegedly prevent a wifi-devastating solar storm, as well as improper interpretations of an article published by the space agency itself. But the Parker Solar Probe was, in reality, launched to study the sun, not save our phones from it, and an internet apocalypse is at the moment no closer to devastating our online connections than Rihanna is to releasing another album. That said, some degree of celestial communication interference is a real possibility, and one that could technically arise as a result of a "strong solar storm hitting Earth" sometime in the future, per The Washington Post.

First and foremost — what is a solar storm?

When solar material from the sun strikes the Earth's "magnetosphere," it has the potential to create so-called geomagnetic storms strong enough to cause blackouts and grid failures on the ground. In 1859, for example, an intense solar storm known as the Carrington Event sent global telegraph systems on the fritz, (literally) shocking operators who watched in awe as sparks allegedly flew out of their machines. Years later, in 1989, a similar solar disturbance caused a 12-hour electrical blackout in Quebec, Canada, prompting school and business closures.

How could a solar storm affect us today?

Given the interconnected nature of our highly-digital world, a Carrington Event in 2023 "would have even more severe impacts," such as "widespread electrical disruptions, persistent blackouts and interruptions to global communications," NASA has said. The resulting "technological chaos could cripple economies and endanger the safety of livelihoods of people worldwide." According to estimates from internet watcher NetBlocks, one day of lost connectivity could cost the U.S. more than $11 billion.

"This is not taken into account in our infrastructure deployment today at all," computer science professor Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, whose paper on how solar storms could affect the interwebs helped popularize the term "internet apocalypse," told the Post.

So an internet apocalypse could happen? If so, when?

It is possible, yes. But experts say it's not very likely. For one thing, powerful solar storms like that of the Carrington Event are only expected once every 500 years. 

Moreover, much of the recent attention on the matter arose as a result of an article NASA published in March, wherein the agency highlighted how it is using artificial intelligence to predict "dangerous space weather." The article does not mention the term "internet apocalypse," but it does mention both the Carrington Event and the Quebec blackouts, and notes the modern consequences if a similar phenomenon were to happen today. In employing AI, the space agency hopes it will be able to predict solar storms up to 30 minutes before they happen, giving power grid operators and telecommunication companies time to move their systems offline and prevent added damage.

According to Space.com (which is owned by Future plc, the same parent company as The Week), most of the online falsehoods regarding an impending "internet apocalypse" refer to this March article, as well as research from "earlier this year" suggesting the sun might reach its solar maximum — or a peak in its 11-year activity cycle — in 2024, a year earlier than expected. "While scientists do, in fact, expect major solar storms to occur after solar activity reaches its peak," wrote Space.com's Sharmila Kuthunur, "there is no evidence to support the viral rumors that the next major solar storm will cause the internet to go offline." Similar online panic appears tied to work done by NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which the Post said is intended to "research the physics of the sun" so as to better understand solar winds and storms — "not to keep the WiFi from going out, as TikTok would have you think." Even Jyothi, the computer science professor, regrets using the phrase "internet apocalypse" in her paper, which she said "just got too much attention" and stirred up undue anxiety among the common folk. "Researchers have been talking for a long time about how this could affect the power grid," she told the Post, "but that doesn't scare people to the same extent for some reason."

Indeed, NASA has been warning of potential communications disruption resulting from solar storms and wind since at least 2009, said USA Today. So while yes, some degree of connectivity chaos is possible, the space agency has yet to officially declare doomsday imminent. What's more, "with this AI, it is now possible to make rapid and accurate global predictions and inform decisions in the event of a solar storm," per astronomer and physicist Vishal Upendran, "thereby minimizing — or even preventing — devastation to modern society."

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American film director Christopher Nolan’s latest work, Oppenheimer, has dominated theatres worldwide (alongside Greta Gerwig’s Barbie), delivering one of the most iconic box office weekends for cinema. The movie has also renewed interest in the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, played in the film by Cillian Murphy.

Known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” Oppenheimer’s contributions to nuclear physics and science in general not only sparked technological advancements but also raised questions about ethics and science.

Early years and education

Born in New York City in 1904 to wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants, Oppenheimer proved to be a prodigious scholar right from the start. His younger brother Frank, too, was a physicist.

After finishing school, he enrolled at Harvard University, majoring in chemistry, but soon realised that his real passion was physics. In fact, in a letter to a friend, Oppenheimer wrote, “My two great loves are physics and desert country.” (He spent time recuperating from illnesses on multiple occasions at a ranch in New Mexico, which he later bought too).

After finishing his degree, Oppenheimer moved to Cambridge University’s Christ’s College, where, in 1925, he expressed a desire to work at Ernest Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory. . Rutherford, the 1908 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner, asked Percy Bridgman, his professor at Harvard, if he’d recommend that Oppenheimer join his laboratory. His response throws light on the great scientist’s still-uncertain future at the time. As science historian and author David C. Cassidy wrote in his 2005 book, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American century, “Despite his (Oppenheimer’s) interest in experimental research, the young man displayed little of the dexterity required for laboratory work.”

“His weakness is on the experimental side. His type of mind is analytical, rather than physical, and he is not at home in the manipulations of the laboratory.”

Percy Bridgman, in his recommendation for Oppenheimer to Rutherford

J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American century by David C. Cassidy

While Oppenheimer left for Cambridge in September 1925, in the hopes of earning a doctorate degree in experimental physics, it was not to be.

Scientific work

Niels Bohr, the 1922 Physics Nobel laureate for his work on structure of atoms, was also a visitor at Cambridge in the spring of 1926. At the time, Oppenheimer was working on the motion of two bodies in quantum mechanics. A discussion with Bohr about the same had profound impact on Oppenheimer and sparked his transition to theoretical physics. “I forgot about beryllium and films and decided to try to learn the trade of being a theoretical physicist,” Oppenheimer said, decided, according to Cassidy’s book.

Oppenheimer’s research yielded results and his first ever published paper, which applied principles of quantum mechanics to a rotating and vibrating diatomic molecule. Max Born, a theoretical physics professor at Germany’s University of Göttingen, arrived at Cambridge just in time for a public reading of Oppenheimer’s second paper, on the motion of two bodies in quantum mechanics. Having worked on a similar topic, Born was interested in Oppenheimer’s work; impressed, he invited Oppenheimer to come the next year to Göttingen, where he was the presiding professor of the new quantum mechanics wing.

Oppenheimer was elated. “I felt completely relieved of the responsibility to go back into a laboratory. I hadn’t been good, I hadn’t done anybody any good, and I hadn’t had any fun whatever; and here was something I felt just driven to try,” he reportedly said.

Oppenheimer arrived in Göttingen in the fall of 1926, joined at the institute by other notable scientists of the time, including Karl T. Crompton, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and more. However, not everyone liked his presence there; Oppenheimer’s wealth reportedly made his peers uncomfortable, and he was known to interrupt seminar speakers, including Born. Despite this, Oppenheimer’s work with Born yielded magnificent results, and he was able to complete his doctoral dissertation within a few months.

He published 12 research papers while at Göttingen, and his association with Born also led to one of his most-valued contributions to the field of quantum mechanics — the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, whichassumes that the motion of electrons can be separated from nuclear motion in molecules to simplify the study of atoms and molecules.

The timing of Oppenheimer’s choice of field can also be attributed as a factor, however small, in his success. Quantum mechanics developed in the 1920s, and Oppenheimer had the chance to associate with stalwarts like Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg, and other scientists considered pioneers of the field. His knowledge of mathematical tools allowed him to focus on applications rather than their formulation and led to various advancements in quantum mechanics.

Back in the U.S. with his doctorate degree at the age of just 23, Oppenheimer split his time between Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology as a fellow of the National Research Council. He also visited other international centres of scientific learning, like Leiden in the Netherlands and Zurich in Switzerland.

Professor Oppenheimer

In 1929, Oppenheimer became an assistant professor in physics, simultaneously at the University of California in Berkeley and at the California Institute of Technology. He continued to collaborate with scientists and his research students. His notable works include the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, which involves a nuclear reaction that results in breaking the neutron-proton bond in a deuteron (a stable particle consisting of a proton and a neutron)— while the neutron is absorbed into the nucleus, a proton is thrown out.

In 1939, Oppenheimer almost predicted the existence of black holes in a publication titled On Continued Gravitational Contraction, in collaboration with his student Hartland Snyder. In the paper, the scientists pointed out that “when all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse.” We now know that most black holes were once large stars that died in a supernova explosion.

The research paper also marked the end of Oppenheimer’s brief foray into astrophysics, and the beginning of World War II, which started his journey for the scientific advancement he’s best known for – the atomic bomb.

World War II

The U.S. entered World War II on December 7, 1941, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbour. However, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already approved a programme to develop an atomic bomb (which was eventually used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, effectively ending the war in 1945).

According to the American Museum of Natural History, a letter written by scientist Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt in 1939 provided the impetus to push the U.S. towards developing an atomic bomb. Consequently, the government launched the Manhattan Project — the scientific and military undertaking to develop the bomb. Einstein himself, however, was denied the security clearance to work on the project because of his left-leaning political views.

In his memoir for Oppenheimer, Nobel Laureate and theoretical physicist Hans Bethe wrote that Oppenheimer felt the urge to “contribute to the American society” in 1942, and the opportunity presented itself soon in the form of leading a theoretical effort to design the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer assembled a small group of theoretical physicists for the job — Edward Teller (who eventually came to be known as the father of the hydrogen bomb), John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, Hans Bethe, Emil Konopinski, Robert Serber, and three of his own graduate students.

According to Bethe, some members of the group did calculations for the actual project of the study under Serber, while the rest — especially Teller, Oppenheimer, and Bethe himself — worked on the question of whether and how an atomic bomb could be used to trigger a hydrogen bomb.

While working on the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer circled back to his love for the desert and chose Los Alamos in New Mexico for a remote and permanent facility to develop the bomb. He owned a ranch with his brother in Pecos Valley of New Mexico, situated around an hour away from Los Alamos.

According to Bethe, it wasn’t obvious at first that Oppenheimer would direct the Los Alamos laboratory, given his inexperience in managing a large group. But General Leslie Groves, by then in charge of the Manhattan Project, overruled objections and appointed him director. t “It was a marvellous choice. Los Alamos might have succeeded without him, but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed,” Bethe wrote.

“It (selecting Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos laboratory) was a marvellous choice. Los Alamos might have succeeded without him, but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed.”

Hans Bethe

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society

Science behind atomic bomb

The Manhattan Project experimented to weaponise nuclear fission. When a single atom of an unstable radioactive element like uranium or plutonium is bombarded with neutrons of a specific energy, it causes the nucleus to split. The reaction can release another neutron of similar energy, hence repeating the process and creating a chain reaction capable of releasing tremendous energy in a short time. Strong nuclear force — the force that holds protons and neutrons inside the nucleus — is the strongest among the four fundamental forces, the others being gravitational force, electromagnetism, and weak nuclear force.

In an atomic bomb, fission explosion occurs when the radioactive material within the core of the bomb, like uranium-235 or plutonium, reaches critical mass. Critical mass is the minimum amount of fissile material that will support a self-sustaining chain reaction.

Before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, it was tested at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. The test was called “Trinity” and provided valuable information on the physical properties of a nuclear explosion.

The ethics of nuclear weapons and its aftermath

According to Bethe, conversations with Bohr, who was asked to help at the Los Alamos laboratory, deeply impressed the scientists working there, including Oppenheimer. Bohr couldn’t influence statesmen as he had hoped to, but the scientists agreed with his views that “international control of the atom was the only way to avoid a pernicious arms race or worse, atomic war”.

After World War II ended, Oppenheimer served as Chairman of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1952.

The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon in 1949, and some scientists proposed that the U.S. should develop hydrogen bombs as a response. The GAC recommended against this. It did not want to set up an arms race with the Soviets, and besides, , a key component for this development was invented by Teller only in 1951.

Following President Harry Truman’s approval for the development of a hydrogen bomb anyway, Oppenheimer tried to resign as the chairman of the committee, but his resignation was not approved.

This wasn’t the only trouble Oppenheimer was going to face. In 1953, he was accused of being a Communist and working against the interests of the country. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered that his security clearance for government operations be terminated. Though he was cleared of the charges, he lost security access as well as his position with the Atomic Energy Commission. The decision was majorly prompted by his “close ties” with the Communist movement between 1939 and 1942.

It wasn’t until 1961 that the U.S. government, under President John F. Kennedy, made amends to Oppenheimer and presented him the Fermi Award (which he eventually received in 1963).

Oppenheimer’s politics

According to Bethe’s memoir, Oppenheimer’s interest in politics began around 1936, shortly before World War II. Some of his Jewish relatives in Germany bore the brunt of Hitler’s antisemitic policies, and he was also affected by how the American depression impacted his students, which shaped his political bent towards the left. Although he never joined the Communist Party, his brother and sister-in-law were members. However, he seemed to move away from its influence after Hitler and Stalin, the Soviet leader, signed the German-Soviet pact, essentially allowing Hitler to start the war.

Oppenheimer, beyond the science

In his memoir, Bethe described Oppenheimer, or “Oppie”, as a “creative scientist”. “He worried about the increasing gap between specialised knowledge and common sense, the increasing gap between neighbouring sciences, and even between different branches within his own science of physics. He said: ”Even in physics we do not entirely succeed in spite of a passion for unity which is very strong.’”

Oppenheimer’s interest in Hinduism, especially the sacred text Bhagavad Gita, is also well documented. According to Cassidy, he studied the scripture in Sanskrit, and also studied Plato in his original Greek. At Berkeley, he studied Sanskrit with the chair and only member of the Sanskrit department, Arthur Ryder. An article published in Time magazine in November 1948 identified, “Scholarship is less than sense, therefore seek intelligence,” as one of Oppenheimer’s favourite couplets.

When the Trinity test was conducted in New Mexico, Oppenheimer is famously known to have quoted, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” from the Gita.

According to Time, Oppenheimer would often treat his students to expensive dinners. Bethe wrote about their evening parties, where they “drank, talked, and danced until late, and, when Oppie was supplying the food, the novices suffered from the hot chilli that social example required them to eat”.

Oppenheimer married Katherine Harrison in 1940. They had a son named Peter and a daughter named Katherine.

Last years

Oppenheimer served as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1947 to 1966. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1965, subsequently undergoing surgery and radiation therapy. However, he fell into a coma on February 15, 1967, and died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 18, aged 62.

In 2022, the Joe Biden administration reversed the 1954 decision revoking Oppenheimer’s security clearance for U.S. government projects. In a press release, the U.S. Department of Energy (the successor of the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the 1954 decision was vacated.

“When Dr. Oppenheimer died in 1967, Senator J. William Fulbright took to the Senate floor and said ‘Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him.’ Today we remember how the United States government treated a man who served it with the highest distinction. We remember that political motives have no proper place in matters of personnel security. And we remember that living up to our ideals requires unerring attention to the fair and consistent application of our laws,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said.

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Understanding this natural process could solve a significant healthcare challenge. Medical devices like catheters enable microbial colonization and biofilm formation by providing a surface for bacteria to cling to, so scientists are developing more effective bactericidal surfaces.

Researchers have previously studied the chemical and physical characteristics of cicada and dragonfly wings, but a lot is unclear about their antibacterial properties, like how they remove traces of their bacterial victims.

"At this moment, we know that the cicada wing can prevent bacteria adhesion, but the mechanism is not clear," says Tadanori Koga, a chemical engineer at Stony Brook University in New York.

After reading 2012 research on cicada wings' lethal puncture of bacterial cells, Koga and Stony Brook University polymer physicist Maya Endoh decided to replicate and study the wings' nanopillars.

"The cicada wing has a really nice pillar structure, so that's what we decided to use. But we also wanted to optimize the structure," Koga says.

To mimic the wing of one of these fascinating critters, materials scientist Daniel Salatto from Stony Brook University used a polymer often used in packaging to create tiny structures shaped like pillars on a silicon base.

"The diblock polymer technically can create the nanostructure by itself as long as we control the environment," Endoh says. "Even though we use a common polymer, we can have the same or similar property that the cicada wing column's bactericidal property shows."

A graphic depicting the nanopillars killing and removing bacteria. (Salatto et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, 2023)

Cicada wings have nanopillars that are about 150 nanometers (nm) tall and the same distance apart, but the team tested varying dimensions to see how this would affect the process.

"We thought that the height would be important for the nanostructure because we originally expected that the pillars' height was acting as a needle to puncture the bacteria's membrane," Endoh explains.

During lab testing, they found that surfaces of super-small nanopillars, about 10 nm tall, 50 nm wide, and 70 nm apart, were very effective at killing Escherichia coli bacteria and also releasing them for at least 36 hours, leaving no accumulated dead bacteria or debris on the surfaces.

"It's known that sometimes when bacteria cells die and they absorb onto surfaces, their debris will stay on the surface and therefore make it a better environment for their brethren to come in and absorb on top of them," Salatto explains.

"That's where you see a lot of biomedical materials fail because there's nothing that addresses debris that works well without using chemicals that more or less could be toxic to the surrounding environments."

But they still didn't know exactly how the nanopillars accomplish the double task of killing and removing surface bacteria from the wings.

To understand how these surfaces work, they enlisted the help of Jan-Michael Carrillo, a computational chemist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who ran high-resolution molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using a simplified model of the E. Coli bacteria.

Large-scale MD simulations consisting of about a million particles showed that when the bacteria come into contact with the pillar surface, their lipid outer shell (membrane) has a strong interaction with the nanopillars.

"The lipid heads strongly absorb onto the hydrophilic pillar surfaces and conform the shape of the membrane to the structure or curvature of the pillars," Carrillo explains.

"A stronger attractive interaction further encourages additional membrane attachment to the pillar surfaces. The simulations suggest that membrane rupture occurs when the pillars generate sufficient tension within the lipid bilayer clamped at the edges of pillars."

The membrane continues to be stressed after rupturing, and tension builds until the bacteria detach from the pillars, effectively cleaning the surface.

Side view cross-section of simulated bacteria interacting with nanopillars. (Jan-Michael Carrillo/ORNL)

Adding a thin layer of titanium oxide (TiO2) to the pillars made the bacteria-killing and releasing properties even better, and they also worked against Gram-positive bacteria called Listeria monocytogenes.

Gram-positive bacteria have a less 'stretchy' outer shell, and the stress concentrates more at their attachment points to the pillars, causing them to rupture easily, but their cells didn't appear to have a strong enough attraction to the pillars without TiO2.

Some of the mechanisms need more clarification, but it was surprising to the scientists that the most efficient method wasn't copying nature's design.

"It's not the way we thought," Endoh says. "Even though the nanopillars' height is short, the bacteria still automatically died. Also, unexpectedly, we didn't see any absorption on the surface, so it's self-cleaning.

"This was thought to be due to the insect moving its wings to shake off the debris. But with our methodology and structures, we prove that they just naturally kill and clean by themselves."

The team plans to use further simulations to uncover other mechanisms, especially the self-cleaning function, to eventually improve antibacterial coatings for use in the medical field.

The research has been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

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The study is has been published online in the journal ACS Sensors. The same group of researchers recently published a paper in the journal Nature Communications about an air monitor they had built to detect airborne SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—within about five minutes in hospitals, schools and other public places.

The new study is about a breath test that could become a tool for use in doctors' offices to quickly diagnose people infected with the virus. If and when new strains of COVID-19 or other airborne pathogenic diseases arise, such devices also could be used to screen people at public events. The researchers said the breath test also has potential to help prevent outbreaks in situations where many people live or interact in close quarters—for example aboard ships, in nursing homes, in residence halls at colleges and universities or on military bases.

"With this test, there are no nasal swabs and no waiting 15 minutes for results, as with home tests," said co-corresponding author Rajan K. Chakrabarty, the Harold D. Jolley Career Development Associate Professor of Energy, Environment & Chemical Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering. "A person simply blows into a tube in the device, and an electrochemical biosensor detects whether the virus is there. Results are available in about a minute."

The biosensor used in the device was adapted from an Alzheimer's disease-related technology developed by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to detect amyloid beta and other Alzheimer's disease-related proteins in the brains of mice. The School of Medicine's John R. Cirrito, a professor of neurology, and Carla M. Yuede, an associate professor of psychiatry—both also co-corresponding authors on the study—used a nanobody, specifically an antibody from llamas, to detect the virus that causes COVID-19.

Chakrabarty and Cirrito said the breath test could be modified to simultaneously detect other viruses, including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). They also believe they can develop a biodetector for any newly emerging pathogen within two weeks of receiving samples of it.

"It's a bit like a breathalyzer test that an impaired driver might be given," Cirrito said. "And, for example, if people are in line to enter a hospital, a sports arena or the White House Situation Room, 15-minute nasal swab tests aren't practical, and PCR tests take even longer. Plus, home tests are about 60% to 70% accurate, and they produce a lot of false negatives. This device will have diagnostic accuracy."

The researchers began working on the breath test device—made with 3D printers—after receiving a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in August 2020, during the first year of the pandemic. Since receiving the grant, they've tested prototypes in the laboratory and in the Washington University Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Unit. The team continues to test the device, to further improve its efficacy at detecting the virus in people.

For the study, the research team tested COVID-positive individuals, each of whom exhaled into the device two, four or eight times. The breath test produced no false negatives and gave accurate reads after two breaths from each person tested. The clinical study is ongoing to test COVID-positive and -negative individuals to further test and optimize the device.

The researchers also found that the breath test successfully detected several different strains of SARS-CoV-2, including the original strain and the omicron variant, and their clinical studies are measuring active strains in the St. Louis area.

To conduct the breath test, the researchers insert a straw into the device. A patient blows into the straw, and then aerosols from the person's breath collect on a biosensor inside the device. The device then is plugged into a small machine that reads signals from the biosensor, and in less than a minute, the machine reveals a positive or negative finding of COVID-19.

Clinical studies are continuing, and the researchers soon plan to employ the device in clinics beyond Washington University's Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Unit. In addition, Y2X Life Sciences, a New York-based company, has an exclusive option to license the technology. That company has consulted with the research team from the beginning of the project and during the device's design stages to facilitate possible commercialization of the test in the future.

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The remnants of last week's super storm Doksuri flooded Beijing for the fourth straight day on Tuesday even as another typhoon approached the eastern coast.

More than 50,000 people in the city have been evacuated so far, according to state media.

The flooding has hit several districts, disrupting train services and traffic.

At least a dozen people were killed in the Philippines and Taiwan as Doksuri passed through at the end of last week on its way to China.

Heavy rains are likely to persist this week, and flooding could worsen in northern regions around Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province, the emergency management ministry has warned.

At least nine people have died in Hebei, officials say.

Relentless rain over the weekend broke daily precipitation records at 14 weather stations in Beijing and the northern provinces of Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong.

Chinese authorities have not announced an official toll of victims or reported how many are missing outside the capital city.

Military helicopters were deployed in the early hours of Tuesday to deliver emergency food supplies and ponchos to people stranded in and around a train station in the hard-hit Mentougou district in western Beijing, CCTV reports.

Around 150,000 households in the district are reported to be without running water.

Nearly 400 flights on Tuesday were cancelled and hundreds delayed at Beijing's two airports, according to flight tracker app Flight Master.

Footage shared online by residents in the surrounding Hebei province show swathes of land engulfed by floods.

Residents in several neighbourhoods in Hebei's Zhouzhou county have reportedly been trapped, some for almost 24 hours, as rescue workers are unable to reach them.

On Monday, state television published a clip of the dramatic rescue of a man clinging to an overturned car caught in raging floodwaters in Wu'an city, also in Hebei. The man and his car were pinwheeling down a flooded river before he was lifted to safety by a helicopter.

Like many parts of the world, China has been seeing extreme heat and rain in recent weeks, which some scientists have linked to climate change.

Doksuri made landfall in China's south-east Fujian province on Friday, triggering landslides and floods before moving north towards the capital.

Hundreds of thousands of Fujian residents were evacuated.

Doksuri, which came a week after typhoon Talim, also led to mass closures of schools and workplaces across the province.

China's Meteorological Bureau said Beijing saw a deluge of about 170.9mm (6.7in) between Saturday night and noon on Monday, the equivalent of the average rainfall for the entire month of July.

There is little relief with typhoon Khanun on the horizon. It is expected to enter the East China Sea on Wednesday before moving to China's coastal provinces, Zhejiang and Fujian.

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Ask your dog if they want to go to the park, and you might get an inquisitive-looking head tilt in response. This cute canine behavior is familiar to dog owners, but no one really knows why human’s best friend does it—and scientists have published just one study focusing on possible reasons for head tilting in dogs. That research suggests the animals might cock their furry noggins when processing familiar words.

“In humans, when you remember a story or something, you tilt your head to the side, and you have this mental image of something in your mind,” says Andrea Sommese, an animal cognition researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and lead author of the study. “Probably it’s the same for dogs.”

Many animals tilt their head as they encounter the sights, sounds and smells of the world. Much of this has to do with having a preferred ear (or sometimes nostril), Sommese says.

In other cases, it’s about localizing a sound, says Julia Meyers-Manor, an animal cognition researcher at Ripon College, who was not involved with the research. “Humans do it; birds do it; dogs do it,” Meyers-Manor says. “Lots of different species will do this head tilt because that changes the angle that your ears are at, and now the sound is reaching one ear faster than the other.”

Barn owls are champion head tilters, for example, and can also swivel their neck 270 degrees around. This adaptation helps them fix their eyes—which are largely immovable—on their prey, and it lets them point their sensitive ears in almost any direction, according to a 2017 study in the Journal of Anatomy.

But in at least some cases of canine head tilt, the behavior seems to be more about processing information than about collecting it in the first place. Sommese and his colleagues studied a subset of “gifted” dogs that could learn the names of many individual toys—a feat that’s nigh impossible for the average pooch. When comparing the performance of these overachieving dogs with their counterparts that couldn’t be trained to learn toy names, the researchers found the gifted dogs tilted their head 43 percent of the time when their owner said the name of one of their toys. That’s compared with just 2 percent of the time for the typical dogs.

The gifted dogs tilted their head in the same direction no matter where their owner was standing, suggesting that the behavior wasn’t about pinpointing the sound but about processing it and matching it to a mental image, Sommese says.

“Probably it doesn’t happen in the typical dogs because typical dogs don’t associate a name to a particular toy, so they cannot recall a memory,” he says. But a typical dog might respond with a head tilt to something it does find relevant, such as the promise of a treat or a walk down the block.

Sommese and his colleagues published their findings in 2021 in the journal Animal Cognition, and they haven’t yet been able to follow up on the head-tilting aspect of canine cognition. So why might head tilting seem to help dogs process a familiar word? It could have to do with the fact that the brain is lateralized, meaning that the processing regions for certain stimuli are located on one side or the other. In humans, language processing is centered mostly in the left side of the brain. Dogs process familiar human words on the right side of the brain, according to a 2016 study published in Science, but the same concept might still hold true.

Over time, Meyers-Manor says, this could also become a social cue that could show others that you’re active and engaged in what’s going on around you. This social aspect might explain why humans interpret the doggy head tilt to indicate attentive curiosity—and why we can’t help finding it so cute.

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NASA has temporarily lost contact with the Voyager 2 probe — the second-farthest human made object from Earth in the universe, currently sailing through interstellar space roughly 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from home.

According to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists lost contact with the probe on July 21 after a series of planned commands inadvertently caused Voyager 2 to angle its antenna away from Earth by about two degrees. Unable to transmit or receive messages from NASA's Deep Space Network — an international array of large radio antennas that support many of NASA's interplanetary missions — Voyager 2 is essentially adrift and alone in the dark of space, having left the outer edge of our solar system in November 2018.

Luckily, the radio blackout should be temporary, NASA said. Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its antenna's alignment several times each year to stay in contact with Earth as it drifts ever farther away. The next reset is scheduled for Oct. 15, at which point communication with Voyager 2 should resume.

The twin Voyager probes were launched in August and September 1977, 16 days apart from one another. (Counterintuitively, Voyager 2 launched before Voyager 1). Both probes flew fly by the outer solar system planets before ultimately passing through the farthest boundary of the heliosphere — the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere that separates our solar system from interstellar space.

Voyager 1 made it to interstellar space first, passing beyond the heliosphere in August 2012. The single most distant human made object from Earth ever created, Voyager 1 is currently about 14.8 billion miles (23.8 billion km) from our planet, and gaining distance every day. Communications with Voyager 1 remain uninterrupted.

Both Yoyagers have enough electircal power and fuel to continue their current operations until at least 2025, according to NASA. But whenthe day comes that both probes inevitably cease communications with Earth forever, their mission to the stars will still continue. Stored aboard both probes are twin copies of a gold-plated copper disk, known as the Voyager Golden Record — a sort of audio postcard designed to share Earth's natural and musical heritage with any intelligent aliens that may one day chance upon the probes. The records each contain 27 pieces of music, including Bach and Chuck Berry, 22 minutes of nature sounds and voices speaking in 59 human languages. 

The probes also contain an audio player with pictorial instructions, and a star map showing the location of Earth. Whether anyone finds them is a question for another millennium. 

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