A glimpse of a more tumultuous future seemed on full display throughout July, a month packed with weather anomalies that exceeded any definition of normal.

It brought deadly and historic rains to parts of India and Vermont, and raging wildfires that delivered dangerously unsafe air to parts of the United States and Canada — all the sort of calamities that researchers have long predicted as the planet heats up. Protracted heat waves that have enveloped parts of North America and Europe during July would have been “virtually impossible” without the fingerprint of climate change, researchers found.

But some events were so abnormal, they sent a wave of consternation through the scientific community. Antarctic sea ice is at a historically low level for this time of year, according to federal data. Sea surface temperatures across the north Atlantic have been “off the charts,” Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported, noting that the figures set records for this time of year “by a very large margin.” Water temperatures off the coast of South Florida rose to unfathomable levels in recent days, leading scientists to fear for the fate of the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States.

“On the one hand, we knew these things were going to happen. These have been the predictions for a long time,” said Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

And yet, she said, “This year, in particular, has seemed so extreme … The size of the anomalies is surprising.”

For years, climate scientists have detailed again and again the many impacts that are likely to unfold as the world grows steadily hotter, such as more intense storms, more torrential rainfall, fast-rising seas and melting ice caps.

But they also have been unequivocal that with more warming comes the possibility of unforeseen consequences — of rapid changes, irreversible collapses and other feedback loops.

More than a decade ago, a study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that while many aspects of climate change and its impacts “are expected to be approximately linear and gradual,” that isn’t always the case.

“It is clear that the risk of surprises can be expected to increase with the duration and magnitude of the warming,” the authors wrote.

That reality seems to be playing out.

“We have always said that the changes of the unexpected are growing with every increment of warming,” Tebaldi said. “The chance to trigger something [surprising] is in direct proportion to how much we warm the planet.”

That’s not to say that the alarming month that has just passed is solely the result of a hotter atmosphere.

Scientists say part of what could be driving some recent extremes is the weather pattern known as El Nino, marked by warmer-than-normal tropical Pacific waters, after three years of its counterpart La Nina, which brings cooler-than-normal waters to the surface.

El Nino began developing this spring, and likely won’t bring a crescendo of warmth to the Pacific until the end of the year. At the same time, there are other aspects of what scientists call natural variability, such as changes in wind patterns and ocean currents, that also play a factor.

David Armstrong McKay, a research impact fellow at the University of Exeter, said El Nino and other natural variability likely play a role in this summer’s extreme events.

“But it’s all happening on this baseline of human-driven warming,” he said. “What used to be a rare event is becoming more common, and what used to be impossible in an unchanged climate is now becoming a real possibility.”

Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, largely agrees. Conditions during what was Earth’s hottest ever observed month were "shocking, but not surprising,” he said.

But some data points — the massive surge in North Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures and minimal winter sea ice coverage around Antarctica, for instance — were unusual enough to surprise scientists.

From the British Isles to the Newfoundland coast, North Atlantic temperatures have surged nearly beyond scientists’ most extreme predictions, as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal last month.

Diminished cloud cover and an absence of Saharan dust plumes may be allowing more sunlight to reach the water’s surface, scientists say, though they don’t know for sure what has made temperatures surge so dramatically.

“That raises an eyebrow for me,” Schmidt said. “That seems to have happened very quickly.”

That was the most extreme example of a warming trend that extends across nearly half of the world’s ocean surface.

Global sea surface temperatures have risen about 0.15 degrees Celsius per decade, as the oceans absorbed most of the warming that is the result of fossil fuel emissions and the greenhouse effect, said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

In June and July, surface waters have been closer to 0.25 degrees Celsius warmer than they were just last summer, he said.

“It’s about two decades’ worth of warming for the globe, year over year,” he said, a rapid surge that can’t fully be explained by El Nino.

“That,” he said, “makes this all the more alarming.”

‘Abrupt, irreversible and dangerous impacts’

Last September, McKay and other colleagues published a study in the journal Science, warning that allowing the world to warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels could trigger multiple “tipping points” around the globe.

Already, the world has experienced more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) of warming, with few signs of slowing. If that trend continues, it could eventually lead to the vanishing of coral reefs, massive sea level rise due to collapsing ice sheets, widespread permafrost thaw or the demise of critical biomes such as the Amazon rainforest.

McKay said in an interview that the various anomalies on display this summer, while unsettling, do not mean that major systems around the planet have crossed some unalterable threshold. Such major shifts would likely become clear only over a long period of time.

“I’m not expecting these hot years to directly trigger climate tipping points,” he said.

At the same time, he said, that doesn’t mean that certain regions or specific places aren’t already experiencing disastrous impacts that large-scale models have a hard time predicting.

“On a smaller scale, individual coral reefs or individual rainforests could tip a lot sooner,” he said. “I think it’s quite likely that these hot years are going to cause a bunch of damage and stress to a bunch of ecosystems.”

Tebaldi describes it this way: “Tipping points could happen for different people, for different communities, at different times.”

In its most recent assessment of the latest science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change detailed how different ecosystems, from boreal forests to permafrost, could change in “irreversible” ways at different levels of warming.

One systems researchers are watching closely is Antarctic sea ice, which has been so slow to build up this year, that it has led to questions about it is headed toward collapse.

Antarctic ice is always prone to fluctuation — it hit a record low in 2017, but then recovered close to its average extent. Over the past two years, however, it has hit repeated record lows during the Southern Hemisphere summer. Now, it is on pace toward a September maximum that will be by far its smallest ever — so small that scientists say it could only be expected to occur once in millions of years, if it were only a matter of natural variation.

“I can’t step out on a limb and say a tipping point has been passed,” said Marilyn Raphael, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “What I can say is, everything is pointing in that direction.”

‘Will these impacts turn pressure up?’

As the sweltering summer of 2023 marches into August, with another round of triple-digit heat advisories, scientists and environmental advocates are hoping the recent extremes somehow spur the kind of global, collective action that has been largely absent.

“This could be an example of what the normal will be in a 1.5C world,” Tebaldi said. “Even if we stop [greenhouse gas] emissions tomorrow, we have to deal with this kind of climate … This should be a stark reminder that we are living in a reality that has already changed, and if we want to be resilient, we need to invest on all sorts of fronts.”

McKay said the lack of sufficient climate action in recent years has not been for a lack of information about the problem, or examples of the damage wrought by a warming planet. Rather, it amounts to a paucity of political will.

“Will these impacts turn pressure up?” he said. “You’d hope some of these extremes would remind politicians and corporations that this is what we are starting to see at only about 1.2 Celsius of warming.”

António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, is hoping for a similar realization among presidents, prime ministers and those in charge of the world’s largest industries.

“Leaders must lead. No more hesitancy. No more excuses. No more waiting for others to move first,” he said in a recent news conference on July’s extremes.

He cited positive signs, such as ongoing growth of renewable energy and a recent international agreement to ensure the shipping industry reaches net-zero emissions by mid-century.

But much more is needed, Guterres said, and if July is a harbinger of what lies ahead, there is not a moment to waste.

“The evidence is everywhere: Humanity has unleashed destruction. This must not inspire despair, but action,” he said. “We can still stop the worst. But to do so we must turn a year of burning heat into a year of burning ambition.”

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While there’s nothing wrong with having a lighted sign on a building, the people who authorized the sign ought to be considerate. X Corp’s logo, however, seems to have been picked to act as some sort of mental torment device aimed at the neighbors.

As you can see in the video above, the X logo was giving off a brilliant white light, almost blinding anyone looking at it at nighttime. Not only that, but it seemed to have an annoying strobe effect where it would go off for a couple of seconds and then come blaring back on.

Aside from the local authorities, the neighbors had lodged complaints about the nuisance it was causing, with one saying it made it hard for them to sleep. Apparently, the company has put the sign up without permission from the authorities.

The installation of the new sign came just days after the old Twitter logo got pulled off the building. The latest removal of the X logo now leaves the build brandless. It’s unlikely that the X logo will be gone for long. The company could dim the lights or get permission from the local authorities before reinstalling it.

The current conversation around the rebranding of Twitter to X is about whether Musk has just binned a recognizable brand name. Anyone who tries going to Twitter.com, however, will still find the platform so it’s unlikely to cause a problem in that respect.

Musk is looking to build an everything app. Westerners are not really familiar with this concept as we have apps for different things, but in China, WeChat combines a whole bunch of things in one app including messaging, social media, ordering in restaurants, shopping, payments, utility payments, sending gifts, and more.

X is already capable of a bunch of different stuff, but it’s got a ways to go before it can be considered an everything app. Hopefully, the company can get on with the task at hand instead of installing obnoxious signage.

Source and image: CNBC

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At the start of his third year of graduate school, Kazi Albab Hussain became a father. As a new dad and a PhD student studying environmental nanotechnology, plastic was on his mind. The year before, scientists had discovered that plastic baby bottles shed millions of particles into formula, which infants end up swallowing (while also sucking on plastic bottle nipples). “At that time,” Hussain says, “I was purchasing many baby foods, and I was seeing that, even in baby foods, there are a lot of plastics.”

Hussain wanted to know how much was being released from the kinds of containers he’d been buying. So he went to the grocery store, picked up some baby food, and brought the empty containers back to his lab at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. In a study published in June in Environmental Science & Technology, Hussain and his colleagues reported that, when microwaved, these containers released millions of bits of plastic, called microplastics, and even tinier nanoplastics.

Plastics are complex cocktails of long chains of carbon, called polymers, mixed in with chemical additives, small molecules that help mold the polymers into their final shape and imbue them with resistance to oxidation, UV exposure, and other wear and tear. Microwaving delivers a triple whammy: heat, UV irradiation, and hydrolysis, a chemical reaction through which bonds are broken by water molecules. All of these can cause a container to crack and shed tiny bits of itself as microplastics, nanoplastics, and leachates, toxic chemical components of the plastic.

The human health effects of plastic exposure are unclear, but scientists have suspected for years that they aren’t good. First, these particles are sneaky. Once they enter the body they coat themselves with proteins, slipping past the immune system incognito, “like Trojan horses,” says Trinity College Dublin chemistry professor John Boland, who was not involved in this study. Microplastics also collect a complex community of microbes, called the plastisphere, and transport them into the body.

Our kidneys remove waste, placing them on the front lines of exposure to contaminants. They are OK at filtering out the relatively larger microplastics, so we probably excrete a lot of those. But nanoplastics are small enough to slip across cell membranes and “make their way to places they shouldn’t,” Boland says.

“Microplastics are like plastic roughage: They get in, and they get expelled,” he adds. “But it’s quite likely that nanoplastics can be very toxic.”

Once they’ve snuck past the body’s defense systems, “the chemicals used in plastics hack hormones,” says Leonardo Trasand, a professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the director of the Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards. Hormones are signaling molecules underlying basically everything the body does, so these chemicals, called endocrine disruptors, have the potential to mess with everything from metabolism to sexual development and fertility.

“Babies are at greater risk from those contaminants than full-grown people,” Hussain says. So to test how much plastic babies are exposed to, Hussain’s team chose three baby-food containers available at a local grocery store: two polypropylene jars labeled “microwave-safe” according to US Food and Drug Administration regulations, and one reusable food pouch made of an unknown plastic.

They replaced the original contents of each container with two different liquids: deionized water and acetic acid. Respectively, these simulate watery foods like yogurt and acidic foods like oranges.

They then followed FDA guidelines to simulate three everyday scenarios using all three containers: storing food at room temperature, storing it in the refrigerator, and leaving it out in a hot room. They also microwaved the two polypropylene jars containers for three minutes on high. Then, for each container, they freeze-dried the remaining liquid and extracted the particles left behind.

For both kinds of fluids and polypropylene containers, the most microplastics and nanoplastics—up to 4.2 million and 1.2 billion particles per square centimeter of plastic, respectively—were shed during microwaving, relative to the other storage conditions they tested.

In general, they found that hotter storage temperatures cause more plastic particles to leak into food. For example, one polypropylene container released over 400,000 more microplastics per square centimeter after being left in a hot room than after being stored in a refrigerator (which still caused nearly 50,000 microplastics and 11.5 million nanoplastics per square centimeter to shed into the stored fluid). “I got terrified seeing the amount of microplastics under the microscope,” Hussain says.

To test what these plastics do to our bodies once they’re consumed, the team bathed human embryonic kidney cells in the plastic roughage shed by the baby-food containers. (The team chose this kind of cell because kidneys have so much contact with ingested plastic.) After two days of exposure to concentrated microplastics and nanoplastics, about 75 percent of the kidney cells died—over three times as many as cells that spent two days in a much more diluted solution.

While the concentration of plastic used in these solutions was higher than what a baby would be exposed to by eating from a microwaved food jar in real life, Hussain notes that the full extent of plastic particle accumulation over time—from food and from the air and surfaces—is unknown, and might be high. So, he says, it’s important to study the health effects of high levels of exposure.

While Hussain’s team was the first to test the toxicity of plastics on cells using the particles released from commercially available food containers, a review published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials last year found that exposure to microplastics can cause cell death, inflammation, and oxidative stress. “Plastics are a huge problem for human health,” says Trasand. “This study just pushes the concern even further.”

Micro- and nanoplastics aren’t the only particles leaking out of plastic containers and into food. When plastic is broken apart by heat, tons of chemical additives fly out as well. Boland notes that while the techniques used in Hussain’s experiment could not distinguish between plastic polymers and chemical additives, “both are probably toxic.” We don’t know whether chemical additives are as bad as nanoplastics (or worse), but “at the end of the day,” he says, “none of the stuff that’s emerging from these plastics is very good for anybody.”

Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and the president of Beyond Plastics, a policy and advocacy group against plastic pollution, stopped microwaving plastic 30 years ago. She thinks that you should, too: “My goodness, especially if you have kids or if you’re pregnant, do not put plastic in the microwave.” 

“It’s a pain in the neck,” she acknowledges, but “even this one study should be a wake-up call—not just to new parents but to the FDA. They need to be far more proactive.” Transand agrees: “The FDA is glacially behind.”

To get a plastic product approved for food or beverage packaging, a manufacturer needs to submit a limited amount of self-reported data to the FDA. But the agency doesn’t have the resources to test the safety of all plastic products before they go on the market or to spot-check them once they’re available in stores.

Polypropylene is considered safe for food contact—even in the microwave—by the FDA, which allows companies to use it for packaging things like baby food. Boland disagrees: “I don’t believe that there are microwave-safe plastics.” Trasand and Enck agree that while independent studies should continue testing how much plastic is being released from food packaging, there is already enough evidence to show that “microwave-safe plastic” isn’t really safe. “I think the FDA needs to tell companies that they can no longer say any plastic is microwavable,” says Enck.

Broadly reducing human exposure to plastics will require government action and sweeping corporate change, says Trasand. After all, they’re in the air, in the water, and inside you. Enck doesn't think manufacturers are likely to make the first move. “Corporations will continue to use plastic for as long as they can, because it’s cheap. That motivates them more than anything,” she says.

Even if a new technology emerged that could prevent plastic containers from shedding particles, Boland suspects that companies wouldn’t adopt it without being forced to do so by regulation. In principle, food companies and plastics manufacturers could be “opening themselves up to litigation for past products,” he says, since changing their packaging would imply that they had been knowingly producing something that released microplastics before.

Enck says that one potential solution could be to create a third-party certification program connecting food companies to independent scientists who can test their products and report results to the FDA. On an individual level, there are still some things people can do: Opt for reusable glass and stainless steel. Don’t pour hot liquids into plastic containers. And, please, stop microwaving plastic.

Boland says scientists should keep doing research to understand exactly what particles are being released from plastics under specific conditions. “If you can’t measure,” he says, “you can’t legislate.”

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Over half of women in the United States will get a urinary tract infection in their lifetime. (This is compared to an estimated 14 percent of men.) Despite being common, it is often an experience layered with frustration and stigma, said Dr. Kalpana Gupta, a professor at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine who does research on U.T.I.s. Patients “feel some personal responsibility,” she said. “Like, ‘I’m doing something wrong.’”

In most cases U.T.I.s — known as bacterial cystitis — are only loosely correlated with personal behavior, she said. The main reason U.T.I.s are more common in women is that they have shorter urethras than men, which makes it easy for bacteria to reach the urinary tract; a U.T.I. in a man is often part of a larger health issue, Dr. Gupta said.

A vast majority of U.T.I. cases are caused by E. coli bacteria, which lives in the gut and sometimes hangs out on the perineum. How and in what circumstances the bacteria migrates into the urethra and infects the urinary tract is “not 100 percent worked out,” she said.

A lot of the misconceptions around U.T.I.s crop up because there is very little quality research into the issue, said Dr. Ja-Hong Kim, a urologist at UCLA Health. Here are some of the most common questions experts get from patients.

Is it a U.T.I. if there’s no burning sensation?

It can be. A U.T.I. can occur anywhere along the urinary tract, which includes the urethra, bladder, the kidneys and, in men, the prostate, Dr. Kim said. For an issue to be considered a U.T.I., a patient must show some symptoms and have confirmed bacteria in their urine.

A lot of the widely known symptoms, like burning and the constant sensation of needing to go to the bathroom, “come from studies that are done in young, college-aged, otherwise healthy adult women,” Dr. Gupta said. But, in fact, symptoms can vary.

In older adults, U.T.I.s might present as a fever or a feeling of fullness, she said. Some patients have lower backaches, signaling that the U.T.I. might be in the kidneys, which would make it a more acute case that can lead to sepsis and kidney damage, though those outcomes are “very, very rare,” Dr. Kim said.

Is it because I had sex?

Not necessarily. Women are often advised to urinate before and after sex to flush out any bacteria, but that practice isn’t backed by any evidence, said Dr. Benjamin Brucker, director of urogynecology at NYU Langone. “I don’t have a study to quote you that says peeing after sex or before sex reduces infections,” he said.

Anecdotally, though, that might work for some women, he added.

The most common hypothesis about a connection between sex and U.T.I.s is that the bacteria on the skin of the perineum is pushed into the urethra during penetrative sex, which can develop into a U.T.I., Dr. Gupta said. Another is that because products, like spermicides, change the microbiome of the vagina, they can create an environment in which bacteria can blossom and migrate to the urethra. But some women never develop U.T.I.s with increased sexual activity, even if they don’t urinate before or after.

Is this a hygiene problem?

Doctors often tell women that hygiene — like wiping front to back, not wearing a wet swimsuit for long periods and avoiding tightfitting underwear — can reduce the risk of developing a U.T.I. The thinking is that wiping front to back reduces the chance that bacteria from fecal matter will be pushed into the urethra and that a wet swimsuit or tight underwear might irritate the vaginal area.

Those practices don’t hurt, but they’re not rooted in scientific evidence either, Dr. Gupta said, adding that dispensing that kind of advice in the context of a U.T.I. can end up giving women anxiety about their cleanliness.

“The bottom line is that the risk for U.T.I. is not related to how well you bathe” or to a wet swimsuit or to your choice of clothing, she said.

Are antibiotics my only option?

Not always. “Imagine you got scratched by a tree when you were out hiking, and it got a little red. You don’t necessarily go and get antibiotics because your body can fight off that bacteria,” Dr. Brucker said. “U.T.I.s are bacteria like anything else,” and many young, healthy patients find that the body can eventually flush the bacteria out on its own. While antibiotics are part of the standard care protocol, he said, it is worth first getting a culture done, which takes time, to figure out the best medical intervention.

In mild cases, good hydration can help the body get rid of the infection, Dr. Brucker said. There are over-the-counter pain relievers, like Tylenol, Ibuprofen and Azo, that can help reduce discomfort while the body does its job.

Research published in April found that the age-old idea that cranberries can prevent U.T.I.s might have some truth to it. In a meta-analysis of 50 randomized control trials, cranberry products — juice, tablets or capsules — reduced the risk of U.T.I.s for women with recurrent infections, children with U.T.I.s and people susceptible to them, but not for other groups, like older men and women or pregnant women.

For menopausal women, decreasing levels of hormones can alter the vaginal environment and increase the risk of U.T.I.s. In those scenarios, Dr. Brucker said, vaginal estrogen can be “an excellent way” of preventing infection.

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With the statistical power of seven international research studies, this analysis confirms for the first time there was a continuous increase in blood pressure measures in both participants with low and high alcohol intake. Even low levels of alcohol consumption were associated with detectable increases in blood pressure levels that may lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular events.

"We found no beneficial effects in adults who drank a low level of alcohol compared to those who did not drink alcohol," said senior study author Marco Vinceti, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology and public health in the Medical School of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia University in Italy and an adjunct professor in the department of epidemiology at Boston University's School of Public Health. "We were somewhat surprised to see that consuming an already-low level of alcohol was also linked to higher blood pressure changes over time compared to no consumption—although far less than the blood pressure increase seen in heavy drinkers."

"Our analysis was based on grams of alcohol consumed and not just on the number of drinks to avoid the bias that might arise from the different amount of alcohol contained in 'standard drinks' across countries and/or types of beverages," said study co-author Tommaso Filippini, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of epidemiology and public health in the Medical School of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, and affiliate researcher at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.

Researchers reviewed the health data for all participants across the seven studies for more than five years. They compared adults who drank alcohol regularly with non-drinkers and found:

• Systolic (top number) blood pressure rose 1.25 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) in people who consumed an average of 12 grams of alcohol per day, rising to 4.9 mm Hg in people consuming an average of 48 grams of alcohol per day. (In the U.S., 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or a 1.5 ounce shot of distilled spirits contains about 14 grams of alcohol. Usual alcohol content differs in alcohol available in other countries.)

• Diastolic (bottom number) blood pressure rose 1.14 mm Hg in people consuming an average of 12 grams of alcohol per day, rising to 3.1 mm Hg in people consuming an average of 48 grams of alcohol per day. These associations were seen in males but not in females. Diastolic blood pressure measures the force against artery walls between heartbeats and is not as strong a predictor of heart disease risk in comparison to systolic.

"Alcohol is certainly not the sole driver of increases in blood pressure; however, our findings confirm it contributes in a meaningful way. Limiting alcohol intake is advised, and avoiding it is even better," Vinceti said.

Although none of the participants had high blood pressure when they enrolled in the studies, their blood pressure measurements at the beginning did have an impact on the alcohol findings.

"We found participants with higher starting blood pressure readings, had a stronger link between alcohol intake and blood pressure changes over time. This suggests that people with a trend towards increased (although still not "high") blood pressure may benefit the most from low to no alcohol consumption," said study co-author Paul K. Whelton, M.D., M.Sc., the Show Chwan Chair in Global Public Health in the department of epidemiology at Tulane University's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans and president of the World Hypertension League. Whelton is also the chair of the American Heart Association's 2017 Hypertension Practice Guidelines and a member of the writing committee for the Association's 2021 Scientific Statement on Management of Stage 1 Hypertension in Adults.

According to American Heart Association recommendations, if you don't drink already, don't start. If you do drink, talk with your doctor about the benefits and risks of consuming alcohol in moderation. The Association also does not recommend drinking any form of alcohol to gain potential health benefits. Instead, follow the Association's lifestyle and health metrics for optimal cardiovascular health called Life's Essential 8: eat healthy food, be physically active, don't smoke, get enough sleep, maintain a healthy weight, and control cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure levels.

Study details and background:

• Researchers analyzed data from seven, large, observational studies involving 19,548 adults (65% men), ranging in age from 20 to their early 70s at the start of the studies.

• The studies were conducted in the United States, Korea and Japan, and published between 1997 and 2021. None of the participants had previously been diagnosed with high blood pressure or other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, liver disease, alcoholism or binge drinking.

• Usual alcoholic beverage intake was recorded at the beginning of each study and the researchers translated this information into a usual number of grams of alcohol consumed daily. The researchers used a new statistical technique that allowed them to combine results from several studies and plot a curve showing the impact of any amount of alcohol typically consumed on changes in blood pressure over time.

• Systolic blood pressure, the top number in a blood pressure reading, measures the force against the artery walls when the heart contracts. It rises steadily with age and is a strong predictor of cardiovascular disease risk. Effective blood pressure management is vital to reduce, prevent or delay the development of high blood pressure.

Other co-authors and authors' disclosures are listed in the manuscript.

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“While environmental and genetic factors have long been believed the major contributors to cancer, this revolutionary finding – which we call ‘ER3D’ (from ‘endogenous RNA directed DNA damage’) – ushers in an entirely new area of medical and molecular biology research,” explains Flinders University Professor Simon Conn, who leads the Circular RNAs in Cancer Laboratory at the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, along with his wife, Vanessa.

To uncover the link between circular RNAs and cancer, researchers compared the neonatal blood tests of infants who later developed acute leukemia with those who did not have any blood disorders. They discovered that a specific circular RNA was present at significantly higher levels in infants who developed leukemia, even before the onset of symptoms. These findings suggest that the abundance of circular RNA molecules within certain individuals’ cells is a major determining factor in why some individuals develop cancer-causing genes or oncogenes, while others do not.

Circular RNAs have the ability to bind to DNA at various locations in different cells. By binding to specific sites on DNA, they initiate changes that result in DNA breakage, which the cell must repair to survive. However, this repair process is not always flawless and can lead to small mutations, akin to misspelled words in a book, or more severe cases, significant and devastating mutations.

Moreover, circular RNAs can also alter the physical location of the broken DNA within the cell nucleus, causing two distinct regions of the DNA to fuse during the repair process, like merging the pages of different books. Prof. Conn notes that multiple circular RNAs seem to work in partnership, causing breaks at multiple DNA sites. This process, called chromosomal translocation, poses a significant challenge to cells as it results in gene fusions that can transform normal cells into cancerous cells. The researchers demonstrated this phenomenon in two different cell types, observing its role in the rapid onset of aggressive leukemia.

The gene fusions resulting from the action of circular RNAs occur at well-known mutation “hotspots” in leukemia. This has critical implications for Australia, which has the highest incidence of leukemia worldwide, with approximately 35,000 Australians currently living with the disease. These gene fusions have long been utilized by doctors worldwide to guide treatment decisions due to their negative impact on patient prognosis.

Dr. Conn emphasizes that ER3D is not exclusive to leukemia; the process extends to other types of cancer and human diseases. The research team at Flinders University is dedicated to further investigating the role of circular RNAs in cancer and other diseases, paving the way for improved understanding and potential therapeutic breakthroughs.

“This is the first example of a genetic molecule present in many individuals that has the ability to mutate our own DNA and drive cancer from within,” explains Vanessa Conn. “This breakthrough opens doors for using these molecules as therapeutic targets and disease markers at an early stage when the chances of successful treatment are higher.”

The study is published in the journal Cancer Cell.

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They took off at 6.31am local time on board a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, off the coast of Andhra Pradesh in South India.

The primary satellite on board this mission, which was dedicated entirely to Singapore, was DS-SAR, a 352kg radar imaging earth observation satellite developed through a partnership between Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency and ST Engineering.

Once deployed and operational, it will support the satellite imagery requirements of various Singapore government agencies. The satellite, equipped with a radar payload developed by Israel Aerospace Industries, can provide all-weather, as well as day-and-night coverage, at a 1m resolution.

Another payload for the mission was the NuLIoN nanosatellite from NuSpace, a Singapore firm that provides Internet of Things connectivity across areas in the South-east Asia region with limited to non-existent communication infrastructure.

The rocket also carried the ORB-12 Strider satellite, developed under an international collaboration coordinated by Singapore-based space-tech company Aliena. It will demonstrate next-generation propulsion systems for small satellite constellations.

Other satellites on board this mission executed by NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), Isro’s commercial arm, included those from Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore (NUS).

According to an NUS statement, its Galassia-2 nanosatellite was built by students and will help with remote sensing for agriculture and environmental change using a multispectral camera on board.

All seven satellites were successfully injected into their orbits less than 24 minutes after the lift-off, which was accompanied by claps and whistles from the public viewing gallery on a cloudy monsoon morning.

The mission follows the PSLV-C55 one in April, which successfully launched two other Singapore-made satellites. As many as 20 Singapore-made satellites have so far been launched by India, including those on Sunday.

Thanking Isro for the “marvellous and precise mission”, Mr Radhakrishnan Durairaj, NSIL’s chairman and managing director, said he hoped Singapore would “continue to have trust in our services and the most reliable launcher – the PSLV”.

“I am sure they will offer many more opportunities for us to give them the best launch in the international community,” he added in an address soon after the launch.

Sunday’s mission was the 58th on the PSLV, which, since its development in 1993, has emerged as Isro’s reliable workhorse for satellite launches, with a success rate of more than 94 per cent.

India has launched over 425 satellites for 36 countries and has been making efforts in recent years to corner a greater share of the global launch market, estimated to be US$9.15 billion (S$12.2 billion).

While the momentum for launches has picked up following the pandemic, experts have noted that India’s space programme, including its ability to launch foreign satellites, continues to be held back by its inadequate infrastructure, including a limited number of launch pads.

“India’s requirements are today limited to not just civilian communications or earth observation, but also security and a whole range of other functions that have come about,” said Dr Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, director of the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

“There is a growing demand, but supply has not kept up… Isro has a capacity deficit,” she told The Straits Times.

Expanding India’s ability to launch more satellites would require the government-run Isro to loosen its monopoly and allow the private sector to emerge as an independent and more active partner, Dr Rajagopalan added.

“There is clearly a recognition that Isro alone cannot deliver, and unless one brings in the private sector, you are going to lose out. This is something that has seeped into the Isro leadership as well.”

The government has made efforts to open up the space sector to private players in its bid to boost India’s share of the global space economy – valued at around US$460 billion – from just 2 per cent currently to 9 per cent in 2030.

In November 2022, Skyroot Aerospace, a Hyderabad-based start-up funded by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, successfully launched India’s first privately built rocket.

Isro has also been working to privatise PSLV operations. At Sunday’s launch, Isro chairman S. Somanath said he expects “fully industry-owned PSLVs” being launched early 2024.

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Scientists now think they've pinpointed the brain region where that conscious awareness is managed.

The team, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), in the US, found sustained brain activity in the occipitotemporal area of the visual cortex in the back of the brain.

While this activity dropped to around 10–20 percent of its level about 300 milliseconds after an original visual stimulus, the pattern of activity remained while the stimulus was viewed.

That was in contrast to other brain areas, where information disappeared entirely within half a second (500 milliseconds).

"This stable representation suggests a neural basis for stable perception over time, despite the changing level of activity," says psychologist Leon Deouell from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In other words, this neural region is where we not just notice something but also notice that we're noticing it. As the visual stimulus changed – a series of images – so did the brain activity recorded by the researchers. Machine learning algorithms then filtered out the noise and spot patterns.

Researchers enlisted 10 epilepsy patients for the study who were already scheduled to have electrodes fitted inside their skulls. These electrodes allow for a more complete measure of brain activity over time, with less guesswork, compared with other brain scanning methods that work externally.

"We are adding a piece to the puzzle of consciousness – how things remain in your mind's eye for you to act on," says psychologist Robert Knight from UC Berkeley.

The researchers can't say for sure how their findings relate to consciousness, but they suggest that the sustained activity in the visual cortex could be fed back to the prefrontal cortex, where thoughts and actions are managed.

There remains a lot of scientific debate about how this all does or doesn't work. After damage to one brain hemisphere following a stroke, for example, some people experience unilateral neglect: They only consciously perceive half a photo or scene but emotionally react to it in its entirety.

Ultimately, further research and data gathering, which leads to a better understanding of consciousness, could help restore the brain when conditions such as unilateral neglect take hold.

"What is required for something not only to be sensed by the brain but for you to have a subjective experience?" says Deouell.

"Understanding that would eventually help us understand what is missing in the cognitive system and in the brains of patients who have this kind of a syndrome."

The research has been published in Cell Reports.

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A dense rainforest or other verdant terrestrial vegetation may be what first comes to mind at the mention of photosynthesis. Yet the clouds of phytoplankton that fill the oceans are the major drivers of that process in nature. The plantlike single-celled aquatic microbes generate more than 50 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and they absorb nearly half of the carbon dioxide, converting it into the glucose, fats, proteins and other organic molecules that nourish the food web of the oceans.

A recently published study in Current Biology finally pins down the source of this unparalleled photosynthetic efficiency, which has long baffled scientists. The new research found that some phytoplankton are equipped with an extra internal membrane that carries a “proton pump” enzyme that supercharges their ability to convert carbon dioxide into other substances. The enhancements due to this one protein modification seem to contribute to the production of nearly 12 percent of the oxygen in the air and as much as 25 percent of all the carbon “fixed” (locked into organic compounds) in the ocean.

Surprisingly, that photosynthetic innovation seems to have evolved by chance from a membrane protein that was originally used for digestion in the ancestor of the phytoplankton. In addition to explaining the cells’ prowess at photosynthesis, the new work helps to confirm the theory that those phytoplankton arose through a symbiotic alliance between a protozoan and a resilient red alga.

“I find it staggering that a proton enzyme that we have known for so many decades is responsible for maintaining such a crucial phenomenon on Earth,” said Dennis Brown, a cell biologist at Harvard Medical School who studies the functions of membrane proteins and was not involved in the study.

Researchers knew that certain classes of phytoplankton—diatoms, dinoflagellates, and coccolithophores—stand out for their exceptional photosynthetic abilities. Those cells are extremely proficient at absorbing carbon dioxide from their environment and directing it to their chloroplasts for photosynthesis, but the details of why they are so good at it haven’t been very clear. A feature unique to those three groups of phytoplankton, however, is that they have an extra membrane around their chloroplasts.

Seven years ago, the microbiologist Daniel Yee, the lead author on the new study, was studying diatoms for his doctorate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Photosynthesis wasn’t his focus; he sought to understand how diatoms regulate their internal acidity to help with nutrient storage and to build their tough silica cell wall. But he kept noticing the unique additional membrane around their chloroplasts.

He learned that the extra membrane was widely regarded by researchers as a remnant of an ancient, failed act of digestion. Scientists hypothesized that about 200 million years ago, a predatory protozoan tried to feast on a single-celled photosynthetic alga. It enveloped the resilient alga in a membrane structure called a food vacuole to digest it, but for unknown reasons, digestion did not occur. Instead, the alga survived and became a symbiotic partner to the protozoan, feeding it the fruits of its photosynthesis. This partnership deepened over the generations until the new two-in-one organism evolved into the diatoms we know today. But the extra layer of membrane that had been a food vacuole never disappeared.

In the late 1990s, some scientists hypothesized that the former food vacuole was still likely to carry a transmembrane channel protein called a proton pump. Proton pumps are highly versatile molecules that can be specialized for diverse tasks in organisms, from digestion to regulating blood acidity to helping neurons send signals, explained the microbiologist Martin Tresguerres, the senior coauthor of the new study and Yee’s former adviser at UCSD. In mammals, one type of proton pump can create highly corrosive acidic conditions within areas of bones to break down their mineralized structure and dissolve them over time.

Yee found that the same proton pump also helps diatoms make their tough silica shell. But considering the versatility of the proton pump and its direct association with the chloroplast, he was convinced that it did even more.

Using a combination of molecular biology techniques, Yee and his team confirmed that the extra membrane around the phytoplankton chloroplast does contain an active, functional proton pump—one called VHA that often serves a digestive role in food vacuoles. They even fused the proton pump to a fluorescent protein so that they could watch it work in real time. Their observations supported the endosymbiotic theory of how the diatoms acquired the extra membrane around their chloroplasts.

Yee, Tresguerres and their colleagues were also curious about how the proton pump might affect the photosynthetic activity of the chloroplast. To find out, they used an inhibitory drug, concanamycin A, to halt the operation of the proton pump while they monitored how much the phytoplankton continued to incorporate carbon into carbonates and produce oxygen. They found that inhibition of the proton pump significantly decreased both carbon fixation and oxygen production in the cells.

Further work helped them understand that the pump enhanced photosynthesis by concentrating carbon near chloroplasts. The pump transferred protons from the cytoplasm to the compartment between the extra membrane and the chloroplast. The increased acidity in the compartment caused more carbon (in the form of bicarbonate ions) to diffuse into the compartment to neutralize it. Enzymes converted the bicarbonate back into carbon dioxide, which was then conveniently near the chloroplast’s carbon-fixing enzymes.

Using statistics on the distribution of the diatoms and other phytoplankton with the extra membrane throughout the global ocean, the researchers extrapolated that this boost in efficiency from the VHA membrane protein accounts for almost 12 percent of Earth’s atmospheric oxygen. It also contributes between 7 percent and 25 percent of all the oceanic carbon fixed each year. That’s at least 3.5 billion tons of carbon—almost four times as much as the global aviation industry emits annually. At the high end of the researchers’ estimate, VHA could be responsible for tying up as much as 13.5 billion tons of carbon a year.

Scientists can now add this factor to other considerations when estimating the effects of climate change on how rapidly atmospheric carbon dioxide is fixed into organic molecules, which dictates how quickly the planet will continue to warm. It also bears on discussions about whether changes in ocean acidity will have a direct impact on the rates of carbon fixation and oxygen production. Yee said that scientists can also begin to ask whether biotechnology solutions based on the newly discovered mechanism could enhance the process of carbon sequestration to limit climate change.

Yee, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Cell and Plant Physiology Laboratory of the French National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble, is proud that his team was able to provide a new mechanism for how photosynthesis occurs in such an ecologically important life form.

“But we also realize,” he said, “that the more we learn, the less we know.”

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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In Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction story “Robbie,” the Weston family owns a robot who serves as a nursemaid and companion for their precocious preteen daughter, Gloria. Gloria and the robot Robbie are friends; their relationship is affectionate and mutually caring. Gloria regards Robbie as her loyal and dutiful caretaker. However, Mrs. Weston becomes concerned about this “unnatural” relationship between the robot and her child and worries about the possibility of Robbie causing harm to Gloria (despite it's being explicitly programmed to not do so); it is clear she is jealous. After several failed attempts to wean Gloria off Robbie, her father, exasperated and worn down by the mother’s protestations, suggests a tour of a robot factory—there, Gloria will be able to see that Robbie is “just” a manufactured robot, not a person, and fall out of love with it. Gloria must come to learn how Robbie works, how he was made; then she will understand that Robbie is not who she thinks he is. This plan does not work. Gloria does not learn how Robbie “really works,” and in a plot twist, Gloria and Robbie become even better friends. Mrs. Weston, the spoilsport, is foiled yet again. Gloria remains “deluded” about who Robbie “really is.”

What is the moral of this tale? Most importantly, that those who interact and socialize with artificial agents, without knowing (or caring) how they “really work” internally, will develop distinctive relationships with them and ascribe to them those mental qualities appropriate for their relationships. Gloria plays with Robbie and loves him as a companion; he cares for her in return. There is an interpretive dance that Gloria engages in with Robbie, and Robbie’s internal operations and constitution are of no relevance to it. When the opportunity to learn such details arises, further evidence of Robbie’s functionality (after it saves Gloria from an accident) distracts and prevents Gloria from learning anymore.

Philosophically speaking, “Robbie” teaches us that in ascribing a mind to another being, we are not making a statement about the kind of thing it is, but rather, revealing how deeply we understand how it works. For instance, Gloria thinks Robbie is intelligent, but her parents think they can reduce its seemingly intelligent behavior to lower-level machine operations. To see this more broadly, note the converse case where we ascribe mental qualities to ourselves that we are unwilling to ascribe to programs or robots. These qualities, like intelligence, intuition, insight, creativity, and understanding, have this in common: We do not know what they are. Despite the extravagant claims often bandied about by practitioners of neuroscience and empirical psychology, and by sundry cognitive scientists, these self-directed compliments remain undefinable. Any attempt to characterize one employs the other (“true intelligence requires insight and creativity” or “true understanding requires insight and intuition”) and engages in, nay requires, extensive hand waving.

But even if we are not quite sure what these qualities are or what they bottom out in, whatever the mental quality, the proverbial “educated layman” is sure that humans have it and machines like robots do not—even if machines act like we do, producing those same products that humans do, and occasionally replicating human feats that are said to require intelligence, ingenuity, or whatever else. Why? Because, like Gloria’s parents, we know (thanks to being informed by the system’s creators in popular media) that “all they are doing is [table lookup / prompt completion / exhaustive search of solution spaces].” Meanwhile, the mental attributes we apply to ourselves are so vaguely defined, and our ignorance of our mental operations so profound (currently), that we cannot say “human intuition (insight or creativity) is just [fill in the blanks with banal physical activity].”

Current debates about artificial intelligence, then, proceed the way they do because whenever we are confronted with an “artificial intelligence,” one whose operations we (think we) understand, it is easy to quickly respond: “All this artificial agent does is X.” This reductive description demystifies its operations, and we are therefore sure it is not intelligent (or creative or insightful). In other words, those beings or things whose internal, lower-level operations we understand and can point to and illuminate, are merely operating according to known patterns of banal physical operations. Those seemingly intelligent entities whose internal operations we do not understand are capable of insight and understanding and creativity. (Resemblance to humans helps too; we more easily deny intelligence to animals that do not look like us.)

But what if, like Gloria, we did not have such knowledge of what some system or being or object or extraterrestrial is doing when it produces its apparently “intelligent” answers? What qualities would we ascribe to it to make sense of what it is doing? This level of incomprehensibility is perhaps rapidly approaching. Witness the perplexed reactions of some ChatGPT developers to its supposedly “emergent” behavior, where no one seems to know just how ChatGPT produced the answers it did. We could, of course, insist that “all it’s doing is (some kind of) prompt completion.” But really, we could also just say about humans, “It’s just neurons firing.” But neither ChatGPT nor humans would make sense to us that way.

The evidence suggests that if we were to encounter a sufficiently complicated and interesting entity that appears intelligent, but we do not know how it works and cannot utter our usual dismissive line, “All x does is y,” we would start using the language of “folk psychology” to govern our interactions with it, to understand why it does what it does, and importantly, to try to predict its behavior. By historical analogy, when we did not know what moved the ocean and the sun, we granted them mental states. (“The angry sea believes the cliffs are its mortal foes.” Or “The sun wants to set quickly.”) Once we knew how they worked, thanks to our growing knowledge of the physical sciences, we demoted them to purely physical objects. (A move with disastrous environmental consequences!) Similarly, once we lose our grasp on the internals of artificial intelligence systems, or grow up with them, not knowing how they work, we might ascribe minds to them too. This is a matter of pragmatic decision, not discovery. For that might be the best way to understand why and what they do.

This should prompt us to look a little closer. For, come to think of it, how do I know that other humans have minds like mine? Roughly: They look like me, they act like me, and so, I reason that they must have minds like mine, which work the way I think mine does. (This is an entirely reasonable inference to the best possible explanation for their visible, external behavior.) We never, though, open the brains of other human beings to check for minds, because we would not know what to look for. More to the point, we know what we would see: a brain, and we do not know how those work. Our intentionality, our understanding, is mysterious too when viewed at this lower level of description. And so, because we cannot find physical correlates of our intelligence, and even if we did, we would find using them too cumbersome in dealing with intelligent humans, we instead observe how human beings behave and act, and how they conform to psychological generalizations. If someone wants to get into medical school, and they believe that studying hard will help them do so, then we can predict that they may be found in a library, studying away diligently. That is what “normal, intelligent” human beings do. This is the interpretive dance we engage in with humans; the language of psychology emerges from these interactions. It is how we make sense of our fellow humans.

This means that our fellow humans, too, are entities whose complex and poorly understood innards do not allow us to explain, predict, and understand their interactions with us in terms of their physical composition and properties (the way we can with objects like stones or glass bottles) or in terms of their design properties (the way we can with aircraft or mechanical pencils). Because we must use higher-level psychological explanations, the best way to make sense of human beings’ behavior is to anthropomorphize them! That is, the best way to make sense of these other beings distinct from me (other “humans”) is to treat them as if they were just like me in kind. The crucial point here is that I did not have to regard other human beings as being like me. I could have perhaps regarded them as curious aliens who happen to resemble me and act like me but were not really like me in some “important, crucial” sense, because I did not have conclusive proof that they had internal lives and minds like mine. Instead, we choose to anthropomorphize humans, because doing so makes interactions with them more tractable, a situation preferable to enduring a solipsistic existence, convinced that our mind is the only one that existed.

This philosophical analysis matters because there is an important balancing act we must engage in when thinking about legal regulation of artificial intelligence research: We want the technical advantages and social benefits of artificial intelligence (such as the amazing predictions of protein structures produced by AlphaFold), so we want their designers to continue developing such systems. But these companies need liability cover—like the railways were provided by the Supreme Court in their fledgling days—otherwise, the designers of artificial intelligence systems would stay out of such a potentially financially risky arena. But we want society to be protected too from the negative effects of such smart programs, especially if they take actions that are not anticipated—which, of course, is also their desirable functionality.

So, in legal and economic terms, we need to appropriately allocate risk and liability. One way to do so builds upon this revised understanding of artificial intelligence. When we have a conceptual sense that the artificial agents we interact with are agents in the psychological sense—that is, we understand their actions as being caused by their beliefs and desires—it will allow us to consider these systems as the legal representatives (the legal agents) of those who develop and deploy them. Much as hospitals employ doctors who act on behalf of the hospitals, whose acts the hospital is liable for, who can sign contracts and take actions on the behalf of the hospital. (The legal system does not, strictly, have to wait for such a conceptual understanding to be in place before deeming artificial agents to be legal agents, but broader social acceptance of such regulations will be easier if such conceptual understanding is widespread.) They would then be the legal agents of their legal principals—for example, the Bing chatbot would be the legal agent of its principal, Microsoft. Then, the principal is liable for their actions and consequences—as we, the broader public, would want—but only within the scope of duty which their developers and deployers would want. For instance, a driver for a public transport company is liable for things he does on the job but not off it. Transit companies can hire drivers, then, knowing that they are justifiably liable for their actions on the job, but they are protected from their employees when they “go rogue” off the job. Similarly, say a custom version of Bing, purchased by a customer to provide expert guidance on pricing, would be liable for the advice it provides on pricing, but if a customer were to use it for another task, say advising on finding suitable romantic partners, Microsoft would no longer be liable for any bad advice Bing may provide. For such advice would be out of the scope of its proposed duties. For another example, consider the case of Google’s Gmail agent, which scans emails for content it can use to provide advertisements to Gmail users. Google’s risible response to the charge of privacy violations is that because humans do not scan users’ emails, there is no privacy violation. This is not a defense Google could employ if its Gmail agent were to be considered its legal agent, because by law, the knowledge gained by a legal agent is directly attributed to its principal. Google’s “automation screen” thus fails because of the legal agent status of the programs it deploys. Here, our interests are protected by the legal status granted to the artificial agent. This does not diminish our rights; rather, it protects them.

Consider what we would do if extraterrestrials alighted on this planet of ours and said, “Take us to your leader!” How would we understand and describe them? What if their innards were so mysterious that our best science gave us no handle on how they functioned? We would have to function like diligent field anthropologists, looking for behavioral evidence that we could correlate with their pronouncements, and start considering the possibility that they have minds like ours. Our lawyers would have to assess the status of these beings in our social orderings and, on seeing they filled and performed important executive roles, that people had formed personal relationships with them, perhaps think about evaluating their application for citizenship and legal status seriously. An analogous situation exists today with regards to the artificial agents and programs in our midst, with a crucial difference: We have made and designed them. This familiarity is tinged with contempt, but the nature of our interpretive dance with them can and will change, depending on how mysterious we find them. The more impenetrable they become in terms of their internal operations, the more sophisticated their functioning, the more we will have to rely on external descriptions using psychological terms like “agent.” This would not be a concession to anything but common sense. And our natural intelligence.

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No, it’s not the premise of a zombie film. The phenomenon is called fetomaternal microchimerism, and in the past decade scientists have come up with some incredible theories about what the cells might be doing.

During pregnancy, cells are exchanged between the mother and foetus via the placenta. These fetal cells have been found to remain in multiple areas of the maternal body – organs and tissues including the liver, heart, brain, lungs and blood – and crucially in areas of disease and damage.

Some studies point to a potentially benevolent role in repair – the presence of fetal cells in healed caesarean section wounds suggest they are beneficial. But they’re also found at sites of disease, and may play a detrimental role in maternal health, for example in the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases and pre-eclampsia.

Certainly, this transfer of cells has profound implications for maternal biology and health. It also troubles the philosophical idea of us as self-contained individuals. The intricate exchange creates what the geneticist Dr Diana Bianchi has called a “permanent connection which contributes to the survival of both individuals”.

Did you know, also, that in pregnancy, some hormones increase in levels by 200 or 300 or even 1,000 times? And that some hormones are unique to pregnancy? Me neither.

The new science of pregnancy and motherhood is showing us just how dramatic the hormonal fluctuations are, as well as how seismic the cardiac, immunological, haematological, renal and respiratory changes – and their lifelong impacts on the body.

Did you know that if you have been pregnant and given birth, your brain will have changed shape in multiple areas? Changed actual shape?

In a landmark study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2017, researchers led by Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist from the Netherlands, and Erika Barba-Müller, a neuroscientist working in Spain, provided evidence for the first time that pregnancy renders pronounced, consistent changes in brain structure.

This synaptic reorganisation and fine-tuning, it is thought, make the brain more efficient and streamlined in what it needs to do to care for a baby. Or as the neuroscientist Jodi Pawluski puts it, “to make sure we, and our child, survive parenthood”.

Did you know that the impact of pregnancy on the brain is comparable to that of adolescence? Neither did I.

Before I became pregnant with my first child in 2016, I did not know that my body, my brain, my self would undergo any lasting, let alone significant, changes. I thought that the hormonal impact of pregnancy was a one-time, transient event, to enable the baby to grow, and then, once out, I’d “bounce back”. Not a big deal, basically.

What I saw portrayed about early motherhood had no bearing on what I experienced, which was that I myself changed. I was altered, rewired, metamorphosed. I was also – and this was a shock – vulnerable, just like our baby.

At the time, I thought I must be imagining it. It is no surprise that I thought this: we knew virtually nothing about the maternal brain until the 2010s and our knowledge of the maternal experience is still staggeringly minimal.

The new science of motherhood shows us what many feel: that becoming a mother is more of a big deal than western society allows. In fact, after childhood and adolescence, there is no other time in a human’s life that entails such dramatic psychological and physical change.

The word that changed everything for me was “matrescence”. It means the process of becoming a mother and it’s a concept that exists in most societies on Earth, with special rites and rituals to hold and support the new mother. The neglect of this transition in western societies has devastating consequences but, in its illumination, critical social possibilities.

In the UK, as many as 20% of women develop a mental health problem in pregnancy or the first year of motherhood; these include mild and moderate to severe depression, anxiety, PTSD and psychosis.

The likelihood of depressive episodes can be twice as high during the period of matrescence, compared with other times of a woman’s life. This number rises for women of colour, those in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups who face systemic health inequalities, and women who have experienced loss. Suicide is the leading cause of death for women in the perinatal period between six weeks and one year after giving birth in the UK.

The neural plasticity of the maternal brain during this period is one of the reasons this is a vulnerable time. The dramatic increase in hormone levels throughout pregnancy and then the dramatic decrease when the placenta is expelled is another.

This new frontier of discovery could have an enormous impact on the health and wellbeing of mothers and their infants. The more scientists know about the physiological, endocrine and neural changes of pregnancy and early motherhood, the more we will know about how these processes can trigger mental illness, and how we can improve postpartum care.

But as a society, there is much more we need to do for care-givers and vulnerable people. Because our current approach is inadequate.

In the first year or so of my matrescence, I felt ashamed by how stressful and bewildering I found aspects of my new life. But as my research continued for my book, and I met and talked with other mothers who were similarly blindsided, I began to feel angry.

I think of the woman I met with a clitoral tear, and the one with severe anxiety, and the one with episodes of psychosis, and the one with rectal prolapse, and the one with autoimmune disease, and the one with fistula, and the one with suicidal ideation, and wonder: why are we sending a high-risk group of people off to spend an unknown period of time at home alone, where they must look after vulnerable infants and recover from the trauma of giving birth without adequate investment in healthcare, or much sleep, or non-hostile public spaces or transport, or social support?

Instead, we give them a shedload of impossible cultural expectations and myths, including the imperative to enjoy every minute. Are these the actions of a responsible or functional society?

The crisis of modern motherhood, combined with the new science, is a damning indictment of the current social paradigm. It lays bare structural injustices, such as chauvinism and racism in maternal care, and the failures of predatory capitalism and the nuclear family. And it reminds us of our entangled, interdependent, cellular origins: that we are interconnected and need each other, even if our current systems of thought and power want us to believe otherwise.

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She's resistant to nearly every antibiotic and allergic or intolerant to the rest.

Now when she gets an infection, which she does every few months, she has to hope her immune system can fight it without much help from modern medicine.

Despite more than a century of antibiotic research and development, the world is quickly running out of these lifesaving drugs.

Antibiotics, either found in nature or developed intentionally, are designed to kill bacteria. But bacteria have been evolving for more than 3 billion years and have learned to change themselves to survive. The more we use them, the more they adapt.

In 2019, the last year data is available, more than 2.8 million Americans had antimicrobial-resistant infections and more than 35,000 died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Worldwide, deaths already top 5 million a year and are expected to grow into the tens of millions within a few decades.

"We are truly right now in the midst of this crisis," Brenda Wilson, a Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois said in a recent American Society for Microbiology talk.

The U.S. was making solid progress against antibiotic resistance before the pandemic. Thanks to improved infection prevention and control and better stewardship, deaths from antimicrobial resistance declined by 18% overall and 30% in hospitals from 2012 to 2017.

But the pandemic pushed hospitals and other health care facilities near their breaking point in 2020, leading to an increase in antibiotic use, trouble following infection prevention and a significant increase in resistant infections in U.S. hospitals, the CDC found. Resistant hospital-onset infections and deaths both increased at least 15% that year, although data outside hospitals is lacking.

Overuse, both among people who would have recovered without the drugs and in livestock who get them to promote growth not treat illness, helps drive resistance.

Dealing with antibiotic-resistant infections already costs about $5 billion a year, said Brian Ho, who co-wrote a book with Wilson called "Revenge of the Microbes."

And there's a tremendous human cost, in addition to the financial one.

"A lot of what we do in medicine relies on our ability to handle bacterial infections that occur along the way," said William Hanage, who co-directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Minor injuries can become life-threatening without antibiotics.

Many surgeries wouldn't be able to happen without knowing there were antibiotics to prevent any later infections.

Patients need antibiotics if they're being treated with steroids or for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, or other conditions that limit their immune response, as do people like Lawrence, who has cystic fibrosis, which makes her vulnerable to every passing bug.

"We want to be able to handle these things," Hanage said.

Urging action

Lawrence, 43, traveled to Washington, D.C., earlier this month from her home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, to lobby the Senate for more funding and attention for antibacterial resistance.

She and others are encouraging Congress to pass a bill called the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act, named for Louis Pasteur, the 19th-century Frenchman often considered the "father" of germ theory and modern microbiology. The bill was first introduced in 2020.

It would create new incentives for drug companies to discover and develop antibiotics.

Right now, there's no financial incentive for a company to spend as long as a decade and upward of $1.5 billion developing an antibiotic that someone will use only for a week or two ‒ limiting the amount a company can charge ‒ and which might be obsolete in four or five years as bacteria become resistant.

"The market is broken because it's focused on volume. Antibiotics should not be used in high volume," said Dr. Helen Boucher, dean of the Tufts University School of Medicine, who also testified in favor of the PASTEUR Act. "PASTEUR reimburses for value, regardless of volume."

Other places already have implemented similar financial models.

In the U.K., the government this month signed contracts with drugmakers Pfizer and Shionogi, guaranteeing them a fixed annual fee of up to $13 million for the next decade for two new antibiotics. Rather than paying the companies based on the volume of drugs sold, the new subscription model removes any incentive for overuse.

Also on the horizon are tests that help doctors quickly distinguish between an infection caused by a virus, which won't benefit from an antibiotic, and one caused by bacteria, which might.

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration cleared a test from Lumos Diagnostics of Australia that can rapidly identify a bacterial infection. And a July 13 study found The Karius Test, commonly used in hospitals, could distinguish among 700 types of microbes, including bacteria, viruses and fungi, in just one day.

Still, Lawrence thinks the world needs "more science, more attention to outsmarting these bacteria because we're losing the race at this point."

Careful use

Resistance develops when a small group of bacteria is different enough from the rest to survive an antibiotic onslaught. These remaining microbes then reproduce, taking over the infection, which is now unaffected by or resistant to the antibiotic.

"We should not be taking antibiotics unless it's absolutely necessary," said Dr. Adi Shah, an infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. "Giving an antibiotic for unclear or unnecessary reasons is like sending bacteria or a fungus to a gym to work out and form stronger defenses."

To limit the overuse of antibiotics, doctors are now prescribing them less often and for shorter periods. Where someone 30 years ago might have been prescribed 10 days of antibiotics, and someone 15 years ago would have gotten a five-day prescription, they're now getting the drug for two days.

Hanage said there was never any magic to 10 days. When researchers started testing, they realized there was no real benefit to longer courses over shorter ones.

Antibiotics also have been shown not to be useful for things like childhood ear infections, shaving at most a half-day off the course of an infection.

But habits die hard. When that news arrived in Hanage's native Britain, emergency room doctors didn't stop prescribing antibiotics for ear infections, they just stopped writing the medical term for "ear infection" as their diagnosis.

"Cultural change in medicine is a really difficult thing to achieve," he said. "It's rightly a small-c conservative field."

Food supply

The commercial raising of animals for food has contributed to the problem. For decades, breeders have fed their livestock antibiotics. At first, they started out trying to help sick animals get well. But they noticed that animals fed antibiotics got big faster. So it became standard practice to include antibiotics in the feed of every animal, from poultry to fish to pigs to cows.

“The nature of raising animals in the backyard or a big barn really motivates the spread of microbes and facilitates the spread,” Johnson said. “Those microbes have the potential to enter humans.”

In recent years, under pressure from advocates, some companies have promised to cut back on the routine feeding of antibiotics. But some of those promises ring hollow, advocates say, or have been hard to maintain in a competitive marketplace.

Earlier this month, Tyson Foods, the largest chicken producer in the United States, moved away from the "no antibiotics ever" pledge it made in 2015. Instead, the company is transitioning to "no antibiotics important to human medicine" by the end of this year. It uses essential oils and botanicals like oregano and thyme, as well as probiotics as antibiotic alternatives, and says it is "making significant progress eliminating the use of antibiotics also important to human health from our chicken production."

While most farms don't use "medically important" antibiotics, using disinfectants or other methods to prevent certain types of bacteria from taking hold can inadvertently favor other potentially dangerous bacteria, Johnson said.

When bacteria develop drug-resistant genes, he said they can jump from one pathogen to another. This tends to occur in microbiomes, like the gut, which are rich in microorganisms and motivate the drug-resistant gene to spread between bacteria to survive.

Drug-resistant genes can also hop from non-threatening bacteria found in animals to pathogens that are more harmful to humans.

"Those resistances don't tend to go away easily," Johnson said.

Facing resistance

Lawrence has cystic fibrosis, an inherited lung disorder that makes her mucus sticky, attracting lots of bacteria and other microbes.

When she was diagnosed as a young child, her parents were told she'd probably not make it past age 16. She's obviously grateful for all the extra time. But anxious too. "In some ways, I'm just getting started. I have so much left in me," Lawrence said.

She's been on antibiotics almost nonstop since her diagnosis. Oral antibiotics worked until puberty. By her teenage years, she'd run out of those and had to go into the hospital for IV antibiotics that would take a week or two to work their magic.

In her 30s, the antibiotics would take five weeks to knock out the bugs, and another two months after that for her body to finish healing.

Now she gets the most cutting-edge treatment for cystic fibrosis, a combination of three medications, approved by the FDA in 2019. In younger people, that therapy, called Trikafta from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, helps reduce infections and the need for antibiotics.

But Lawrence, like other older cystic fibrosis patients with some lung damage, still has infections roll in every few months. Even during the pandemic, when she rarely left the house and wore a mask everywhere, antibiotic-resistant infections still found her. "It's in the soil. It's in the environment. It's everywhere," she said.

Shah, of the Mayo Clinic, said he noticed about six years ago patients would come in with harder-to-treat infections. They were sicker than he would have expected and the typical drugs didn't work or took longer to make a difference.

Boucher, of Tufts, said she sometimes has to offer patients the choice of saving their life with an antibiotic, but at the cost of harming their kidneys or hearing or both. Some antibiotics damage the cranial nerves, involved in hearing and balance, as well as the kidneys.

Dr. Lilian Abbo, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said she's also been seeing more patients resistant to first, second and third-line antibiotics, as well as antimicrobials ‒ drugs that work against viruses and fungi.

"Even in children who are healthy, we're seeing resistance, which before we would not have seen," she said. "Most people may not be aware until it's their turn to experience it."

It's tough, she said, when she has to tell a patient they need to be hospitalized to get intravenous antibiotics because pills aren't working against something as seemingly simple as a urinary tract infection.

Sometimes, she'll try combinations of drugs. In a few cases, she's had to "simply tell the person, I've run out of options. Those are heartbreaking."

Changing times

Climate change also is fueling antibiotic resistance, several experts said.

"It's important to understand and acknowledge that as our global temperature rises, the number of microbes that are present in the environment and where they tend to flourish will change," said Tim Johnson, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine. "If the temperature is increasing in the soils or ambient, that promotes their survival in places where they normally just hang out but don't grow."

Wound infections are worse in warming climates.

More waterborne pathogens are becoming drug-resistant, in part, because of agricultural use of antibiotics that flush into waterways. Increased flooding brings those pathogens into closer contact with people.

In her recent talk, Wilson told the story of Aimee Copeland, a 24-year-old grad student when she fell off a zip line in 2012 and scraped her knee on some rocks in the river below.

Copeland's leg was stitched up and she was sent home with antibiotics, but the wound quickly got infected. Available drugs were no match for the naturally antibiotic-resistant bacteria she had picked up in the water.

Kidney and heart failure followed, along with the amputation of all four limbs.

Stories like Copeland's will become more common, Wilson fears, as more bacteria and other microbes become drug resistant.

Bacteria don't all become resistant at the same rate.

Group A streptococcus, for instance, which causes a variety of infections including strep throat, has remained mostly susceptible to penicillin for a century, Hanage said. The bacterium that causes tuberculosis, meanwhile, is increasingly resistant to most available antibiotics.

It's not clear why this difference exists, Hanage said.

"We need to understand more about that kind of thing because it will mean whether any of our interventions will be successful."

What's next?

Prevention is a growing focus, both today and in the future.

Lawrence does everything she can to boost her immune system and prevent infections, from exercise to power yoga to traditional Chinese medicine known as Qigong.

Others put their hopes in probiotics, hoping that boosting "good" microbes will help stave off the "bad." More work on this in coming years should yield more specific and effective prevention tools, experts say.

Vaccines, including some now under development, offer the potential to fight infections that would otherwise need to be controlled with antibiotics. A study published July 20 in The New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, showed an experimental vaccine given during pregnancy, can prevent dangerous group B streptococcus infections in infants.

Nature also has offered a potential solution.

Graham Hatfull, a professor of biotechnology at the University of Pittsburgh, studies bacteriophages, viruses that naturally destroy bacteria. For more than a century researchers have tried to use phages as a treatment for bacterial infections.

"In the next short while, we'll learn whether it's finally going to get traction and take off, or whether it's doomed to another cycle of disappointment," Hatfull said.

Phages are extremely specific. That's good because they're like "targeted missiles to go and take out the bad guys in the body without disturbing the rest of your natural biology," Hatfull said. "In contrast, antibiotics are like cluster bombing. They get everything in their way."

The downside of such specificity is that a phage might only knock out the bacteria in one sick person.

But solving the problem of antibiotic resistance with phages or anything else will take time ‒ and especially money. "The impediment is ultimately more financial than it is intellectual," Hatfull said.

The threat of antibiotic resistance has felt largely theoretical, but it is becoming more real all the time, experts said.

"The alarm has been sounding. You hear the train far, far, far away. Hey, the train is coming. Now the train is getting closer," Abbo said. "By the year 2050, if we don't do something, it's going to be very, very serious."

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City officials say replacing letters or symbols on buildings, or erecting a sign on top of one, requires a permit for design and safety reasons.

The X appeared after San Francisco police stopped workers on Monday from removing the brand's iconic bird and logo from the side of the building, saying they hadn't taped off the sidewalk to keep pedestrians safe if anything fell.

Any replacement letters or symbols would require a permit to ensure "consistency with the historic nature of the building" and to make sure additions are safely attached to the sign, Patrick Hannan, spokesperson for the Department of Building Inspection said earlier this week.

Erecting a sign on top of a building also requires a permit, Hannan said Friday.

"Planning review and approval is also necessary for the installation of this sign. The city is opening a complaint and initiating an investigation," he said in an email.

Musk unveiled a new "X" logo to replace Twitter's famous blue bird as he remakes the social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year. The X started appearing at the top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday.

An “X” sign rests atop the company headquarters, formerly known as Twitter, in downtown San Francisco, on Friday, July 28, 2023. The city has launched an investigation into the sign as city officials say replacing letters or symbols on buildings, or erecting a sign on top of one, requires a permit. Credit: AP Photo/Noah Berger

Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla, has long been fascinated with the letter X and had already renamed Twitter's corporate name to X Corp. after he bought it in October. One of his children is called "X." The child's actual name is a collection of letters and symbols.

On Friday afternoon, a worker on a lift machine made adjustments to the sign and then left.

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Khanun, now more than 1,000km east of the Philippine archipelago in the Pacific, may make landfall in China’s economically important Zhejiang province as early as Tuesday, Chinese forecasters said.

Typhoons, as hurricanes are called in East Asia, are common in China, often threatening big cities. As many as 150 Chinese cities suffer from flooding each year due to inadequate drainage systems, disrupting local economies and even claiming lives.

As the Western Pacific enters its peak typhoon season in August and September, scientists warn storms could grow more frequent and violent due to global warming.

Khanun would be the third typhoon to hit China after the powerful Doksuri on Friday and Talim just a week earlier.

Global average sea surface temperatures hit 21 deg C in late March and remained at record levels for the time of year throughout April and May. In the Florida Keys last week, the surface ocean temperature soared to abnormally high levels.

Temperatures on land have also smashed records in 2023 as heatwaves ravaged much of the Northern Hemisphere – from Canada and the United States to the Mediterranean, India and China.

A remote township in north-west China endured temperatures of 52.2 deg C earlier in July, setting a new record for the country. REUTERS

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Sunday, 30 July

• The first launch this week will take off at 1:00 a.m. UTC from the Dhawan Space Centre in India. NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) will launch a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) carrying the DS-SAR satellite for Singapore into orbit.

The DS-SAR is a Synthetic Aperture Radar Earth Observation satellite that has been ordered by Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency and will be used for government and commercial satellite imagery purposes.

• The second launch of the day is a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. It will be carrying the first in a series of satellites called Acadia for Capella Space. Acadia satellites are Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites.

The launch will happen at 5:00 a.m. UTC from Mahia in New Zealand. If you want to tune in, just head over to the Rocket Lab website which should have a livestream of the event.

Wednesday, 2 August

• On Wednesday, a Northrop Grumman Antares rocket will launch a Cygnus cargo freighter on a mission to the International Space Station. As a cargo ship, this mission won’t be manned but will instead bring supplies to the ISS.

It’s unclear if Northrop Grumman will stream the event on its website or on YouTube, but if it does, it’s scheduled to launch at 12:31 a.m. UTC.

Thursday, 3 August

• Finally, we have SpaceX launching a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Galaxy 37 communications satellite for Intelsat. While the mission is due to take off from Cape Canaveral, we do not have a launch time for this mission.

If you’re interested in watching this mission, SpaceX will stream the website as usual. Once in orbit, the Galaxy 37 satellite will provide television broadcast services in the United States.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites to orbit. The first stage of the rocket also performed a landing.

Next, a Long March 2D launched the Yaogan 36 satellites to orbit where they will perform remote sensing tasks.

Next up was the subsequent Starlink mission, with the first stage of the Falcon 9 successfully landing.

Finally, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launched the JUPITER 3 comms satellites into orbit. SpaceX recovered the two side boosters of the rocket but not the core booster.

That’s all for this week, check in next time.

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There is a scene in Christopher Nolan’s new film, Oppenheimer, where the eponymous physicist is thronged by his adoring pupils after his paper is published. They have gathered to celebrate the ‘black hole paper’ that J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote with his student Hartland Snyder. “The world will remember the day,” one of his students says.  

The world of physics does indeed remember the paper. While Oppenheimer is remembered in history as the “father of the atomic bomb”, his greatest contribution as a physicist was on the physics of black holes. The work of Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder helped transform black holes from figments of mathematics to real, physical possibilities – something to be found in the cosmos out there.

Exceptionally versatile

At the time of this work, Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. The Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb were still some years in his future. He was unknown to the public but the community of physicists knew him as the man who had established the finest school of theoretical physics outside of Europe.

Before Oppenheimer, it was customary for young American theoretical physicists to go to Europe, which had become the mecca of physics.

Oppenheimer had made the pilgrimage himself in his youth and studied with some of the pioneers of quantum theory, such as Max Born and Wolfgang Pauli. After Oppenheimer joined Berkeley, many of the best young American physicists flocked there instead, drawn to his genius.

Oppenheimer and his students worked on a wide range of topics – from cosmic rays to nuclear physics, from quantum electrodynamics to astrophysics. Each student worked on a different topic, and the exceptionally versatile Oppenheimer oversaw it all.

For most physicists, who prefer to dig deep into one or two topics at a time, this would be a nightmare scenario. But Oppenheimer thrived on it.

When he later became the scientific director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, his versatility helped him oversee diverse aspects of building the world’s first nuclear weapons.

From darkness to light

Among his students, Snyder was regarded as the most proficient at hard mathematical problems. He would go on to make important contributions to accelerator physics and noncommutative field theory. Oppenheimer gave him the problem of black hole formation to solve.

In their collaboration, Oppenheimer provided the vision and Snyder fleshed it out. Together, they brought black holes to life.

The possibility of black holes had been discovered shortly after Albert Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, in 1915. According to this theory, matter warps the fabric of spacetime around it. To determine the exact amount of warp, physicists have to solve a set of equations known as Einstein’s equations. The first person to find such a solution to these equations was the German physicist Karl Schwarzschild: he computed the warping outside a perfectly spherical mass.

Schwarzschild’s solution contained a surprise. He found that if you compute the warping near spheres of the same mass but of smaller and smaller radii, the warp keeps increasing. Below a certain critical radius, the neighbouring spacetime would curve into a pocket from which not even light can escape. That is, if a certain amount of mass was packed into a small enough radius, a black hole would exist around it.

Most physicists dismissed the possibility of black holes as mathematical fiction. They pointed to the fact that there was no known way by which matter could be squeezed so tight that a black hole would form.

A remarkably accurate picture

The next step came from the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. His work showed that black holes could be formed when certain stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own weight. But a description of a star imploding and forming a black hole was still missing.

This is where Oppenheimer and Snyder came in. Oppenheimer had already made a foray into the topic of stellar collapse, which convinced him of the inevitability of black holes. Together with his student George Volkoff, he was able to significantly extend Chandrasekhar’s result.  Now, with Snyder, Oppenheimer set out to provide a mathematical description of the birth of a black hole.

The collapse of a star is an enormously complicated process that would have been impossible to fully understand mathematically. But Oppenheimer had a talent for zeroing in on the essential features of a problem. He told Snyder to solve the problem for a perfectly spherical star with no internal forces. Unrealistic though their model was, Oppenheimer and Snyder’s final result was remarkably accurate.

But even with the simplifications, the problem was not easy. Oppenheimer and Snyder had to work out how the contraction of the star would affect the spacetime inside it. (Unbeknownst to them, the problem had been solved a year earlier by an Indian physicist named Bishveshwar Datt).

For all their simplifications, their final result provided a remarkably accurate picture of the birth of a black hole. It showed that a black hole would inevitably form once the star collapsed into its critical radius. It also showed that the star would continue to implode, eventually reaching infinite density, creating a singularity.

Oppenheimer and Snyder’s work also produced a striking demonstration of the relativity of time for different observers. For an observer on an imploding star that was as heavy as our Sun, it would take mere hours to shrink to the size of the critical radius. But for an observer outside, it would take an eternity. They would see the collapse get slower and slower as the star shrank to become smaller and smaller, never quite crossing the critical radius.

The Oppenheimer-Snyder paper should have closed the debate on black holes. Unfortunately, most physicists were not ready to accept the weirdness of black holes yet and argued that the idealisations that Oppenheimer and Snyder had made were too unrealistic. Oppenheimer himself lost all interest in the subject: he would change the topic whenever someone tried to discuss it with him.

It was only after Roger Penrose proved the inevitability of black hole formation that the importance of the Oppenheimer-Snyder paper became recognised. But by then, both the authors were deceased.

Into the black hole

One has to wonder how Oppenheimer’s life and career would have panned out under different circumstances, if he could have continued at Berkeley as the brilliant teacher and physicist that he was. But that was not to be.

Oppenheimer’s and Snyder’s paper was published by the journal Physical Review on September 1, 1939. Two other notable events took place that day. First, Niels Bohr and John Wheeler published a paper that explained nuclear fission and demonstrated the utility of the isotope uranium-235 to produce nuclear chain reactions. Second, Adolf Hitler’s army invaded Poland, starting World War II.

The course of history from that point on was perhaps as inevitable as the collapse of a star into a black hole. Oppenheimer was caught in its relentless pull, never to escape.

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Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser is not afraid to go against the flow.

In a July 26 interview with The Epoch Times, Mr. Clauser explained that he carried out his early research on quantum mechanics against opposition from some in the field.

As a young man, he pulled off the first experiment to demonstrate the reality of non-local quantum entanglement—that is, the strange linkage between multiple particles across any physical distance. That groundbreaking work earned him one-third of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Today, the 80-year-old scientist is up against another establishment. This time, though, he's not just violating a prediction so as to rule out an alternative explanation to quantum mechanics. He's violating a taboo that has slowly but surely become one of the biggest in science and politics.

"I am, I guess, what you would call a 'climate change denialist,'"  Mr. Clauser told The Epoch Times.

His training in science makes him "a little bit different than some others," he said.

The physicist, who also won a third of the Wolf Prize for his quantum mechanics contributions, shared some of his views on climate during a recent talk in South Korea soon after his election to the CO2 Coalition's board of directors.

'Dangerous Misinformation'

"I believe that climate change is not a crisis," Mr. Clauser told the audience at Quantum Korea 2023.

He also described the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as "one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation."

Mr. Clauser elaborated further on his views in his interview with The Epoch Times.

Contra the IPCC and other major institutions, he argues that climate is primarily set by what he refers to as the "cloud cover thermostat," a self-regulating process whereby more clouds start to enshroud the Earth when the temperature is too high, and vice-versa. Although he accepts observations showing that atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, he believes that gas's effect on heat transfer is swamped by a great natural cloud cycle.

"It [the carbon dioxide] may or may not be made by human beings," Ms. Clauser said. "It doesn't really matter where it comes from."

The physicist believes that objective science on climate has been sacrificed to politics. The preeminence of politics is all the worse, he said, because so much money has already gone to climate.

"We're talking about trillions of dollars," he said, adding that powerful people don't want to hear that they've made "trillion-dollar mistakes."

Concerns about such mistakes may have been relevant after Mr. Clauser was slated to speak before the U.N.'s International Monetary Fund (IMF) on July 25.

In recent years, the international economic and monetary agency has focused heavily on climate. Officials have laid particular stress on international carbon taxes.

"The latest IMF analysis finds that large emitting countries need to introduce a carbon tax that rises quickly to $75 a ton in 2030," the agency's website on climate mitigation states.

Just days before his talk was to take place, the Nobel laureate got some alarming news.

Mr. Clauser told The Epoch Times he'd received an email indicating that the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office Director, Pablo Moreno, did not want the talk to go forward that day.

In an email, an IEO senior official told The Epoch Times that Mr. Clauser's speech "has been postponed to reorganize it into a panel discussion."

"We are working to reschedule it after the summer," the official added.

No New Date Set

For now, a new date has not been set.

Mr. Clauser pointed out that a past attempt at a vigorous, transparent debate over climate change—namely, the "red team, blue team" exercise proposed by Obama administration veteran Steve Koonin in 2017—was ultimately scuttled during the Trump administration. When Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Director Scott Pruitt sought to carry out the exercise, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly shot the idea down.

In the eyes of some observers, the stated postponement looks more like a straightforward cancellation.

"Dr. John Clauser, Nobel Prize Recipient for Physics, 2022, & Board Member of the CO2 Coalition, has been summarily canceled as a confirmed speaker on July 25 at the International Monetary Fund. They say his speech is “postponed”. Don’t hold your breath!" wrote Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace and now a high-profile climate skeptic, on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Mr. Moore is a former chair of the CO2 Coalition.

"Whatever you do anon, you must not question 'The Science,' even if you are a [N]obel laureate," Joshua Steinman, a cybersecurity entrepreneur who served on the Trump administration's National Security Council, wrote on the same site.

When and if the IMF's IEO reinvites Mr. Clauser, his remarks could make a bigger splash than his initially scheduled talk.

Like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., however, Mr. Clauser may find it hard to get his message out there if the opposition remains sufficiently entrenched.

For now, the physicist doesn't sound likely to yield.

"We are totally awash in pseudoscience," Mr. Clauser told The Epoch Times.

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The news comes after scientists confirmed that July is on track to be the warmest month in record history—searing heat intensified by global warming that has affected tens of millions of people.

"Based on our analysis, the record-high average sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic Ocean is 24.9 degrees Celsius," (76.8° Fahrenheit) observed Wednesday, Xungang Yin, a scientist at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, told AFP.

The record is particularly startling as it comes early in the year—usually, the North Atlantic reaches its peak temperature in early September.

The previous record high was recorded in September 2022, at 24.89 degrees Celsius, Yin said.

NOAA, which has been tracking sea temperatures since the early 1980s, will need about two weeks to confirm the preliminary findings.

The Mediterranean Sea reached its highest temperature on record Monday, Spanish researchers said—amid an exceptional heat wave in Europe.

The record of 28.71 degrees Celsius was announced by Spain's Institute of Marine Sciences, which analyzed data from satellites used by the European Earth observation program Copernicus.

Those experts said they measure the daily median sea surface temperature, rather than the average, because it is less susceptible to extreme spikes in temperature in isolated areas of the sea.

The Mediterranean region, hit by record temperatures in July, has long been classified as a hotspot of climate change.

Atlantic record likely to be broken again

The sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic is "expected to continue to increase through the month of August," NOAA's Yin said, adding it was "highly likely" the record would again be broken.

The new high of 24.9 degrees Celsius is "more than one degree warmer than a 30-year climatological normal, calculated from 1982 to 2011," he added.

Since March, which is the month when the North Atlantic begins to warm up after winter, temperatures have generally been warmer than in previous years, with the difference more pronounced in recent weeks.

The North Atlantic has become an emblematic observation point for the warming of seawater worldwide due to the effects of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The Copernicus program, which uses different data than that analyzed by NOAA, told AFP on Friday that it had recorded a temperature of 24.7 Celsius on Wednesday in the North Atlantic.

A Copernicus spokesman said while that remained below the program's September 2022 record, slightly lower than the NOAA level at 24.81 Celsius, that record was sure to be broken "this summer."

"At this stage, it is just a matter of days."

'Extreme' situation

"This situation is extreme: we've seen maritime heat waves before, but this is very persistent and spread out over a large surface area" in the North Atlantic, Karina Von Schuckmann from the Mercator Ocean International research center told AFP.

The expert noted that the oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat produced by human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.

"This accumulation of energy doubled over the last two decades," fueling global warming, she said.

On a global scale, the average ocean temperature has been besting seasonal heat records on a regular basis since April.

A specific, striking example has been recorded in Florida where waters off the coast of the Sunshine State reached 38.3 degrees Celsius on Monday, according to data from a weather buoy—a temperature more associated with a hot tub.

If confirmed, the reading could constitute a world record.

© 2023 AFP

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Experts say that depends on a number of factors, including who's on the receiving end of a venting session, how often a person does it and what type of feedback they receive.

"By and large, we do need to get our negative emotions out," said Rachel Millstein, a staff psychologist in the behavioral medicine program and the Lifestyle Medicine Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "The ways we do it, though, that's where it's healthy or unhealthy, productive or unproductive."

Why vent

Personal relationships, work, finances and discrimination are just some of the daily stressors that may fuel someone's need to vent. Research shows this kind of stress can raise the risk for cardiovascular disease, whereas releasing or managing stress can improve physical and psychological health, lowering that risk. Having a strong social support network has been linked to better psychological health.

Venting to people in that network is one way to reduce the impact of daily stressors, said Millstein, also an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Calling a friend and letting it out can be helpful. It helps us feel connected to our social support networks, which is a big determinant of life satisfaction and overall well-being."

Choose your audience wisely

Speaking to someone who is supportive of your feelings can be helpful, even if that person offers a different perspective, she said.

But venting to someone who is dismissive of your feelings can be detrimental, said Jonathan Shaffer, an associate professor of clinical health psychology at the University of Colorado in Denver. "It's invalidating to share and get no response from the other person. It might make you feel like you don't have worth or are not loveable."

Venting also can be counter-productive if the listener amplifies negative feelings and "the conversation spirals. Then you can pull each other down," Millstein said.

Another negative consequence could be if the listener gets tired of listening. "If you vent over and over again, this person might not want to be present, and this can fray a social connection," she said.

For major stressors, it might be more helpful to speak to a therapist, Shaffer said.

Venting without an audience

If speaking feelings aloud to someone else feels unsafe, another alternative is to write them down, Shaffer said.

Studies have found numerous health benefits to expressive writing, the practice of writing down feelings on a daily basis. It has been shown to aid in healing from traumatic experiences and to help lower blood pressure, boost the immune system, improve sleep and lessen depression and pain.

Don't forget the positive

Whether releasing feelings on paper or in person, Shaffer suggests finding ways to focus on the positive, as well as the negative. For example, ending a venting session with a focus on things for which the person is grateful can help restore positive feelings, he said, as can mindfulness practices.

"Make a plan for some type of relaxation, such as deep breathing or meditation afterwards," he suggested.

Other ways to relieve stress

Exercise also can relieve stress and release negative feelings, Millstein said.

"And don't forget that humor is a really good coping strategy, too," she said. Venting to a friend with a good sense of humor may be twice as helpful, because "sometimes other people can help us see the funny side of things."

Copyright © 2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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The invention comes from American researchers aiming to combat “interval cancers,” which emerge between regular scans and constitute almost 30 percent of all breast cancer cases. The survival rate for breast cancer – the most common cancer in women – is nearly 100 percent when diagnosed early. However, that figure plummets to just 25 percent for tumors detected in later stages.

The research team crafted this wearable device as a home monitoring method for those at high risk of breast cancer. The study’s lead author, Turkish scientist Dr. Canan Dağdeviren, an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, is personally affected by the tragic loss of her aunt to late-stage breast cancer, was inspired to create a wearable diagnostic device that could be incorporated into a bra.

On the left of the photo, a yellow strip-cable has a green circuit board on one end, and a small ultrasound tracker on the other. On the right, the white device is teardrop shaped and has a hexagonal grid of holes where the tracker can be placed. (credit: Canan Dagdeviren)

The resulting ultrasound device aims to facilitate earlier breast cancer diagnoses in women. The device was proven to capture images as accurately as those taken at medical imaging centers. The team designed it as a flexible patch that attaches to a bra, allowing the wearer to move freely while an ultrasound tracker captures images of breast tissue from different angles.

“We changed the form factor of the ultrasound technology so that it can be used in your home. It’s portable and easy to use, and provides real-time, user-friendly monitoring of breast tissue,” says Dr. Dağdeviren in a media release. “My goal is to target the people who are most likely to develop interval cancer. With more frequent screening, our goal is to increase the survival rate to up to 98 percent.”

Interval cancers, or tumors that develop between scheduled mammogram breast screenings, account for 20 to 30 percent of all breast cancer cases and tend to be more aggressive than those detected during routine scans.

(© okrasiuk – stock.adobe.com)

To make the device wearable, the team devised a flexible, 3D-printed patch with honeycomb-like openings. Using magnets, it attaches to a bra, allowing the scanner to contact the wearer’s skin. The ultrasound scanner is housed inside a small tracker, which can move to six different positions, allowing for complete breast imaging. It can also rotate to capture images from different angles and doesn’t require specialist expertise to operate.

The device was tested on a 71-year-old woman with a history of breast cysts and could detect cysts as small as 0.3 centimeters in diameter, similar in size to early-stage tumors.

“Access to quality and affordable health care is essential for early detection and diagnosis,” says Catherine Ricciardi, nurse director at MIT’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research. “This technology holds the promise of breaking down the many barriers for early breast cancer detection by providing a more reliable, comfortable, and less intimidating diagnostic.”

Though wearers currently have to connect their scanners to a traditional ultrasound machine, the research team is working on a miniaturized imaging system about the size of a smartphone. The ultrasound patch can be reused, and the researchers envision it being used at home by those at high risk of breast cancer and those without access to regular screening.

The team also plans to incorporate advances in artificial intelligence to track how images change over time, offering more precise diagnostics. They also aim to adapt the technology to scan other body parts for early diagnoses of other cancers.

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

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