In the study conducted by Northwell Health, Thomas underwent a surgery where five small chips were implanted into his brain in a procedure known as a double neuro bypass. The chips send and interpret signals between his brain, damaged spinal cord and hands, allowing him some movement.

"We are literally pulsing very intense electrical patterns, but very briefly, that activates those circuits, those damaged circuits that are in his spinal cord and then we believe it's starting to strengthen those connections. There's a saying that neurons that fire together, wire together," said engineer Chad Bouton, who leads the Neural Bypass Lab in New York. 

Feeling anything at all is a significant milestone for Thomas, whose life changed forever three summers ago when he miscalculated a swimming pool's depth and took a dive that broke his neck. He was left paralyzed from the chest down at the age of 42, eliminating most independent movement.

Before the accident, independence was everything to Thomas, although he said he took it for granted. The former finance professional had an active social life, going out to dinner with clients almost every night of the week. 

After the accident, his new reality was hard to face. 

"When I first got home, I didn't get out of bed. I got out of bed once a day for six months," Thomas said. "I cried all the time. I was crying cause I didn't have independence." 

Michelle Bennett, his sister, remained a constant source of support. The accident brought them closer and Bennett said even when Thomas was still in the hospital and intubated, she remained positive about her brother, because she witnessed glimmers of the fun-loving Thomas despite his challenges.

He kept his sense of humor, she said. 

"In September, he goes, 'Michelle, I'm just so hungry.' Because he couldn't eat yet. He'd been hungry since August," she said. 

But he watched the Food Network every day, Bennett said, laughing.

While he still has a long way to go, Thomas said he is experiencing small victories, including being able to scratch his face. He hopes to be able to wipe away his tears in the future. 

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Four hours’ drive from the hustle and bustle of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, lies the secluded community of Baduy Dalam, where the trapping of modern life are shunned. The Baduy Dalam people reject money, technology and formal education, and limits tourists – banning any visitors from documenting their life. Now the tribe wants to go one step further, by cutting off the internet.

Officials in Indonesia are considering a request from the group for an internet blackout, after they cited concerns over negative impacts on tribe members.

The Baduy community in Lebak, Banten province, is made up of two groups, Baduy Dalam and Baduy Luar, totalling about 26,000 people.

Baduy Luar people have adopted contemporary ways of living, with some relying on the internet to attract tourists and promote their handcrafts.

But a letter from representatives of Baduy Dalam, dated from June and shown to the Guardian by a local official, requests that the authorities remove or divert internet signals supplied by surrounding towers. Baduy Dalam representatives also asked that officials limit, reduce or close down applications that can affect the young generation’s morals.

“The existence of phones/smartphones that can be owned by everyone, including Baduy people, is considered to result in the declining morals of our generation that can access non-educating applications and contents,” the letter reads.

Lebak official Anik Sakinah said that her office had forwarded the request to Indonesia’s ministry of communications and information.

Ministry official Usman Kansong said his office had coordinated with several internet providers operating towers around Baduy Dalam, which were currently conducting field surveys. He also noted concerns of tourists using the internet in the area.

“It’s technically feasible, obviously with some treatments such as moving the towers or reducing the signal capacity. We’re still waiting for survey results on what can be done next,” Usman said.

Steve Saerang, representing one of the providers, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, said it supported the Baduy people’s cultural preservation but believed the internet had positive impacts on the economy. He added that the company had run a field survey but refused to comment further.

Sarpin, a Baduy Luar village official and tour guide, said that while he agreed with Baduy Dalam’s request to preserve its tradition, it should not affect the adjacent Baduy Luar and other villages. As well as businesses and tourism, Sarpin said, essential government services relied on the internet.

“We are requesting better internet signals. Some areas still don’t have access to the internet. It’s becoming more important for us,” he said by phone.

While the world’s largest archipelago has enjoyed rising internet penetration, reaching almost 80% of its 275 million people, an urban-rural divide persists when it comes to access to the web.

Endroyono, an information technology and communications expert from Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology, said that technically, operators could easily limit access in certain areas. But he suggested that the government also provide education on the positive use of the internet along Baduy Dalam borders to help younger generations cope with the changing world.

“Digital divide should be addressed by the government through socio-cultural approaches. Whether we realise it or not, every citizen should benefit from technological advancement and should be protected from its negative excesses,” he said.

Dubbed the Amish of Asia, Baduy people inhabit a 5,000ha area, over half of which is protected forest.

There are more than 2,000 Indigenous groups with dozens of millions of members in Indonesia, according to the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago, and while they have a big role in nature conservation, they are subject to discrimination and human rights violations, especially in land conflicts.

A bill on the recognition and protection of Indigenous people’s rights has stalled since 2012, depriving them of legal certainty, which activists say is fuelled by conflicted business interests.

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To have one patron imprisoned in the Tower may be regarded as a misfortune; to have two looks like carelessness. Perhaps Thomas Harriot, Renaissance polymath and client of both Sir Walter Ralegh and Henry Percy, had good reason to direct his attention from worldly troubles.

At 9 pm on Wednesday 26 July 1609, Harriot, then living in the grounds at Syon House, pointed his telescope at a five-day-old crescent moon. It made him the first person to train such an instrument on the skies and map the moon.

Telescopes were the latest technology: one had first been patented the previous autumn in the Netherlands, and it’s possible that Harriot had built his own.

Not all his moon drawings survive, but a composite map from 1610 suggests he thought he was drawing coastlines and continents, islands and seas. It was his navigational and cartographic skill that drew him to Ralegh; he had lived for a year in Ralegh’s Roanoke colony, where he learned the Algonquian language and studied their customs.

Harriot never published, however. His work lay undiscovered until 1784; his moon map wasn’t published until 1965. It thus seems apt that, although there is a crater on the moon named in Harriot’s honour, it is on the far side, where no one can actually see it.

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A clip of Neil Oliver, a GB News presenter, accusing the BBC "and others" of "driving fear" by using "supposedly terrifying temperatures", has been viewed more than two million times.

For the past few weeks, an intense heatwave has been sweeping through parts of southern Europe and north Africa, with extensive wildfires breaking out in Greece, Italy and Algeria - leading to more than 40 deaths.

Speaking about the fires on Rhodes on GB News on Monday, Mr Oliver accused the BBC, and other broadcasters, of trying to "make people terrified of the weather".

"Those supposedly terrifying temperatures that were being predicted, all starting with a four... 40 this and 40 that... were obtained using satellite images of ground temperatures," he said.

"That's never been the temperature that's used in weather reporting and forecasting.

"On the contrary, those figures are the air temperature, a couple of feet above the ground surface ...the true temperatures, the air temperatures which actually happened, were in the 30s."

Mr Oliver's claim that the BBC was using ground temperatures is false, as several BBC weather presenters have pointed out.

BBC Weather bases its temperature reporting and forecasting on air temperatures.

For his other claim, that "true temperatures" were in the 30s, Mr Oliver didn't specify exact locations, but on Monday 24 July several places across Europe recorded air temperatures over 40C.

Lamia in Greece experienced an air temperature of 45C, as did Figueres in Spain (45.4C) and Gythio in Greece (46.4 °C) in previous days.

GB News did not respond to the BBC's request for a comment about Mr Oliver's clip. Mr Oliver has also been approached for comment.

How the BBC reports temperatures

BBC Weather - in keeping with other broadcasters and weather services - relies on temperature measurements taken in line with internationally agreed standards.

These are taken using thermometers that measure temperatures in the shade with a free movement of air.

For that reason, thermometers are placed inside Stevenson screens - purpose-built, white-slatted boxes at a height of 1.25m to prevent direct heat from the ground and other hard surfaces from affecting any reading.

The air temperature measurements taken in countries affected by the heatwave will have been obtained using instruments and methods approved by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), of which the UK is a member.

Ground temperatures can be measured by thermometers and by satellites. On average, they can to be 10-15 degrees higher than air temperatures.

But these are not used in the BBC's weather reporting and forecasting.

Other claims about high temperatures

Some social media users have attacked BBC Weather forecasts, suggesting the reporting does not match real temperatures.

An air temperature of 48.2C was recorded in Jerzu, in Sardinia, Italy on Monday - the highest temperature in Europe so far this year.

BBC Weather was one of many news outlets reporting this record. But some social media users suggested the reports were inaccurate.

Robin Monotti, a film-maker with more than 81,000 followers on Twitter, claimed the BBC's reports were not backed by evidence.

But data from Sardinia's own Regional Agrometeorological Service confirms the high temperatures reported.

Contacted by the BBC, Mr Monotti directed us to the Italian Meteorological Service's website, which listed different temperature readings for that day in Jerzu.

However, none of those readings were taken in Jerzu itself, but instead in nearby municipalities (with the nearest of those more than 13 miles away).

He then alleged that the equipment to get that particular temperature reading did not abide by international standards.

But Sardinia's Regional Agrometeorological Service makes clear on its website that its weather stations are operated according to WMO recommendations.

And the WMO also told the BBC that the temperature of 48.2C registered in Jerzu is consistent with data from other stations across Sardinia.

But it added that any temperature record is provisional until recognised by national or regional authorities, and ultimately by the WMO.

Forecasting the weather

Weather forecasts are produced using complex computer models and updated once maximum temperatures have been reached.

Forecasters aim to get as close as possible to the actual temperatures.

Small variations in atmospheric conditions can make a significant difference to the weather which has been forecast.

A forecast temperature within a range of two degrees of the measured reading is considered by most meteorological organisations to be accurate.

But even if forecasts for cities or entire regions are correct, they do not always reflect small, local variations in temperature.

BBC Weather forecast temperatures of 47C on the Italian island of Sicily on 19 July.

A number of Twitter users, including Mr Monotti, claimed that the BBC's own weather website listed a much lower temperature of 37C in Palermo, the Sicilian capital.

Palermo's location meant the city remained cooler than other parts of the large Mediterranean island.

According to Sicily's Agrometeorological Information Service, the highest temperature recorded on that day was 44.8C in the municipality of Francofonte.

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A Georgia boy was given an unexpected gift by a Hapeville police officer after someone reported him for trying to find work around the neighborhood.

The boy, in a suburb just south of Atlanta, intended to do yard work such as pulling weeds, cutting grass, and trimming hedges for neighbors. His goal was to save up money to purchase a PlayStation.

A nearby resident contacted police regarding the kid, intending to have him taken away.

Officer Colleran of the Hapeville Police Department arrived to speak with the boy, who expressed his desire to earn money to purchase a gaming system.

"The young man was polite, respectful, and truthful," Officer Colleran shared.

Colleran shared that he too is a passionate gamer and offered to assist the boy in achieving his goal. The officer coordinated with his department to present the boy with a PlayStation 5 and an online gaming gift card.

The two plan to continue their friendship online where they will ban together in the gaming world.

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Watching it all from an observation deck was Amanda Williams, the only reason the still-anonymous surfer’s good deeds are known to the world, because she described this “beautiful” rescue to local news.

Walking along the headland above South Cronulla beach in NSW, Williams noticed there was something struggling in the water. At first she wasn’t sure what it was, but the fear it might have been a human led her to take out her phone’s camera and zoom in.

That’s when she saw that it was a magpie—this small bird was flapping about, getting swooped by seagulls no less, with no ability to save itself.

Williams wanted to help, but there was no one around, and with her 6-month-old infant strapped to her chest, there was nothing she could do.

After 10 minutes, some surfers went out to catch some of the waves, and one of them noticed the magpie was there. Paddling his board under the exhausted bird, he lifted it out of the water. The waves though sent his board bobbing up and down, and eventually the surfer just had to pick the magpie up in his hand.

“He was just holding this thing like it was a pet bird, it just sat in his hand,” Mrs. Williams said. “It was so beautiful, he could’ve just left it or ignored it but he went and cut his surfing trip short for this poor little magpie. He went out of his way and took it to the vet, it was beautiful.”

She watched, touched, until bird and brawn were out of sight. She then went home and posted the episode to her local Facebook page where it accumulated a big reaction.

“I have no idea who he is, he just did it on his own. No one was watching, there was no-one on the shore cheering. He just did it for this poor little bird that was drowning in the surf,” she said, adding that she wanted to thank him for “showing me that there are still good people around”.

Williams did manage to contact the veterinary hospital, who said the bird was rapidly improving.

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Sinusitis, which is an inflammation or swelling of the sinuses, can cause congestion, runny nose, discomfort and difficulty breathing. Doctors often prescribe antibiotics, which target only bacterial infections, to treat the condition—even though it may be caused by viruses.

“Five million kids in the U.S. get prescribed antibiotics for sinusitis each year,” said study lead author Professor Nader Shaikh of the University of Pittsburgh.

“Our study suggests that only half of these kids see an improvement in symptoms with antibiotic use, so by identifying who they are, we could greatly reduce unnecessary antibiotic use.”

He adds that’s is difficult to properly diagnose the nature of a sinus infection.

“For an ear infection, we can look inside the ear; for pneumonia, we listen to the lungs. But for sinusitis, we have nothing to go on from a physical exam. That was very unsatisfying to me.”

With the target of developing a better tool to diagnose bacterial sinusitis, Prof Shaikh and his team enrolled around 500 children with sinusitis symptoms from six centres across the U.S. and randomly assigned them to receive either a course of antibiotics or placebo.

The research team also took swabs from inside the nose of each child and tested for the three main types of bacteria involved in sinusitis.

Youngsters who tested positive for the bacteria had better resolution of symptoms with antibiotic treatment compared to those who did not have bacteria.

The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), suggest that testing for bacteria could be a simple and effective way to detect children who are likely to benefit from antibiotics and avoid prescribing the drugs to those who wouldn’t.

“If antibiotics aren’t necessary, then why use them?” said Dr. Shaikh. “These medications can have side effects, such as diarrhoea, and alter the microbiome, which we still don’t understand the long-term implications of.”

“Overuse of antibiotics can also encourage antibiotic resistance, which is an important public health threat.”

He says a common belief among parents and doctors is that yellow or green snot signals a bacterial infection.

“But we found no difference, which means that colour should not be used to guide medical decisions.”

The study shows how important “basic science” as it’s generally referred to, still is. This was as simple a trial as one could imagine but with incredibly serious consequences. The knowledge regarding the importance of the human microbiome, as Dr. Shaikh explained, continues to grow rapidly, while antibiotic-resistant infections occur in 2.8 million Americans every year, and there is a gradual slowing down in the development of new antibiotics.

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It’s an effort aimed at combatting the paradox of the big city: millions of people crammed together, many of whom suffer from social isolation as their millions of neighbors take on endless shades of anonymity.

This is true of many cities in the world, but unique to Paris is the brusqueness that develops from a city of perpetual hustle and hordes of tourists.

Unwilling to let the City of Light, their City of Love, dim under this curtain of curtness, the self-proclaimed “Republic of Good Neighbors”

(Republique des Hyper Voisins) is on a mission to transform their neck of the woods into a vision of Paris from the past, full of ‘bonjours,’ of greenery and promenading, and of taking every opportunity to chat with passersby.

In the first effort of the collaboration, a 215-meter-long table (715 feet) was set out on the Rue de L’Aude, where the entire 14th arrondissement was invited to a special lunch event entitled “Bonjour.”

The Guardian newspaper, reporting from the event, called it “distinctly un-Parisian,” and local cafe owner Benjamin Zhong said, “I’d never seen anything like it before. It felt like the street belonged to me, to all of us.”

“The stereotype of a Parisian is brusque and unfriendly,” added Patrick Bernard, the former journalist and local resident who launched the project.

“But city living doesn’t have to be unpleasant and anonymous. We want to create the atmosphere of a village in an urban space.”

Since 2018, the Republic has been the site of hundreds of small events celebrating conviviality, including brunches, aperitifs, cultural outings, bake-a-thons, children’s activities, and group exercise meets. The airwaves are filled with communications from dozens of WhatsApp groups, for people trading and selling handmade goods, people repairing electronics or mechanical equipment, or sharing referrals to various professional services.

Many residents say the deliberate shift to good neighborliness has changed their lives. This includes not only Frenchmen, but immigrants to the area as well, who feel they’re living the Paris they always imagined.

Musique on the Rue de L’Aude – credit Hyper Voisins Facebook

A French Revolution

Once the good neighbor republic realized it could organize the citizenry in camaraderie, it began doing so for other causes, including improving local access to healthcare services and electric transportation.

Mr. Bernard has petitioned for, and received, several grants from city hall to pursue civic improvements like electric bike rentals and charging stations. The Hyper Voisins actually opened a medical clinic, staffed by ten people, that targets its facilities and services around the needs of people in the 14th arrondissement.

The Republique has lobbied city hall to levy a tax on businesses deemed undesirable by those in the neighborhood, such as banks that no one uses, or delivery hubs.

It’s also hired local green entrepreneurs to design a variety of collection points for organic waste which is then turned into compost for the neighborhood trees and flower boxes.

Its most recent civic engagement project was when the Republique turned its attention to the Place des Droits L’Enfant, a plaza that had become a largely lifeless road junction. By working together, the neighbors pedestrianized it, cleaned up litter and broken pavement, planted a variety of garden beds along the roads and plaza, and inaugurated the new space with a big party of music and board games.

While there, the Guardian met with Patrick Touzeau, who moved to the area with his three kids in 2018. Touzeau believes the concept should be implemented everywhere on Earth.

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More than three million cases of dengue have been reported in the Americas so far this year. That means 2023 already has the second-highest annual incidence of the disease since 1980, when the Pan American Health Organization began collecting data on the number of cases (see ‘Dengue on the rise’).

“We do observe an increase in cases beyond what was expected for this period,” says Cláudia Codeço, an epidemiologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a biosciences and public-health institution in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Whether the record of 3.2 million cases reported in 2019 will be broken in 2023 depends on how the disease spreads in Central and North America, because most researchers think the peak of dengue season in South America has passed

Source: Pan American Health Organization.

Dengue is caused by four closely related viruses, or serotypes, which makes identifying the exact cause of the surge challenging. “There is an interaction between these serotypes, with the immunity against one interfering with the others. When we put this together, it can lead to unpredictable dynamics,” Codeço says.

But rising temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns might help to explain the trend, researchers say. Dengue’s main vector, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, thrives at temperatures around 30 °C and in humid conditions, which have become more frequent in the past few years as a result of record heat and extreme weather events.

There is no specific treatment for the disease, which can cause fever, headache and fatigue. Severe cases can be fatal: more than 1,300 people have died from dengue in the Americas so far this year.

Range expansion

Dengue is spreading to regions that were once off-limits to A. aegypti. In Brazil — which has reported nearly 2.4 million cases this year — the disease is expanding into southern states, which were previously too cold for the mosquito. Over the past 5 years, 481 Brazilian municipalities have registered sustained local transmission of dengue for the first time, according to an analysis by Codeço and her colleagues1. And Mexico City, at an altitude of 2,240 metres, recorded its first A. aegypti invasion in 2015. “If you read books about the biology of the Aedes aegypti, they say the mosquito doesn’t reproduce at altitudes above 1,200 metres,” says José Ramos-Castañeda, a virologist at the Mexican National Institute of Public Health in Cuernavaca. “In that aspect, global warming is affecting the distribution of the vector and therefore the possible distribution of cases.”

Researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have investigated how rising temperatures in parts of Brazil might affect dengue’s epidemic potential — the chance of it spreading among people — in the late 2040s2. “What we found was that, regardless of the specific climate-change scenario, the epidemic potential was higher than today,” says computational epidemiologist Andrew Brouwer, one of the authors of the study. “In most locations, we’ve seen a 10–20% increase in the epidemic potential,” he says.

The phenomenon is not restricted to South America. “Both in the Southern and Northern Hemisphere, the regions where vector and pathogen can be sustained are going to be increasing,” says Brouwer. In the continental United States, local transmission of dengue has already been registered in Florida, Texas and Arizona.

Longer seasons

Dengue is typically seasonal — case numbers tend to go up in summer or the rainy season and down in winter or the dry season. But global temperature increases mean that dengue seasons might get longer. In Brouwer and his colleagues’ projection, “we found that the transmission seasons generally increased by about a month on either end”, Brouwer says.

In the short term, the ongoing El Niño weather event — which is expected to bring floods, droughts and record temperatures — could have consequences for dengue. In late June, the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that the phenomenon “could increase transmission of dengue and other so-called arboviruses such as Zika and chikungunya”.

El Niño will probably have the greatest impact on dengue incidence in Central America and parts of North America, regions that are now going through the rainy season.

Several strategies have been used to control dengue transmission. They include the use of traps or insecticides to kill the mosquito host, and getting rid of open containers of stagnant water, where the insects can breed. There are also efforts to develop modified mosquitoes that cannot transmit the disease.

All these approaches can help, says Ramos-Castañeda, but “the thing that could really impact the transmission is immunity in the population”. Two dengue vaccines have been approved by authorities in some locations since 2015, but they haven’t been widely adopted, owing to issues with efficacy, safety concerns and high prices.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02423-w

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Here Are the Stunning Heat Records Set So Far This Summer

In an aerial view, a billboard displays the temperature that was forecast to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit on July 16, 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Temperature records have been shattering left and right as searing, unrelenting heat has enveloped numerous spots around the planet—from Phoenix, Ariz., to Sanbao, China—during this summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Breaking high-temperature records is a hallmark of climate change. With more and more heat being trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouses gases emitted when humans burn fossil fuels, heat records are now set increasingly more often than cold ones.

Climate change leads to longer, stronger and more frequent heat waves. A recent study from the World Weather Attribution group found that some of this summer’s record-setting heat waves would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. A hot summer of the past is an average one today, and the current hot summers will be considered pretty average in the future.

Extreme heat kills people. In the U.S., it claims more lives than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods—combined. It is particularly dangerous for young children, the elderly, those with health conditions such as asthma and heart disease, those who work outside and the unhoused.

Below is a running list of some of the records that have been set this year.

LOCAL-LEVEL RECORDS

Under the influence of a tenacious heat dome, Phoenix has blown past a record for the longest stretch of days with high temperatures at or above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius). As of July 26, that record stood at 27 days. (The previous record, set in 1974, was 18 days.)

Phoenix also tied the record (previously set in 2021) for the most days in a row—six—with a high of at least 115 degrees F (46.1 degrees C).

Additionally, the city has tied the record for the most days at or above 115 degrees F within a single year, with 14 days so far in 2023.

And Phoenix hasn’t only sweltered during the day. Nighttime lows hit an all-time high record of 97 degrees F (36.1 degrees C), breaking an earlier peak on July 19. The city has seen a record 17 consecutive days with a low of 90 degrees F (32.2 degrees C) or higher. The previous record of seven days was set twice in 2020.

Miami, Fla., has seen a heat index (a measure that factors in humidity to determine what the temperature feels like to the human body) above 100 degrees F (37.8 degrees C) for 45 days as of July 25, according to local meteorologist Brian McNoldy. This is by far the most days in a row to reach that level. (The previous record, set in 2020, was 32 days.) The city also saw a record 13 consecutive days with a heat index of 106 degrees F (41.1 degrees C) or higher and a record two days in a row where the heat index topped 110 degrees F.

San Angelo, Tex., set an all-time high of 114 degrees F (45.6 degrees C) in June as a heat dome stayed parked over the area for weeks. It was one of many heat records that have broken around the state this summer.

Algiers, the capital of Algeria, set an all-time record high of 119.7 degrees F (48.7 degrees C) on July 23 amid a brutal heat wave affecting areas all around the Mediterranean.

Palermo, the capital of the Italian region of Sicily, hit an all-time record high of 116.6 degrees F (47 degrees C) on July 24, breaking its previous record by more than 3.6 degrees F (two degrees C). Temperature data there extend back to 1791.

REGIONAL AND NATIONAL-LEVEL RECORDS

Sanbao township in China’s Xinjiang Uygur region set the country’s all-time record high temperature of 126 degrees F (52.2 degrees C). And Spain’s Catalonia region had its hottest-ever temperature of 113.7 degrees F (45.4 degrees C).

On July 8 a town in Canada’s  Northwest Territories recorded a temperature of 100 degrees F . The location was the farthest north of the 65-degree latitude line where that has ever happened in the Western Hemisphere.

GLOBAL RECORDS

On the global scale, the planet saw its hottest June on record this year by a wide margin. And July is expected to be not only the hottest July on record but also the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The first week of July was also provisionally the hottest week on record for the whole planet.

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Loch Ness is a large oligotrophic freshwater loch located along the Great Glen Fault in Scotland.

Since the 1930s, purported sightings of unknown animals in the loch have featured prominently in popular media, but to date, no specimen has been obtained despite numerous efforts, making the probability of such animals unlikely.

The authenticity and interpretations of photographs and films allegedly depicting unknown animals in Loch Ness have been seriously doubted.

In the 20th century, systematic searches with submersibles, sector-scanning sonar surveys, hydrophones, underwater photography, long-lining, and trawling have returned only ambiguous sonar signals, low-quality photographs, and unidentifiable sound recordings.

In the 1970s, a sample of European eels was collected from Loch Ness with baited traps.

The distribution of eel masses was skewed, which led biologists to conclude that large eels may exist in the loch.

Eel body structure and function are characterized by an elongated body form, a single pair of pectoral fins, strong musculature and high-amplitude winding movement, and a durable integument with a thick epidermis and dark chromatophores.

An environmental DNA study conducted at the loch in 2018 detected extraordinary amounts of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from eels, prompting authors to further suggest the possibility of large eels in the loch.

However, the new research by Folk Zoology Society researcher Floe Foxon casts doubt on the eel theory.

The European eel (Anguilla anguilla). Image credit: Gerard M / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Foxon analyzed catch data from Loch Ness and other freshwater bodies in Europe to predict the likelihood of observing eels as large as previous estimates of the Loch Ness Monster’s size.

The chances of encountering a 1-m-long eel in Loch Ness, according to the results, are approximately 1 in 50,000, which could explain some sightings of smaller unknown creatures.

The probability of finding much larger eels, however, is virtually zero, debunking the theory that giant eels account for sightings of larger animals.

“In this new work, a much-needed level of scientific rigor and data are brought to a topic that is otherwise as slippery as an eel,” Foxon said.

“Contrary to popular conception, the intersection between folklore and zoology is amenable to scientific analysis and has the potential to provide valuable insights into anthrozoological phenomena.”

“This work also champions open access science and nontraditional publishing — the future of scientific publication.”

The paper was published in the journal JMIRx Bio.

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A woman buried more than 2,400 years ago in what’s now northwestern China has galloped into a scientific afterlife atop the earliest directly dated horseback riding saddle.

Researchers have radiocarbon dated the well-preserved, soft saddle to 727 B.C. to 396 B.C. Excavated at what’s known as the Yanghai cemetery, this expertly crafted piece of riding equipment is about as old as, or possibly older than, the previous record holders, archaeologist Patrick Wertmann of the University of Zurich and colleagues report in the September Archaeological Research in Asia.

Soft saddles found in tombs of mobile herders and warriors from the Scythian Pazyryk culture of northern Asia date to 430 B.C. to 420 B.C. Those dates are inferred from analyses of tree rings in wood that was used to construct those chambers.

Despite its simple design, “the Yanghai saddle was manufactured by a specialist familiar not only with needle- and leatherwork but with horse riding and the anatomy of horse and rider,” Wertmann says. The finished product, which showed signs of extensive use, had been placed with the deceased woman’s body in a position for her to take another ride.

It shares basic features with present-day soft saddles, including two wing-shaped hides sewn together to form a seat, divided by a long, narrow strip of hide that was placed over a horse’s spine. Rounded pieces of hide attached to the front and back of the wing-shaped pieces would have helped riders to maintain an upright position and raise themselves up, say when shooting an arrow.

A more than 2,400-year-old saddle found in western China showed signs of extensive use and had been placed with a deceased woman’s body in a way that suggests she might be riding still (marked by the red circle).
P. WERTMANN ET AL/ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN ASIA, 2023

Different stitching techniques using either sinew or leather thread hold the Yanghai saddle together. Saddle stitching, a method still practiced today that creates two rows of interlocking threads using a single row of holes, connected front and back supports to the saddle seat. Simpler stitching methods were used to repair tears in the saddle and to close incisions in each main hide that could be opened to stuff animal hair and straw into the saddle seat for cushioning.

When and where people began to ride horses and use saddles remains uncertain. Yamnaya herders living in the area of modern Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary may have ridden horseback as early as around 5,000 years ago, based on an analysis of the herders’ skeletal features (SN: 3/3/23). Ancient artwork from around 4,800 years ago in Mesopotamia shows horses being ridden without saddles, Wertmann says.

But only saddles provide clear evidence of horseback riding, says anthropological archaeologist Alicia Ventresca-Miller of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Subtle construction differences between the Yanghai saddle and others found at several regional sites, presumed to be of around the same age as the Yanghai find, “suggest that knowledge of saddle-making was being transferred between [communities] that then made variable types of saddles,” says Ventresca-Miller, who did not participate in the new study.

At Yanghai, where 531 tombs have been excavated, researchers have recovered whips, bridles and other items associated with horseback riding that date to as early as around 3,300 years ago. Only one other grave aside from the woman’s tomb, thought to be of about the same age, has yielded a saddle. But that find is fragmentary and has not been radiocarbon dated.

Yanghai excavations have also produced the oldest known pair of pants, worn by a horseback rider around 3,000 years ago (SN: 2/18/22).

Saddle-making emerged later, as riders became concerned with their own comfort and safety and the health of their horses, Wertmann suspects. Comfortable saddles would have enabled everyone in a community to ride horses and spurred increases in long-distance horseback trips, Ventresca-Miller says.

Wertmann’s team cannot say whether Yanghai people, who lived in year-round settlements, or a mounted herding community from elsewhere in Central and East Asia made the ancient woman’s saddle. She may have migrated to Yanghai from a herding group and brought the saddle along. Or Yanghai people may have acquired the saddle through trade. Or local experts in leather and needlework may have crafted the saddle.

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So much on this planet depends on a simple matter of density. In the Atlantic Ocean, a conveyor belt of warm water heads north from the tropics, reaching the Arctic and chilling. That makes it denser, so it sinks and heads back south, finishing the loop. This system of currents, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, moves 15 million cubic meters of water per second.

In recent years, researchers have suggested that because of climate change, the AMOC current system could be slowing down and may eventually collapse. A paper published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications warns that the collapse of the AMOC isn’t just possible, but imminent. By this team’s calculations, the circulation could shut down as early as 2025, and no later than 2095. 

That’s a tipping point that would come much sooner than anyone thought. “We got scared by our own results,” says Susanne Ditlevsen, a statistician at the University of Copenhagen and coauthor of the new paper. “We checked and checked and checked and checked, and I do believe that they're right. Of course, we might be wrong, and I hope we are.” But there’s vigorous debate in the scientific community over just how quickly the AMOC might decline, and how best to even figure that out.

It’s abundantly clear to researchers that the Arctic is warming up to four and a half times faster than the rest of the planet. Arctic ice is melting at a pace of about 150 billion metric tons per year, says Marlos Goes, an oceanographer from the University of Miami and NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory who was not involved with the new paper. Greenland’s ice sheet is also rapidly declining, injecting more freshwater into the sea. That deluge of freshwater is less dense than saltwater, meaning less water sinks and less power goes into the AMOC conveyor belt. 

The consequences would be brutal and global. Without these warm waters, weather in Europe would get significantly colder—more like that of similar latitudes in Canada and the northern United States. “In model simulations, the collapse of the AMOC cools the North Atlantic and warms the South Atlantic, which may result in drastic precipitation changes throughout the world,” Goes says. “There would be changes in storm patterns over the continental areas, affecting the monsoon systems. Therefore, a future AMOC shutdown could bring massive migration, impacting ecological and agricultural production, and fish population displacement.” 

Ditlevsen did her team’s calculation by using measurements of Atlantic sea surface temperatures as a proxy for the AMOC. These readings go all the way back to the 1870s, thanks to measurements taken by ship crews. This meant researchers could compare temperatures before and after the start of the wide-scale burning of fossil fuels and the ensuing changes to the climate. 

Because the AMOC system involves warm water heading north from the tropics, if the circulation is slowing down, you’d expect to find cooler temperatures in the North Atlantic over time. And indeed, that’s what Ditlevsen’s group found, once they compensated for the overall warming of the world’s oceans due to climate change. “When it is established that the sea surface temperature record is the fingerprint of the AMOC, we can calculate the early warning signals of the forthcoming collapse and extrapolate to the tipping point,” says University of Copenhagen climate scientist Peter Ditlevsen, coauthor of the new paper. (The Ditlevsens are siblings.)

The result echoes previous studies finding early warning signals in the circulation, says Stefan Rahmstorf, who studies the AMOC current system at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “As always in science, a single study provides limited evidence, but when multiple approaches lead to similar conclusions, this must be taken very seriously, especially when we're talking about a risk that we really want to rule out with 99.9 percent certainty,” says Rahmstorf. “The scientific evidence now is that we can't even rule out crossing a tipping point already in the next decade or two.”

Still, scientists don’t agree about whether sea surface temperature (SST) is a good indicator of the health of this massively consequential circulation. “Fundamentally, I am deeply skeptical that SST is actually a proxy of AMOC,” says climate scientist Hali Kilbourne, who studies the current system at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “But there's certainly a school of thought of people who think it's the best thing going—and it may be the best thing going right now. I don't think we have a good alternative, which is why people are using it."

“I really question whether [SST] is an adequate proxy for AMOC itself,” agrees Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “But the trouble is there aren't really adequate measurements.”

The core of the issue is that sea surface temperatures are just one component of the AMOC system; other factors also help determine Atlantic temperatures. Warm waters flowing north have an effect, but so does the atmosphere touching the water. “There's a lot of what we call air-sea interactions—the heat exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean,” Kilbourne says. “And that's not at all related to ocean circulation.” 

“This SST fingerprint, although sensitive to the AMOC, is not solely driven by it, so these changes may be overestimated,” agrees Goes, the oceanographer from the University of Miami and NOAA. “Current climate models do not give a strong probability of the collapse of the AMOC this century.”

The beauty of the SST dataset is that it stretches back 150 years, so scientists can see longer-term trends in temperatures. However, those early shipboard measurements were made by people hauling buckets of water aboard and sticking a thermometer in—not exactly the precision that modern science demands. “It is not ideal, but it’s the best we can do,” says Peter Ditlevsen, “since we need measurements to go back to the pre-industrial era to assess the natural state of the AMOC, before it began slowing down toward the collapse.” 

Satellite measurements of SST began in the late 1970s, providing much better coverage across oceans. And it wasn’t until 20 years ago that scientists deployed a dedicated AMOC sensor array, known as RAPID, which also measures current velocities and salinity—another factor that influences the density of water. By comparing this modern data to the historical SST data, Peter Ditlevsen says, they can compensate for the influence of the atmosphere on the sea surface, isolating the signal of the AMOC system.

When the RAPID array went online, the assumption was that it’d take 40 years to get an idea of whether the current system was in decline. “It's just hard to tease apart, because we really don't know what the intrinsic timescales of AMOC are,” says Nicholas Foukal, an assistant scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “We haven't had an AMOC collapse in the past 20 years, so it’s like trying to predict a hurricane—having never seen a hurricane.” 

Since RAPID started operating, scientists have seen a good amount of variability. “We've been directly measuring AMOC since 2004, and we don't have any evidence of long-term decline,” says Foukal. “The first six years, there was a very strong decline. And people jumped on that, saying that it's declining, and we have observational evidence of it. But since then, it has recovered.” 

Scientists also use models to simulate how the current system might change as the climate does. Compared to the studies indicating a slowdown and eventual collapse of the circulation, models indicate more stability, says Oluwayemi Garuba, a climate scientist who studies ocean-atmosphere interactions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Observations are showing more statistically significant early-warning signals of a collapse of the AMOC, whereas most models are not showing that,” says Garuba. “So, it could be that the overturning circulation in models is just more stable than in observation, as earlier studies have suggested.”

Going forward, Greenland will be a major wildcard. Last week, scientists reported how they used ice cores from an abandoned military base to determine that around 400,000 years ago, northwest Greenland was ice-free. Back then, temperatures were about the same as they are today, yet atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were far lower. That raises the alarm that the decline of Greenland’s ice sheet could accelerate. If it does, the melt would load the north Atlantic with astonishing amounts of freshwater, fast-tracking the decline of the AMOC and adding many feet to sea levels.

It’s complexity and uncertainty all the way down. “The fact that, with continued warming, AMOC will slow down is a very robust result. The uncertainty—and where science still needs to figure things out—is when,” Kilbourne. “But I kind of think that by the time we figure out when, it'll already have happened.”

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Somewhere in Earth’s past, some branches on the tree of life adopted a body plan that made breathing and cooling down considerably more efficient than how mammalian bodies like ours do it. This development might not seem like much on the surface, until you consider that it may have ultimately enabled some of the largest dinosaurs this planet has ever known. It was so successful that it was maintained by three different groups of extinct species and continues to exist today in the living descendants of dinosaurs.

 

Because lungs don’t usually survive fossilization, one might wonder how scientists are able to ascertain anything about the breathing capabilities of extinct species. The answer lies within their bones.

 

In a suite of papers published in late 2022 and early 2023, paleontologists examined fossil microstructure within some of the earliest known dinosaurs to determine just how early parts of this system evolved.

Breathing efficiency

In species like birds, that system contains cavities, also known as “air sacs,” within bones located throughout the entire body. Unlike mammalian breathing, where inhaling and exhaling are two separate processes, these bones help enable unidirectional breathing: inhaling and exhaling at the same time. Known as postcranial skeletal pneumaticity, it’s part of an extraordinarily efficient system that rapidly gets oxygen into the blood and extracts heat from the body.

 

Today, that invasive air-sac system is known only in birds. Birds and crocodilians are archosaurs, the living relatives of non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs. While today’s crocodilians have unidirectional breathing through their lungs, their air handling does not extend to their bones, which do not have any air-sac cavities. A 2012 PLOS One paper examined air-sac systems in the Triassic, and the authors determined that “no crocodile-line archosaur (pseudosuchian) exhibits evidence for unambiguous” postcranial skeletal pneumaticity.

 

“There are no anatomical signs of any true pneumatic features that would have been related to invasive air sacs prior to the evolution of pterosaurs and saurischian dinosaurs,” Tito Aureliano, who was not part of that PLOS One research, explained of the authors’ conclusion.

 

Aureliano, a paleontologist at Brazil’s Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, is lead author on the three more recent papers. He explained that, as mammals, we can become breathless or overheated through intense physical activity or intense heat. Not so if you have an invasive air sac system.

 

When did these air sacs evolve? They’re already present from approximately 145 to 66 million years ago within Cretaceous theropods (bipedal dinosaurs that were either carnivorous or herbivorous), pterosaurs (flying reptiles), and sauropods (gigantic long-necked dinosaurs).

 

Thus, to find their origin, the team looked further back to the Triassic (about 252 to 201 million years ago). They studied two types of sauropodomorphs (early sauropods before they evolved long necks and enormous size) named Buriolestes and Pampadromaeus, and a type of carnivorous dinosaur known as Gnathovorax. (Whether Gnathovorax is a theropod or a herrerasaurid—a different type of dinosaur—is currently debated.)

 

“So the big question was,” Aureliano said in a video interview, “did the common ancestor of these three groups back there in the Triassic already have air sacs or did the air sacs originate three times independently in evolution?”

Multiple origins

Traces on fossil bone tissue matching those seen in extant birds—today’s dinosaurs—would indicate the presence of this respiratory adaptation. None of the early species contained these traces, indicating that postcranial skeletal pneumaticity hadn’t yet evolved. This means it couldn’t have been present in the common ancestor of the dinosaurs and other major groups where it was also present.

 

This surprised co-author Aline Ghilardi, a paleontologist and tenured assistant professor, also at Brazil’s Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. “Since the earliest dinosaurs didn’t have the invasive pneumatic structure,” she said, “[the air sacs] had to have evolved after that. And if it evolved after that, logically, pterosaurs had to have evolved it in a parallel way.”

 

In other words, these results suggest that three lineages of extinct species evolved the same respiratory system independently. This phenomenon is known as convergent evolution.

 

But the fossils also suggested that the evolution of air sacs had started by this time. Aureliano explained that the two sauropodomorphs and the one herrerasaurid they studied lived approximately 233 million years ago, but Pampadromaeus “was collected in a bedrock that was a little bit higher,” meaning that it existed a little later in time than Buriolestes. That gap in time, although relatively small geologically speaking, presented “a huge change” in the sauropodomorph skeleton. Pampadromaeus had a new kind of tissue that the team suspects may have been a step toward the evolution of air sacs.

 

“The whole vasculature was different [in Pampadromaeus],” Aureliano said. “It was less dense and [had] fractals inside, very small chambers to receive blood and fat tissues.” This, he added, would make it “easier in the future for the invasive air sacs to occupy” the space created by those fractals, “because air sacs work like fractals going out of the lungs.”

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Fat incinerator. Metabolism booster. Thermo activator. Some over-the-counter sports supplements advertise ingredients with purported performance-enhancing properties, but it’s anyone’s guess what’s really in that pill or powder.

Just 11 percent of nearly 60 tested dietary supplements actually contain an accurate amount of key ingredients listed on the label, scientists report July 17 in JAMA Network Open. Forty percent did not contain a detectable amount of the ingredients at all.

“I just had to shake my head,” says Pieter Cohen, a primary care doctor at Cambridge Health Alliance in Somerville, Mass. “It’s incredible that in 40 percent of the products, the manufacturer doesn’t even bother putting any [of the ingredient] in.”

Cohen and his colleagues chemically analyzed 57 sports supplements with labels that listed R. vomitoria, methylliberine, halostachine, octopamine or turkesterone — plants or plant compounds that could potentially serve as stimulants or muscle-builders. Only 34 contained the ingredient claimed. Six had about the right amount; 28 had inaccurate amounts that varied wildly, from 0.02 percent to 334 percent of the quantity indicated on the label.

“That’s alarming,” says Luis Rustveld, a dietician and epidemiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who was not involved with the work. Some people may be very sensitive to these ingredients he says, and “they may be getting a whole lot more than they thought.”

Cohen’s team also found that seven of the products tested contained at least one compound prohibited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In past years, scientists have identified hundreds of supplements tainted with potentially harmful drugs (SN: 10/12/18). 

Unlike prescribed drugs, the FDA does not have the authority to approve dietary supplements before they hit grocery store shelves. But the agency requires that supplements do at least contain the ingredients they list on their label, Cohen says.

Just because a supplement is on the market does not mean it’s safe, effective or contains what it advertises, says Patricia Deuster, a nutrition specialist at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md., who did not participate in the new research. “It is virtually impossible for the average person … to make informed decisions about purchasing supplements without outside assistance.”

Third-party organizations like NSF, BSCG and USP can be helpful, she says, because they analyze supplements and offer their stamp of approval. And an online scorecard developed by the U.S. Department of Defense can also help consumers evaluate their supplements, Deuster says.

When deciding what and whether to buy, Cohen cautions, “you should use the utmost skepticism.” Rustveld agrees. “Whenever you see claims like, ‘You’re going to burn fat’, or ‘You’re going to improve your performance,’” he says, “if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not true.”

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A team of physicists and medical doctors from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) has now succeeded in making another—and radiation-free—imaging technology ready for use on humans. It's called magnetic particle imaging (MPI). With the portable scanner they developed, it is possible, among other things, to visualize dynamic processes in the human body, such as blood flow.

Professor Volker Behr and Dr. Patrick Vogel from the University's Institute of Physics are responsible for this study, and they have now published their results in the journal Scientific Reports.

A sensitive and fast alternative

Magnetic particle imaging is a technique based, as the name suggests, on the direct visualization of magnetic nanoparticles. Such nanoparticles do not occur naturally in the human body and must be administered as markers. "As with positron emission tomography, which relies on the administration of radioactive substances as markers, this method has the great advantage of being sensitive and fast without 'seeing' interfering background signals from tissue or bone," explains Volker Behr.

MPI is not based on the detection of gamma rays from a radioactive marker like positron emission tomography, but on the response signal of the magnetic nanoparticles to magnetic fields that change over time. "In this process, the magnetization of nanoparticles is specifically manipulated with the help of external magnetic fields, whereby not only their presence but also their spatial position in the human body can be detected," says physicist Patrick Vogel, first author of the publication.

The iMPI scanner (left) provides new insights into the human body. Here you can see a constriction in a blood vessel—recorded with conventional X-rays (b), with the scanner (c) and in a combination of both techniques (d). Credit: Patrick Vogel / Stefan Herz

A small scanner for big insights

The MPI idea is not new. As early as 2005, the Philips company was able to show the first images of this novel approach in a small demonstrator, which, however, could only take samples a few centimeters in size. And the development of devices suitable for examining humans proved more difficult than expected, leading to large, heavy and expensive constructions.

In 2018, the team led by Professor Volker Behr and Patrick Vogel found a new way to implement the complex magnetic fields required for imaging in a much smaller design. In a multi-year research project, the scientists succeeded in implementing the novel concept in an MPI scanner (interventional Magnetic Particle Imaging—iMPI) specifically designed for intervention.

"Our iMPI scanner is so small and light that you can take it almost anywhere," Vogel explains. The authors impressively demonstrate this mobility of the scanner in a simultaneous real-time measurement in comparison with a special X-ray device, which is the standard device in angiography in university hospitals.

The team led by Professor Thorsten Bley and Dr. Stefan Herz of the Interventional Radiology Department of the Würzburg University Hospital, which accompanied this project from the beginning, carried out the measurements on a realistic vascular phantom and evaluated the first images.

"This is a first important step towards radiation-free intervention. MPI has the potential to change this field for good," said Dr. Stefan Herz, senior author of the publication.

In addition to further measurements with the iMPI device, the two physicists are now working to further develop their scanner. The main goal is to improve the image quality.

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Once symptoms develop, Crohn's is a lifelong condition – and while there are ways to manage symptoms during flare-ups, there's currently no cure.

The exact causes of Crohn's disease are unknown and are probably due to a number of complex and overlapping factors – such as genetics, environmental cues (such as smoking) and an immune system that's overactive in the gut.

Research has also shown that the gut microbiome plays a crucial role in the disease.

The gut microbiome is a collection of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi. These microbes are present from birth and play a crucial role in ensuring the gut cells and our intestines function as they should. The bacteria in our gut also help our immune cells function as they should, ultimately ensuring it is effective.

Many studies show that people with Crohn's disease have a less diverse community of gut bacteria. They also have higher levels of certain types of bacteria that can trigger gut inflammation.

But it isn't only the gut's bacteria that show signs of dysfunction in people with Crohn's disease.

Rather unexpectedly, research also shows that the bacteria in the mouth might also be important in this inflammatory condition.

Mouth microbiome

When we're in the womb, our gut is sterile. But our gut microbiome begins to develop the moment we're born – first after coming in contact with vaginal bacteria during birth, then from other maternal sources such as breast milk and skin, as well as our environment.

By the time we're adults our gut becomes a thriving community of trillions of bacteria which, by some estimates, outnumber our cells by 10:1.

Most of the bacteria that make it to our guts had to travel through our mouths first. As such, our mouth contains the second highest number of bacteria after the gut. And, we swallow these millions of bacteria daily in our saliva.

The oral microbiome is complex. Each part of our mouth – whether it's the tongue, cheek or our saliva – is composed of different microbes depending on factors such as pH level and oxygen levels.

These communities of microbes can then form complex structures called biofilms, where bacteria organise themselves on mouth surfaces (dental plaque is one example). The bacteria then interact with each other and our immune cells to create a harmonious state of health.

There are a couple of reasons why researchers think the oral microbiome might play a role in Crohn's disease.

First, studies indicate that people with Crohn's disease have different bacteria in their mouths compared to those without the condition. This could suggest that certain species of bacteria present in the mouth may play a role in Crohn's disease.

Second, a few species of bacteria commonly found in higher abundances in the intestine of people with Crohn's disease compared to healthy people are also present in the mouth. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the entry route of bacteria into the lower gut is generally via the mouth. In fact, it's not uncommon for people with Crohn's disease to develop ulcers in the mouth, alongside those commonly seen in the gut.

Research in humans also suggests that one oral bacterium in particular, called Veillonella parvula, is abundant in the guts of people with Crohn's disease. This bacterium is associated with diseases such as periodontitis and even meningitis.

It's typically found in the oral microbiome, but one notable study has shown it has developed a way to live in the lower gut.

If other bacterial culprits of Crohn's found in the gut are also found in the mouth, this might allow researchers to develop better tests that only need a saliva sample to diagnose the disease. This would be much easier than needing patients to provide a stool or gut tissue sample.

Researchers will also need to investigate whether the oral microbiome may cause Crohn's.

Research in mice suggests that inflammation (which happens when the immune system is triggered by a pathogen) makes it easier for certain types of bacteria to grow – leading to even greater inflammation and an over-activation of immune cells.

If the same is true of the oral bacteria linked to Crohn's disease, it could suggest that bacterial overgrowth and inflammation in the mouth is a possible root cause of Crohn's.

Other diseases

Crohn's is not the only disease in which certain mouth bacteria are implicated.

For instance, researchers have shown that two toxic chemicals produced by the oral bacteria Porphyromonas gingivalis (which is involved in gum disease) were found in more than 96 percent of participants in brain regions associated with memory. Significantly, these toxic chemicals feed on human cells.

In breast cancer, the oral bacteria Fusobacterium nucleatum has been linked with accelerated tumour growth and the spread of cancer cells. Many studies have also shown that the same bacterium is often found in colorectal cancer tissues.

Additionally, there has been a long-held idea that oral bacteria may have a substantial impact on cardiovascular disease, where microbes may leak into the bloodstream and take residence in heart plaques, leading to inflammation – and thus a higher likelihood of rupture or blood vessel blockage.

Although the oral microbiome has been associated with the development and progression of Crohn's disease, research has not fully worked out the exact way by which bacteria may move from the mouth to parts of the gut. And although there's plenty of data from mouse studies, more research showing this link in humans is needed.

Better understanding how the oral bacteria are involved in Crohn's disease – and which species may be implicated – will help develop better diagnostics and treatments, not only for Crohn's disease but many other conditions as well.

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In the study, believed to be the first research comparing bystander CPR and survival rates between Asian and white adults in the U.S., researchers reviewed data for nearly 279,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. The analysis found:

• Asian and white adults who had a cardiac arrest at home or in public (not at a hospital) had similar rates (about 42%) of receiving potentially lifesaving CPR from a bystander.

• However, after adjustments for factors such as age, sex and the cause of the cardiac arrest, Asian adults were 8% less likely to survive to hospital discharge and 15% less likely to have favorable neurological outcomes compared to white adults.

"We were surprised that rates of bystander CPR in Asian adults were the same as white adults, as we have previously found that Black and Hispanic persons with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest have much lower rates of bystander CPR than white persons," said Paul Chan, M.D., senior author of the study and a professor of medicine at Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. "The Asian community in the U.S. is economically and culturally diverse and not monolithic, and skin color of Asian persons also varies widely. Because of this, we had expected to see lower rates of bystander CPR in Asian versus white adults.

"Subsequently, since Asian individuals had similar rates of bystander CPR as white individuals, we didn't expect them to have lower survival rates. Receiving bystander CPR is usually a very strong predictor of survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, therefore, it is not entirely clear what may be driving the lower survival rate among Asian adults," he said.

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart malfunctions and abruptly stops beating. According to a 2023 Scientific Statement co-authored by the American Heart Association, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death worldwide, and bystander CPR rates varies between countries, averaging about 20% worldwide. In addition, global survival rates among all adults range between 2% to 20% and are particularly low without an immediate bystander response.

Study details and background:

• The study used data for 2013-2021 from the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES), a multicenter registry across the U.S. for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, established by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Emory University in Atlanta.

• CARES data from other racial/ethnic groups, children and cardiac arrests that occurred in nursing homes or were witnessed by first responders were excluded from this analysis.

• CARES defines "Asian" as a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand and Vietnam.

• The research compared rates of bystander CPR, survival to discharge and favorable neurological survival (defined as survival to discharge without severe neurological impairment or disability) between Asian and white individuals.

• Among the cardiac arrest data analyzed, 5% occurred in Asian individuals and nearly 95% occurred in white adults.

• Asian adults with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest had several different markers in comparison to white peers: they were older (average age of 67 years compared to 62 years, respectively); more likely to be women (36% vs. 34%, respectively); less likely to have drug overdose as the cause of the cardiac arrest (1.3% vs.6.6%, respectively); and less likely to have an arrest rhythm that would benefit from the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED) (19% vs. 22%, respectively).

• Rates of witnessed cardiac arrest and location of arrest—at home or in public—were similar in both groups.

"It is quite encouraging that bystander CPR rates for Asian adults were comparable to white adults; however, the overall analysis indicates additional research is needed to better understand the gap in CPR survival and neurological outcomes among Asian adults after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest," said Joseph C. Wu, M.D., Ph.D., FAHA, volunteer president of the American Heart Association, director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and the Simon H. Stertzer Professor of Medicine and Radiology at Stanford School of Medicine. "The results here call for us to investigate the biological and physiological factors, as well as socioeconomic determinants of health and outcomes, and how they may impact people in various Asian subgroups."

Among the study's limitations: the CARES registry did not include Asian subgroups, such as South Asian, East Asian and Southeast Asian, therefore, the findings are for Asian adults, in general as one group. In addition, the results may not be applicable to people living in rural U.S. regions because those communities are underrepresented in the CARES registry, and there was a lack of information about other health conditions in addition to cardiac arrest.

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Emblazoned on items ranging from the sleeves of soccer jerseys in England and beer cans in Arizona to a climate handbook and knitted scarves, climate stripes are a widespread phenomenon that has engaged people in conversations about the warming world. The stripes’ creator, Ed Hawkins, is a climate scientist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

An astrophysicist turned climate expert, Hawkins realized he wanted to become a scientist in his teenage years. “I used to read lots of popular science books and magazines and became fascinated by the stories of people and the discoveries they were making,” he said.

In the mid-1990s, Hawkins earned a master’s degree in astrophysics and then moved on to a Ph.D. at the University of Nottingham.

“I felt I needed something that could be more directly useful to people.”

“I loved astrophysics, and I still do,” Hawkins said. “But at the same time, I felt I needed something that could be more directly useful to people.”

Hawkins isn’t sure what made him realize that studying climate was a viable option, but he decided to pursue another master’s degree, this time in climate science at the University of Reading.

It wasn’t hard to find common ground between astrophysics and climate change. “They are both observational sciences, as you can’t do controlled experiments,” he said. “Just like we have models for the weather and climate, there are models for the universe in astrophysics.” These similarities, he recalled, smoothed what could otherwise have been a bumpy transition.

These stripes, representing average global temperatures for the period 1850–2022, change from mainly blue to mainly red in recent years, illustrating the rise in average temperatures. Credit: Ed Hawkins, University of Reading, CC BY 4.0

“I think it is very helpful to bring people from outside the [climate] field to provide fresh perspectives and bring in new techniques and insights,” he said.

One of Hawkins’s fresh perspectives translated into a success story in climate communication. Climate stripes sprang from a collaboration with children’s author and poet Nicola Davies at the 2018 Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in Wales. The stripes evolved from a spiral representation that Hawkins had already been using since 2016 to convey the climate urgency message and had already gone big; the visual had been displayed at the opening of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“I’m really glad about the stripes’ power to start conversations about climate change.”

Being a visual learner helped Hawkins think about how to communicate climate data. “When I started, I had to learn very fast about climate science [to advance] in my new role, so making visuals was always something interesting to me,” he shared.

Hawkins’s work has given him wide recognition, including the Royal Meteorological Society’s Climate Science Communication Award in 2017 and a Member of the Order of the British Empire appointment in 2020.

“I’m really glad about the stripes’ power to start conversations about climate change,” Hawkins said.

—Meghie Rodrigues (@meghier), Science Writer

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Researchers have proposed that an unusual rock, which was recently discovered in northern Africa, could be the first ever known "boomerang meteorite" — a space rock that originated on our planet before being ejected into space and then later tumbling back to Earth. However, not everyone agrees with the new findings, which have yet to be peer-reviewed.

The meteorite, which is named NWA 13188 and weighs around 23 ounces (646 grams), was discovered by meteorite hunetrs in an unknown part of the Sahara Desert in Morocco in 2018. Nobody saw the rock fall to Earth and its composition was discovered to be very similar to a specific type of volcanic rocks known to scientists, which has led to speculation about its origins. 

But a group of researchers who have recently analyzed the rock now believe that it is a terrestrial meteorite, a rock that originated on Earth and was catapulted into space millions of years ago, and which has only just fallen back to our planet. Jérôme Gattacceca, a meteoriticist at Aix-Marseille University in France, presented his team's findings July 11 at an international geochemistry conference in Lyon, France. (Their work has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.)

If the team is correct, NWA 13188 will be recognized as the first official terrestrial meteorite found on Earth. 

A cross-section of part of the meteorite's fusion crust, which shows that it partially burned up the atmosphere. (Image credit: Albert Jambon)

The researchers believe that NWA 13188 is a meteorite because it has a "well-developed fusion crust" — a fine layer of heat-shocked rock on its surface, which is a sign that it partially burned up in Earth's atmosphere and is not a feature found in volcanic rocks on Earth. 

The team also found traces of isotopes (elements with differing numbers of neutrons in their nuclei) including beryllium-3, helium-10 and neon-21, which suggest that the rock was exposed to cosmic rays — high-energy particles that move through space at nearly the speed of light. The level of these isotopes suggests that the rock was in space for at least 10,000 years, but possibly much longer.

There are two possible scenarios for how the meteorite was once ejected into space: The first is that a massive volcanic eruption launched it directly into space, and the second is that it was catapulted out of the atmosphere by a colossal asteroid impact. The researchers believe that the latter explanation is the most likely because no recorded volcanic eruption has been powerful enough to launch rocks into space.

Not everyone is ready to classify the rock as a boomerang meteorite.

"It is an interesting rock," Ludovic Ferrière, a curator of the meteorite collection at the Natural History Museum Vienna in Austria, who was not involved with the new analysis, told Live Science's sister site Space.com. But it requires "more investigations to be conducted before making extraordinary claims." Without being able to trace it to an impact crater or knowing how old it is, it is hard to pin down exactly how the rock left or reentered Earth, he added.

Others think that the rock could also have been birthed elsewhere in the solar system despite its similarities to Earth rocks. "I think there is no doubt that this is a meteorite," Frank Brenker, a geologist at the Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, who was not involved with the new analysis, told Space.com. "It is just a matter of debate if it is really from Earth."

The research team is planning further analysis to work out the exact age of the rock and search for any other clues that may determine how it was catapulted away from Earth.

NWA 13188 could potentially be the first boomerang meteorite found on Earth, but it is not the first possible terrestrial meteor to ever be discovered. In a 2019 study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers identified an unusual chunk of rock from the moon during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, which contains tiny fragments of quartz, feldspar and zircon that all likely originated on Earth. They propose that this chunk of rock was ejected from our planet when the moon was much closer to our planet, billions of years ago.

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