This is particularly concerning in light of the current heat extremes we're witnessing across the globe, including a massive departure from previous records in the Atlantic Ocean itself.

"Here we calculate when the early warning signs are significantly above the natural variations," write physicist Peter Ditlevsen and statistician Susanne Ditlevsen from the University of Copenhagen.

"Given the importance of the AMOC for the climate system, we ought not to ignore such clear indicators of an imminent collapse."

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a large system of ocean currents that includes the well-known Gulf Stream and regulates the transfer of ocean heat from the tropics to the northern hemisphere.

As such, it impacts much of Earth's climate. It is considered one of the most important tipping elements in Earth's climate system, and has been slowing down since the mid-1900s.

If it stalls completely, monsoon seasons will likely be disrupted in the tropics, and Europe and North America will experience dangerously harsher winters. The knock-on effects will severely impact entire ecosystems and our food security.

The AMOC has only been directly monitored since 2004, which is not long enough to understand the full trajectory of its current slowing trend.

So by examining many models, the researchers identified an ocean area where sea surface temperatures most strongly match the ocean's circulation condition, to use as one of two less direct indicators for which records exist as far back as 1870.

The other early warning sign the researchers considered is "loss of resilience" in the system, which presents as increased fluctuations and variance – like the increasing wobble of a spinning top before it topples over.

Using these two early warning signs to assess AMOC's condition is somewhat like measuring pulse and blood pressure to monitor heart health.

The team's modeling suggests that this all important ocean circulation could stall as early as 2025, and likely no later than 2095.

These findings are alarmingly sooner than the most recent IPCC predictions, but the early warning signs are already clear, Peter Ditlevsen and Susanne Ditlevsen argue.

Previous models have "biases toward overestimated stability of the AMOC, both from tuning to the historic climate record, poor representation of the deep water formation, salinity and glacial runoff," the team points out in the paper.

What's more, the speed at which we hit this destabilizing event could also determine if the system collapses or re-steadies.

As we have not only failed to decrease the amount of greenhouse gasses we've been pumping into the atmosphere so far – but increased them instead – it sure looks like we're on a frightening trajectory to hit this ocean threshold mighty hard and fast.

Past research has suggested that previous extreme climate fluctuations or Dansgaard-Oeschger events were caused by such instability.

Previous research has also shown that changing just one parameter, such as increasing the amount of freshwater entering the North Atlantic, can cause the system to bifurcate – lead to a sudden and drastic change in the system's behavior.

This level of sensitivity may not have been maintained in the IPCC's assessment, as not all the models they've included take it into consideration.

We still do not understand all the factors that might impact this system, and other researchers have argued elements such as the impact of cold water influx do not fully match past climate records.

The researchers think their method focusing on the early warning symptoms avoids the need to fully understand these drivers, but caution they can't rule out some unknown unknowns creating a different outcome. They also can't distinguish between a partial or full collapse of the AMOC, they explain.

"Even with these reservations, this is indeed a worrisome result, which should call for fast and effective measures to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid the steady change of the control parameter toward the collapse of the AMOC," the team concludes.

This research was published in Nature Communications.

Source

Also:  Gulf stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests.

Global warming from burning fossil fuels also made the heatwave affecting parts of China 50 times more likely.

Climate change meant the heatwave in southern Europe was 2.5C hotter, the study finds.

Almost all societies remain unprepared for deadly extreme heat, experts warn.

The study's authors say its findings highlight the importance of the world adapting to higher temperatures because they are no longer "rare".

"Heat is among the deadliest types of disaster," says Julie Arrighi from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and also one of the authors.

Countries must build heat-resistant homes, create "cool centres" for people to find shelter, and find ways to cool cities including planting more trees, she says.

In July, temperature records were broken in parts of China, the southern US and Spain. Millions of people spent days under red alerts for extreme heat.

Experts say extreme heat can be a very serious threat to life, especially among the elderly. According to one study, more than 61,000 people were estimated to have died from heat-related causes during last year's heatwaves in Europe.

"This study confirms what we knew before. It shows again just how much climate change plays a role in what we are currently experiencing," said Friederike Otto from Imperial College London.

Climate scientists say decades of humans pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are causing global temperatures to rise.

But not all extreme weather events can immediately be linked directly to climate change because natural weather patterns can also play a part.

Scientists in the UK, US and Netherlands in the World Weather Attribution group studied the recent heatwaves to identify the fingerprint of climate change.

Using computer models, they simulated a world without the effects of emissions pumped into the atmosphere to the real-world temperatures seen during the heatwaves.

The North American heatwave was 2°C (3.6°F) hotter and the heatwave in China was 1°C hotter because of climate change, the scientists concluded.

The world has warmed 1.1C compared to the pre-industrial period before humans began burning fossil fuels.

If temperature rise reaches 2C, which many experts warn is very likely as countries fail to reduce their emissions quickly enough, these events will occur every two to five years, the scientists say.

The study also considered the role of El Niño, a naturally occurring powerful climate fluctuation that began in June. It leads to higher global temperatures as warm waters rise to the surface in the tropical Pacific ocean and push heat into the air.

The study concluded that El Niño probably played a small part but that increased temperatures from burning fossil fuels was the main driver in the more intense heatwaves.

A run of climate records have fallen in recent weeks, including global average temperatures and sea surface temperatures particularly in the North Atlantic.

Experts say the speed and timing is "unprecedented" and warn that more records could tumble in the coming weeks and months.

Dangerous wildfires in Greece forced thousands of people to evacuate hotels at the weekend. Experts say that the hot and dry weather created favourable conditions for fire to spread more easily.

Source

Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered to infect humans and cause them harm — a bioweapon — and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army of China. A third school, more moderate than the second but also implicating laboratory work, suggests that the virus got into its first human victim by way of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (W.I.V.), a research complex on the eastern side of the city, maybe after well-meaning but reckless genetic manipulation that made it more dangerous to people.

If you feel confused by these possibilities, undecided, suspicious of overconfident assertions — or just tired of the whole subject of the pandemic and whatever little bug has caused it — be assured that you aren’t the only one.

Some contrarians say that it doesn’t matter, the source of the virus. What matters, they say, is how we cope with the catastrophe it has brought, the illness and death it continues to cause. Those contrarians are wrong. It does matter. Research priorities, pandemic preparedness around the world, health policies and public opinion toward science itself will be lastingly affected by the answer to the origin question — if we ever get a definitive answer.

But much of the evidence that might provide that answer has either been lost or is still unavailable — lost because of failures to gather relevant material promptly; unavailable because of intransigence and concealment, particularly on the part of Chinese officialdom at several levels.

Take the natural-spillover hypothesis, for instance, and assume that the virus passed to humans from a wild animal — maybe a raccoon dog (a foxlike canine) or a Malayan porcupine — somewhere in the Huanan market. To test that hypothesis, you would want samples of blood, feces or mucus taken from the raccoon dogs, porcupines and other wildlife that languished, caged and doomed, in the market. You would screen those samples for signs of the virus. If you found the virus itself, or at least sizable bits of its genome, you would then make a comparative analysis of genomes, including some from the earliest human cases, to deduce whether people got the virus from the wildlife or vice versa.

But you can’t do that, because whatever raccoon dogs or porcupines or other wild animals were on sale in the market during December 2019 had vanished by Jan. 1, 2020. On that date, the market was closed by order of Chinese authorities, with no (reported) effort to sample the most suspect forms of wildlife.

Or take the lab-engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, as recently offered in an article in The Sunday Times of London. The two Times reporters cited unidentified “U.S. investigators” who “scrutinized top-secret intercepted communications” and concluded that the Chinese military was supporting a covert project to develop a weaponized coronavirus. The article also posited a related vaccine effort, to protect China’s populace once the killer virus was unleashed on the world. It’s a riveting narrative. The virus engineering occurred, according to this account, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The reporters didn’t name their intelligence sources or supply evidence to make their allegations concrete, but if they did, it would be explosive news.

Or take the lab-leak scenario, some versions of which point accusingly at a nonprofit organization in New York, EcoHealth Alliance, and its collaborative relationship with Dr. Zhengli Shi, a senior researcher at the W.I.V. Shi and her team study coronaviruses, especially those carried by bats, extracting fragments of viral RNA (the molecule in which coronavirus genomes are written) and occasionally live virus, from samples of guano and other bodily material, and assembling whole genome sequences, like jigsaw puzzles, from the fragments. They perform experiments, sometimes combining an element of one virus with the backbone of another, to learn how that element might function in the wild; and they publish scientific papers, warning which bat viruses could pose a threat to humans. What if a researcher or technician under Shi’s leadership, handling a virus very much like SARS-CoV-2, became infected by accident and then spread the infection to others? That question became, from the early months of the pandemic, a suspicion and then a hypothesis and then an accusation.

Even now, the trade in claims and counterclaims remains brisk. Last month, in a Substack newsletter called Public, three authors asserted — citing unnamed “U.S. government officials” — that one of the first people infected with SARS-CoV-2 was a scientist named Ben Hu, from Shi’s lab. That assertion was significant, and important if true, but no proof or identified sourcing so far supports it. Ten days later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released (as required by a law passed three months earlier) a declassified report outlining whatever was known to the U.S. Intelligence Community about potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the pandemic. The report concluded, among other things, that W.I.V. personnel had collaborated at times on coronavirus work with scientists associated with the People’s Liberation Army, but that (so far as available evidence showed) such work involved “no known viruses that could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.”

And then, on July 11, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, led by Representative Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, convened a hearing at which he and colleagues interrogated two scientists, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, about their authorship of an influential 2020 paper that appeared in the journal Nature Medicine. That paper was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The tenor of the hearing was foretold by its own announced title: “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up,” and the proceedings that day consisted of accusation and defense, without shedding any new light, let alone yielding certitude about the origin of the virus.

Certitude is an elusive goal and a high presumption, even for science, even for a director of national intelligence, even for the chairman of a select congressional subcommittee. Philosophers have recognized that, and so have novelists and poets. “I was of three minds,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “Like a tree/In which there are three blackbirds.” In the poem, Stevens found 13 different ways of looking at a blackbird. There are at least that many ways of viewing the origin of SARS-CoV-2, and to do justice to the question, you’ll need, like him, to hold several possibilities in your mind at a time.

How you regard a blackbird or an origin hypothesis may be influenced by where you’re coming from. That’s an old truth, but I was reminded of it during a conversation with Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, and one of the best-qualified among those who argue that the lab-leak hypothesis deserves robust investigation. Bloom studies the evolution of viruses, for two reasons: It happens fast, and therefore illuminates evolution in general, and it has large implications for public health.

When I spoke with him back in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, and asked about the origin question, Bloom said, “I think what you have is a lot of people strongly defaulting to their prior beliefs.” Scientists who study zoonotic diseases (those that spill over from nonhuman animals into people) might be inclined to assume a natural origin. Scientists who have long argued against the risks of “gain of function” research (experimental work exploring the evolutionary capacities of potentially dangerous pathogens) might readily assume a lab leak. National security experts with strong views of the oppressive, secretive Chinese government might lean toward scenarios involving Chinese malfeasance and cover-up.

More recently, Bloom told me that his own “prior” inclination would be toward a natural spillover. “But you certainly wouldn’t think it’s, like, 99.99 percent the most likely explanation,” he said, adding, “There could be other possibilities.”

That gave me pause to consider my own priors. For the past 40 years, I’ve written nonfiction about the natural world and the sciences that study it, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. During the first half of that, my attention went mainly to large, visible creatures like bears, crocodiles and bumblebees and to wild places like the Amazon jungle and the Sonoran Desert. I came to the subject of emerging viruses in 1999, during a National Geographic assignment, when I walked for 10 days through Ebola-virus habitat in a Central African forest. Later I spent five years writing a book about zoonotic diseases and the agents that cause them, including the SARS virus, the earlier killer coronavirus now often called SARS-CoV-1, which emerged in 2002 and spread in human travelers from Hong Kong to Singapore, Toronto and elsewhere, alarming experts deeply. Scientists traced SARS-CoV-1 to palm civets, a type of catlike wild carnivore sold as food in some South China markets and restaurants. But the civets proved to be intermediate hosts, and its natural host was later identified as horseshoe bats.

The story of SARS is only one chapter in the saga of dangerous new viruses emerging from animals. The grim tale of how H.I.V. got into humans and caused the AIDS pandemic is another — a tale known partly by inference and partly by molecular evidence, and traceable back to a single blood-mingling event between a person and a chimpanzee, probably hunter and hunted, in the southeastern corner of Cameroon around the start of the 20th century. Human contact with nonhuman animals accounts for our influenzas as well, which usually emerge from wild aquatic birds. Hendra virus, in Australia, comes to humans from bats, generally through an intermediate host: horses. Machupo virus, in Bolivia, abides in rodents when not infecting people. Hantaan virus, discovered in Korea, and its relative Sin Nombre virus, in the American Southwest, also spill over from rodents. Nipah virus, in Bangladesh and some surrounding countries, comes from bats. It’s excreted in bat feces, saliva and urine, and when certain fruit bats visit date palm trees that are being tapped for their sugary sap — a custom in Bangladesh — the virus contaminates the sap, which is sold fresh on the street to local customers, some of whom die. These cases and many others like them are among my own priors, and no doubt they do incline me toward the idea of natural spillover. It happens often, sometimes with dire consequences.

Research accidents have occurred, too, in the history of dangerous new viruses, and longtime concerns over such accidents constitute the priors of some who favor the lab-leak hypothesis for Covid. Such accidents might number in the hundreds or the thousands, depending on where you put the threshold of significance and how you define “accident.” There was an event that (probably) reintroduced a 1950s strain of influenza in 1977, causing that year’s flu pandemic, which killed many thousands of people, and a 2004 needle-stick injury of a careful scientist, Kelly Warfield, while she was doing Ebola research (but she proved uninfected by Ebola). Also in 2004, just a year after the global SARS scare, two workers at a virology lab in Beijing were independently infected with that virus, which spread to nine people in total, one of whom died. This followed two other single-case lab-accident infections with SARS virus the previous year, one in Singapore, one in Taiwan.

When the first known cases of an “atypical pneumonia” began turning up at Wuhan hospitals in late 2019, and then exploded into a coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, the location itself seemed to fit, in different ways, the priors that might incline one toward either a natural-origin explanation or a lab-leak explanation. The potential lab-leak connection was easiest to note: The city contained a research facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with a well-known laboratory devoted to coronavirus research. On the other hand, Wuhan was also a major nexus for the significant national trade in wild animals for food, fur and traditional medicines (estimated at more than $70 billion annually), where such creatures, and the viruses they carry, were sold at many crowded markets — one of which, Huanan, lay at or near the center of the spatial pattern of earliest known cases.

So, starting from simply those circumstances, was a lab accident more “likely” than a natural spillover? And under either of those scenarios, how much did Chinese-government pressure and obscurantism constrain the availability of evidence for assessing one or the other? Because there exists no definitive account — yet — of the particular events that delivered SARS-CoV-2 into the human population, even experts are forced to frame their views as probabilities, based on data and circumstance, influenced variously by prior beliefs as to how the world works.

In assessing the probabilities for yourself, you might want to step back from the noise, anger, vitriol and politicization that have clouded the controversy and focus on the evidence we do have. To that end, it may help to note some events in the order they occurred.

On Jan. 11, 2020, in Shanghai, just 11 days after first reports of the outbreak in Wuhan circulated globally, a team of scientists led by Yong-Zhen Zhang of Fudan University released a draft genome sequence of the novel virus through a website called Virological.org. The genome was provided by Edward C. Holmes, a British Australian evolutionary biologist based in Sydney and a colleague of Zhang’s on the genome-assembly project. Holmes is famous among virologists for his work on the evolution of RNA viruses (including coronaviruses), his pristinely bald head and his mordant candor. Everyone in the field knows him as Eddie. The posting went up at 1:05 a.m. Scotland time, at which point the curator of the site there in Edinburgh, a professor of molecular evolution named Andrew Rambaut, was alert and ready to speed things along. He and Holmes composed a brief introductory note to the genome: “Please feel free to download, share, use and analyze this data,” it said. They knew that “data” is plural, but they were in a hurry.

Immediately, Holmes and a small group of colleagues set to analyzing the genome for clues about the virus’s evolutionary history. They drew on a background of known coronaviruses and their own understanding of how such viruses take shape in the wild (as reflected in Holmes’s 2009 book, “The Evolution and Emergence of RNA Viruses”). They knew that coronavirus evolution can occur rapidly, driven by frequent mutation (single-letter changes in a roughly 30,000-letter genome), by recombination (one virus swapping genome sections with another virus, when both simultaneously replicate in a single cell) and by Darwinian natural selection’s acting on those random changes. Holmes traded thoughts with Rambaut in Edinburgh, a friend of three decades, and with two other colleagues: Kristian Andersen at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif.; and Robert Garry at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. Ian Lipkin, of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, joined the huddle later. These five would form a sort of long-distance study group, aimed toward publishing a paper on SARS-CoV-2’s genome and its likely origin.

Holmes, Andersen and their colleagues recognized the virus’s similarity to bat viruses but, with more study, saw a pair of “notable features” that gave them pause. Those features, two short blips of genome, constituted a very small percentage of the whole, but with potentially high significance for the virus’s ability to grab and infect human cells. They were technical-sounding elements, familiar to virologists, that are now part of the Covid-origin vernacular: a furin cleavage site (FCS), as well as an unexpected receptor-binding domain (RBD). All viruses have RBDs, which help them attach to cells; an FCS is a feature that helps certain viruses get inside. The original SARS virus, which terrified scientists worldwide but caused only about 800 deaths, didn’t resemble the new coronavirus in either respect. How had SARS-CoV-2 come to take this form?

Andersen and Holmes were genuinely concerned, at first, that it might have been engineered. Were those two features deliberate add-ons, inserted into some coronavirus backbone by genetic manipulation, intentionally making the virus more transmissible and pathogenic among humans? It had to be considered. Holmes called Jeremy Farrar, a disease expert who was then director of the Wellcome Trust, a foundation in London that supports health research. Farrar saw the point and quickly arranged a conference call among an international group of scientists to discuss the genome’s puzzling aspects and the possible scenarios of its origin. The group included Robert Garry at Tulane and a dozen other people, most of them distinguished European or British scientists with relevant expertise, like Rambaut in Edinburgh, Marion Koopmans in the Netherlands and Christian Drosten in Germany. Also on the call were Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health and therefore Fauci’s boss. This is the famous Feb. 1 call on which — if you believe some critical voices — Fauci and Collins persuaded the others to suppress any notion that the virus might have been engineered.

“The narrative going around was that Fauci told us, Change our mind, yada, yada, yada, yada. We were paid off,” Holmes said to me. “It’s complete [expletive].”

Andersen concurs. “There is no universe in which this would even be possible,” he told me. Recently, based on selections of their private email and Slack traffic made public, Andersen and his colleagues have been accused of concealment and dissembling: Their messages, critics contend, prove that even as they were deeply concerned in private about the engineered-virus or lab-release possibilities, they were striving to keep both out of public discussion. But as the researchers describe it, these apparent contradictions were simply a reflection of their fast-evolving views. After initial concern that the receptor-binding domain in SARS-CoV-2 might be a sign of engineering, for instance, they learned soon after the Feb. 1 conference call of a very similar RBD in a coronavirus that infected pangolins. It was detected from a public database by a bioinformatician in Houston, Matt Wong, and posted on the Virological website, where it eventually came to the group’s attention. It showed that such an RBD had evolved in the wild and might well have gotten into SARS-CoV-2 by recombination, the natural gene-swapping process. Andersen and the others also recognized that furin cleavage sites occur naturally in other coronaviruses, like the MERS virus, though not (as so far detected) in any other member of the subgenus to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs.

Such new data led to a new conclusion, in what Andersen called, on Twitter, “a clear example of the scientific process.” Sixteen days after the conference call, they posted a preprint (a draft, not yet peer-reviewed) of their paper, and four weeks later it appeared in the journal Nature Medicine — this was the one titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Andersen and his co-authors stated their conclusion at the top: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” That still left the possibility of a natural virus, evolved in an animal host and passed into humans by zoonotic transfer — or perhaps a natural virus accidentally leaked? Near the paper’s end they stated something more nuanced: that while intentional engineering of the virus could be ruled out, “it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.” That said, they added, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

One other coronavirus quickly came to light as the closest known match to SARS-CoV-2. This wasn’t actually a virus “in the flesh” — in physical presence. It was a genome sequence, assembled from RNA fragments extracted from a fecal swab sample of a bat, captured in a mine several years earlier in 2013. The mine was in Yunnan Province, 1,200 miles southwest of Wuhan. The genome was 96.2 percent identical to the SARS-CoV-2 genome as sampled from people during the early days of the pandemic. That degree of similarity — or a 3.8 percent difference — suggests a common virus ancestor some years ago and independent evolution in the years since. So this represented a cousin to SARS-CoV-2, not its progenitor.

The work of sampling the bat and assembling the sequence (first just a portion, then, with better technology, nearly the whole thing) had been led by Zhengli Shi, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shi and her team labeled the sequence RaTG13, coding the facts that it came from an individual of Rhinolophus affinis (Ra), the intermediate horseshoe bat, captured in that mine in Tongguan (TG), a town in the Mojiang district of Yunnan, in 2013. RaTG13 has attained renown, not just because it constituted strong evidence of SARS-CoV-2’s ancestry in bat viruses but also because the Mojiang mine figures in some of the more lurid scenarios for a lab-leak origin.

Part of what makes the very name Mojiang seem lurid is that in 2012, three workers at the mine died of unidentified respiratory infections after days of underground labor there. What got into their lungs and killed them? Was it a fungus? Was it a virus? Some lab-leak proponents suggest that those deaths, described in two obscure medical theses written in Mandarin, represent the earliest known fatalities from a virus — possibly RaTG13 — that either already was, or in Shi’s lab became, SARS-CoV-2 or its immediate progenitor (that is, something far more similar than a cousin). The inference is that Shi’s team, a year after the mine workers died, may have taken the virus back to Wuhan. But the Mojiang deaths were also reported in 2014 in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases by scientists who found an entirely different virus, also potentially dangerous because it had similarities to Nipah and Hendra viruses, and was carried in the Mojiang mine by rats, not bats. One takeaway: Sample the rats and bats and other fauna in a mine, and you might well find a variety of viruses you wouldn’t want in your lungs.

Another problem with the RaTG13 scenario: Its genome differs from that of SARS-CoV-2 at more than 1,100 scattered positions throughout its genome. To engineer SARS-CoV-2 into existence by starting with RaTG13 would have been unreasonable and impractical, according to Holmes and other experts in coronavirus genomics. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that RaTG13 was a genome sequence, not a live virus: It was information, not a biological entity. Coaxing a virus that lies dormant in bat guano to grow in a cell culture is difficult, and usually the effort fails. Zhengli Shi told Jon Cohen, a senior correspondent for the journal Science, in her answer to a set of emailed questions, that she never grew RaTG13 in her lab. She told me the same thing during a two-hour conversation by Zoom: “No, no. We couldn’t culture any of the sample from this cave at Mojiang.”

Shi was in Shanghai for a conference on the night of Dec. 30, 2019, as she explained it to me, when word reached her about a mysterious respiratory illness spreading dangerously among people back in Wuhan. Preliminary lab results suggested a coronavirus — not SARS virus, but something similar — might be the cause. She was asked to help identify the thing. She put her lab team to work on that immediately and took a train back to Wuhan the next day. Within hours, her lab had received a partial sequence from another lab. Her first instinct was to compare it with sequences of viruses they had worked on themselves, “and we found it’s different,” she told me. “So, the afternoon of Dec. 31, I already know it’s nothing related to what we have done in our laboratory.”

Some critics, she was well aware, had suggested that her urgency in checking her own records was an implicit admission of error or guilt. “It’s normal!” was her response.

Jon Cohen mentioned the possibility of a lab leak in a report published in Science on Jan. 31, 2020, noting that not all the earliest confirmed cases had some direct link to the Huanan market. Fourteen of the first 41, according to one study, did not. Might those people have picked up their infections somewhere else, and maybe not from an animal at all? After describing a couple of vivid but unsupported allegations, including the idea that SARS-CoV-2 resembled a snake virus (and snakes were sold at Wuhan wet markets), Cohen added, “The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the premier lab in China that studies bat and human coronaviruses, has also come under fire.” Concerns had been voiced, he wrote, about the security of the W.I.V.’s biosafety procedures and facilities.

Evidence regarding the origin of the virus, apart from what could be read from the genome itself, remained scarce during those early months. In place of evidence, there was the weight of scientific authority on one side and the volume of outcry on the other. On Feb. 19, 2020, an open letter appeared online in The Lancet, a British journal, signed by 27 scientists, some of them eminent senior figures in virology and public health, others researchers in the full heat of distinguished careers. It was a statement of solidarity with Chinese scientists and health professionals, who were then on the front line in efforts to understand and control the virus. The letter was organized by Peter Daszak, a British American disease ecologist, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a collaborator with Zhengli Shi. Besides voicing support for Chinese colleagues, it said: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” That expression of confidence, so soon, would prove to be counterproductive, and the phrase “conspiracy theories” landed like bacon grease thrown into a campfire, causing skeptics to flare and sizzle.

The lab-leak idea, meanwhile, took hold in some political circles, partly because it dovetailed with attitudes toward the Chinese government, its repressive policies and its penchant for secrecy. In late January 2020, even before Cohen’s Jan. 31 article, The Washington Times ran an article suggesting links between the W.I.V. and a covert bioweapons program of the Chinese military. The article (later walked back with an editor’s note) was based largely on assertions by a former Israeli military-intelligence officer. Several weeks afterward, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas voiced a similar suspicion about the Wuhan lab on Fox News. “We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” Cotton said, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question.” Soon enough, Donald Trump’s mind began to change. The president spoke supportively about China throughout the early weeks of the pandemic and on Feb. 7 said of President Xi Jinping, “I think he’s handled it really well.” Then the winds shifted, and four months later Trump was inciting his rally crowds by calling Covid-19 “the kung flu.”

The attractions of the lab-leak idea weren’t entirely partisan. Jamie Metzl is an author and political commentator who worked in the Clinton administration and, at one point, as a Senate committee staff member working closely with Senator Joe Biden. Metzl has a blindingly luminescent and liberal-tinged résumé that includes a Ph.D. from Oxford, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a senior fellowship at the Atlantic Council and 13 ironman triathlons. A former member of the W.H.O. expert advisory committee on human genome editing, Metzl called early on for an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, including, in his words, “the distinct possibility this crisis may stem from a research-related incident in Wuhan.”

Having spoken up about this in the early months of 2020, Metzl encountered resistance that seems to have startled and aggrieved him. “When I was seeing this different story,” he told me, “and I started speaking publicly about it, friends of mine would say two things.” The first was, “You’re a progressive, liberal Democrat” — but — “you’re delivering a message that’s helpful to Trump.” Implication: Metzl should get back on the right side of scrimmage. The second sort of comment, he says, was: “Who the F are you? You have all these senior scientists and Nobel laureates and others who are saying it comes from nature? Who the F are you to say that, based on your analysis and your deductive reasoning, you have additional questions?”

The proselytizing by Metzl and others who saw a “different story” from natural spillover — plus the swing of Trump’s message, plus the prevailing cultural disposition to distrust experts, plus no doubt other factors — had an effect on public opinion and media attention, if not on scientific consensus. According to the Pew Research Center, polling Americans in March 2020, 43 percent believed that the virus emerged naturally, against less than 30 percent who thought it came from a lab, developed either by accident or intentionally. By September 2020, another polling organization found the natural versus lab options embraced almost equally. By June 2021, a Politico-Harvard poll put the lab-origin idea ahead by a two-to-one margin: 52 percent of Americans versus 28 percent.

Metzl himself has maintained the somewhat agnostic position that accidental release is a possibility but not the only possibility. In his eventual March 2023 testimony to Congress, he urged “fully examining all relevant origins hypotheses, obviously including a lab origin, but also a market origin, which some experts I respect believe to be more probable.” Among those experts, he cited Michael Worobey, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Arizona.

Worobey is a Canadian-born, Oxford-educated scientist who speaks mildly and sometimes entertains provocative theories. One such theory was O.P.V., the “oral polio vaccine” hypothesis for the origin of the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic. I first interviewed Worobey a dozen years ago to hear about that. The O.P.V. hypothesis asserted that the virus (H.I.V.-1, Group M) was put into humans, inadvertently, during reckless trials of an oral polio vaccine on unsuspecting African “volunteers,” including hundreds of thousands of children. The vaccine had been developed in chimpanzee cell cultures — so the hypothesis claimed — and contaminated with a chimpanzee virus that became H.I.V.-1-M. In early 2000, Worobey left his doctoral studies in Oxford, flew to a war zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spent weeks collecting chimpanzee dung in the forest to test that hypothesis.

His senior partner on this wildcat expedition was William Hamilton, a famous Oxford biologist who considered the O.P.V. hypothesis plausible. Worobey and Hamilton collected their chimpanzee samples, with help from local forest guides, and then scrambled out of Kisangani, Worobey with his arm in a sling from a badly infected forest wound, Hamilton desperately ill with malaria. They reached England, and Hamilton died soon afterward from complications. The samples got lost in baggage handling, then found, then tested negative for the chimpanzee virus, except for one sample that proved inconclusive.

Such are the labors and frustrations of science. Worobey, along with other scientists, drawing on other evidence, eventually showed that the oral-vaccine hypothesis was false. Open-mindedness toward a provocative hypothesis, and a commitment to confirm it or refute it as the evidence may dictate, are among his priors.

With SARS-CoV-2, 20 years later, Worobey likewise felt inclined to give the provocative, heterodox hypothesis all due consideration. Concerned by what he saw as premature dismissal of the lab-leak possibility, he signed a public letter in spring 2021, with 17 other scientists, arguing that “greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.” One of the letter’s other co-signers, in fact the first as listed, was Jesse Bloom. Worobey had helped initiate the letter, with emails to Bloom on March 21 of that year, including the suggestion, “I have been thinking about something like a Perspective in Science or an Op-Ed in the NY Times.”

The letter was initially drafted by Bloom and two others: Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who was an author of a preprint in 2020 arguing that SARS-CoV-2 was already well adapted to infecting humans at the start, raising questions about its provenance; and David Relman of Stanford, a distinguished microbiologist with a long-term concern about biosecurity issues and some gain-of-function research. Others of the group contributed input, and the letter ran in Science on May 14, 2021, under the imperative title “Investigate the Origins of Covid-19.” But from that point, with passing months and more research, Worobey would diverge from the most vocal of his co-signers regarding what constitutes “sufficient data.”

Strong tides of opinion were moving by spring 2021. An international team of scientists, recruited by the World Health Organization to its joint W.H.O.-China study of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, had returned from a month in Wuhan and issued its Phase 1 report, finding a laboratory leak “extremely unlikely.” That finding took criticism from Worobey, Bloom and their co-authors of the letter to Science, published weeks afterward. Even the director-general of the W.H.O. himself, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, hoped for further investigation. At a news conference marking the report’s publication, Tedros said, “As far as W.H.O. is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table,” noting the need for continued research.

Notwithstanding Tedros’s hopes, and mainly because of Chinese resistance, there has been no official Phase 2 follow-up study per se. Instead, the W.H.O. created a Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a body of disease scientists who will continue to study the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as well as other dangerous new bugs.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead for Covid at the W.H.O., has been vocal about the barriers to progress. “There’s very little information that can be accessed with regard to lab leak, with regard to breach of biosafety or biosecurity, and that’s the problem,” she told me recently, saying that she had discussed the issue directly with Chinese officials. “That’s what’s frustrating,” she added. “With that lack of information, you’re left with these gaping holes.”

Popular articles espousing the lab-leak idea also began to blossom forth around this time, in magazines and newspapers and on web platforms. In January 2021, New York magazine carried a Covid-origin article by Nicholson Baker, who had lately published a book on American bioweapons research in the early 1950s and his frustrations with the Freedom of Information Act. Baker now raised the “What if?” question about coronavirus research. In May 2021, Nicholas Wade (who once worked for The New York Times) published a long article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describing the collaborations between Zhengli Shi’s lab and EcoHealth Alliance, for research on bat coronaviruses as potential threats to human health — research that, Wade suggested, could have led to the escape of a virus intentionally made more dangerous to humans. Soon afterward, another science writer with former connections to The Times, Donald G. McNeil Jr., found himself moved by Wade’s article to do further probing and questioning and posted a more judicious essay, concluding, “All we have so far is speculation, and all the explanations are unsatisfactory.” In early June, Vanity Fair followed with a feature by the journalist Katherine Eban, suggesting that research at the W.I.V. — or, alternatively, field collection of bat samples, and the accidental infection of a fieldworker — might have put the virus, engineered or not, into people.

Then came Jon Stewart. On June 14, 2021, the comedian appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show and announced, with sublime confidence and transcendent shallowness, his grounds for certainty that the virus first detected in Wuhan had come from a Wuhan lab. “If you look at the name!” he shouted. “Look at the name!” Stewart got the name of the institution wrong, in fact — he called W.I.V. the “Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab” — though he got the name of the city right. How much that mattered to Colbert’s millions of viewers is unknown.

Throughout 2020 and 2021, scientists with deep expertise in relevant fields, especially molecular evolutionary virology, veterinary virology and molecular phylogenetics (the drawing of family trees by comparison of genomes), were busy too. Their efforts added data and analyses to the natural-origin side of the balance.

One study, by two Chinese researchers and three Westerners, showed that the wet markets in Wuhan — not just the notorious Huanan but also three others — contained numerous shops selling wild animals for food from May 2017 to November 2019. The offerings included raccoon dogs, masked palm civets and Malayan porcupines. Many of the animals showed what seemed to be wounds from gunshots or traps, suggesting harvest from the wild (as distinct from farm-raised wildlife), but lacked the requisite documentation to make their sale legal under China’s Wildlife Protection Law.

That’s important because it gave local authorities incentive, as the pandemic spread, to close the market (as they did on Jan. 1, 2020) and conceal whatever illegalities had been ignored by enforcement officers there. For all the assumptions made about China’s motivation to cover up a lab leak, it’s worth remembering that they would have had similar motivations — including that $70 billion national industry — to cover up a devastatingly consequential market leak.

Another study, published by Science in July 2022, with Michael Worobey as first author, joined by Eddie Holmes and Marion Koopmans and many others, considered the spatial pattern of more than 150 of the earliest Covid-19 cases from December 2019. Worobey and colleagues found that not only were Huanan market customers and workers (and people in contact with those customers or workers) among those cases living close to the market, but so were patients with no known epidemiological link to the market. Therefore, that market was “the early epicenter” of the pandemic, as the paper’s title declared.

A distinct but related study that appeared around the same time, with Worobey and other co-authors but in this case with Jonathan Pekar as first author, looked at the shape of the SARS-CoV-2 family tree. It was unexpected. As drawn from comparison of genomes sequenced from human samples, taken at the beginning of the pandemic, it consisted of two thick limbs branching from a trunk, then each limb exploding into many tiny stems, without intermediate branches.

The two major limbs were lineages, labeled Lineage A and Lineage B, from which all the virus’s later diversity arose. Lineage B was the more prolific and successful, accounting for most of the world’s Covid-19 cases, including all early cases directly linked to the market. Lineage A had been found in the market, too, by the Chinese team that swabbed after the place was summarily closed. That smudge of A turned up on a pair of discarded gloves. Lineage A was also detected in two Covid patients living near the market. Pekar and his colleagues did a high-tech analysis of the tree pattern — those two big limbs, then that explosion of twiggy stems from each — and concluded that the virus probably entered humans multiple times. The outbreak of human infections, they judged, most likely had (at least) two separate beginnings.

Why did this finding matter? Two spillovers into people, from a market stall holding infected raccoon dogs, was more parsimonious than two separately infected laboratory workers, carrying their infections independently to the same market. Partly that’s because of geography: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, as Jon Stewart tried to say, is indeed in the city of Wuhan, but it sits on the other side of the Yangtze River, more than seven miles (as the crow flies) from the Huanan market.

Beginning early this year, the popularity of the lab-accident idea, which grew steadily from 2020 through 2022, received several additional boosts. On Feb. 26, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy, one of the organizations assigned earlier by President Biden to study the origin question, offered a new judgment. Previously undecided, the D.O.E.’s intelligence people now concluded, though with “low confidence,” that the pandemic most likely began from a lab leak. The Journal’s reporters had this from “a classified intelligence report,” unavailable for scrutiny by the public but delivered to the White House and “key members of Congress,” who were unidentified.

The next day, CNN’s website posted a follow-up story stating that three sources, also unidentified, had told CNN that the D.O.E. based its shift partly on information about research done at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, another disease-related facility in the city, more than seven miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This caught my attention, because I knew that the Wuhan C.D.C., having recently relocated, was now just a few hundred yards from the Huanan market. It occurred to me, disquietingly, that a virus leak from the center might fit the spatial clustering of early cases around the market, as analyzed by Worobey and his colleagues, in a way that a putative leak from the W.I.V. did not.

But nothing more on that provocative assertion has come from CNN, or from any other news outlet, in the months since. I was reminded that the Wuhan C.D.C. moved to its new location, near the market, only on Dec. 2, 2019; that date, plus the time presumably needed to bring laboratory work back online, might not jibe with a viral outbreak that most likely began in late November. In any case, two different sources with good access to the Chinese research community told me that the Wuhan C.D.C. (as distinct from the national C.D.C. in Beijing) had no coronavirus research program before the pandemic. One of those sources, Jane Qiu, a China-born independent journalist, added that the Wuhan group’s mandate was mainly technical tasks such as disease surveillance, rather than research. (Qiu couldn’t name her own sources due to their potential jeopardy in China.)

Still more recently, in mid-June, came the Substack article I alluded to earlier, claiming that Ben Hu and two others from Zhengli Shi’s lab were “the first people infected by the virus” and therefore the starting point of the pandemic. Posted by Michael Shellenberger and two co-authors, this article cited unidentified sources “within the U.S. government.” Hu was a first author on a 2017 paper describing the Shi group’s discovery of multiple coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2, in bats from a cave (not the Mojiang mine) in southern China, and experimental work on three of those viruses that some critics considered risky. Hu and the other two scientists, according to Shellenberger and his co-authors, had contracted “Covid-19-like illnesses” in November 2019, suggesting that they were the conduits of a lab leak. Hu himself promptly denied the allegation in an email to Jon Cohen at Science: “I did not get sick in autumn 2019, and did not have Covid-19-like symptoms at that time.” Furthermore, Hu told Cohen, he and both colleagues had tested negative for signs of recent Covid infection (antibodies) in March 2020.

The surge of opinion toward the lab-leak idea was interrupted in March, when Florence Débarre, a scientist working for France’s National Center for Scientific Research, discovered another body of interesting evidence, long missing but now found. This was genomic data — from the swab sampling of door surfaces and equipment and other items, including that pair of discarded gloves — gathered at the Huanan market in early 2020 but withheld since that time. The data were released, perhaps by mistake, and Débarre was alert enough to spot them and recognize what they were. A team of researchers, including Worobey, detected a pattern in the data: strong proximity between samples containing raccoon dog DNA and others containing SARS-CoV-2 fragments (and some samples that contained both), from stalls in the southwest corner of the market where wild animals had been sold as food. Malayan porcupine DNA and Amur hedgehog DNA were also found near the virus, but raccoon dogs were of special interest because of their proven susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2.

These findings didn’t establish that raccoon dogs had carried the virus into the market. But they added plausibility and detail to that scenario.

Notwithstanding the Débarre group’s revelations, the lab-leak idea has remained strongly preferred by public opinion, and not just in the United States. According to one poll, as of April 2023, 62 percent of Italian respondents, 56 percent in France and 50 percent in the United Kingdom found the lab-leak idea most compelling, with sizable segments of undecided (and flummoxed) people, leaving only modest minorities embracing natural spillover. Earlier polling showed lab-related scenarios even more strongly favored in still other countries, ranging from 73 percent in Kenya and 64 percent in Hungary to 58 percent in Brazil.

Various factors may account for this public drift to the lab-leak hypothesis. In my view, a preponderance of empirical evidence is not one of them. I agree it’s important to remain open-minded toward a lab-leak possibility, but most of the arguments made in support of that possibility boil down to conjecture from circumstance and unsupported accusations.

To speak of a “lab-leak hypothesis” in the singular is, of course, misleading. There are multiple lab-leak hypotheses, just as there are multiple ways a natural spillover could have occurred. A more encompassing and emollient phrase is “research-related incident,” preferred by Jamie Metzl and some other critics. That covers several possibilities, including the chance that misbegotten gain-of-function research, at the W.I.V. or the Wuhan C.D.C. or who knows where, yielded a dangerous new hybrid virus that escaped through a malfunctioning autoclave or an infected technician or grad student. (In support of this scenario, proponents point to a grant proposal known as DEFUSE — made by EcoHealth Alliance to a U.S. defense research agency in 2018, though never funded — for experiments that some critics construe as potentially dangerous gain-of-function research.) Another “research-related” possibility: the nightmare that some Chinese biowarfare program created a murderous virus intentionally but let it escape to the world by some catastrophic goof. Still another: the notion that a scientific fieldworker became infected while taking samples from bats in, say, the Mojiang mine, where Zhengli Shi’s team found RaTG13.

They’re all vivid but not all logical, and it seems to me they don’t reinforce one another. If a wild coronavirus from the Mojiang mine was capable of infecting and transmitting among humans, for instance, then it didn’t need a furin cleavage site to be inserted during reckless or malevolent lab work. And if it infected a scientific fieldworker in 2013, and that fieldworker returned to Wuhan, where did the virus linger for six years before exploding through the city’s population in 2019? And if the virus was engineered in Shi’s lab, using sophisticated gene-editing methods, or was transformed into this dangerous pathogen by passaging a less dangerous virus through cell cultures or living mice (which seems far-fetched), and then subsequently escaped, then the Mojiang mine, with all its sinister narrative appeal, is irrelevant. In other words, the various research-related-incident hypotheses may each be plausible (some more than others), but they compete against one another. You can’t pile them all on the scale and judge the likelihood of an unnatural origin by their combined weight.

Lab-leak partisans have focused intently on Shi and her lab, but it’s important to bear in mind that Shi has made her career by publishing research and issuing warnings about potentially dangerous coronaviruses found in the wild, not by keeping them secret. If she had such a formidably dangerous virus in her lab in 2018 or 2019 — a virus similar to the original SARS virus but with a receptor-binding domain and a furin cleavage site well shaped for human infection, features that could make it even more dangerous — she presumably would have announced that important discovery from the pages of a leading journal, to her professional gain as well as the benefit of the world. She didn’t.

And there’s a small body of lost evidence, recently recovered, that seems to support this logic. In 2018, a scientist named Jie Cui led a study of SARS-related coronaviruses in bats. His purpose was to illuminate the evolution of the original SARS virus by placing it on a family tree of its relatives. Cui had been a postdoctoral fellow in Eddie Holmes’s lab, going from there to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a couple of years, then to a position in Shanghai. Cui and a group of colleagues, including both Holmes and Zhengli Shi, analyzed partial genome sequences of 60 coronaviruses detected in bat samples collected from 2011 to 2016. They wrote a paper and submitted it to a leading virology journal. It was rejected. They tried another. Rejected. The journals’ reviewers wanted complete genome sequences, but the team had only partials. So in October 2018, they gave up on that paper. They pulled it from the submission process. They forgot about it. In the meantime, they had submitted their partial but telling genome data to an international database, GenBank, with a routine stipulation that it would be embargoed, in this case for four years. The embargo allowed them to retain exclusive access to the data for that period, in the event they wanted to revive the project.

Four years passed, and then, in October 2022, the embargo expired. The data, mothballed since just before the pandemic and now publicly available, were revealing for what they did not include: a progenitor of the pandemic virus. Here were 60 coronaviruses that Zhengli Shi and others had considered intriguing in 2018. But nothing that matched SARS-CoV-2.

“Where’s the virus?” said Eddie Holmes, recounting this to me recently. “The virus is absolutely not there.”

Two other arguments on the lab-leak side deserve attention. Each can be phrased as a question. Why did SARS-CoV-2, from the start, seem to be very well adapted to humans? And why, if its natural host was some kind of bat, has that host not yet been found, after three and a half years?

The first of those questions ignores the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has shown itself, from the beginning, to be quite capable of infecting other mammals (cats and dogs), and eventually a wide range of them (tigers, gorillas, mink, white-tailed deer and others), not just humans. The second question betrays a lack of familiarity with the history of emerging viruses. When a novel virus appears suddenly in humans, causing disease and alarm, the search for its natural host is always an urgent task. But such ecological work is difficult to do amid the public-health emergency of an outbreak, and once the outbreak (or epidemic, or pandemic) is controlled, the sense of urgency and the available research money tend to disappear.

Finding the host animal is sometimes easy, by luck, and sometimes hard. Identifying horseshoe bats, with high confidence, as the likely hosts of the original SARS virus took 15 years. Tracing the Marburg virus to its reservoir host in Egyptian fruit bats took 41 years (or 42, if you count the time to publication). And the natural host of Ebola virus, despite what you may think you’ve heard, is still unidentified, 47 years after its emergence at a remote mission hospital in what was then Zaire. The suggested linkage between Ebola virus and some form of bat is still suppositional, not settled scientific fact — and we have enough suppositions entangled with this subject already.

So, what’s tilting the scales of popular opinion toward lab leak? The answer to that is not embedded deeply in the arcane data I’ve been skimming through here. What’s tilting the scales, it seems to me, is cynicism and narrative appeal.

I asked about this in conversation with David Relman, the biosecurity expert who was also an author of the “Investigate” letter with Jesse Bloom. To some extent, Relman agreed. “When you sow the seeds of distrust, or suggest that you haven’t been transparent with what you knew,” he told me, “you’re setting yourself up for a persistent, insidious, continuing distrust.” That inclines people to assume that “there was something deliberate, or deliberately concealed.”

The seeds of distrust have been growing in America’s civic garden, and the world’s, for a long time. More than 60 percent of Americans, according to polling within the past several years, still decline to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John F. Kennedy. Is that because people have read the Warren Commission report, found it unpersuasive and minutely scrutinized the “magic bullet” theory? No, it’s because they have learned to be distrustful, and because a conspiracy theory of any big event is more dramatic and satisfying than a small, stupid explanation, like the notion that a feckless loser could kill a president by hitting two out of three shots with a $13 rifle.

Most of us don’t reach our opinions by fastidious calibration of empirical evidence. We default to our priors, as Jesse Bloom noted, or we embrace stories that have simple plots, good and bad characters and melodramatic trajectories, and that seem commensurate in scope to the event in question. The process of scientific discovery is a complicated story involving data collection, hypothesis testing, hypothesis falsification, hypothesis revision, further testing and brilliant but fallible humans doing all that work. Scientific malfeasance driven by hubris and leading to runaway trouble, on the other hand, is a much simpler story that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, “Frankenstein.”

Carl Bergstrom is an evolutionary biologist and an author of commentaries on scientific misinformation. He ponders, among other things, how students of science are taught — or at least should be taught — about not just what science says but what science is. I asked Bergstrom about the human affinity for dark theories of big events.

There was something about that in Thomas Hardy, he told me. “It’s in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles,’ where Tess is doomed by hapless chance. It really sucks! To live in a world where we are at the mercy of hapless chance.”

I had never read “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” to my embarrassment, so I stuck with SARS-CoV-2. “This is not a contest now, in the public domain, between bodies of evidence,” I proposed. “This is a contest between stories.”

“Yeah!” Bergstrom said. “That’s right.”

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Think of a psychopath and any number of Hollywood villains might come to mind, from charming killers like Hannibal Lecter to Anton Chigurh, portrayed with chilling menace by Javier Bardem in the film No Country for Old Men. But the traits and symptoms of psychopathy run along scales that range from weak to strong. So, someone may be mildly psychopathic or severely so. There could be a psychopath sitting next to you right now.

Some psychologists argue that the focus on violent and criminal psychopathic behavior has marginalized the study of what they call “successful psychopaths” — people who have psychopathic tendencies but who can stay out of trouble, and perhaps even benefit from these traits in some way. Researchers haven’t yet reached a consensus on which traits distinguish successful psychopaths from serial killers, but they are working to clarify what they say is a misunderstood branch of human behavior. Some even want to reclaim and rehabilitate the concept of psychopathy itself.

“Most of what people think about psychopaths is not what psychopathy actually is,” says Louise Wallace, a lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Derby, in England. “It is not glamorous. It is not a spectacle.” Psychopathic traits exist in everyone to some degree and shouldn’t be glorified or stigmatized, she says.

In some ways, the study of successful psychopaths takes the field back to the beginning. In his 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity, the influential US psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley set out the personality profile of a psychopath: a superficially charming but egocentric and untrustworthy person who conceals an antisocial core.

Cleckley (who later identified the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy as a psychopath) drew his insights from people he saw in psychiatric centers. Among his descriptions of psychopaths were people who could keep a lid on the worst of their behavior. He sketched the profile of a psychopathic businessman, for instance, who worked hard and appeared normal except for bouts of marital infidelity, callousness, wild drinking and risk-taking.

Over the following decades, researchers who wanted to study psychopathy often did so in prisons. And so, fueled by lurid depictions in books and films, the psychopathic profile originally envisioned more broadly by Cleckley became tightly associated with dangerous and violent criminals in both the public and academic spheres.

That view is now being challenged. In the last 15 years or so, psychiatry has embraced what’s called a dimensional approach, based on the idea of scales and spectrums of trait and symptom severity. That replaced the categorical approach, which took a more binary view of mental syndromes and assessed whether conditions were present or not.

Seeing psychopathy through this different lens opened new doors to researchers. They no longer needed to work in prisons to study psychopathy. Instead, they could recruit groups from the general population, screen them for psychopathic traits and investigate the behavior and biology of “normal” people with successful or mild psychopathy. “Most psychopathic individuals just live around us,” says Désiré Palmen, a clinical psychology researcher at Avans University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.

BALANCED BY BOLDNESS

Psychopathy is a composite of several interacting traits. The traditional model of a psychopathic mind focuses on meanness and disinhibition. In psychological terms, meanness is aggressive resource-seeking without regard for others. Disinhibition shows itself as a lack of impulse control. People high in both traits feel little or no empathy and find it hard to control their actions, with often violent consequences.

As part of the recent rethink, psychologists have introduced a new factor: boldness, which they define as a mix of social dominance, emotional resiliency and venturesomeness.

“You can think of boldness as fearlessness expressed in the realm of interactions with other people where you’re not intimidated easily, you’re more assertive, even dominant with other people,” says longtime psychopathy researcher Christopher Patrick, a clinical psychologist at Florida State University, who highlighted the role of boldness in a 2022 article on psychopathy in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology.

A bold person is not necessarily a psychopath, of course. But add boldness to high degrees of meanness and disinhibition, Patrick says, and you could have a psychopath who’s more able to use their social confidence to mask the extremes of their behavior and so excel in leadership positions. In fact, it may be that the degree of boldness correlates closely with whether someone with traditionally psychopathic traits can make their life a success.

Other psychopathic traits can also benefit people in certain careers: Meanness, for example, often shows itself as a lack of empathy. “Within the corporate world, you want someone who can perform under pressure and make quick decisions, perhaps without displaying high levels of empathy, because they need to be able to make those cutthroat choices,” says Wallace.

A 2016 study of employees in an Australian advertising agency, for example, found that senior executives scored higher than more junior staff on measures of behaviors linked to psychopathic traits — such as being initially charming, poised and calm, but also egocentric, remorseless and lacking in self-blame.

Other research has suggested that the language used to describe the ideal candidate in executive job ads could actively attract candidates with psychopathic traits. In one especially direct example, a UK firm advertised in 2016 for a “Psychopathic New Business Media Sales Executive Superstar! £50k — £110k.” The ad claimed that one in five CEOs was a psychopath and it wanted a candidate with their positive qualities.

Some have even suggested that psychopathic traits and associated tendencies such as fearlessness and narcissism can make people behave in a heroic way. A 2018 study, for example, suggested that first responders scored significantly higher than civilians on measures of psychopathy, including fearless dominance, boldness and sensation-seeking.

The idea that some psychopathic traits could be positive does not sit well with everyone. “There has been a big, big fight about this,” says Klaus J. Templer, an organizational psychology consultant formerly of the Singapore University of Social Sciences.

Critics take issue with the inclusion of boldness as a defining psychopathic trait, Templer says. A 2021 study asked more than 1,000 students to agree or disagree with statements to probe traits including meanness (“I do not mind if someone I dislike gets hurt”), disinhibition (“I have taken money from someone’s purse or wallet without asking”) and boldness (“I’m a born leader”).

The results suggested that increased levels of meanness and disinhibition could explain the variance in self-reported antisocial behaviors, such as aggression, rule-breaking and drug-taking. In other words, boldness was largely irrelevant.

But Patrick thinks some people don’t fit that interpretation. Other research has identified people who score higher than most on meanness or disinhibition, but who don’t seem to get into trouble for antisocial behavior. Boldness may make the difference: Some studies suggest that boldness can be protective in terms of well-being and workplace behavior.

“They would find it easier to kind of schmooze with people and use people and so forth,” Patrick says. This type of successful psychopath may turn out to be completely untrustworthy, but they initially come across as assertive and capable, he adds. “That’s what boldness brings to the table.”

Much of this academic debate is a legacy of relying on the study of people who committed violent or criminal acts to assess and diagnose psychopathy, says Wallace. “Once you label psychopathy as a clinical disorder characterized by extreme violence, then all the positive adjustment traits get pushed to the side,” she says. “And now researchers are just kind of backtracking on themselves a little bit and saying, hang on, what about all these good things.”

Part of the problem, she says, is that researchers trying to study the positive traits of psychopathy don’t have their own version of the screening tool used to identify more severe cases. That’s a checklist focusing on the effects of disinhibition and meanness developed by the Canadian psychologist Robert Hare and immortalized in the 2011 book The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson.

To address that gap, Wallace has helped to produce a Successful Psychopathy Scale: a 54-question scale designed to identify and assess psychopathic traits in the general population. She hopes that the scale, currently under review at the Journal of Personality Assessment, will help researchers in the field assess, for example, the prevalence of successful psychopathy in the workplace, or psychopathic traits in people in positions of power and leadership. The scale asks responders whether they agree with statements such as “Gaining success can be tough; it is all about survival of the fittest.”

“I think the scale is needed, because at the moment successful psychopathy research is almost like fumbling in the dark,” she says. “The only way you can actually push research forward is by being able to measure these traits.”

Eventually, Wallace hopes the scale will help more people realize that a person with psychopathic traits is not always something to be afraid of. “There’s so much that we don’t know about individuals who are high on the prototypical psychopathic traits and how they just engage with their day-to-day lives,” she says. “And that’s because we’ve got lost in this idea of Hannibal Lecter.”

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The woman shared on social media how the 57-year-old star assisted her after seeing she had trouble carrying her luggage while cradling her two-month-old infant during a flight from Taipei, Taiwan to Shanghai, China.

According to the unidentified woman, Jen helped to carry her luggage and pushed her baby’s buggy besides accompanying her to collect her luggage, TVBS reported.

Once everything had been gathered, Jen even accompanied the woman to the arrival hall.

In the post, the woman only had good words to say about Jen.

“Bringing a two-month-old newborn to board a flight alone, thankful to meet someone to help,” she said, adding that Jen was very polite.

Responding to the woman’s post, social media users described Jen as a celebrity with positive energy, low profile, considerate and loving.

“Hence he could be popular for such a long time,” one social media user commented on Jen who first joined the entertainment industry in 1990.

In May, a Chinese woman who received financial aid from Jen two decades ago turned up at his recent concert to personally thank him for his assistance.

The unidentified 23-year-old fan attended Jen’s concert at Shenyang in Liaoning Province on May 28 where she shared she had known Jen for 22 years.

The woman said she was born with a congenital heart condition and her family could not afford to get her treated.

After seeing her story in a local daily, Jen donated 30,000 yuan (RM19,499) that allowed her to undergo the surgery.

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He said temple president Kripa Sindhu Krishna Das, or fondly known as Prabhu, believes that everyone irrespective of race, religion and background ought to be taken care of.

“In any country or organisation, a good leadership is very important and that is why today, I came to support Iskcon Kuching’s Hare Krishna Food for Life programme,” Lo told reporters at the temple’s food distribution event at the Mile 7 Market in Kota Sentosa here yesterday.

“I think some leaders should also need to emulate Prabhu’s humble ways, as well as for other organisations or societies to do more charity works.”

Prabhu, meanwhile, said the food distribution was part of the temple’s monthly programme, where members and congregants gather to prepare 500 packs of pure vegetarian food to be distributed to the market traders, old folks’ homes, the blind centre and orphanages.

“We believe that whatever God gives us, we share it to people. There are people in need of food and by distributing them food, this will make them happy.

“This is the best charity work we can do for the community. In this way, God blesses us too,” Prabhu said.

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These major cities and others around the globe have many similarities, but they share one particular commonality that is concerning for residents.

They are among the global cities most affected by climate change.

While each of these cities has proven resilient for centuries, urban planners, community leaders and civil engineers continue to address their many environmental challenges. In preparing for these cities' future, however, it might be more expedient to revisit the distant past for inspiration.

A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) explores how ancient Mesoamerican civilizations fared against environmental threats and provides examples of how modern metropolises can learn from their successes.

"Mesoamerican Urbanism Revisited: Environmental Change, Adaptation, Resilience, Persistence, and Collapse" was published in the latest edition of PNAS and also is available to review on PubMed Central. Its authors include a who's who of anthropological archaeology and urbanism scholars from across the globe.

"There are some lessons to be learned from many regions within Mesoamerica," said its lead author Diane Z. Chase, University of Houston senior vice president for academic affairs and provost.

Both Diane Chase and her husband Arlen Chase (longtime archaeologists, research collaborators and spouses) are frequent visitors to the Maya archaeological site of Caracol in Belize. That region and others, she said, holds many clues to addressing some of the problems faced by today's cities.

"When that city was at its height, the city planning in and of itself was exceedingly well done," she said. "They were doing some things that we are still talking about … green cities, walkable cities."

Credit: University of Houston

Prehispanic Mesoamerica included areas of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador. In addition to Caracol, Mesoamerican cities examined within the article include Chunchucmil, Monté Alban and Teotihuacan in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala.

These and other Mesoamerican cities prospered despite a lack of modern technologies and without basic resources such as wheeled transport or domesticated animals such as oxen, mules or donkeys to carry loads. Chase and her fellow authors maintain that despite history often depicting the fall of Maya cities, their resiliency for centuries is often overlooked.

"While the causes of the Classic lowland Maya collapse remain a subject of coalescing debate, sizeable changes in the populations of many cities occurred," Chase and co-authors stated in the article. "These changes in population have largely blinded scholars to the remarkable successes of lowland Maya cities that persisted, adapted, and flourished for many centuries and were then replaced by smaller cities that subsequently arose and flourished."

Such resiliency can be attributed to enhanced infrastructure that included roads, access to markets and agricultural terracing (or sloped planes with sections landscaped into flattened platforms for farming). Likewise, these cities supported advanced socio-economic systems that included structured governance, institutions and social norms.

Ultimately, these cities withstood a number of environmental challenges such as drought, earthquakes, heavy rains, hurricanes and rising sea levels. Many of these meteorological conditions were detected by researchers who examined stalagmites, shells and other items found within these ancient sites.

Drought has long been considered to be a factor in the demise of Mesoamerican cities. According to Arlen Chase, professor in UH's Comparative Cultural Studies Department, that is indeed a myth. He said that cities such as Teotihuacan experienced significant growth during a period of severe drought. In Caracol, the city was already largely abandoned when that area of Belize was affected by lack of rain.

"The correlation between the population sizes within these cities and the consistency of these sites doesn't have anything to do with drought," he said. "These cities actually were quite resilient."

Another myth, he said, focused on the concept of compact and dense urbanism as constituting all cities, which is largely a western concept. A form of dispersed urbanism was prevalent within Mesoamerica (and in other parts of the world) that varied from city to city. One trend observed by the Chases and their collaborators was that collective societies (or those that were largely democratic) were the most successful.

Credit: University of Houston

"At their peaks, most Mesoamerican cities were prosperous and sustainable, often with a form of collective governance," the authors stated within the article. "Governance, however, was fickle and was subject to shift between more collective and more autocratic systems over the course of history. Also particularly striking in terms of the abandonments of Mesoamerican cities―and opposed to earlier understandings―is that most of their collapses are associated with a rejection of these successful adaptations for strategies more focused on autocracy and inequality, in which there was only limited wealth sharing."

In determining social structures and governance within these ancient sites, the Chases and fellow researchers analyzed the bones of residents within Caracol and other sites. Chemical elements within these human remains can offer clues to a person's diet (which provides insights on where people lived or their level or wealth). Additionally, artifacts and the size of living spaces can offer insight on wealth, power and social status.

Co-author Gary M. Feinman, MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, said there are many lessons to be learned from Mesoamerica. In facing the challenges of the future, it's essential to look to the past, he said.

He added that the PNAS article is a first step in helping clear the air regarding any misconceptions regarding the perceived failures of Mesoamerican cities and truly spotlights the resiliency of their residents.

"Part of this article is trying to correct the misbelief that the Mesoamerican cities were riddled with collapse, that rulers were purely despotic and that there was no such thing as economic growth and prosperity," Feinman said. "That's why this era is not looked at as a source of information. By clearing up some of these misbeliefs that are broadly held, we can make this information more accessible to city planners and policy makers."

Feinman believes that one of the biggest lessons to be learned from the success of Mesoamerican cities is from its residents. Those community members, who worked tirelessly to adapt to a changing environment and react to natural disasters without technology, are models for contemporary communities, he said.

"These cities speak to the great potential of human cooperation," he said. "When people share a goal, they can do amazing things."

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In July 1945, two days before the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, Robert Oppenheimer recited a stanza from the Bhagavad Gita, or The Lord's Song.

Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, had been introduced to Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language, and subsequently the Gita, as a teacher in Berkeley years before. The 2,000-year-old Bhagavad Gita is part of the Mahabharata - one of Hinduism's greatest epics - and at 700 verses, the world's longest poem.

Now, hours before an event that would change history, the "father of the atomic bomb" relieved his tension by reciting a stanza he had translated from Sanskrit:

In battle, in forest, at the precipice of the mountains

On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

The good deeds a man has done before defend him

Oppenheimer with Albert Einstein in an undated picture

As Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin write in their authoritative 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, a young Oppenheimer was introduced to Sanskrit by Arthur W Ryder, a professor of Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley. The precocious physicist had arrived there as a 25-year-old assistant professor. Over the next few decades, he helped build one of the "greatest schools of theoretical physics" in the US.

Ryder, a Republican and a "sharp tongued iconoclast", was fascinated by Oppenheimer. For his part, Oppenheimer regarded Ryder as a "quintessential intellectual", a scholar who "felt and thought and talked as a stoic". The young scientist's textile importer father agreed, saying Ryder was a "remarkable combination of austereness through which peeps the gentlest soul".

Oppenheimer - played by actor Cillian Murphy in the biopic - also regarded Ryder as a rare person who had "a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation".

Soon, Ryder was giving Oppenheimer private lessons in Sanskrit on Thursday evenings. "I am learning Sanskrit," the scientist wrote to his brother Frank, "enjoying it very much and enjoying again the sweet luxury of being taught".

Many of his friends found his new obsession with an Indian language odd, Oppenheimer's biographers noted. One of them, Harold F Cherniss, who introduced the scientist to the scholar, thought it made "perfect sense" because Oppenheimer had a "taste of the mystical and the cryptic".

So Oppenheimer's knowledge of Sanskrit and the Gita is clearly germane to telling his story. But some right wing Hindus have complained - particularly about the sex scene with lover Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh - saying the film is an attack on their religion and demanding cuts.

But India's film censors found no problem with it and at the box office it's the Hollywood hit of the year in India, faring better than Barbie since the two blockbusters opened on Friday.

Oppenheimer (standing third, left to right) with fellow nuclear scientists near New Mexico

There's no doubt Oppenheimer was a widely well-read man - he took courses in philosophy, French literature, English, history, and briefly considered studying architecture, and even becoming a classicist, poet or painter. He wrote poems on "themes of sadness and loneliness", and identified with TS Eliot's "sparse existentialism" in The Waste Land.

"He liked things that were difficult. And since almost everything was easy for him, the things that really would attract his attention were essentially the difficult," Cherniss said.

With his facility for languages - Oppenheimer had studied Greek, Latin, French and German and learned Dutch in six weeks - it "wasn't really long before" he was reading the Bhagavad Gita. He found it "very easy and quite marvellous" and told friends that it was the "most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue". In his bookshelf was a pink-covered copy of the book that Ryder had gifted him; and Oppenheimer himself gifted copies to his friends.

The biographers write that the scientist was so "enraptured by his Sanskrit studies" that in 1933 when his father brought him a Chrysler, he named it Garuda, after the giant bird God in Hindu mythology.

In spring of that year, Oppenheimer had written a rather florid letter to his brother explaining why discipline and work had always been his guiding principles. It pointed to the fact that he was enthralled by eastern philosophy.

He wrote: "through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation… and that detachment which preserves the world it renounces". Only through discipline, he added, is it possible to "see the world without the gross distraction of personal desire, and in seeing so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror".

Oppenheimer quoted the Gita saying "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" - this is seen written in dust on a deactivated nuclear missile

"In the late twenties, Oppenheimer seemed to be searching for an earthly detachment; he wished, in other words to be engaged as a scientist with the physical world, and yet detached from it," his biographers write.

"He was not seeking to escape to a purely spiritual realm. He was not seeking religion. What he sought was peace of mind. The Gita seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy for an intellectual keenly attuned to the affairs of men and the pleasures of the senses."

One of his favourite Sanskrit texts was the Meghaduta, a lyric poem written by Kalidasa, one of the greatest poets in the language. "The Meghaduta I read with Ryder, with delight, some ease and great enchantment," he wrote to his brother, Frank.

Why did Oppenheimer turn to Gita and its notions of karma, destiny and earthly duty so fervently? His biographers hazard a guess: "Perhaps the attraction Robert felt to the fatalism of the Gita was at least stimulated by a late blooming rebellion against what he had been taught as a youth", alluding to his early association with the Ethical Culture Society, an "uniquely American offshoot of Judaism that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism".

To be sure, Oppenheimer was not alone in admiring the Hindu text. Henry David Thoreau wrote about immersing himself in the "stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial". Heinrich Himmler was an admirer. Mahatma Gandhi was an ardent follower. And WB Yeats and TS Eliot, two poets Oppenheimer admired, had read the Mahabharata.

The sight of the giant orange mushroom cloud rising in the skies after the first atomic bomb test had led Oppenheimer to return to the Gita again.

The bombs that were eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II had killed tens of thousands of people.

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent," he told NBC in a 1965 documentary.

"I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu [a principal Hindu deity] is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds'. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

A friend of the scientist said the quote sounded like one of Oppenheimer's "priestly exaggerations".

Yet, the enigmatic scientist remained profoundly influenced by it.

When the editors of The Christian Century asked the scientist once to share the books that most profoundly influenced his philosophical outlook, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal held the top spot. And the Bhagavad Gita took the second position.

Source

Over the course of the pandemic, lawsuits came from every direction, questioning public health policies and hospitals' authority. Petitioners argued for care to be provided in a different way, they questioned mandates on mask and vaccine use, and they attacked restrictions on gatherings.

Historically, "there's been nothing but a cascade of supportive deference to public health," said Lawrence Gostin, a professor specializing in public health law at Georgetown University. That changed during the pandemic. "It's the opposite. It's been a torrent."

Even as COVID-19 wanes, lawyers representing the health care sector predict their days in court aren't about to end soon. A group of litigators and media companies, among others, are eyeing policy changes and even some profits from yet more lawsuits.

Because such groups can reach millions of people, public health advocates like Gostin and Brian Castrucci, president of the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health nonprofit, suggest that the result, beyond creating legal setbacks, could spread more misinformation about their work.

The imprimatur of a lawsuit, they think, can help spread vaccine skepticism or other anti-public health beliefs, if only through news coverage. "You know, lawsuits have a galvanizing effect," Gostin said. "They tend to shape public opinion."

Lawyers are organizing to promote their theories. Late in March, a group of them gathered in Atlanta for a debut COVID Litigation Conference to swap tips on how to build such cases. "Attention, Atlanta lawyers!" proclaimed an ad promoting the event. "Are you ready to be a part of the fastest-growing field of litigation?"

The conference was sponsored in part by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, which was established on vaccine-skeptical views. The gathering promised to share legal strategies for suing federal and state public health agencies over COVID policies, as well as hospitals and pharmaceutical firms for alleged malfeasance.

It's the sort of thing that has people like Gostin paying attention. "It's very worrisome," he said. Even if lawsuits don't succeed, it could make hospitals and public health officials gun-shy, he said. At the height of the pandemic, lawyers were successfully forcing hospitals to administer ivermectin to treat COVID—despite many gold-standard, randomized, controlled trials demonstrating it wasn't particularly useful.

The conference was a good way to meet like-minded advocates, explained Steven Warshawsky, a New York lawyer who attended. "There's networking and an effort to create a legal community that's knowledgeable," he said. And colleagues can also "spread the word about different legal angles." Indeed, panels covered subjects ranging from licensure to hospital negligence, and allegations of vaccine injuries.

The conference was organized by Steve Kirsch, a wealthy San Francisco Bay Area tech executive, who describes himself as a "truth teller" regarding COVID vaccines and policies. He has persistently raised questions about masks and vaccines and other standard public health measures.

The conference, he said, is meant to help encourage lawyers to further that stance. He said he hopes that "the lawyers are successful in getting large settlements" because "it will incentivize other lawyers" to bring their own suits against pharmaceutical firms and government agencies alike.

He's been known to tweet about situations in which he, an unmasked person, encountered masked counterparts. For example, during a flight, he offered $100,000 to an airplane seatmate to remove her mask. (He said he did it to test the level—and potential hypocrisy—of people's attachment to masks.)

Kirsch's legal entrepreneurism is on full display in his newsletter: Individuals seeking his comments can check boxes if they are lawyers who would represent him in various lawsuits against the federal government on vaccine-related issues.

Visitors can also book his time in 15-minute increments, at $500 a pop; subscriptions to his newsletter—of which he claims "tens of thousands"—are $50 a year. (He says he donates the subscription income.)

The lawyers' conference attracted speakers well known in the COVID litigation world. One, Robert Malone, did early work on messenger RNA and has now grown skeptical over alleged defects in COVID vaccines. (They've been approved by the FDA after large trials.) Malone and other plaintiffs threatened Twitter last year with a lawsuit seeking to reverse a ban on spreading misinformation. After taking a media tour, he's now back on the social media network.

For public health officials, it's not merely the potential outcome of the courts' rulings but also the publicizing of the theories that poses a risk.

"Even one win, despite countless losses, for some will provide supposed evidence and vindication that questions need to be answered, liability needs to be assigned, or a wrong needs to be righted," Castrucci told KFF Health News. "But the decision of any one trial can't and shouldn't supplant the findings of clinical trials enrolling nearly 70,000 Americans."

"I think this is part of a grander destabilization of public health, through the judicial system," Castrucci said.

Readers wanting to connect favored theories to courtroom drama through the media have no lack of opportunity. Take The Daily Wire, an online publication featuring conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro. The company was a plaintiff in one federal lawsuit, part of a barrage of successful litigation, challenging the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's policy of giving large businesses an option of either requiring their employees to get vaccinated or test weekly for COVID. The regulation was stymied by the Supreme Court and later withdrawn by the agency.

The lawsuit served a second purpose. It provided a continual, evolving theme for Facebook ads promoting the outlet's fight—and asking viewers to subscribe, sign petitions, or purchase merchandise. In a November 2021 ad, Shapiro asserted there was "no bigger fan" of vaccines than he. But any pro-vaccine claim was not a centerpiece of future ads, which inveighed against mandates, vaccine passports, and the like. The Daily Wire claimed in February 2022 that it was bringing in $100 million in annual revenue.

The publication made COVID messaging, particularly around lawsuits or legal matters, a frequent theme of its advertising. One ad, for example, mentioned how police were enforcing vaccine passports in "certain cities"—it didn't specify which cities. But The Daily Wire published an article about police checking such passports in Paris, not the United States. The media outlet didn't respond to multiple requests for comment.

In all, KFF Health News found the publication had at least 10 million ad impressions on Meta platforms—Facebook and Instagram—from October 2021 to February 2023 concerning lawsuits, mandates, lab leaks, and other COVID-related topics.

Earlier, conservative media groups were happy to contribute by writing amicus briefs in support of certain cases. But there's now plenty of right-wing voices trying to seize an audience, said A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism studying conservative media at the University of Alabama. "We're seeing an oversaturated media space, with a lot of competition," especially on the right, Bauer said. As such, he said, they need to stand out—even if it means embracing "stunts," like participating directly in lawsuits.

2023 KFF Health News.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Source

While it's not clear exactly how Alzheimer's starts or develops, aggressive aggregations of a protein called tau in the brain – a protein that is perfectly fine in normal amounts – are prime suspects in the case that researchers are keen to question further.

Here, a team from the University of Verona in Italy concentrated on the effects of coffee compounds on tau protein clumps, following previous research that linked coffee and caffeine with protection against cognitive decline.

"These results add insights into the neuroprotective potential of espresso coffee and suggest candidate molecular scaffolds for designing therapies targeting monomeric or fibrillized forms of the tau protein," write the researchers in their published paper.

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a technique where magnetic fields can control and analyze substances at the atomic level, was used to look at the chemical composition of espresso shots. Key ingredients – caffeine, trigonelline, genistein, and theobromine – were chosen for further lab experiments.

Molecules of these compounds were incubated with tau proteins for up to 40 hours. As the concentration of caffeine, genistein, or the entire espresso extract increased, the tau fibrils (protein clumps) got shorter and less likely to form larger groups.

Caffeine and other coffee compounds were shown to prevent tau proteins from clumping. (Tira et al., Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2023)

What's more, the experiments showed these shortened fibrils were non-toxic to cells and didn't act as 'seeds' from which further clumping could happen. Caffeine and the espresso extract were also shown binding to preformed tau fibrils, suggesting they could be used to interact with existing clumps and prevent new ones.

Applying coffee compounds directly to the tau proteins is not how it will work within our bodies. The drink will first be processed in our digestive systems, and while some of these compounds are known to cross the blood-brain barrier, like caffeine, many other complex chemical interactions inside our bodies may not make these effects direct.

The researchers admit there's much more work to do here, but they're hopeful that these results can eventually lead to preventative or therapeutic treatments for Alzheimer's and other brain diseases where cognitive ability is affected.

Current treatments are still unable to reverse or prevent Alzheimer's, though experts are constantly progressing in their understanding of it, whether with drugs that can slow it down or lifestyle changes that can delay symptoms.

As for coffee and its ingredients, there's a lot more to it than giving us that jolt of alertness in the morning. It's previously been linked to reducing the risk of cancer and the risk of liver disease, for example; just don't drink too much of it.

"We have presented a large body of evidence that espresso coffee, a widely consumed beverage, is a source of natural compounds showing beneficial properties in ameliorating tau-related pathologies," write the researchers.

The research has been published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

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Now, new research shows the trading of spices for culinary use goes way back – some 2,000 years, to be precise.

In a paper published today [21 July] in Science Advances, we and our colleagues detail our findings of what seems to be evidence of Southeast Asia's oldest known curry. It's also the oldest evidence of curry ever found outside India.

We made the intriguing discovery at the Oc Eo archaeological complex in southern Vietnam. We found eight unique spices, originally from different sources, which were likely used for making curry. What's even more fascinating is that some of these would have been transported over several thousand kilometers by sea.

Grinding into the evidence

Our team's research wasn't initially focused on curry. Rather, we were curious to learn about the function of a set of stone grinding tools known as "pesani", which the people of the ancient Funan kingdom likely used to powder their spices. We also wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the ancient spice trade.

Using a technique called starch grain analysis, we analyzed microscopic remains recovered from a range of grinding and pounding tools excavated from the Oc Eo site. Most of these tools were excavated by our team from 2017 to 2019, while some had been previously collected by the local museum.

Starch grains are tiny structures found within plant cells that can be preserved over long periods. Studying them can provide valuable insights into past plant use, diet, cultivation practices, and even environmental conditions.

This footed sandstone grinding slab was excavated in 2018. Starch grains of ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg were identified on its surface.

(Khanh Trung Kien Nguyen/Wang et al., Science Advances, 2023).

Of the 40 tools we analyzed, 12 produced a range of spices, including turmeric, ginger, fingerroot, sand ginger, galangal, clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon. This means the occupants of the site had indeed used the tools for food processing, including to powder the rhizomes, seeds, and stems of spice plants to release flavor.

To figure out how old the site and tools were, our team obtained 29 separate dates from charcoal and wood samples. This included a date of 207-326 CE produced by a charcoal sample taken from just below the largest grinding slab, which measures 76cm by 31cm (pictured below and at the top of this article).

Another team working at the same site applied a technique called thermoluminescence dating to bricks used in the site's architecture. Collectively, the results show the Oc Eo complex was occupied between the 1st and 8th centuries CE.

A spicy history

We know the global spice trade has linked cultures and economies in Asia, Africa, and Europe since classical times.

However, before this study, we had limited evidence of ancient curry at archaeological sites – and the little evidence we did have mainly came from India. Most of our knowledge of the early spice trade has therefore come from clues in ancient documents from India, China, and Rome.

Our research is the first to confirm, in a very tangible way, that spices were valuable commodities exchanged on the global trading network nearly 2,000 years ago.

The spices found at Oc Eo wouldn't have all been available in the region naturally; someone at some point would have transported them there via the Indian or Pacific Ocean. This proves curry has a fascinating history beyond India and that curry spices were coveted far and wide.

If you've ever prepared curry from scratch, you'll know it's not simple. It involves considerable time and effort, as well as a range of unique spices and the use of grinding tools.

So it's interesting to note that nearly 2,000 years ago, individuals living outside India had a strong desire to savor the flavors of curry – as evidenced by their diligent preparations.

Another fascinating finding is that the curry recipe used in Vietnam today has not deviated significantly from the ancient Oc Eo period. Key components such as turmeric, cloves, cinnamon, and coconut milk have remained consistent in the recipe. It goes to show a good recipe will stand the test of time!

What's next?

In this study, we primarily focused on microscopic plant remains. And we have yet to compare these findings with other larger plant remains unearthed from the site.

During an excavation conducted from 2017 to 2020, our team also collected a significant number of well-preserved seeds. In the future, we hope to analyze these, too. We may identify many more spices, or may even discover unique plant species – adding to our understanding of the region's history.

By completing more dating on the site, we might also be able to understand when and how each type of spice or plant started to be traded globally.

Source

• Experts have raised concerns about the efficacy of warning labels due to consumers’ tendencies to ignore them.

• Research shows the most effective warning labels are those that elicit strong emotions, which often means the labels should be graphic rather than text-based.

• Consumer advocates say it’s best practice to design the risk out of products rather than to rely on warning labels to protect people.

Warning labels are designed to inform consumers about potential risks of using a product, but they have become too prevalent to be beneficial.

“Warning labels really were fairly rare until the 1960s,” said W. Kip Viscusi, a distinguished professor of law, economics, and management at Vanderbilt University. “Beginning in the mid-1960′s, cigarettes started to have a warning label. Since that time, other products have followed suit, trying to emulate the cigarette experience.”

Warning labels generally come in two forms: those that warn the consumer against buying the product, such as a cigarette box label that says, “This product can cause mouth cancer,” and those that warn about the risks associated with incorrect use of a product and may say, “To prevent this furniture from tipping over, it must be permanently fixed to the wall.”

One of the problems researchers have pointed out is people are desensitized to warning labels because they seem to be everywhere.

“One of my main complaints about warnings is that they’ve become ubiquitous,” Viscusi said. “There’s a tendency to say things are risky [and] slap a warning on it, and that tends to dilute the impact of the other warnings that are out there. So if everything in the supermarket is labeled as dangerous, you don’t know what to buy.”

Viscusi has developed two criteria for effective warning labels: 1) they must provide new information to consumers, and 2) the consumer must find the information credible.

“When companies are making statements against their financial interest, that would tend to be credible,” Viscusi said.

There has been pushback against putting warning labels on certain products. In December 2022, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cannot require tobacco companies to put graphic warning labels on cigarettes.

When it comes to making sure people are using products safely, consumer protection advocates say warning labels should be a last resort.

“In general, warning labels by themselves [are] just not effective,” said Oriene Shin, policy counsel at Consumer Reports. “They really need to be coupled with safe design.”

That’s where the safety hierarchy of product design comes in. This is a multistep process meant to eliminate risk to the consumer, and when that’s not possible, minimize it through safeguards.

An example of a safeguard, Shin says, would be requiring a potentially dangerous product such as a lawnmower to only start if the user pulls a lever and presses a button, rather than only requiring one of those procedures.

The last tier of the safety hierarchy is a warning label.

“I have probably seen hundreds of warning labels in the last week, and we probably don’t remember any of them,” Shin said. “And that’s the problem with just relying on warning labels. [They’re] the icing on the cake rather than the end all be all.”

Source

In 1959, the United States began construction of a real-life version of the frozen Echo Base from The Empire Strikes Back. The plan for Camp Century was to test snow tunneling technologies in northwest Greenland, not far from the north pole, ostensibly for scientific research. Really, the US was flexing its military muscle, and may have been considering Project Iceworm, a way to hide 600 nuclear missiles in thousands of miles of snow tunnels across northern Greenland, close to the former Soviet Union. The island’s massive ice sheet had other ideas for Camp Century, though—ice shifts and flows, making this not a particularly ideal place to stash nukes or run the nuclear reactor that powered the base.

Iceworm never went anywhere, and the US closed Camp Century in 1966, leaving the tunnels to collapse. But before everyone fled, researchers did manage to dig up some actual scientific dirt, drilling a 4,550-foot-deep core into the ice sheet. When they hit earth, they drilled a further 12 feet, bringing up a plug of frozen sand, dirty ice, cobbles, and mud. The military moved that ice core from its own freezers to the University at Buffalo in the 1970s. The core ended up in Denmark in the '90s, where it was kept frozen, so that now it provides scientists with invaluable insight into ice ages past.

Drilling at Camp Century in 1961 Photograph: David Atwood/U.S. Army-ERDC-CRREL/AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

Nobody cared much about the sediment, though, until 2018, when it was rediscovered in cookie jars in a University of Copenhagen freezer. Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed that sediment, and made a major scientific discovery.

“In that frozen sediment are leaf fossils and little bits of bugs and twigs and mosses that tell us in the past there was a tundra ecosystem living where today there's almost a mile of ice,” says University of Vermont geoscientist Paul Bierman, coauthor of a new paper describing the finding in the journal Science. “The ice sheet is fragile. It can disappear, and it has disappeared. Now we have a date for that.”

The fossil stem and leaves of a moss, from the Camp Century sample. Photograph: Halley Mastro/University of Vermont

Previously, scientists reckoned that Greenland iced over some 2.5 million years ago, and has been that way since. In 2021, Bierman and his colleagues determined that it was actually ice-free sometime in the past million years. Now, they’ve dated the tundra ecosystem captured in the Camp Century core to a mere 416,000 years ago—so northwestern Greenland couldn’t have been locked in ice then.

Scientists also know that at that time, global temperatures were similar or slightly warmer than what they are today. However, back then, atmospheric concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide were about 280 parts per million, compared to today’s 422 parts per million—a number that continues to skyrocket. Because humans have so dramatically and rapidly warmed the climate, we’re exceeding the conditions that had previously led to the wide-scale melting of Greenland’s ice sheet and gave rise to the tundra ecosystem. “It's a forewarning,” says Utah State University geoscientist Tammy Rittenour, a coauthor of the new paper. “This can happen under much lower CO2 conditions than our current state.” 

Hawke Woznick processes samples for dating  Photograph: Levi Sim/Utah State University

That melting could be incredibly perilous. The new study finds that the Greenland ice melt 400,000 years ago caused at least 5 feet of sea level rise, but perhaps as much as 20 feet. “These findings raise additional concern that we could be coming perilously close to the threshold for collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and massive additional sea level rise of a meter or more,” says University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t involved in the research. Today, less than a foot of global sea level rise is already causing serious flooding and storm surge problems for coastal cities—and that’s without the potential for an additional 20 feet. 

If Greenland melts again, it could reach a point of no return, relentlessly driving up sea levels as it does so. When an ice sheet melts, it exposes darker dirt beneath it, which absorbs more of the sun’s energy, raising local temperatures and driving more melting.

“If too much mass is lost and the elevation of the surface drops significantly, the resulting warming of the surface makes regrowth of the ice sheet more difficult,” says Pennsylvania State University geoscientist Richard B. Alley, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The new paper provides further evidence that even moderate sustained warmth will drive major melting in Greenland, forcing sea-level rise.”

Exactly how the Greenland ice sheet might degrade in the future is still unclear, and requires more research. Temperatures 400,000 years ago were similar to what they are today, but the natural warming that drove Greenland's melting back then happened gradually. Humans have quickly and dramatically warmed the planet since preindustrial times, and anthropogenic CO2 will stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, unless people invent a way to remove it at large scale. We can also reduce temperatures. If we slash emissions, Mann says, Greenland’s ice sheet might remain stable.

A modern Greenland tundra landscape Photograph: Joshua Brown

So, how did this research team figure out that northwest Greenland was an ice-sheet-free tundra 400,000 years ago? The sediment from the Camp Century core was loaded with organic material, but it was way too old to examine by using carbon dating, which is only effective for periods up to 50,000 years back. “We pulled out little twigs and leaves, and we immediately sent them off radiocarbon dating, and they came back what we call ‘radiocarbon dead,’” says Rittenour. “There were no traces of radioactive carbon left in the sample.”

So instead, Rittenour used light—specifically the luminescence of bits of feldspar buried in the sediment. Free electrons build up in the minerals over time, producing a "luminescence signal." Exposure to sunlight essentially neutralizes this signal, but once these minerals became buried under thousands of feet of ice, the sun’s rays could no longer reach them, and the electron buildup recommenced. In a darkroom in the lab, Rittenour could peer into the Camp Century samples using infrared light. “We can use light of one wavelength, and we measure the luminescence coming off at a different wavelength,” says Rittenour. “The older the sample, the more luminescence it produces.” That allowed them to determine how long it had been since the feldspar in the sediment last saw sunlight.

Paul Bierman (right) and Joerg Schaefer inspect the core samples in Copenhagen Photograph: University of Vermont

To complement this, at the University of Vermont, Bierman looked at the mineral quartz in the samples for rare isotopes of beryllium and aluminum. “They're formed when cosmic rays, these really high energy particles, come zipping into Earth from beyond the solar system. And occasionally, they'll smack an element in the quartz grain,” says Bierman. “By looking at the ratio of those two isotopes, we can tell how long something's been buried away from those cosmic rays.” The result told them that this material had sat out on the landscape for less than 16,000 years.

Scientists are now racing to drill more ice cores in Greenland to gather more soil. Although the Camp Century core gives them the basis for modeling that they can use for estimations, with more cores, they can better work out how much of the island’s ice had disappeared and how quickly—and what that might presage about the ice sheet’s modern decline. “We now have definitive evidence that when the climate gets warm, the Greenland ice sheet disappears,” says Bierman. “And we've just started warming the climate.”

“We use the past to try to understand the future and understand the present,” Bierman continues. “And that makes the future a little frightening. Not that we should run from it—but to me, it's a call for action.”

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Fifteen seconds before 5.30 am on July 16, 1945, above an area of New Mexico desert so unforgivingly dry that earlier travelers christened it the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man), a new sun flashed into existence and rose rapidly into the sky. It was a little before dawn.

This strange, early daybreak was the Trinity Test: humanity’s first encounter with the atomic bomb. Within a month, two bombs were dropped on Japan: the first, “Little Boy,” a uranium weapon, at Hiroshima; the second, “Fat Man,” a plutonium weapon of the implosion design tested at Trinity, on Nagasaki. Casualty estimates vary widely, but perhaps as many as 150-250,000 people died as a direct result of these two events. The following half-century was one of intense nuclear testing, the residue of which might be the signature for the proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene.

The extraordinary story of the Manhattan Project, which led to this point, has been told many times. It begins with the realization that atomic weapons, releasing vast amounts of energy via a nuclear chain reaction, were possible. It includes a 1939 letter, signed by Albert Einstein, alerting President Roosevelt to the dangers of a German atomic bomb program, and tells how, following the United States’ entry into the second world war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the program accelerated rapidly under the control of General Leslie Groves.

The Manhattan Project absorbed the British and Canadian “Tube Alloys” atomic program and drew on a dazzling array of scientific talent. More than a purely scientific endeavor, it was an engineering and industrial enterprise on a massive scale, employing about 130,000 people at its peak and perhaps half a million cumulatively.

Site Y was a town built from scratch to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here, under the scientific directorship of J Robert Oppenheimer — a complex, charismatic figure (so famous after the war that he was instantly recognizable by his porkpie hat) — scientists, including many who’d fled Nazi persecution in Europe and were acutely aware of what a Nazi bomb might mean, built the “gadget” tested at Trinity.

By then, though, circumstances had changed. In late 1944, as Allied forces advanced across Europe, it became apparent that the German bomb program had stalled years before. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 and Germany’s defeat in May, the Trinity Test was prioritized so Harry Truman, the new president, would have news of it when he met Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam conference.

Trinity is a striking moment. Scientists, military personnel, and observers gathered in observation bunkers 10,000 yards from ground zero, at a base camp ten miles away, and at Compañia Hill, 20 miles away. Overnight, thunder, lightning, and rain swept across the area, imperiling the test.

Don Hornig, the last man to “babysit” the bomb in its metal shack at the top of a 100ft tower, recalls passing the time by reading an anthology of humorous writing, Desert Island Decameron, by the light of a 60-watt bulb. He hoped the wet tower would act as a lightning rod if there were any lightning strikes. The alternative was sobering, but he appears to have been philosophical: “It would set the bomb off. And in that case, I’d never know about it! So I read my book.”

At a 2 am conference, Groves threatened hard-pressed project meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, insisting he signs his forecast predicting conditions would clear by dawn and promising to “hang” him if they didn’t. Groves then roused New Mexico’s governor by phone, warning him he might have to declare martial law if things went wrong. By 4 am, the skies were clearing.

As 5.30 approached, people readied themselves with the welder’s glass to view the test. At Compañia Hill, the physicist, Edward Teller, passed around sun cream. At S-10000, the main control bunker, an exhausted Oppenheimer, leaned against a post to steady himself as the final seconds ticked away and was heard to mutter: “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.”

The story of the Manhattan Project often ends with the controversial use of the bomb on Japan or goes on to tell about the leaking of atomic secrets by Klaus Fuchs and the first Soviet atomic test in 1949. It might add that Oppenheimer, frequently portrayed as a tragic figure, had his security clearance revoked amid the anti-communist hysteria of the early 1950s.

A NEW WORLD

Now, 75 years on, it’s worth isolating Trinity from this complex history to ask what that early morning moment in the remote desert meant. It was here, after all, that humans first encountered phenomena that were to haunt the cold war imagination and still shape how many imagine potential nuclear futures: the atomic flash, the mushroom cloud, and radioactive fallout.

Although this was a new human experience (Norris Bradbury, who succeeded Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, noted that “the atom bomb did not fit into any preconceptions possessed by anybody”), it was processed through cultural traditions with long histories. It’s become an origin story in nuclear mythologies.

Writers repeatedly return to Trinity as a moment pregnant with meaning. In the 21st century alone, it’s featured in novels by, among others, Lydia Millet, Ellen Klages, Nora Gallagher, TaraShea Nesbit, Elizabeth J Church, and Louisa Hall, and there are notable earlier examples, including those by Pearl Buck, Leslie Marmon Silko and Joseph Kanon. It’s been depicted by poets from William E Stafford to John Canaday and Hannah Cooper-Smithson, and on stage by Tom Morton-Smith. It features music in genres ranging from rock to opera.

This fascination with Trinity shows how it’s not only an important historical moment but a critical cultural one too. As the old sun crept above the horizon a few minutes after the test, many present were in little doubt it was rising on a new world.

THE BRIGHTEST LIGHT

In both eyewitness accounts and in fiction, Trinity is described as a moment of rupture and rapture: rupture because it marks the transition from a pre-nuclear to a nuclear age; rapture because the encounter with dazzling light and power overwhelming the senses has the quality of religious experience.

Of course, there can be distortion in such accounts. The popular tendency to see the atomic bomb as the definitive nuclear technology marginalizes fields like nuclear medicine and ignores the intellectual richness of the nuclear sciences.

And there are other candidates for the beginning of the nuclear age: Hiroshima, for sure, but also perhaps the creation of the first self-sustaining chain reaction by Enrico Fermi’s team in Chicago in 1942, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch’s description of fission in 1939, James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron in 1932, and Ernest Rutherford’s “splitting” (depending how one defines this) of the atom in 1917. The very notion of a singular beginning to the nuclear age is fiction: each moment exists only in the context of others.

Yet, Trinity was experienced as a new dawn. This is particularly apparent in the recurring metaphor of the explosion as a sun. For William Laurence of the New York Times, observing the test from 20 miles away at Compañia Hill, it was:

Sunrise such as the world has never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than 8,000 feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling intensity.

Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator, noted the transition “from darkness to brilliant sunshine, in an instant.”

Perhaps the description by Isidor Rabi, discoverer of nuclear magnetic resonance (used in MRI scans), is the most compelling:

The brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision that was seen with more than the eye.

The experience is corporeal here: the light has heft and is felt by the body. Its revelatory characteristics are picked up in the literature of the Trinity Test. In Lydia Millet’s novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, the flash is a “sear of lightness.” In Joseph Kanon’s thriller Los Alamos, the protagonist “closed his eyes for a second, but it was there anyway, this amazing light as if it didn’t need sight to exist.” In John Canaday’s poem, Victor Weisskopf, “a sun erupted.”

Laurence, whose reporting on the bomb won a Pulitzer, saw Trinity as crystallizing a new relation with the universe. There, he wrote, “an elemental force [was] freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years” as, for the first time, humans used an energy source that “does not have its origin in the sun.” “All seemed to feel,” wrote Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, General Groves’s deputy, “that they had been present at the birth of a new age – the Age of Atomic Energy.”

FIRE FROM THE GODS

Stories of human acquisition of knowledge and power have deep roots in Western culture. In Greek myth, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and is punished by being chained to a rock, his liver torn out daily by an eagle, only to grow back that he might be tormented again. One of the most substantial biographies of Oppenheimer names him, in its title, The American Prometheus.

In 1946, reflecting on the moment of the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer himself saw the analogy: “We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it.”

The most famous of Oppenheimer’s words to describe the Trinity, the lines from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” – first appearing in print in 1948 but frequently repeated subsequently – reinforce this sense of an encounter with divine forces. They are, for instance, the final words in Tom Morton-Smith’s play Oppenheimer. They are invoked, too, though not actually spoken or sung, when the chorus sings lines from the Gita in John Adams’ opera, Doctor Atomic.

So much part of the mythology are these words that it’s sometimes erroneously assumed Oppenheimer actually said them at Trinity. His brother Frank’s recollection was that he simply said: “It worked”. It’s important, too, to be wary of where the mythmaking might take us. As the nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein points out, the words from the Gita are unlikely to be the hubristic statement of Oppenheimer’s triumph they might seem.

They are often contrasted with the rather blunter assessment of Kenneth Bainbridge, in charge of the test, who commented to Oppenheimer, “Now we are all sons of bitches”.

The phrase’s attraction is, I think, its ambiguity. It’s portentous but open to interpretation, gesturing toward something important in humanity’s encounter with greater powers (perhaps a Faustian bargain struck between the purity of physics and the real-world horror of military technology) without quite stating it. A similar suggestiveness surely accounts, too, for the proliferation of the famous (but possibly erroneous) story that Trinity was named by Oppenheimer for a metaphysical poem by John Donne:

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, overthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

It opens up interesting creative possibilities. In her novel Trinity, Louisa Hall imagines Donne’s poem to be one admired by Jean Tatlock, with whom Oppenheimer had an intense relationship but who died in 1944. In Doctor Atomic, the poem’s words comprise the lyrics of the moving aria closing the first act.

Unsurprisingly, Christian traditions of the acquisition of knowledge and of the relation with God are also invoked at Trinity. Oppenheimer famously stated in a lecture in 1947 that “the physicists have known sin,” a statement controversial among his colleagues.

There is, then, furious mythmaking around both Trinity and Oppenheimer. It transforms Oppenheimer from an actual person into a compelling, tragic figure. It transforms the atomic bomb into a technology that symbolizes broader anxieties about the relations between ourselves, our technologies, and the Earth.

BEAUTY AND TERROR

Stories about the atomic explosion also conjure up the aesthetic tradition of the sublime, perhaps the dominant means through which encounters with nature have been processed in Western societies since the Romantic period. In the art of the sublime, extremity of experience — the wildness and grandeur of nature one might encounter in a storm at sea, for instance — is emphasized.

The sublime evokes both beauty and terror. For Farrell, Groves’s deputy, the explosion was “magnificent, beautiful” and “terrifying.” In Ellen Klages’ young adult novel, The Green Glass Sea, a witness describes Trinity, saying, “It was beautiful. It was terrifying”. These are experiences of awe in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “a feeling of fear or dread, mixed with profound reverence, typically as inspired by God or the divine.”

Indeed, Edwin McMillan, one of the physicists, described “the immediate reaction of the watchers as one of awe,” and Frisch, Farrell, Bainbridge, and Robert Wilson all use the word “awesome” to describe their own responses.

Farrell said of the test that it appeared as “that beauty that great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.” He is, in fact, remarkably eloquent, as this description of the desert landscape, lit by Trinity, shows:

The whole country was lighted by a searing light with intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, violet, grey, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.

Pearl Buck’s novel about the Manhattan Project, Command the Morning (1959), seems to draw on this description. Stephen Coast, a (fictional) project scientist, sees:

The sky burst into blinding light. Miles away, the mountains were black and then glittered into brilliant relief in the searing light. Color splashed over the landscape, yellow, purple, crimson, and grey. Every fold in the mountain sprang into bold lines, every valley was revealed, every peak stood stark.

The proliferation of adjectives chase after the experience as if they can’t keep up with the boiling profusion of colors. Characteristically, here, the sublime exceeds language’s capacity to capture it.

TRINITITE AND TRANSMUTATION

Of course, what’s important about eyewitness and literary descriptions is not merely that they fit Trinity into established aesthetic traditions but that the fit is uncomfortable. There are religious connotations to the dazzling light and overwhelming power of the explosion, but the forces encountered aren’t divine. Feelings aroused by the sublime are displaced uncannily when the source is technology, not nature.

In an essay on the atomic sublime, the scholar, Peter Hales, shows how the threat of the mushroom cloud was eventually somewhat tamed by being mediated through the aesthetics of the sublime. Trinity, though, provides a compelling origin story in nuclear mythologies precisely because, in 1945, it was too new to be contained by that tradition. Even the familiar term, “mushroom cloud,” wasn’t yet readily available to name what rose into the sky (Frisch thought it both “a bit like a strawberry … slowly rising into the sky from the ground, with which it remained connected by a lengthening stem of whirling dust”, and “a red-hot elephant standing balanced on its trunk”).

Trinity is unsettling. The experience evoked intimations of the world’s end that were later frequently associated with nuclear weapons. George Kistiakowsky, who led the group building explosive lenses for the gadget, said Trinity was “the nearest thing to doomsday that one could possibly imagine.”

As the mushroom cloud boiled upwards, one military official, perhaps spooked by Enrico Fermi’s mischievous taking of bets on whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and, if so, whether it would destroy the whole world or just New Mexico (a possibility actually discussed, but ruled out well in advance of the test), apparently lost faith in the “long-hairs,” as the scientists were sometimes referred to by the soldiers at Los Alamos. “My God,” he’s said to have exclaimed, “the long hairs have lost control!”

Trinity presaged an era when the absurdity of extinction replaced a divinely ordained judgment day as the dominant vision of the end of the world: Dr. Strangelove instead of the Book of Revelation.

Frequently, then, Trinity is a story about entering an unsettling new era. The Green Glass Sea captures this beautifully. The desert sand was melted by the test into a glassy substance, dubbed trinitite or Alamogordo glass. The novel’s young protagonist traverses this beautiful, alien world that came into being 75 years ago:

The ground sloped gently downward into a huge green sea. Dewey took a few more steps and saw that it wasn’t water. It was glass. Translucent jade-green glass was everywhere, coloring the bare, empty desert as far ahead as she could see.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Daniel Cordle at Nottingham Trent University. Read the original article here.

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Dangerous heatwaves in Europe could break further records, the UN says.

It is hard to immediately link these events to climate change because weather - and oceans - are so complex.

Studies are under way, but scientists already fear some worst-case scenarios are unfolding.

"I'm not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory," Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at London School of Economics, says.

"The Earth is in uncharted territory" now due to global warming from burning fossil fuels, as well as heat from the first El Niño - a warming natural weather system - since 2018, says Imperial College London climate science lecturer Dr Paulo Ceppi.

Here are four climate records broken so far this summer - the hottest day on record, the hottest June on record globally, extreme marine heatwaves, record-low Antarctic sea-ice - and what they tell us.

The world experienced its hottest day ever recorded in July, breaking the global average temperature record set in 2016.

Average global temperature topped 17C for the first time, reaching 17.08C on 6 July, according to EU climate monitoring service Copernicus.

Ongoing emissions from burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, and gas are behind the planet's warming trend.

This is exactly what was forecast to happen in a world warmed by more greenhouse gases, says climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto, from Imperial College London.

"Humans are 100% behind the upward trend," she says.

"If I'm surprised by anything, it's that we're seeing the records broken in June, so earlier in the year. El Niño normally doesn't really have a global impact until five or six months into the phase," Dr Smith says.

El Niño is the world's most powerful naturally occurring climate fluctuation. It brings warmer water to the surface in the tropical Pacific, pushing warmer air into the atmosphere. It normally increases global air temperatures.

The average global temperature in June this year was 1.47C above the typical June in the pre-industrial period. Humans started pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when the Industrial Revolution started around 1800.

Asked if summer 2023 is what he would have forecasted a decade ago, Dr Smith says that climate models are good at predicting long-term trends but less good at forecasting the next 10 years.

"Models from the 1990s pretty much put us where we are today. But to have an idea about what the next 10 years would look like exactly would be very difficult," he says.

"Things aren't going to cool down," he adds.

Extreme marine heatwaves

The average global ocean temperature has smashed records for May, June and July. It is approaching the highest sea surface temperature ever recorded, which was in 2016.

But it is extreme heat in the North Atlantic ocean that is particularly alarming scientists.

"We've never ever had a marine heatwave in this part of Atlantic. I had not expected this," says Daniela Schmidt, Prof of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Marine heatwave in the North Atlantic

Daily sea surface temperature April - July 2023, compared with 1985-1993 average

Press play to see the map animated.

Source: NOAA (1985-1993 reference period recommended by NOAA as representative conditions)

In June temperatures off the west coast of Ireland were between 4C and 5C above average, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration classified as a category 5 heatwave, or "beyond extreme".

Directly attributing this heatwave to climate change is complex, but that work is ongoing, Prof Schmidt says.

What is clear is that the world has warmed and the oceans have absorbed most of that heat from the atmosphere, she explains.

"Our models have natural variability in them, and there are still things appearing that we had not envisaged, or at least not yet," she adds.

She emphasises the impact of this heat on marine ecosystems, which produce 50% of the world's oxygen.

"People tend to think about trees and grasses dying when we talk about heatwaves. The Atlantic is 5C warmer than it should be - that means organisms need 50% more food just to function as normal," she says.

Record low Antarctic sea-ice

The area covered by sea-ice in the Antarctic is at record lows for July. There is an area around 10 times the size of the UK missing, compared with the 1981-2010 average.

Alarm bells are ringing for scientists as they try to unpick the exact link to climate change.

A warming world could reduce levels of Antarctic sea-ice, but the current dramatic reduction could also be due to local weather conditions or ocean currents, explains Dr Caroline Holmes at the British Antarctic Survey.

She emphasises it is not just a record being broken - it is being smashed by a long way.

"This is nothing like anything we've seen before in July. It's 10% lower than the previous low, which is huge."

She calls it "another sign that we don't really understand the pace of change".

Scientists believed that global warming would affect Antarctic sea-ice at some point, but until 2015 it bucked the global trend for other oceans, Dr Holmes says.

"You can say that we've fallen off a cliff, but we don't know what's at the bottom of the cliff here," she says.

"I think this has taken us by surprise in terms of the speed of which has happened. It's definitely not the best case scenario that we were looking at - it's closer to the worst case," she says.

We can certainly expect more and more of these records to break as the year goes on and we enter 2024, scientists say.

But it would be wrong to call what is happening a "climate collapse" or "runaway warming", cautions Dr Otto.

We are in a new era, but "we still have time to secure a liveable future for many", she explains.

Additional reporting by Mark Poynting and Becky Dale

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Cannabis use, both recent and long-term, has been linked to epigenetic changes in a new study. The researchers found evidence that the drug is associated with DNA methylation, a chemical alteration to the DNA inside human cells. With almost half of adults in the US having tried cannabis at least once, according to some estimates, the findings help shed more light on its potential long-term effects.

Humans have been using cannabis recreationally for thousands of years, but for much of our recent history, the practice was criminalized in many countries. That has started to change, with growing interest in the drug’s medicinal applications as well as calls for legalization in a number of hold-out regions. However, some studies have raised alarm bells by finding that, among other potential risks of long-term use, cannabis may be associated with psychiatric disorders, and that there appears to be a lack of robust evidence to back up some of the most widespread claims about its medical uses.

Against this backdrop, there’s a need to add to the scientific understanding of the effects of cannabis on the human body. A recent study aimed to find out more about what the drug could be doing to our DNA.

“Despite its growing popularity, as well as recent legalization by several states, the effect of marijuana on epigenetic factors has not been well studied,” explained senior author of the study, Dr Lifang Hou, in a statement.

Epigenetic modifications do not alter the fundamental sequence of our DNA. Instead, they are additional changes that affect how these DNA sequences are “read” by the cellular machinery. One of the best-studied mechanisms of epigenetic change is DNA methylation. Methyl groups – small molecules consisting of one carbon and three hydrogen atoms – can be tacked onto a strand of DNA, preventing neighboring genes from being expressed.

“We previously identified associations between marijuana use and the aging process as captured through DNA methylation. We wanted to further explore whether specific epigenetic factors were associated with marijuana and whether these factors are related to health outcomes,” said Hou.

The researchers analyzed blood samples from over 900 people who had previously participated in a large study called CARDIA (Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults). Samples taken five years apart were assessed for each person, and they were also surveyed about their cannabis use.

The team found 22 DNA methylation markers associated with recent cannabis use, and 31 markers associated with cumulative use in the first set of samples. In the second batch of samples, 132 markers associated with recent drug use and 16 associated with cumulative use were identified.

“In our study, we observed associations between cumulative marijuana use and multiple epigenetic markers across time,” Hou summarized. “Interestingly, we consistently identified one marker that has previously been associated with tobacco use, suggesting a potential shared epigenetic regulation between tobacco and marijuana use. The observed marijuana markers were also associated with cell proliferation, infection and psychiatric disorders, however, additional studies are needed to replicate and verify these findings.”

The authors stress that it’s too soon to say whether the links between cannabis and DNA methylation, or between DNA methylation and health outcomes, are causal. The findings add to previous work that found a possible association between cannabis use and epigenetic changes, but highlight the need for more research into the long-term effects of cannabis use – something that is still lacking despite the most recent statistics finding that roughly 18 percent of Americans used the drug at least once during 2019.

“Additional studies are needed to determine whether these associations are consistently observed in different populations,” explained first author Dr Drew Nannini. “Moreover, studies examining the effect of marijuana on age-related health outcomes may provide further insight into the long-term effect of marijuana on health.”

The study is published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. 

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The majority of the world’s clothing is made in China, literally on the other side of the world from Chile. However, huge quantities of the clothes that aren’t sold in Europe, North America, and Asia end up here. 

Leftover and second-hand clothes are sold to merchants who receive the imports through Iquique port in the Alto Hospicio free zone, northern Chile. While buyers from the capital of Santiago in the south of Chile purchase some of the clothing and redistribute it around Latin America and beyond, much of it remains unsold and is eventually dumped in the Atacama Desert, a conventionally remote and vast desert hundreds of kilometers away. 

An investigation by Greenpeace Germany in 2021 found that up to 20 tons of old clothes end up being illegally dumped in the Atacama Desert each day on average. In total, it's amassed into a pile of some 39,000 tons of discarded textiles, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. 

A view of the problem.

The mounting problem is a relatively recent one. It’s estimated that global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, with the average consumer now buying 60 percent more pieces of garment compared to the early 2000s. Simultaneously, people keep each piece of clothing for just half as long as they used to. 

Altogether, an estimated 87 percent of discarded textiles are chucked away and end up in landfill, despite the vast majority being viable for recycling and repurposing. 

Beyond its heaps of clothing, the Atacama Desert is a fascinating and unique place. Squished between the Pacific Ocean and Andes Mountains, it’s the driest place on earth, other than the poles, where some areas haven’t seen a drop of rain for centuries. It’s such an otherworldly landscape, NASA uses it to train scientists who are set to look for signs of life on Mars. 

The piles of clothing in portions of the Atacama Desert are merely the visible impact of the clothing industry, however. One of the big issues is water usage. Cloth manufacturing uses some 93 billion cubic meters of water each year, enough to meet the needs of five million people.

Along with water usage and the physical pollution it leaves behind, fast fashion also has a substantial impact on greenhouse gas emissions that lead to climate change. 

Research suggests that the fashion and textiles industry was responsible for some 2.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2018, about 4 percent of the global total. That’s more than all maritime shipping and international flights combined.

“The global production of clothing and footwear generates 8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and, with manufacturing concentrated in Asia, the industry is mainly reliant on hard coal and natural gas to generate electricity and heat. If we carry on with a business-as-usual approach, the greenhouse gas emissions from the industry are expected to rise by almost 50% by 2030,” Elisa Tonda, Head of the Consumption and Production Unit at the UN Environment Programme, said in a statement in 2019.

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Zebby, a two-year-old black and white cat, has been the ears for his 66-year-old owner Genevieve Moss, who is deaf and lives alone in Chesterfield, England.

“Whether it’s the phone ringing, someone at the door or a sound in the night, Zebby will tap Genevieve’s face or pace in front of her, alerting her that she needs to put on her hearing aid,” reads a description of Zebby on the website of UK feline welfare charity, Cats Protection.

Zebby was not trained for the job, but his helpfulness and exemplary performance had clearly won over those who vote at the National Cat Awards.

Besides winning the Family Fur-ever category, which honoured cats that “go the extra mile” for families across the UK, Zebby also beat thousands of other competitors and emerged the overall winner.

On July 17, Cats Protection crowned Zebby the National Cat Of The Year, which comes with prizes including a trophy and a £200 pet store voucher.

“I can’t imagine life without Zebby and I’m over the moon that he’s been honoured in the National Cat Awards. Living on my own and being deaf means life could be lonely, but not with Zebby around – he’s my hero,” said Ms Moss.

“I am so proud of Zebby for showing the world how intuitive and caring cats can be, and what a positive effect they can have on people’s lives.”

According to Ms Moss, Zebby also brings her mail to her bedroom, and delivers her slippers to her if he finds them “somewhere other than (her) feet”.

In a video posted by Cat Protection, Ms Moss said it was very difficult being deaf and living alone. One night, she was burgled when she was not wearing her hearing aid.

Zebby alerts his owner Genevieve when she needs to put on her hearing aid. PHOTO: SCREENGRAB FROM CAT PROTECTION/YOUTUBE

“Right from being very small, Zebby sensed that I had difficulty hearing, and he’s become my night watchman, my postman and guardian, ” she said.

“He seems to know that when the phone rings, he needs to alert me. At night time, if my security light goes on, he seems to know to wake me up, and he does so by tapping my face.”

Ms Moss added that she used to be scared to go to sleep, but she says she can now sleep knowing that Zebby would be there.

Other categories in the annual National Cat Awards include Cat Colleagues, for cats that “enhance the 9-5 or make working from home a joy”, Moggy Marvels, which focuses on “jaw-dropping tales of moggy brilliance”, and Social Star, which focuses on cats “spreading joy across the online world”.

Winners of these categories are determined via a public vote. All four category winners were then reviewed by a panel of independent judges who would determine one overall “National Cat of the Year”.

According to its website, Cats Protection helps an average of 157,000 cats and kittens every year, with the help of a network of more than 210 volunteer-run branches and 34 centres.

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The animal is said to have found the baby girl in a bin bag at the town hall in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli on Wednesday. 

The dog then began dragging the bag with the newborn inside and a passer-by heard a crying sound coming from it, The National reports.

The baby was taken to the Islamic Hospital, before being transferred to the Tripoli Government Hospital. 

Her condition was described as having been serious but stable, with people describing her survival as a ‘miracle’.

Pictures of the baby have been shared online showing she sustained bruising and cuts during the horrific ordeal, but she is said to have recovered quickly.

There has been widespread outrage in the country and condemnation of the heinous act, with many pointing out that the dog ‘has more humanity’ than the ‘criminal’ parents.

‘Some say that the dog is an unclean animal and, of course, this is not true,’ one commentator, Farid, said on Twitter.

‘The dog has much more humanity, kindness, cunning and intelligence.’

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Also:  Baby Carried To Saftey By Stray Dog After Being Abandoned In Trash.

Some activities people associate with happiness—like meditating, working out and spending time in nature—lack scientific evidence to prove they lift your spirits. 

Self-help websites and news articles often suggest these activities are mood boosters, but most peer-reviewed studies that argue for such a link are weak or inconclusive. Partly to blame are older practices in psychology that allowed scientists to use small sample sizes and massage the data to find results when in truth there were none, researchers say in a paper published Thursday in the journal Nature Human Behavior. 

Some years ago, a journalist asked psychologist Elizabeth Dunn if strategies for happiness that commonly appeared in news stories were backed by strong evidence. Dunn, who studies happiness at the University of British Columbia in Canada, didn’t know the answer. So she set out to find out.  

“People Google ‘how to be happy’ more often than ‘how to be rich,’” she said. “We wanted to understand: What answers are they getting?”

Dunn and Dunigan Folk, a doctoral student in Dunn’s lab at the University of British Columbia, worked with a team to compile news articles in the first 10 pages of search results in response to variations on the query: “How to be happy.” The five activities recommended most often were expressing gratitude, being social, exercising, spending time in nature and meditating. 

Dunn and Folk then scoured the scientific literature for studies that examined the effects of each activity on moods. They gathered 494 peer-reviewed papers involving healthy people, in which one of the five happiness strategies was evaluated against a control group. But when they weeded out weakly designed work, only 57 robust studies were left.

The vast majority of the papers were too poorly designed to support their conclusions.  

This remaining subset of studies met at least one of two conditions for good science: They included sufficient numbers of study participants or the researchers committed to hypotheses or study plans before analyzing their data.

Meditating is one of the practices that has been associated with happiness. PHOTO: LYNNE SLADKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

But even these studies failed to confirm that three of the five activities the researchers analyzed reliably made people happy. Studies attempting to establish that spending time in nature, meditating and exercising had either weak or inconclusive results.

“The evidence just melts away when you actually look at it closely,” Dunn said.

There was better evidence for the two other tasks. The team found “reasonably solid evidence” that expressing gratitude made people happy, and “solid evidence” that talking to strangers improves mood.

The new findings reflect a reform movement under way in psychology and other scientific disciplines with scientists setting higher standards for study design to ensure the validity of the results.

To that end, scientists are including more subjects in their studies because small sample sizes can miss a signal or indicate a trend where there isn’t one. They are openly sharing data so others can check or replicate their analyses. And they are committing to their hypotheses before running a study in a practice known as “pre-registering.” 

Pre-registering involves submitting plans for analyses to independent registries that research peers can access. Committing to a research design up front discourages researchers from burying negative results when the data don’t support the hypotheses and inoculates against “p-hacking,” where data is selected or manipulated to falsely yield a statistically significant result.

The practice drastically improves the credibility of findings, said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville, Va., that champions rigor in research. 

Spending time in nature is another activity often recommended as a mood booster. PHOTO: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

A handful of scandals in psychology in the 2010s—including a bombshell paper that demonstrated the danger of p-hacking by showing, tongue-in-cheek, that people who listened to the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four” grew younger—sent shock waves through the field and forced researchers to re-examine the status quo. 

“It was really a wake-up call,” Dunn said of the Beatles study. “We really changed everything about how we do science.” 

In the decade since, “the goal posts have shifted,” said Sonja Lyubomirsky, an experimental social psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, who wasn’t involved with the study but commented on an early draft. 

“This is really important as a paper that will galvanize researchers in the field to make sure that all of our studies going forward are well-powered and preregistered,” she said of the new work. 

This reform isn’t limited to psychology. “Every field that has bothered to look at issues of rigor and reproducibility in their evidence has found challenges,” Nosek said.

Lyubomirsky said the new analysis won’t persuade her to stop exercising or take nature walks to improve her mood, because future studies could establish that those activities are linked to happiness. 

For the full story, she said, “We really need those big studies.”

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In July 1945, as J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other researchers of the Manhattan Project prepared to test their brand-new atomic bomb in a New Mexico desert, they knew relatively little about how that mega-weapon would behave.

On July 16, when the plutonium-implosion device was set off atop a hundred-foot metal tower in a test code-named “Trinity,” the resultant blast was much stronger than anticipated. The irradiated mushroom cloud also went many times higher into the atmosphere than expected: some 50,000 to 70,000 feet. Where it would ultimately go was anyone’s guess.

A new study, released on Thursday ahead of submission to a scientific journal for peer review, shows that the cloud and its fallout went farther than anyone in the Manhattan Project had imagined in 1945. Using state-of-the-art modeling software and recently uncovered historical weather data, the study’s authors say that radioactive fallout from the Trinity test reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico within 10 days of detonation.

“It’s a huge finding and, at the same time, it shouldn’t surprise anyone,” said the study’s lead author, Sébastien Philippe, a researcher and scientist at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.

The study also reanalyzed fallout from all 93 aboveground U.S. atomic tests in Nevada and created a map depicting composite deposition of radioactive material across the contiguous U.S. (The team also hopes to study U.S. tests over the Pacific Ocean in the future).

How much of Trinity’s fallout still remain at original deposition sites across the country is difficult to calculate, said Susan Alzner, an author of the study and the co-founder of shift7, an organization that coordinated the study’s research. The study documents deposition as it originally hit the ground in 1945.

“It’s a frozen-in-time image,” she said.

< Watch the video here. >

The findings could be cited by advocates aiming to increase the number of people eligible for compensation by the federal government for potential exposure to radiation from atmospheric nuclear explosions.

The drift of the Trinity cloud was monitored by Manhattan Project physicists and doctors, but they underestimated its reach.

“They were aware that there were radioactive hazards, but they were thinking about acute risk in the areas around the immediate detonation site,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, said. They had little understanding, he said, about how the radioactive materials could embed in ecosystems, near and far. “They were not really thinking about effects of low doses on large populations, which is exactly what the fallout problem is.”

At the time, Dr. Stafford L. Warren, a Manhattan Project physician specializing in nuclear medicine, reported to Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project, that the Trinity cloud “remained towering over the northeast corner of the site for several hours.” Soon, he added, “various levels were seen to move in different directions.” Dr. Warren assured General Groves that an assessment of the fallout’s reach could be undertaken later on horseback.

In the decades that followed, a lack of crucial data has bedeviled assessments and attempted studies of the Trinity test’s fallout. The U.S. had no national monitoring stations in place in 1945 to track the fallout, Dr. Philippe said. Plus, essential historical weather and atmospheric data was available only from 1948 onward. Remodeling fallout from tests in Nevada — starting in 1951 — was easier, but Trinity remained frustratingly difficult to reanalyze.

“The data sets for the Nevada tests and the available data that we could possibly find for Trinity were not comparable,” Ms. Alzner said. “You couldn’t put them on the same map. We decided to keep pushing.”

“Show to Dr. Opp”: An envelope sent to General Groves contained contaminated film scans from Rochester, N.Y., an early indicator that the fallout from the Trinity test was spreading nationwide.Credit...National Archives and Records Administration

Determined to fill in the gaps, the team started the study about 18 months ago. Dr. Philippe has extensive background in modeling fallout and was an author of a similar project in 2021 that documented the effects from French nuclear tests.

A breakthrough came in March, when Ms. Alzner and Megan Smith, another co-founder of shift7 and a former United States chief technology officer in the Obama administration, contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There, Gilbert P. Compo, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado and the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, told the team that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts had only a week earlier released historical data that charted weather patterns extending 30,000 feet or higher above Earth’s surface.

“For the first time, we had the most accurate hourly reconstruction of the weather back to 1940, around the world,” said Dr. Compo, who became a co-author on the study. “Every single event that puts something in the air, no matter what it is, can now be tracked, by the hour.”

Using the new data and software built by NOAA, Dr. Philippe then reanalyzed Trinity’s fallout. And while the study’s authors acknowledge limitations and uncertainties within their calculations, they maintain that “our estimates likely remain conservatively low.”

“It’s a very comprehensive, well-executed study,” said M. V. Ramana, professor and Simons chair in disarmament, global and human security at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in the study. Dr. Ramana was unsurprised by the study’s findings about Trinity. “I expected that the old estimates were understating what was actually deposited,” he said.

The results show that New Mexico was heavily affected by Trinity’s fallout. Computations by Dr. Philippe and his colleagues show the cloud’s trajectory primarily spreading up over northeast New Mexico and a part of the cloud circling to the south and west of ground zero over the next few days. The researchers wrote that there are “locations in New Mexico where radionuclide deposition reached levels on par with Nevada.”

Trinity’s fallout, Dr. Philippe says, accounts for 87 percent of total deposition found across New Mexico, which also received deposition from Nevada’s aboveground tests. The study also found that Socorro County — where the Trinity test took place — has the fifth highest deposition per county of all counties in the United States.

Trinity test “downwinders” — a term describing people who have lived near nuclear test sites and may have been exposed to deadly radioactive fallout — have never been eligible for compensation under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). It has provided over $2.5 billion in payments to nuclear workers in much of the Western U.S. and to downwinders who were located near the Nevada test site and may have developed cancer or other diseases as a result of radiation exposure.

“Despite the Trinity test taking place in New Mexico, many New Mexicans were left out of the original RECA legislation and nobody has ever been able to explain why,” said Senator Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat. He has helped lead efforts in Congress to expand and extend the legislation, currently due to sunset in 2024.

Census data from 1940 shows that as many as 500,000 people were living within a 150-mile radius of the test site. Some families lived as close as 12 miles away, according to the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Yet no civilians were warned about the test ahead of time, and they weren't evacuated before or after the test.

“This new information about the Trinity bomb is monumental and a long time coming,” Tina Cordova, a co-founder of the consortium, said. “We’ve been waiting for an affirmation of the histories told by generations of people from Tularosa who witnessed the Trinity bomb and talked about how the ash fell from the sky for days afterward.”

The study also documents significant deposition in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and Idaho, as well as dozens of federally-recognized tribal lands, potentially strengthening the case for people seeking expanded compensation in those areas.

Although Dr. Wellerstein said that he approaches such reanalyses of historical fallout with a certain amount of uncertainty, partly because of the age of the data, he said there is value in such studies by keeping nuclear history and its legacy in the public discourse.

“The extent to which America nuked itself is not completely appreciated still, to this day, by most Americans, especially younger Americans,” he said.

A correction was made on July 20, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled a researcher’s surname. He is Sébastien Philippe, not Phillippe

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