A young Indian physicist was under pressure. His heart was set on working in the field of general relativity – the study of space, time, and gravity.

But the director of his institute stood in the way. The physicist was told that he had to work on a field of the director’s choosing, or leave. He still kept at it, working on the mysteries of gravity in his spare time.

He ended up writing the most significant paper on general relativity to have come out of India. 

This young physicist was Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri. The central result of his paper, published in 1955, is now known as the Raychaudhuri equation. It was important to the work of Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and others – work that revolutionised general relativity.

This year is Raychaudhuri’s birth centenary.

A breakdown in the theory

Raychaudhuri was born in Barisal (now in Bangladesh) in 1923 and educated in Kolkata. After completing his MSc in physics from Science College, he joined the Indian Association of Cultivation of Science (IACS) to pursue experimental physics research.

While the work didn’t suit him and he eventually dropped out, he discovered in the IACS library his deep interest in general relativity.

Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri in 1991. | Photo Credit: IUCAA

Albert Einstein had developed the theory of general relativity in 1916, seven years before Raychaudhuri was born. Before Einstein, gravity was believed to be a force that attracted massive objects towards each other. But general relativity explained gravity to be the result of massive objects bending the fabric of space and time around them.

The theory had a problem, however. It predicted that at certain points in space and time, gravity could become infinitely strong. In other words, space and time could become infinitely curved. All matter in the vicinity would get pulled in and converge at those points. Such points are called singularities, and that the theory allowed for them signalled a breakdown of the theory itself.

A barrier

In Raychaudhuri’s time, it was an open problem as to whether the singularities were bugs introduced by the unrealistic simplicity of the models – or features of reality itself. The question was unsolved because realistic models of the universe were notoriously difficult to solve mathematically.

Raychaudhuri was looking for the answer. Working as a scientific officer in IACS, a position well below a faculty member, he dove into the topic – and immediately hit a snag in the form of the director of the institution, Meghnad Saha.

Saha is one of the greatest Indian scientists in history. But as director, he could be a micromanager. He deemed general relativity to be too impractical a topic to work on. He told Raychaudhuri to work either on more ‘useful’ topics or find another job. With few career options available to him, Raychaudhuri had no choice but to comply.

But he did not give up on gravity. Even as he worked on the topics chosen for him by Saha, Raychaudhuri pursued the problem of singularities in his spare time. Soon, he hit on a highly original approach that entirely bypassed the mathematical challenges.

The north-bound ships

According to general relativity, every bit of matter tries to move in a straight line in space and time. But space and time are themselves bent by massive objects.

As an analogy to how matter moves in a curved spacetime, consider a couple of ships that start sailing in parallel. Both the ships travel north. Even if they sail in the straightest possible line, following their bows, they will end up converging at the North Pole. To someone who is not aware (or, more likely, in denial) of the shape of the earth, it would look like the ships had been pulled together.

Similarly, when a passing asteroid gets sucked into the earth’s atmosphere, it is because the earth’s mass has warped the fabric of spacetime around it. The straightest possible path in this curved fabric leads directly to earth.

Raychaudhuri studied the motion of bits of matter navigating the fabric of spacetime. Each bit followed the straightest path in space-time. He found that, just like the north-bound ships, the bits of matter were bound to converge to a single point as long as they had positive energy.

More accurately, he considered that the bits were initially spread across a volume and asked how this volume would change as each bit tried to travel straight in a curved space. Raychaudhuri found that the answer was given by a simple, elegant formula that showed the volume would always decrease regardless of how curved the spacetime was. This is the celebrated Raychaudhuri equation.

More powerful than imagined

The equation dispensed with the need to find realistic solutions by indicating, strongly, that singularities were inevitable in the general theory of relativity. However, it was not a complete proof, because while all singularities are points where matter converges, all points of convergence are not singularities.

For a complete proof, one had to show that there were no points of convergence that also were not singularities. Such a proof was developed in a series of theorems, chiefly by British physicists Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking. The Raychaudhuri equation played a key role in many of them. It was also central to Hawking’s famous area theorem, which proved that the surface area of a black hole never decreases.

The Raychaudhuri equation proved to be more powerful than Raychaudhuri himself may have anticipated. However, he found little appreciation in India until his work received recognition in the West, and even then it didn’t transform his career. IACS members scuttled his promotion to the faculty while Calcutta University rejected his application. Raychaudhuri eventually joined Presidency College, Kolkata, where he became a legendary teacher, inspiring generations of future physicists.

Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri’s story teaches us the folly of telling scientists what to work on and the importance of following one’s own path under difficult conditions. For many Indian scientists, his story continues to both resonate and inspire.

• The central result of Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri’s paper, published in 1955, is now known as the Raychaudhuri equation. It was important to the work of Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and others – work that revolutionised general relativity.

• In Raychaudhuri’s time, it was an open problem as to whether the singularities were bugs introduced by the unrealistic simplicity of the models – or features of reality itself. The question was unsolved because realistic models of the universe were notoriously difficult to solve mathematically.

• Raychaudhuri studied the motion of bits of matter navigating the fabric of spacetime. Each bit followed the straightest path in space-time. He found that, just like the north-bound ships, the bits of matter were bound to converge to a single point as long as they had positive energy.

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But does it matter when you do this exercise? Should you spread it out in the week or does it lose some of the benefit if you cram it in at the weekend?

A new study analysing data from the UK Biobank has attempted to answer this very question.

Around 90,000 healthy, middle-aged people wore wrist bands (accelerometers) that tracked their activity. It recorded their activity levels for a week with particular attention to moderate-to-vigorous activity (more on that later).

The researchers found that in the six years after the accelerometer assessment, people who did regular moderate-to-vigorous activity had less stroke, heart attack, heart failure and atrial fibrillation (an irregular heart rhythm) compared with sedentary people.

The novel finding of this study was that there was no difference in outcomes in people who did more than half of their activity at the weekend compared with those who spread it out across the week.

It didn't matter when it was done, moderate-vigorous physical activity was associated with improved heart health.

In the study, the authors called people who did more than of their 150 minutes a week of moderate-to-vigorous activity "weekend warriors". This gives the impression of Lycra-clad cyclists riding up mountains or muddied middle-aged men playing a gruelling 90 minutes of football.

Over 37,000 people in the study met the definition of the "weekend warrior" so why aren't the roads filled with cyclists and the parks filled with footballers? It certainly seems to contradict the epidemic of obesity and sedentary lifestyle that we hear so much about.

Weekend warriors? Really?

It may seem like semantics, but the definition of the "weekend warrior" is important. In this study, the threshold used for moderate-to-vigorous exercise was three "mets" (metabolic equivalent of task). The mets scale is used to measure physical activity.

For example, washing the dishes is 2.5 mets, vacuuming is 3.3 mets and walking at 3mph is 3.5 mets. To put this into context, cycling at 15mph on the flat is 10 mets.

The threshold of three mets is rather unambitious and seems like something that many people would achieve in their everyday lives without a concerted effort to exercise.

So perhaps when thinking of the people in this study instead of being called "weekend warriors" they should have been called "Saturday strollers" or "Sunday stretchers".

The other point about this study is that these people were not sports people or athletes but rather normal middle-aged people doing their normal activities, some of which included exercise and some of which were normal activities measured on an accelerometer.

This context is important when thinking about how we can use these results to inform our patients. I would not want anyone to think that doing two and a half hours of vacuuming or strolling at the weekend is enough to stave off heart disease.

It is the bare minimum level of exercise. To see real benefits, you are going to need to break a sweat.

The relationship between exercise and heart health is simple: the more you exercise the greater the improvements in your health. This study did show that doing some physical activity is better for your heart than being sedentary, which is an important message for the many people not managing 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.

Knowing these limitations of this study, we should avoid the interpretation that it is OK to live a sedentary existence from Monday to Friday and then atone by doing an hour or so of strolling on a Saturday and Sunday.

The findings of this study do not support this interpretation. If 150 minutes without breaking a sweat is all you can manage, then it doesn't matter when you do it. But if you can manage something more strenuous, then you really should make an effort to do it.

The findings of this study do not apply to more intense exercise, and if the opportunity comes to go for a bike to work on a Tuesday or go swimming on a Thursday, you should take it. Your heart will thank you.

Peter Swoboda, Senior Lecturer, Cardiology, University of Leeds

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A study from researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found that an estimated 795,000 Americans suffer permanent disability or death as the result of medical misdiagnoses, and there's a chance the number could even be as high as 1.02 million people.

Of the patients who are misdiagnosed, the researchers said, nearly half (371,000) die.

"Diagnostic errors are, by a wide margin, the most under-resourced public health crisis we face," said Dr. David Newman-Toker, director of the Johns Hopkins diagnostic excellence center.

The top five most misdiagnosed diseases – represented 38.7% of all misdiagnosed cases – were stroke, sepsis, pneumonia, venous thromboembolism (blood clots in veins), and lung cancer.

According to the research, these diagnostic errors often occur when patients exhibit symptoms other than those most commonly associated with the disease.

In the case of strokes, we all know the classic symptoms (weakness on one side, slurred speech, etc.).

However, during an appearance on CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper," Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said there could also be other signs, such as dizziness, headaches, and fatigue, that are more likely to be dismissed by doctors as something less severe.

While adverse outcomes are still rare, according to Gupta, there are some simple questions patients can ask their doctor to lower their risk even further:

• What could be causing my problem?

• What else could it be?

• When will I get my test results, and what should I do to follow up?

When will I get my test results, and what should I do to follow up?

In particular, Gupta called the second one a "very important follow-up question you should ask." For doctors who see hundreds and thousands of patients, it may be necessary to help them think outside the box and beyond the day-to-day.

The good news, according to the research authors, is that only 15 account for more than 50% of the misdiagnoses. Better awareness of less common symptoms and treatments for those diseases could lead to less frequent diagnostic errors.

One example is lung cancer. The American Cancer Society now recommends people with a high risk of lung cancer get a low-dose CT scan. This screening tool has a much better chance than traditional chest X-rays of detecting the disease early.

While we would all love for the doctors to get it right every time, we are talking about complex diseases with sometimes mysterious presentations. Patient awareness and questioning, and ongoing research can be our most potent weapons against this health crisis.

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China has just tested a new type of air-launched spaceplane design in its ultra-powerful hypersonic wind tunnel, with the futuristic craft designed for commercial, reconnaissance and military roles. 

The Chinese government has released footage of the world’s most powerful wind tunnel performing a scale separation test of what appears to be an air-launched spaceplane from a mothership aircraft, The Warzone reported citing a report aired by state-run China Central Television’s (CCTV) Channel 13. 

The Warzone notes that the spaceplane’s design looks like designs seen in wind tunnel test pictures and an accompanying video the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics (CAAA) released in 2019. However, the report says there are no immediate indications to show that the two tests are related. 

In June 2023, Asia Times reported on China’s JF-22 hypersonic wind tunnel’s progress after passing an evaluation the previous month. It can reportedly simulate the atmosphere in which a spacecraft re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere, according to Chinese scientists from the National Natural Science Foundation of China quoted in media reports. 

The scientists confirmed that the JF-22’s detonation-driven high-enthalpy shock tunnel project’s performance indicators, which include effective test time, temperature, pressure and nozzle flow, had achieved international standards. 

Its goal is to accelerate the development of a space-to-earth shuttle system, and, if successful, achieve a 90% cost reduction for launching satellites and spacecraft.

China started building the JF-22 in 2018 and completed it in August 2021 with a length of 167 meters, a diameter of four meters, and sustainable airflow of three to 10 kilometers per second. 

That makes it the world’s largest and fastest hypersonic wind tunnel, capable of simulating hypersonic flight conditions up to Mach 30 for a maximum of 130 milliseconds. In contrast, LENS II, the most advanced US hypersonic wind tunnel, can only reach Mach 7 with a maximum runtime of 30 milliseconds.

The JF-22 wind tunnel can simulate the environment in which a spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere. Photo: China Central TV

Moreover, Asia Times reported in September 2022 about the completion of China’s Sichuan-based free-piston driven hypersonic shock tunnel, currently the largest facility of its type worldwide. 

It can simulate extreme flight conditions up to Mach 33, or 2.5 to 11.5 kilometers per second. The facility has a diameter of 80 centimeters, twice the size of the X3 Expansion Tube at the University of Queensland in Australia, which was previously the largest facility of its kind.

As with the JF-22, the Sichuan-based facility can provide ground testing support for developing hypersonic vehicles such as scramjet-powered aircraft by simulating the escape velocity from Earth’s atmosphere. At the same time, it can contribute to other types of missions, such as putting Chinese astronauts on the moon. 

However, that type of hypersonic test facility is limited by its short simulation length, which lasts only a thousandth of a second, which is too short for some experiments. The new facility is thus expected to work with other wind tunnels to overcome that limitation. 

China’s J-22 and Sichuan-based free-piston driven hypersonic shock tunnel will both be instrumental in China’s spaceplane, which may be built as a multi-mission platform and serve as the basis for future space weapons. 

Asia Times reported in May 2023 on the successful return of China’s Shenlong mini spaceplane, which touched down in the Gobi Desert after 276 days in orbit after being launched in August of the previous year. While Shenlong’s flight was much shorter than the US X-37B, which spent 908 days in orbit, it was still a major milestone for China’s space program. 

Since its August 2022 launch, China’s Shenlong mini spaceplane has conducted multiple large maneuvers that have raised its altitude and demonstrated formation flying. 

It appears to be self-propelled in two or three docking or capture missions. China’s Shenlong and its successor designs may also launch satellites into orbit, conduct reconnaissance missions and perform military tasks.

A reusable mass satellite launch platform is critical to establishing satellite constellations, which major world powers increasingly view as a strategic asset. China’s spaceplane mothership is thus a vital reusable launch platform. 

This month, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the race between China and the US to find ways to cheaply and efficiently launch low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, which are the building blocks of satellite constellations for high-speed broadband internet access. 

WSJ noted that 360 million people in China still lack internet access, with LEO satellites viewed as an ideal solution to provide internet access in remote areas. The report also notes that reusable satellite launch vehicles can save significant sums on launch costs for building satellite constellations. 

WSJ also noted that China plans to build 7,808 LEO broadband internet satellites, but no enterprise in China has as of yet created a reusable launch platform like SpaceX’s Falcon 9. However, China’s Shenlong spaceplane and similar designs may serve as reusable mass satellite launch platform options.

Hypersonic test facilities may also be vital for developing advanced reconnaissance drones that can fly at supersonic and hypersonic speeds to evade enemy air defenses. 

In April 2023, Asia Times reported on China’s rocket-powered supersonic WZ-8 drone, a cutting-edge reconnaissance system that can gather real-time mapping data to inform strategy or pre-determine missile strike targets in preparation for a future conflict. Leaked documents have shown the flight paths for WZ-8 missions over Taiwanese and South Korean airspace. 

The WZ-8 reconnaissance drone on display at Airshow China Zhuhai in 2022. Photo: Wikipedia

In addition to being a reusable mass satellite launch platform and high-speed reconnaissance asset, China’s spaceplane mothership design may also serve as a fractional orbital bombardment platform (FOBS).

Ritwik Gupta notes in a June 2023 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that FOBS is a payload delivered into LEO and then re-enters the atmosphere to bombard a target before completing a full orbit. 

Gupta notes that a FOBS has several advantages over traditional ballistic missiles, including global range, the ability to launch attacks from multiple directions and a shorter flight time versus intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). 

He writes that while the Soviet Union created FOBS in the 1960s, they were less accurate than ICBMs, their time-to-target advantage was neutralized by enhanced US space-based detection and their use was explicitly prohibited by the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II (SALT II).

However, Gupta says combining hypersonic weapons technology with FOBS can solve the latter’s limitations, as hypersonic weapons can maneuver to fine tune their final approach to their targets and LEO is increasingly accessible through smaller space payloads.

The combination would also appear to exploit a loophole in SALT II forbidding the installation of any nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in “orbit around the Earth.” 

In October 2021, Financial Times reported that China may have tested such a weapon in August of that year, with the Chinese military launching a rocket that then launched a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) that circled the Earth in LEO before cruising to its target. 

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Omicron-derived virus variants currently account for the majority of SARS-CoV-2 infections globally. Compared to its predecessors, Omicron generally leads to less severe disease. This is largely attributed to Omicron’s reduced ability to infect lung cells, and as a result, cause pneumonia less frequently. However, a team of international researchers, including scientists from the German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, discovered a mutation in the spike protein of the Omicron subvariant BA.5.

This mutation allows the virus to efficiently infect lung cells again.

This study provides evidence that Omicron subvariants may evolve in such a way that they regain their ability to effectively infect the lungs and cause severe illness in high-risk patients and individuals with inadequate immunity. The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

Omicron Subvariants: BA.1 and BA.2

The BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron subvariants dominated the COVID-19 pandemic during the first half of 2022. These subvariants, in comparison to the Delta variant and others, showed a reduced ability to infect lung cells. However, the infective efficiency of the BA.5 subvariant, which outcompeted other Omicron subvariants in the fall of 2022, was initially unclear. Markus Hoffmann and Stefan Pöhlmann from the German Primate Center led a team of researchers to show that, due to a mutation of the spike protein, BA.5 actually infects lung cells much more efficiently than previous Omicron subvariants.

Model of the spike protein of the Omicron subvariant BA.5, in which the H69Δ/V70Δ mutation that is partly responsible for the increased lung cell entry is highlighted in red. Credit: Markus Hoffmann

Mutations in the Spike Protein and Their Impact

The researchers discovered that the spike protein of the BA.5 Omicron subvariant is cleaved more efficiently than its predecessors. Additionally, the spike protein of BA.5 facilitates the virus’s entry into lung cells and increases cell fusion efficiency. The team used “pseudo-viruses” as a safe model to examine how the virus penetrates lung cells.

Markus Hoffmann, the study’s first author, explains: “We found that BA.5 has acquired a mutation that allows the virus to penetrate lung cells more efficiently than the previously dominant Omicron subvariants. Thus, the ongoing evolution of Omicron subvariants may produce viruses in the future that efficiently spread into the lower respiratory tract and may cause severe disease, at least in patients without effective immune protection.” The altered properties of Omicron BA.5 are due to a key mutation known as “H69Δ/V70Δ.”

Infection biologist Dr. Markus Hoffmann (left) and Prof. Dr. Stefan Pöhlmann, head of the Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research. Credit: Karin Tilch

Confirmation With Real Virus and Further Studies

To validate these findings, Christian Drosten’s team at the Virology Department of Charité – Berlin University Hospital performed additional experiments with real viruses. These tests confirmed that BA.5 strain viruses infect lung cells efficiently, corroborating the results from Göttingen. To determine whether Omicron BA.5 also infects lung cells in living organisms, researchers at the University of Iowa compared the lungs of mice that were infected with BA.5 with those that received other subvariants. They found that BA.5 replicated up to 1000 times more efficiently in the lungs of mice compared to earlier Omicron subvariants.

Lastly, experiments conducted on ferrets at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut in Greifswald – Insel Riems, Germany, revealed that the BA.5 subvariant spreads more efficiently in the upper respiratory tract than previous virus variants.

“Altogether, this suggests that similarly to other Omicron subvariants, BA.5 is highly contagious and has additionally evolved the ability to efficiently infect lung cells,” says Stefan Pöhlmann, head of the Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center. “The further evolution of Omicron subvariants should therefore be monitored closely in order to be able to quickly identify variants with increased risk potential.”

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A new analysis of data gathered from over 10,000 adults reveals a correlation between physical activity and increased pain tolerance. Those who led an active lifestyle demonstrated a higher tolerance to pain compared to sedentary individuals, with those engaging in a higher intensity of physical activity showcasing even more resilience. Anders Årnes of the University Hospital of North Norway, Tromsø, and colleagues recently published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE.

Although previous research has hinted at the potential benefits of regular physical activity, including possibly mitigating or preventing chronic pain by enhancing one’s ability to tolerate pain, most studies until now have either been limited in scope or focused on specific demographics.

To help clarify the relationship between physical activity and pain tolerance, Årnes and colleagues analyzed data from 10,732 Norwegian adults who participated in a large population survey study—the Tromsø Study—that is conducted periodically in Norway. The researchers used data from two rounds of the Tromsø Study, one conducted from 2007 to 2008 and the other from 2015 to 2016. The data included participants’ self-reported levels of physical activity and their levels of pain tolerance, as evaluated in a test involving submerging their hands in cold water.

Statistical analysis of the data showed that participants who reported being physically active in either round of the Tromsø Study had higher pain tolerance than those who reported a sedentary lifestyle in both rounds. Participants with higher total activity levels had higher pain tolerance, and those who had higher activity in 2015/2016 than in 2007/2008 had a higher overall level of pain tolerance.

The analysis did not show a statistically significant relationship between activity level and changes in pain tolerance between the two rounds of the study. Nonetheless, it suggests that remaining physically active, becoming active, or boosting activity is linked to higher pain tolerance.

On the basis of their findings, the researchers suggest that boosting physical activity could be a potential strategy for easing or staving off chronic pain. Future research could help confirm whether there is indeed a cause-and-effect relationship between activity and pain tolerance and evaluate potential therapeutic applications.

The authors add: “Becoming or staying physically active over time can benefit your pain tolerance. Whatever you do, the most important thing is that you do something!”

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NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission was a success from the perspective of planetary defense, as it successfully shifted the orbit of an asteroid. But the mission had a scientific element to it, and we're still sifting through the debris of the collision to determine what the impact tells us about the asteroid. That's difficult due to the distance to the asteroid and the low amounts of light that reflect off the debris.

 

Today, a paper was released by a team that analyzed images of the aftermath using the Hubble Space Telescope. They've spotted dozens of boulders that collectively would have originally made up 0.1 percent of the mass of Dimorphos, DART's target. And while they're all moving very slowly from the site of the collision, some of them should be able to escape the gravity of the double asteroid system.

Knocking rocks

The images taken by DART immediately prior to its demise suggest that Dimorphos was a rubble pile, a mixture of boulders, small rocks, and dust barely held together by their mutual gravitational pull. So what happens when a relatively solid object, like the DART spacecraft, hammers an asteroid at high speed?

 

For a while, the answer was "a lot of dust." Early images show lots of material pouring out from the asteroids, spreading out in space and forming a long "tail" driven away by the radiation pressure of the Sun. But, with time, the debris cleared up enough that Hubble was able to get a clear picture of any larger objects that had been obscured by the dust—or rather, a number of clear pictures.

 

The challenge with this is that those larger objects would still be quite small and reflect very little in the way of sunlight. As a result, they'd generally appear as small points of light and appear indistinguishable from cosmic rays striking the detector or background stars that moved through Hubble's field of view during imaging.

 

So, the Hubble images had to be long-exposure to capture enough light, and the researchers combined multiple exposures taken by Hubble at different points in its orbit around Earth (which required them to reorient the image so that they all showed the equivalent area from the same angle). Light that only showed up in one or a few of the images was discarded, getting rid of some of the noise.

 

Once the exposures were combined, the researchers could identify roughly 40 objects that were moving along with the Didymos/Dimorphos system but distinct from it. Only the brightest of these are visible in the individual images.

Small and slow-moving

Based on the amount of light they reflect, the researchers estimate that the boulders they're seeing are in the range of 4–7 meters across. This is based on the average reflectivity of the parent asteroids; obviously, any darker or brighter boulders will throw these estimates off. The researchers also use a single-density estimate based on the intact asteroids to figure out the boulders' likely masses. Collectively, they're estimated to carry about 0.1 percent of the pre-collision mass of Dimorphos.

 

Based on their distance from the impact site, it was possible to estimate their speeds. And they're all very slow. Even the fastest boulders are moving at less than a meter per second, which translates to taking roughly four hours to travel a kilometer from the impact site. And the slower ones are only a fraction of that speed.

 

But, given the incredibly weak gravity of the double asteroid system they came from, the higher-speed objects will be able to escape the gravitational pull. In fact, the boulder population can be roughly divided in half, with the faster half having achieved escape velocity.

 

The combination of mass and speed let the authors estimate the total kinetic energy carried away from the collision by these rocks. Compared to the energy delivered by DART, it's quite small, at about 0.003 percent of the energy that DART delivered.

 

Since Dimorphos is a rubble pile, there's no reason to think that these are the product of DART shattering a larger rock on impact. Instead, Dimorphos was built from rocks that were pre-shattered by collisions in the distant past; DART just liberated a few of them from the rubble pile's gravity. Based on the pre-impact images of Dimorphos, the researchers estimate that the boulders would have collectively occupied about 2 percent of the asteroid's surface. That's consistent with DART having blasted out a crater about 50 meters across.

 

The crater could potentially be smaller if DART had imparted enough seismic energy to knock material loose from elsewhere on the asteroid. But, given that rubble piles are expected to be very porous, it's unlikely that seismic energy gets very far in its interior.

 

In any case, we'll have a clearer picture of things once the European Space Agency's HERA probe reaches the asteroid for a follow-on study. Just have to be patient, as that's not expected to happen for another three years.

 

The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2023. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ace1ec  (About DOIs).

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• Inflation in India sparks cheaper offers from global giant

• Domino's and Pizza Hut tout world's cheapest pizza

• India is key growth market for global restaurant chains

• Popularity of street food and local chains a big challenge

CHENNAI/NEW DELHI, July 20 (Reuters) - Q: How does the world's biggest pizza brand respond to high inflation in the world's most populous nation? A: With the world's cheapest Domino's pizza.

The 49-rupee ($0.60) pizza in India, Domino's No.1 market outside America, is the tip of the spear in its fight against rampant inflation that's squeezing profits and pricing out many customers, according to the CEO of its franchisee there.

The company wants to "own that price point", said Sameer Khetarpal, confirming the stripped down, seven-inch cheese pizza with a "sprinkle" of basil and parsley is Domino's cheapest anywhere.

"You are coming to the store or open the app, because there is a 49-rupee callout," he said, adding that Domino's global team supported the plans.

"Customers are going to eat out less because prices are higher everywhere - our existing consumers should not go out to some competition."

In Shanghai, by comparison, Domino's (DPZ.N) cheapest savoury pizza is priced about $3.80, and in San Francisco about $12, online menu prices show. Domino's global HQ referred queries about India to its local franchisee.

Reuters interviews with six executives and 12 store managers revealed how Domino's and other global fast-food giants like Pizza Hut and Burger King are being forced to change tactics to weather rampant inflation in the market of 1.4 billion people.

The companies are striving to hold onto market share gained over three decades of rapid growth in a nation critical to their futures - and one where it's tough to compete with a street-food culture and a sizzling samosa for as little as 10 rupees.

Khetarpal, whose Jubilant FoodWorks (JUBI.NS) runs Domino's 1,816 outlets in the country, says he holds a staff meeting first thing every Monday to brainstorm new ways to manage costs and fight the "historic high inflation" that contributed to its profits sliding 70% in the first three months of 2023.

He gave new details of Domino's India pivot and its financial gains; his company has removed lids from all boxes of pizzas sold at stores starting December, saving 0.6 cents each time. He said that amounts to a significant saving in packaging costs because 37% of Domino's Indian business is dine-in.

Jubilant - whose Domino's business accounted for most of its $635 million in revenues last year - also aims to secure rent rebates from some store landlords by offering upfront payments, Khetarpal said, declining to give further details about cost benefits.

CUSTOMERS EMPTY POCKETS

Domino's is not alone in zeroing in on prices in India, a highly price-sensitive market that is currently facing higher inflation than many other markets including the U.S. The hope is that low-price offers will draw people to stores and apps who might order more add-ons or upgrade, the executives said.

Pizza Hut is aggressively promoting pizzas starting at 79 rupees ($0.96) that it launched last year and its India franchisee, Sapphire Foods (SAPI.NS), said it was the brand's lowest-priced globally.

Merrill Pereyra, managing director of Pizza Hut in the Indian subcontinent, said the chain was developing products that "make the brand relevant and easy to access" for price conscious consumers in India, adding its budget pizzas were a hit with young people.

McDonald's (MCD.N) launched half-price meals in June. They'll be the focus of promotion efforts in coming weeks, according to Akshay Jatia, executive director at Westlife Foodworld (WEST.NS), which runs 357 outlets in western and southern India. He said the meals would bring in more customers and boost sales and margins.

The budget products are indeed being accompanied by a digital and physical marketing blitz across the nation - with stores, and even a posh New Delhi mall, plastered with banners, according to Reuters visits to stores across four Indian states.

Domino's flagship inflation-buster is the 49-rupee pizza, which was launched in February. Khetarpal said it was "re-engineered" by cutting price - and tomatoes - from its earlier cheapest offering of 59 rupees.

Franchisee Jubilant said in May it witnessed a cheese price surge of 40% during 2022-23, and a 30% rise in chicken and paper boxes. There have been more shocks in recent weeks, with tomato prices rising over 400% to record highs and households toiling under rising rates of everything from milk to cereals and spices, according to official data.

The industry players described a tale of two consumers in a country with yawning gaps between rich and poor.

Many low and middle-income earners who saw dining at foreign chains as a lifestyle upgrade when the economy boomed are tightening belts as inflation bites, while the wealthier continue to spend on products like pricier smartphones, and SUV cars whose sales are touching new highs.

When Khetarpal visited Domino's stores in Chennai and other cities, he said he saw customers emptying out their pockets and only being able to scrape together 49 rupees. By contrast, he added, Domino's new gourmet pizzas priced as high as $14 had seen a sales jump in some affluent areas.

'A SMALL LAYER OF CHEESE'

It's been a bleak year for Domino's, the Indian fast-food restaurant leader with a market share of about 12.5%, as well as for other companies.

Pre-tax profit at Pizza Hut's Sapphire Foods more than halved in the March quarter. Burger King's India franchisee, Restaurant Brands Asia (RESR.NS), saw its net loss widen by 9%.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. Euromonitor International estimates India's nearly $5 billion market for quick-service restaurants which serve fast food is a fraction of United States' $341 billion and China's $137 billion.

The narrower market for pizza, burger and chicken restaurants, dominated by Western chains and worth $2.1 billion in India, will grow, but at a slower pace. Its estimated growth rate is around 15% a year until 2027, Euromonitor forecasts. That compares with 21% growth in 2022 and 43% in 2021 largely due to a post-COVID consumption spike.

Pizza Hut owner Yum Brands (YUM.N) sounded a bullish tone in June, comparing its 17,000 U.S. outlets to its over 2,000 in India, where it sees a "tremendous growth opportunity".

There are still daunting challenges in the near term.

"For a population eating roadside, in the current environment where inflation is hurting their pockets, (the new offers) are still on the higher side," said Devanshu Bansal, a consumer analyst at India's Emkay Global Financial Services.

And many pizza-lovers like Kiran Raj will never contemplate budget offerings. The 26-year-old bank employee said he was prepared to pay a little more for a cheese-loaded product as he devoured slices at Pizza Lounge, a local restaurant in Chennai.

"I avoid buying the sub-100-rupee pizzas at stores operated by big chains as they generally contain less toppings and a small layer of cheese," he added. "It's just a rough crust."

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Small quantities of A100 and H100 chips manufactured by Nvidia are still reportedly available on many Chinese e-commerce platforms despite being banned for export by the United States in 2022 over “national security” concerns. 

Such hardware components are used in artificial intelligence (AI), cost more than US$10,000 (S$13,200), and have been increasingly sought after in China after the roll-out of ChatGPT in the US. Chinese firms want to create their own version of the highly intelligent chatbot.

The below-the-counter trade has apparently flourished as the US reportedly mulls over further curbs on such powerful chips, with the two countries’ tech rivalry showing few signs of easing. 

The US, its partners and allies such as Japan and the Netherlands dominate key areas of the semiconductor supply chain, and have recently moved to tighten the transfer of critical technology to China.

But checks by The Straits Times found many listings for high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) on Chinese e-commerce platforms ranging from Xiaohongshu to Pinduoduo and JD, although often with inflated prices and dubious warranty status.

One seller, whose IP address is shown to be from Shanghai, quoted 125,000 yuan (S$23,000) for the A100. The A800, a version of the A100 with reduced capabilities for the Chinese market, was priced at 108,000 yuan. 

Another Guangdong-based seller, who declined to be named, said: “There are no longer any authorised agents for this model (A100). Any guarantee would be by the seller.” 

Nvidia’s GPUs are widely considered to be industry-leading and are used in laptops, data centres and cars. 

The firm’s market value briefly crossed the US$1 trillion mark in May amid the generative AI boom in the past year. Other than Nvidia, key players in this sector include AMD and Intel, which are also American. 

Nvidia declined comment when asked about media reports that said further US government curbs on its chips, including the cleared-for-China A800, could be on the cards. It said via e-mail that it complies with all US government export restrictions. 

“We continue to work with our customers in China to satisfy their planned or future purchases with alternative products and may seek licences where replacements aren’t sufficient.”

Vendors at electronics malls in the Huaqiangbei shopping street in tech hub Shenzhen were quick to tout locally made alternatives when asked about the A100.

Sellers told ST that users with the A100 run a high risk of being left without a warranty if there are any problems with the chips, adding that it is a safer bet to buy locally made alternatives.

But they conceded that the raw processing power of the local alternatives fall short of the A100’s, even though “many of our customers find them good enough”.

Impact of the chip war

With the US and China at loggerheads, the decades-old semiconductor industry is facing an upheaval. 

Supply chains are being reconfigured: More of Apple’s latest iPhones are being made in India rather than China, while leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is building two fabrication plants in the US. 

For decades, firms in the semiconductor sector have thrived because it is one of the most globalised industries, said the managing director of Chinese-owned Singapore firm Stats ChipPAC, Mr Chiou Lid Jian.

The industry has supply chains spread across the world, leveraging various countries’ strengths and purely governed by the laws of economics, said Mr Chiou. His firm provides advanced semiconductor packaging and test services. 

“The chip war is changing this long-established paradigm. It will definitely cause major disruptions in the industry,” said Mr Chiou, who has worked in the industry for more than 30 years. 

The US ratcheted up the rivalry last October by banning American firms from exporting tech used in producing advanced chips to China. In January, an agreement was reached for the Netherlands and Japan to join the effort.

In May, the Chinese authorities banned Micron Technology from key infrastructure projects, saying that products made by the US memory chip giant posed a national security risk.

This was followed by a decision in July to restrict the export of gallium and germanium, two metals used in semiconductor manufacturing. 

There are few signs of easing competition between the two superpowers. Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng told a US forum on Wednesday that Beijing will definitely respond if the US imposes more curbs on the chip sector.

Mr Walter Kuijpers, an advisory partner at KPMG in Singapore, said semiconductor capabilities are seen as more closely linked to national security and economic prosperity today, driving a trend towards nationalism. 

The US Chips and Science Act was never meant to build a completely independent supply chain, said Mr Kuijpers, referring to a US$52 billion investment announced in August 2022 to boost US chip research and manufacturing. 

He expects changes to supply chains to focus on protecting high-end technologies, while low-tech capabilities and low-cost components will continue to be sourced and manufactured through global supply chains.

China’s prospects

In the short term, China is unlikely to catch up in making the most advanced chips, said Mr Bert Hofman, director of the East Asian Institute in Singapore, pointing to the complexity of the mechanical and software tools involved. 

For instance, ASML, which produces high-end lithography machines, has more than 5,000 companies in its supply chain, he noted. The Dutch company holds a monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography tools needed to make the most advanced chips. 

He believes China will not be satisfied with making and using only lower-end chips, even though these are most important for its current industrial production. 

“Access to high-end chips is important for numerous areas of research and development critical for the industries of the future that China wants to engage in, including AI, biochemicals and new materials.”

Nevertheless, few are betting against China, which has been making massive investments in this strategic industry.

Professor Joseph Liow of Nanyang Technological University said that US actions to restrict the export of chip technology – including by joining forces with allied countries – had catalysed Beijing’s efforts at self-sufficiency.

“The Chinese government is throwing everything and the kitchen sink at semiconductor development,” said Prof Liow, who is dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

“No amount of money is too large... and at some point, breakthroughs are going to come.” 

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A team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University was testing the resilience of the metal, using a specialized transmission electron microscope technique to pull the ends of the metal 200 times every second. They then observed the self-healing at ultra-small scales in a 40-nanometer-thick piece of platinum suspended in a vacuum.

Cracks caused by the kind of strain described above are known as fatigue damage: repeated stress and motion that causes microscopic breaks, eventually causing machines or structures to break. Amazingly, after about 40 minutes of observation, the crack in the platinum started to fuse back together and mend itself before starting again in a different direction.

Pulling forces (red arrows) created a crack that healed (green) in platinum metal. (Dan Thompson/Sandia National Laboratories)

"This was absolutely stunning to watch first-hand," says materials scientist Brad Boyce from Sandia National Laboratories. "We certainly weren't looking for it."

"What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale."

These are exact conditions, and we don't know yet exactly how this is happening or how we can use it. However, if you think about the costs and effort required for repairing everything from bridges to engines to phones, there's no telling how much difference self-healing metals could make.

And while the observation is unprecedented, it's not wholly unexpected. In 2013, Texas A&M University materials scientist Michael Demkowicz worked on a study predicting that this kind of nanocrack healing could happen, driven by the tiny crystalline grains inside metals essentially shifting their boundaries in response to stress.

Demkowicz also worked on this latest study, using updated computer models to show that his decade-old theories about metal's self-healing behavior at the nanoscale matched what was happening here.

That the automatic mending process happened at room temperature is another promising aspect of the research. Metal usually requires lots of heat to shift its form, but the experiment was carried out in a vacuum; it remains to be seen whether the same process will happen in conventional metals in a typical environment.

A possible explanation involves a process known as cold welding, which occurs under ambient temperatures whenever metal surfaces come close enough together for their respective atoms to tangle together. Typically, thin layers of air or contaminants interfere with the process; in environments like the vacuum of space, pure metals can be forced close enough together to literally stick.

"My hope is that this finding will encourage materials researchers to consider that, under the right circumstances, materials can do things we never expected," says Demkowicz.

The research has been published in Nature.

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In the midst of an already record-breaking heat wave, Phoenix, Ariz., set a particularly eye-popping record: the temperature only dropped to 97 degrees Fahrenheit overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, setting an all-time record high for a nighttime low.

When temperatures stay high overnight, they place a particularly heavy burden on the body, raising the risk of heat illness and death.

The U.S.—and the world—has seen a spate of extreme heat so far this year, including the planet’s hottest-ever June and hottest week on record during the first week of July. Rising global temperatures from burning fossil fuels are the main driver of more frequent and more intense heat waves. And an El Niño event is also boosting global temperatures this year.

A heat dome has been in place for weeks over the U.S. Southwest and Texas, and it has fueled many heat records. Phoenix has now seen 20 days in a row with a daytime high of 110 degrees F or higher, a record streak that is likely to continue for several more days. A heat dome is an area of high pressure that sometimes parks over a region. High-pressure ridges, as they are also called, feature sinking air, which compresses and heats up. These ridges’ hallmark clear skies also allow the sun’s rays to beat down on the ground, further raising temperatures.

Prolonged heat extremes pose a major public health threat because heat is the number-one weather-related killer in the U.S.; it causes more human deaths than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined. Heat can cause dehydration, which leads the blood to thicken and makes the heart pump harder. That organ and others can be damaged by too much exposure to heat.

The soaring, triple-digit high daily temperatures grab the headlines, and they definitely are a concern—but when temperatures only drop into the 80s and 90s at night, the body doesn’t get a chance to cool down. This is particularly a concern for those who lack air-conditioning, including unhoused populations. And heat is especially a health risk for the very young, the elderly and those with preexisting health conditions such as asthma and heart disease.

Overnight lows in the U.S. are rising twice as fast as daytime highs, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit research and news organization. A 2022 Climate Central analysis found that overnight lows in the U.S. have risen by 2.5 degrees F on average since 1970. In Phoenix they have risen by 5.7 degrees F over that same period.

Phoenix’s all-time overnight low record of 97 degrees F displaced the previous record of 96 degrees F, which was set in 2003. It may not take another 20 years for the new record to be topped because climate change is making summers ever hotter.

One sign of how remarkable the recent record was came from the response that the National Weather Service’s office in Flagstaff, Ariz., sent to the agency’s Phoenix office on Twitter. “So you’re saying your all time record warm low temperature is our all time record high temperature?” the tweet read. “That’s just nasty.”

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The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.

Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is cited as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned in a statement with two other scientists that the world was moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years, bringing impacts such as stronger storms, heatwaves and droughts.

The world has already warmed by about 1.2C since mass industrialization, causing a 20% chance of having the sort of extreme summer temperatures currently seen in many parts of the northern hemisphere, up from a 1% chance 50 years ago, Hansen said.

“There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts,” Hansen, who is 82, told the Guardian. “These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality – we knew it was coming.”

Hansen was a Nasa climate scientist when he warned lawmakers of growing global heating and has since taken part in protests alongside activists to decry the lack of action to reduce planet-heating emissions in the decades since.

James Hansen: ‘There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

He said the record heatwaves that have roiled the US, Europe, China and elsewhere in recent weeks have heightened “a sense of disappointment that we scientists did not communicate more clearly and that we did not elect leaders capable of a more intelligent response”.

“It means we are damned fools,” Hansen said of humanity’s ponderous response to the climate crisis. “We have to taste it to believe it.”

This year looks likely to be the hottest ever recorded globally, with the summer already seeing the hottest June and, possibly, hottest week ever reliably measured. Conversely, 2023 may in time be considered an average or even mild year, as temperatures continue to climb. “Things will get worse before they get better,” Hansen said.

“This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year. Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.”

< View the graphic at the source page. >

Hansen has argued in a new research paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, that the rate of global heating is accelerating, even when natural variations, such as the current El Niño climatic event that periodically raises temperatures, are accounted for. This is due to what he said was an “unprecedented” imbalance in the amount of energy coming into the planet from the sun versus the energy reflected away from Earth.

While global temperatures are undoubtably climbing due to the burning of fossil fuels, scientists are divided over whether this rate is accelerating. “We see no evidence of what Jim is claiming,” said Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist who added that the heating of the climate system had been “remarkably steady”. Others said the idea was plausible, although more data was required to be certain.

“It’s maybe premature to say the warming is accelerating, but it’s not decreasing, for sure. We still have our foot on the gas,” said Matthew Huber, an expert in paleoclimatology at Purdue University.

Hansen testifies before a Senate subcommittee in 1989, a year after his history-making testimony telling the world that global warming was here and would get worse. Photograph: Dennis Cook/AP

Scientists have estimated, through reconstructions based on evidence gathered via ice cores, tree rings and sediment deposits, that the current surge in heating has already brought global temperatures to levels not seen on Earth since about 125,000 years ago, before the last ice age.

“We quite possibly are already living in a climate that no human has lived through before and we are certainly living in a climate that no human has lived in since before the birth of agriculture,” said Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.

Should global temperatures rise by a further 1C or more, which is widely predicted to happen by the end of the century barring a drastic reduction in emissions, Huber said Hansen was “broadly correct” that the world will be plunged into the sort of warmth not seen since 1-3m years ago, a period of time called the Pliocene.

“That is a radically different world,” said Huber of an epoch in which it was warm enough for beech trees to grow near the south pole and sea levels were about 20 meters higher than now, which would today drown most coastal cities.

“We are pushing temperatures up to Pliocene levels, which is outside the realm of human experience; it’s such a massive change that most things on Earth haven’t had to deal with it,” Huber said. “It’s basically an experiment on humans and ecosystems to see how they respond. Nothing is adapted to this.”

Previous shifts in the climate, spurred by greenhouse gases or changes in the Earth’s orbit, have caused changes to unfold over thousands of years. But as heatwaves strafe populations unused to extreme temperatures, forests burn and marine life struggles to cope with soaring ocean heat, the current upward spike is occurring at a pace not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65m years ago.

“It’s not just the magnitude of change, it’s the rate of change that’s an issue,” said Ellen Thomas, a Yale University scientist who studies climate over geologic timescales. “We have highways and railroads that are set in place, our infrastructure can’t move. Almost all my colleagues have said that, in hindsight, we have underestimated the consequences. Things are moving faster than we thought, which is not good.”

This summer’s searing heat has fully revealed to the world a message that Hansen attempted to deliver 35 years ago and scientists have strived to convey since, according to Huber. “We have been staring this in the face as scientists for decades, but now the world is going through that same process, which is like the five stages of grief,” he said. “It’s painful to watch people go through it.

“But we can’t simply give up because the situation is dire,” Huber added. “We need to say ‘Here is where we need to invest and make changes and innovate’ and not give up. We can’t just write off billions of people.”

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Rents for GTA condos continue to soar, hitting an average of about $2,800 a month in the second quarter of 2023, according to market research firm Urbanation.

That’s about $4 a square foot — an almost 32 per cent rise over the last two years. And the spike in rents has been even higher for micro units under 400 square feet.

“I’d say it’s alarming as this growth is occurring off of record highs from a year ago,” said Shaun Hildebrand, president of Urbanation. “There is a point where, and I think we’ve already reached that, the market becomes unaffordable and you start to see some resistance, and unfortunately the only relief valve is from people leaving the city.”

The vacancy rate for purpose-built rental buildings is up slightly from 1.5 per cent a year ago to 1.9 per cent, but still very low.

Hildebrand blames sky-high rents on a “confluence of factors” including a strong job market, rising interest rates, high home prices that shut out first-time buyers, and immigration. As well, more people are doubling- and tripling-up with roommates to be able to afford more.

If tenants want to live alone, they’re going to be shelling out for even the smallest spaces. Micro condos had the highest annual rent growth, of 15 per cent in the second quarter of this year, with an average rent of $2,121.

“I think this is a direct correlation with just how expensive the market has become,” said Hildebrand. “There really isn’t anything that runs for under $2,000 a month anymore.”

This is “catching the eye of developers” he said, who have “pulled back” on building new purpose-built rentals because of high costs and interest rates.

Apartments too small for a child — or even a pet

Meanwhile they can build more micro units — too small for a child or even a pet — for a higher price per square foot. This does result in more supply, “but on the other hand,” said Hildebrand “is it really the type of supply that we need for the long term?”

There were 17,542 new condo units registered during the 12 months ending in June 2023, and nearly 37 per cent were rented through the real estate board, up from 31 per cent at the same time last year.

This suggests, said Hildebrand, that despite some investors losing money due to rising mortgage payments, some are hanging on as a “long-term investment.”

Dania Majid, a staff lawyer for Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO) said these new rent numbers are “part of the continuing trend of rent skyrocketing and wages not keeping up with these major increases.”

What happens in this environment is that tenants become “house poor” spending more than 50 per cent of their income a month on rent with little left over for basic necessities. They also end up taking on “peculiar” arrangements like staying in the same place as a partner after they’ve broken up, or dividing a one-bedroom among three roommates.

She noted that condos built after 2018 are not subject to rent control in the province, meaning that in the new towers going up “fast and furious” across the GTA tenants can be “economically evicted,” through huge yearly rent hikes.

The move toward smaller units, she said, reflects that despite the fact that condos make up a big chunk of the rental stock in the region, they are increasingly not a place to raise a family or live long-term.

“They are a place to park money and get a really high return on that money,” she said.

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Much of the southern United States is in an extended heat wave, with no end in sight until at least the end of the month. Phoenix, Arizona, just experienced its 19th consecutive day of heat over 110 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, setting a new record. People are getting third degree burns from the pavement. Even in comparatively mild Connecticut, country star Jason Aldean recently fled the stage due to heat stroke.

But the extreme and prolonged heat of a warming world is not just a threat to our physical health. It’s also trying us psychologically, whether you’re lucky enough to be cooped up inside, handcuffed to your air conditioner, or forced to brave the outdoors.

One 2018 study looked at the correlation between heat waves and deaths by suicide and found that monthly suicide rates rose more than 2% due to temperature in the hottest months between 1968 and 2004. The authors also collected more than 600 million Twitter posts published over the course of about a year beginning in May 2014 and found more instances of depressive language like “lonely,” “trapped” or “suicidal” when temperatures rose.

Another study published last year looked at emergency room visits for mental health throughout the United States during the summer months between 2010 and 2019. The researchers found a 5% to 10% increase in visits on the hottest days. The association held true across a wide range of conditions, including substance use disorders, childhood-onset behavioral anxiety disorders like ADHD, schizophrenia, and self-harm.

Amruta Nori-Sarma, the lead author of that study and an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me that the study only includes those covered by commercial insurance providers, and may be underestimating the problem.

“I think we’re potentially missing very vulnerable people,” she said. “Folks who are on Medicare, Medicaid, or people who don’t have health insurance.”

While the study did not assess causes, the authors hypothesize that one factor may be disruptions to sleep due to heat. They cite another paper which found an association between higher nighttime temperatures and self-reported nights of insufficient sleep. Heat can also trigger physiological responses that exacerbate mental health conditions, like the release of stress hormones that send your body into fight or flight mode. Psychiatric medicines can affect how your body regulates temperature, and dehydration has been linked to increased anxiety and impaired cognitive function.

When people ask her what they can do, Nori-Sarma said to rely on social networks. If you know someone who might be vulnerable, check in on them and make sure they are doing okay, she said.

But while we are starting to understand the effects of extreme heat on people who have some of the most severe forms of mental illness, we still know very little about what those with general anxiety or other less acute conditions experience, Nori-Sarma told me. “If we want to intervene and try and reduce the impacts of heat exposure, it might be good to know, earlier in that pathway, where we could potentially help people,” said Nori-Sarma, “so they don’t end up needing to go to the emergency department.”

I asked Anna Graybeal, a psychologist based in Austin, Texas, one of the cities hit hard by this summer’s extended heat wave, whether any of her patients were struggling due to the heat. At first she said no, and hypothesized that people who can afford therapy are generally also able to stay in air conditioning most of the time. She wondered aloud what would happen if the power went out, noting that during the 2021 winter blackout in Texas, when much of the state was stranded without heat during freezing temperatures, many of her patients were stressed and scared.

But then she remembered that one patient had actually brought up the heat in a session that morning, expressing frustration about their inability to exercise outdoors, which they felt was crucial to regulating their mental health.

But for the most part, the main way heat comes up in her sessions is in discussions about climate anxiety. Graybeal is part of the Climate Psychology Alliance and trains other providers to work with clients who are worried about climate change.

When asked what people can do if they are experiencing anxiety related to heat or global warming, Graybeal encourages talking about it, whether that’s with a therapist, friends, family, or in a group therapy setting. “It’s so important to talk to other people because, when it comes down to it, our relationships are almost always what matters most to us over the course of our lives,” she said. “So in this time of existential crisis, we need to talk with others so we aren‘t alone with the dreadful feelings, but instead feel understood, cared about, and connected.”

Graybeal added that if you’re in distress, it’s always important to give extra attention to habits of self care, like sleeping, exercising, and eating well. “And then bring in some kind of practice of mental or emotional self care, like meditation, or breathing and relaxation techniques,” she said. “In general that will help almost anyone.”

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Interestingly, the poll, commissioned by the Thriving Center Of Psychology, found that more women (52%) than men (41%) have this view of marriage.

So much for saying yes to the dress!

The survey comes as a recent Pew Research study finds that one in four 40-year-olds in the United States have never walked down the aisle. The U.S. Census Bureau adds that 34 percent of people 15 years and older have never been married as of 2022. In 1950, that number was only 23 percent. So, what’s up? Why aren’t young people putting a ring on their serious relationships anymore?

The new survey finds that one of the biggest reasons is still the sheer cost of getting married. Nearly three in four millennials and Gen Zers (73%) say it’s just too expensive to tie the knot in today’s economy. Another 72 percent say they just “aren’t interested” in marriage, with one in six respondents saying they have no plans to get married in the future. However, 83 percent hope they will eventually marry someone “someday.”

No judgments, please

As younger adults turn away from the institution of marriage, many of them say they’re getting a lot of questions from the older generations. Two in three (68%) think it’s intrusive to ask people about their marriage plans. Another 77 percent think it’s just as bad to ask a couple if they’re planning to have kids.

That’s not stopping mom from needling her kids about starting a family! Nearly two in five young adults (38%) say they feel judged for not being married, with a whopping 69 percent of women saying their mother judges them the most for staying unmarried. Only 27 percent of young men say their mom judges them for staying single or not marrying their sweetheart.

Breaking up is hard to do

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons young adults are skipping out on ring shopping is the fear that the marriage won’t last. Almost half of respondents (47%) are afraid of getting a divorce. With that in mind, 51 percent admit they have no plan for their shared pet if they break up with their current partner.

Concerningly, 15 percent have a child with their partner, but 89 percent have no plan in place for their child’s living arrangements if they were to break up with that partner. One in 10 say they regret moving in with their partner and another 16 percent believe they made the move too fast in their relationship.

Overall, only three in five unmarried couples in the survey live together, with two in three being millennial couples.

Survey methodology:

In June 2023, the Thriving Center Of Psychology surveyed 906 Gen Z and Millennials who are currently in a relationship but not married.

Respondents ranged in age from 18 to 42 with an average age of 29. 56% were Millennials and 44% were Gen Z. 55% were women, 40% were men, and 5% were non-binary. 79% identified as straight, 17% as bisexual, 2% as gay, and 2% as lesbian.

To determine the most marriage-averse cities in the U.S., researchers analyzed the 100 most populous cities using data from the U.S. Census Bureau on the number of unmarried-partner households from 2021 (the most current data available) and analyzed the results per capita.

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"...In the search for a harmonious attitude towards life, it must never be forgotten that we ourselves are both actors and spectators in the drama of existence." – Niels Bohr, physicist

During World War Two, the US government formed the Manhattan Project, recruiting scientists and engineers from across the country to live and work at a secret research centre in Los Alamos, New Mexico. From this base in the desert, and under the leadership of Robert Oppenheimer, they developed the world's first atomic bombs.

On 21 May 1946, the physicist Louis Slotin was in his final weeks of working for the Project. He was an expert in bomb assembly and had played a central role, hand-building the "Trinity" device for the first test in July 1945, just a month before the Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. But, like Oppenheimer, in the months that followed, he came to object to the continuation of the nuclear weapons programme and had decided to go back to civilian life.

Slotin was giving a tour to Alvin Graves, the scientist who was due to replace him. A little before 15:00, in the middle of one of the laboratory buildings, Graves spotted something he recognised: the "critical assembly", which was Slotin's specialism. Like an experimental nuclear bomb, it was used to safely test the reactivity of a plutonium core.

The "critical assembly" was comprised of a plutonium core and two hemispherical neutron "reflectors" made of beryllium.

Graves commented that he had never seen the assembly demonstrated. Slotin offered to run through it for him.

Alvin Graves (left) and Louis Slotin (right).

From the other side of the room, Raemer Schreiber, Slotin's colleague, agreed. However, he encouraged him to proceed slowly and with caution:

Slotin's colleague, Raemer Schreiber, who had helped assemble the Fat Man bomb, dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945.

Schrieber would later say this comment was not entirely serious since "we all had confidence in Slotin's ability".

The idea was to bring the core to a stable rate of reactivity and hold it there, rather like starting a car's engine and allowing it to tick over.

Using as screwdriver for support, Slotin lowered the upper hemisphere over the core, reflecting neutrons back into it, gradually increasing the rate of reactivity inside.

There are conflicting reports about what went wrong. An onlooker said Slotin's approach on this occasion was "improvised". Others said what he did was perfectly normal. In Schreiber's official report, he said Slotin acted "too rapidly and without adequate consideration", but that the others in the room "by their silence, agreed to the procedure".

The screwdriver slipped and the upper reflector enclosed the core.

"I turned because of some noise or sudden movement," wrote Schreiber. "I saw a blue flash... and felt a heat wave simultaneously." It seems the screwdriver had slipped and the plutonium had gone "prompt critical" as the reflector dropped down over it. It happened, as Schreiber wrote, in "a few tenths of a second." Slotin flipped the upper reflector to the floor, but his reaction was already too late. In the moments after the accident, the room was silent.

Then Slotin said quietly:

Slotin knew the implications of what had happened.

The aftermath was remembered chaotically. The scientists gathered in the corridor outside. Slotin sketched a diagram of where they had each been standing at the moment of the accident. Schreiber, who'd been furthest away, went back in and tried to get radiation readings. While he was there, he also collected his jacket. One internal report on the accident says humans are in "no condition for rational behaviour" after radiation exposure. It also says they may experience "vertigo". It doesn't say whether this is a direct effect of high-energy particles or some response of the body to the imminence of death.

Slotin died nine days later from organ failure. "A pure and simple case of death from radiation," as a colleague would later describe it.

Slotin's left hand three days (left) and nine days (right) after the accident – drawn from archival photographs.

Had Slotin simply grown careless, as official histories suggest? Or was the accident caused by something harder to detect?

During the 1940s, in parallel with the atomic bomb's development, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr was working on the new science of quantum mechanics, a discipline with some profound implications for the idea of scientific objectivity. Unlike events described by classical physics, Bohr said, quantum activity could only be measured through physical interaction with the particles concerned; interaction that inevitably changed both the particles and the equipment used to measure them.  

Physicist Niels Bohr.

Objectivity was not a question of passive observation but of "permanent marks – such as the spot on a photographic plate, caused by the impact of an electron – left on the bodies which define the experimental conditions". In an important sense, quantum phenomena were inseparable from the equipment employed in their measurement and, by extension, from the people that used the equipment.

Through his choices, Slotin turned his own body into a part of the experimental apparatus.

When Bohr spoke of "bodies" defining experimental conditions, he was probably thinking of apparatus rather than of human bodies. But by manually handling the critical assembly that day, Slotin turned his own body into a part of the apparatus, into both a biological register of quantum effects and into one of the materials that was causing those same effects. A 2018 reconstruction of the accident suggested the plutonium core would not have gone critical had it not been for his hand on the beryllium hemisphere acting as an additional neutron reflector.

Slotin in the moments before the accident.

Tragically, Slotin's death was not unprecedented: he had watched a colleague die after a very similar accident the year before, involving the same plutonium core.

Slotin's colleague, Harry Daghlian, who died handling the same plutonium core a year earlier, in 1945; drawn from film stills shot the same year.

In fact his boss, Enrico Fermi, had explicitly warned Slotin only a few months earlier about his approach to critical assemblies. "You'll be dead within the year, if you keep doing that," he had said.

But it seems Fermi's was a lone voice in an institution that tended to downplay the dangers of its work. Lieutenant Edward Wilder who served on the Los Alamos High Explosives and Assembly Team during WW2, later recalled fires, electrocutions and explosions at the lab. He once saw a man swallow a fragment of high explosive that accidentally flew into his mouth. "In these times," as he put it, "there was no safety organisation."

Edward Wilder rides the "Fat Man" bomb, before it was dropped on Nagasaki. Drawn from an original photograph provided by Wilder's son Marshall.

At Los Alamos, two simultaneous realities were at play. In the first, the gravity of the work was overwhelming. As the physicist Phillip Morrison put it in 1986: "There was no doubt in our minds that the German government… was in possession of the means of the most powerful weapon that the world had ever seen… the reaction was great anxiety and fear." In the other reality, the use of human bodies in defining experimental conditions was common practice and the work's implications were disguised by what physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad calls a culture of "play" and "anti-realism".

Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.

A blinkered pursuit of the "sweet" can still be seen in science and technology today, such as in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Even projects that appear benign may have calamitous potential. In 2022, researchers at a drug development company decided to test if its software could also create biochemical weapons. Within six hours, the AI had identified more than 40,000 compounds "predicted to be more toxic... than publicly known chemical warfare agents".

"The thought had never previously struck us," wrote the authors. "We were naive in thinking about the potential misuse of our trade… A non-human autonomous creator of a deadly chemical weapon is entirely feasible."

The US government "established a pattern of secrecy", in response to Slotin's death "that still persists".

Niels Bohr once defined an "experiment" as "a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned". From this perspective, Slotin's accident was a missed opportunity; a minor entry in a long history of technological wake-up calls that have been poorly recorded and at best partially examined. Thousands attended his funeral. His hometown named a park after him. But there was little public discourse around what his death might mean. According to one researcher the US government "established a pattern of secrecy", in response to Slotin's death "that still persists".

Relatively unscathed by the accident, Schreiber went on to help re-design the way procedures like the one that killed Slotin were conducted, with a greater emphasis on safety.

Standing at Slotin's shoulder, Graves received a high dosage of radiation and became critically ill. The official reports seem to downplay the effects – the permanent impairment of vision in his left eye, or the many months it took for his sperm count to recover. One report stated: "The patient felt well 38 months after exposure. He was working extremely hard in a position of great responsibility..."

The regrowth of Alvin Graves' hair, drawn from anonymised archival photographs taken one, two and four months after the accident.

Floy Agnes Lee, the haematologist treating Graves after the accident described in a 2017 interview how severe his condition was. "His white blood cells were so low that they didn’t understand why he was still living," she said. "I don’t remember how long it took before his hair started growing back again."

Graves went on to become the chief scientific officer at Los Alamos. During the Cold War, he oversaw many of the most destructive weapons tests in history, vaporising whole Pacific islands, irradiating swathes of ocean ecology, and leaving a terrible nuclear legacy for the people who live there. Raised rates of cancer and still birth were reported, not to mention the damage caused by the evacuation of homelands.

The inhabitants of Bikini Atoll, evacuated in 1946 to make way for nuclear weapons tests, based on a photo by Carl Mydans.

In a testimony to the International Court of Justice in 1995, the advocate, Lijon Eknilang, from the Marshallese island of Rongelap, described the impact of the tests on successive generations of her community:

Marshallese activist Lijon Eknilang speaking to the International Court of Justice in 1995.

"The fall-out was in the air we breathed, in the fresh water we drank, and in the food we ate... Some of our food crops, such as arrowroot, completely disappeared. Makmok, or tapioca plants, stopped bearing fruit. What we did eat gave us blisters on our lips and in our mouths and we suffered terrible stomach problems and nausea... we later experienced other, even more serious problems... Our illnesses got worse, and many of us died. We had to believe that our island was radioactive, and we evacuated ourselves from Rongelap in 1985. The Rongelapese have been living in exile ever since."

Coral atolls, such as those in the Marshall Islands, take up to 10,000 years to form. US nuclear tests destroyed whole islands, leaving craters visible in satellite images.

The former US Secretary of the Interior, Stewart­­­­ Udall, later suggested that Graves' experience of the accident in 1946 protected him from criticism: "No one had the temerity to challenge [his] reckless safety policies' because he had the measure of radiation 'from personal experience'."

Alvin Graves speaking in 1965.

The lump of plutonium that killed Slotin was later nicknamed the "demon core". In March 1965, four months before his own death, Graves gave a speech in which he used a different, if equally colourful, metaphor, naturalising the existence of nuclear weapons by comparing them to "man-eating sharks". 

"All the instincts of a shark must tell him that that helpless succulent morsel in the water with him is just what he wants and should have," he said.

"The question of immorality does not arise. It seems to me the question of morality enters the picture the moment that man enters the picture and not before. Hence, I can think of atomic bombs being used for immoral purposes but not being of themselves immoral."

He explained that stockpiles of atomic weapons made nuclear war "unthinkable", buying time for negotiation between enemies. "New advances in the tools of war," he added, "have almost always brought about new advances in the tools of peace." 

As for Slotin's death, Graves left no comment behind. He was, an official memo records, "reluctant to discuss it".

Louis Slotin died 30 May 1946

*All illustrations and text are by Ben Platts-Mills,  a writer and artist whose work investigates power, reasoning and vulnerability, and the ways science is represented in popular culture. His memoir, Tell Me The Planets, was published in 2018. On Instagram he is @benplattsmills. 

Commissioned and edited by Richard Fisher.

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Fascinated by airplanes and everything else that flies in the air, he developed a passion for aerospace that took him from high school in Greenville, South Carolina to New York University (NYU).

With a mechanical engineering degree under his belt, he is now responsible for the soil compactor line at a construction equipment company in Atlanta, Georgia.

But nine years on from his life-altering decision, he has lost faith that he is still competing on a level playing field.

"For the past three years, I've had recruiters from major companies reach out to me, 10 to 20 a week," he claims.

As soon as they find out he is on a visa in the H1-B specialty occupation category, however, "most of them walk away", he said.

The H1-B allows highly-skilled, foreign-born individuals to work in the country for three to six years, but requires sponsorship by an employer and often provides no meaningful path to permanent residency.

This week, Mr Yang, now 25, submitted his application for a new Canadian programme that offers open work permits, for up to three years, to H1-B visa holders and their immediate family members.

The measure, a temporary effort to attract skilled and high-tech US workers to the country, only opened on Monday morning. By Tuesday, it had already reached its initial cap of 10,000 applicants.

Canada's immigration minister Sean Fraser announced the new work permit programme in June.

The burst of applications is a sign of mounting frustrations among skilled workers in the US who feel trapped in the limbo of a legal immigration system that they see as outdated and unfriendly.

When his visa expires, Mr Yang says he will have few options. He fully intends to move to Canada if he is accepted by the programme.

"I will be treated not equal, but fair compared to other competitors in the job market and that's one of the things I've missed so much in the past three years," he told the BBC.

Mr Yang is hardly alone in feeling that way. Thousands of skilled foreign nationals either fail to make the cut for the H1-B visa or, when chosen, spend years waiting for a chance at the permanent residency green card.

Demand for the visa category "massively" outstrips supply, said Madeline Zavodny, a University of North Florida economics professor who studies immigration and the future of the US labour market.

When it was established by the US Congress in the year 1990, only 65,000 foreign nationals could apply for the visa each year.

That limit has since been raised only once - to 85,000 - which Ms Zavodny says is "way too small".

"Employer demand has risen, immigration has become much more common and the US workforce hasn't grown enough to keep up with employer demand," she said.

The crush of applicants also prompted US immigration authorities in 2014 to switch from a first-come, first-serve process to a randomised lottery system.

The result, according to Ms Zavodny, is that the US is losing graduates of its own universities who want to stay but are forced to return to their home countries or go elsewhere for employment.

"The impressive thing about Canada is how nimble and flexible they are," she said. "They are constantly innovating their immigration policies, while the US has not for decades."

It remains to be seen whether Canada will extend the cap for its work permit programme or seek to make it permanent.

But a spokesperson for its ministry of immigration told the BBC it believed there were likely more than 400,000 eligible applicants at any given time.

"This temporary policy is intended to facilitate career development and mobility for tech workers, expanding the range of opportunities available for skilled workers to advance their career in the North American tech sector," communications advisor Julie Lafortune said.

"The immense interest in Canada's new H1-B application stream is a strong indication of just how competitive Canada is on the global stage."

Ron Hira, a research associate with the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute think tank, says the H1-B programme is "a mixed bag" that sometimes rewards "the best and brightest" but largely benefits workers with skills already abundantly available in the US.

His research also suggests employers, like technology and outsourcing companies, are exploiting the visa category to hire migrant workers they routinely underpay and place in poor working conditions.

And if terminated, workers on the visa have only 60 days to secure new employment.

"It's not a big surprise that some H1-B workers want to escape and maybe think that Canada will be a better option for them," Mr Hira said.

"If we want immigrants," he added of the US, "we should be offering them green cards, not placing people in situations where the employer controls them."

He warns that it is far too early to know if Canada has made a good decision, in spite of the optics, and points to its lack of screening criteria for the open work permit as well as mass layoffs in the US tech industry.

"We don't know what mix of workers have applied," he said.

"It could be that some of them are very highly skilled. It could be that some of them have ordinary skills and they're just trying to escape a bad situation."

In fact, the longer that H1-B visa holders remain in the US, the more their concerns of getting a raw deal may intensify.

Those who seek green cards run up against the limited quotas allotted by nationality.

"The wait is so long now that, functionally, a new applicant from India is not going to get a green card in their lifetime," said David Bier, the associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank.

The problem is compounded for those with families, as their children lose eligibility for the green card as dependents when they reach the age of 21 and must leave the country.

"If your kids are having to leave the country, you might want to consider going to a country that would welcome you and your family," said Mr Bier.

"The Canadian offer is: you come, immediately get to work for any employer you want and you're going to have a clear path to permanent residency to stay. That is a very attractive offer."

Soumya, 42, a financial services employee in New Jersey, is one Indian national who has applied for the Canadian work permit.She claims the stress and anxiety borne out of the green card "waiting game" is "killing a lot of the enthusiasm that people initially came [to the US] with".

"If people live in a country for 10 years, and they're still not sure whether they'll get to stay, that's not the feeling someone should have," she said.

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Professor Sir Bob Watson, former head of the UN climate body, told the BBC's Today programme he was "pessimistic".

His warning comes amidst a summer of extreme heat for Europe, China and the US.

The UN says passing the limit will expose millions more people to potentially devastating climate events.

The world agreed to try to limit the temperature increase due to climate change to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels at a UN conference in Paris in 2015. That target has become the centrepiece of global efforts to tackle climate change.

Climate scientists have been warning governments for years that they are not cutting their countries' emissions quickly enough to keep within this target.

But it is surprising for someone as senior and well respected as the former head of the UN climate science body the IPCC to be so frank that he believes it will be missed.

Professor Sir Bob Watson is currently Emeritus Professor of the UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Research - having previously worked at the UN, Nasa, UK's Department of Environment and the US White House - and is perhaps one of the foremost climate scientists in the world.

In the interview aired on Thursday he said: "I think most people fear that if we give up on the 1.5 [Celsius limit] which I do not believe we will achieve, in fact I'm very pessimistic about achieving even 2C, that if we allow the target to become looser and looser, higher and higher, governments will do even less in the future."

His comments although candid were supported by Lord Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, later on Thursday during an interview with BBC's WATO programme.

He said: "I think 1.5 is probably out of reach even if we accelerate quickly now, but we could bring it back if we start to bring down the cost of negative emissions and get better at negative emissions. Negative emissions means direct air capture of carbon dioxide."

Based on current government commitments to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Climate Action Tracker predicts that global temperatures will rise to 2.7C.

The figure is not a direct measure of the world's temperature but an indicator of how much or how little the Earth has warmed or cooled compared to the long-term global average - and even slight changes can have significant impacts.

The UN climate body, the IPCC, has said keeping temperature rises below 1.5C, rather than 2C, would mean:

• 10 million fewer people would lose their homes to rising sea levels

• a 50% reduction in the number of people experiencing water insecurity

• a reduction in coral reef loss from 99% to 70%

Prof Sir Bob Watson said that the world was struggling to prevent temperature rises as we are not reducing emissions fast enough.

"The big issue is we need to reduce greenhouse gases now to even be on the pathway to be close to 1.5C or 2C. We need to reduce current emissions by at least 50% by 2030. The trouble is the emissions are still going up, they are not going down," he said.

He told the Today programme that setting targets was not enough and countries needed to back these up with action: "We need to try and hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions, but even governments with a really good target like the United Kingdom don't have the policies in place, don't have the financing in place to reach those goals."

In March the UK's watchdog on climate change, the UKCCC, said the UK had lost its leadership on climate issues. It said the government's backing of new oil and coal projects, airport expansion plans and slow progress on heat pumps showed a lack of urgency.

In response to comments from Lord Stern and Sir Professor Bob Watson, a government spokesperson said: "The UK is a world-leader on net zero, cutting emissions faster than any other G7 country and has attracted billions of investment into renewables, which now account for 40% of our electricity."

But Lord Deben, who until last month was chair of the UKCCC, said the government was "entirely wrong". Talking to BBC's WATO programme he said that other countries like the US and China were moving much faster, and that the UK was setting "the worst possible example to the rest of the world".

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In a bid to ease tensions with Beijing, the United States will limit the scope of its coming investment curbs against China to the semiconductor, artificial intelligence and quantum computing sectors – not extending those sanctions into biotechnology and clean energy industries. 

The restrictions will be “narrowly targeted”; they will not be broad controls that would affect US investment broadly in China or have a fundamental impact on the investment climate for China, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday.

Bloomberg reported that the investment curbs against China will be announced by the end of August but won’t take effect until next year as “the policy grinds through Washington’s bureaucracy.”

The tone of the response from Chinese officials, while far from enthusiastic, is milder than that of Beijing’s response on April 21, which called the US “selfish” and its move a “blatant act of economic coercion and sci-tech bullying.” 

“China opposes US politicizing and weaponizing of trade and tech issues,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson at China’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday. “It is in no one’s interest to place arbitrary curbs on normal technology cooperation and trade, violate the market economy principles and destabilize global industrial and supply chains.” 

Mao said China hopes that the US will follow through on President Joe Biden’s commitment of not seeking to “decouple” from China, halt China’s economic development or contain China. It should create a sound environment for China-US economic cooperation and trade, Mao said.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing the US chips industry, in a statement called on both the Chinese and US governments to ease tensions and seek solutions through dialogue.

“Repeated steps to impose overly broad, ambiguous, and at times unilateral restrictions risk diminishing the US semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, disrupting supply chains, causing significant market uncertainty, and prompting continued escalatory retaliation by China,” said the SIA.

The SIA urged the Biden administration to refrain from further restrictions until it engages more extensively with industry and experts to assess the impact of current and potential restrictions to determine whether they are narrow and clearly defined, consistently applied, and fully coordinated with allies.

Some commentators said the US curbs may not create much impact as China has its own AI and quantum computing technologies. 

Media reports said Huawei Technologies launched Ascend 910, an AI chip using TSMC’s 7nm technology, in 2019, and that the chip now has a 79% market share in mainland China. Huawei also established an AI cloud hub in Guizhou.

An IT writer says Huawei will stack up 16,000 Ascend 910 chips in a cluster that can train a chatbot equivalent to GPT3.0 later this year. 

Besides, Origin Quantum, a Hefei-based quantum computer maker, launched its 6-qubit superconducting chip, known as KF-C6-130, in 2020. It also unveiled a 24-qubit quantum chip, KF-C24-100, in 2021. 

China’s five demands

The US Treasury’s Yellen visited Beijing between July 6 and 9. By then Sino-US relations had fallen to the lowest point in decades after a Chinese spy balloon was spotted in North American airspace in late January. Beijing has been more willing to talk since media reports said in mid-April that Biden would sign an executive order that would restrict US firms and funds from investing in China’s high technology sectors.

During Yellen’s visit to Beijing, Chinese officials called for the cancellation of the extra tariffs, company sanctions, investment restrictions, export controls and Xinjiang product bans imposed by the US on China in recent years.

“The tariffs were put in place because we had concern with unfair trade practices on China’s side — and our concerns with those practices remain,” Yellen told reporters during her trip to the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (FMCBG) meeting in India on Sunday. 

“Perhaps over time this is an area where we could make progress but I would say it’s premature to use this as an area for de-escalation, at least at this time,” she said.

She said the United States’s chip export controls and investment restrictions against China were driven by national security considerations, not aimed at cutting ties with the country.

Besides, she said, she had discussed with Chinese officials about the Chinese economic slowdown, which will affect many other countries that export products to China. She said she thinks Chinese officials are anxious to communicate that the business environment in China is open and friendly.

She said the US will continue to push forward its “friend-shoring” policy of reshaping global supply chains to reduce over-reliance on China. Departing from India on Tuesday, Yellen is heading to Vietnam. The US treats both India and Vietnam as “friend-shoring” countries and Mexico as its top “near-shoring” place.

De-sinicization

Chinese commentators said “friend-shoring” and “near-shoring” are the real threats to the global economy.

“For some time, the US has been advocating ‘decoupling,’ ‘friendly-shoring’ and ‘near-shoring,’ and seeking to de-sinicize the global supply chain,” Qiu Haifeng, a commentator at the People’s Daily, says in an opinion piece published on Monday. “These acts artificially split the world’s supply chains, severely disrupted market rules and the international economic and trade order, and were widely criticised by the global community.”

“The term ‘de-risking’ is confusing and deceptive,” says Qiu. “Some US politicians are playing new tricks, trying to embellish their wording to boost their discourse power and avoid criticism.”

He says the US only wants to deceive the international community and lures allies to further “decouple” with China. He says “de-sinicization” will not help resolve the problems in the US but slow the world’s economic development.

“‘De-risking’ seems to be milder than ‘decoupling’ but it actually broadens the definition of ‘risk’ and exacerbates the chaos of the global economic system,” Ma Xue, a researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a unit of the Ministry of State Security, says in an article published on Monday. 

“National security is a broad and vague concept, which covers not only a large number of US manufacturing products and firms but also civil-use research and communication tools,” her article says.

She adds that the US tries to label China as a risk and persuade its allies to join its de-sinicization plan. She says the restructuring of the supply chain will polarize the world and seriously obstruct global economic development.

In the first four months of this year, trade between the US and Mexico reached US$263 billion. Mexico surpassed China and Canada to become the United States’s top trade partner.

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The US has finished destroying the last of its chemical weapon stockpiles. Since it is the last state to declare possession of these dreadful tools of war, this recent action means that the world is officially free from chemical weapons – on paper, at least. 

The US Department of Defense (DOD) recently announced that the nation's “obsolete” stockpile of chemical weapons has been safely destroyed in accordance with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. 

At its peak in the mid-1980s, the US possessed 30,000 tons of chemical warfare agents. These included nerve agents, such as sarin and tabun, that disrupt the mechanisms by which nerves transfer messages to organs, as well as blister agents like mustard gas, which cause severe irritation to the skin, eyes, and lungs.

In 1986, with the Cold War slowly coming to a close, Congress required that all stockpiles of US chemical warfare agents be destroyed. This plan was affirmed in 1997 when the US ratified the United Nations International Chemical Weapons Convention treaty, a global agreement designed to rid the world of chemical weapons. 

The US started getting rid of their chemical weapons in 1990, but the long process has only just been completed. In their recent announcement, the DOD added that the final sarin nerve agent-filled M55 rocket was destroyed on July 7 at the Blue Grass Army Depot, Kentucky. 

Chemical weapons were first used in the First World War where they killed around 100,000 soldiers, while many of those who survived chemical weapons attacks were left with lifelong health complications. 

The prolific use of mustard gas during the war was widely condemned as a “barbaric innovation” and governments sought to crack down on its use. This led to the signing of the Geneva Protocol in 1925, which outlawed the use of chemical weapons. 

Nevertheless, many of the world’s major powers – including the US – continued to use them. One of the most significant uses of chemical weapons by the US was the Vietnam War where vast quantities of Agent Orange, a powerful and highly toxic herbicide, were used to destroy forest cover and farms of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. 

The US has argued that Agent Orange is merely a "tactical defoliant," not a weapon, but the chemical caused a horrifying amount of harm to people’s health. It’s estimated that over 300,000 US veterans and over 400,000 Vietnamese people died from exposure to Agent Orange, while potentially millions have been left with lifelong disabilities, including severe birth abnormalities. 

It’s also been strongly implied that the US used white phosphorus as a chemical weapon against insurgents in Iraq during the assault on Falluja in 2004.

Given this grim track record of chemical weapons, the recent news from the US has been welcomed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. However, it’s still possible that some nations are still in possession of chemical weapons, but have failed to declare them to international authorities. 

Syria, for one, was accused of using illegal chemical weapons against its own civilians in August 2013. Syria’s Assad regime has strongly denied this, but the United Nations is wary that they are still unable to verify whether the country is storing chemical weapons in secret stockpiles.

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In 2021, cave paintings found in eastern Spain revealed an unbelievably clear image of one of our ancient ancestors climbing a rope ladder to reach a beehive. Now, new analysis of this and similar artwork has allowed archaeologists to understand more about the sophisticated rope-making techniques mastered by these prehistoric societies.

Rope-making is a particularly tough tradition to trace in the archaeological record. The ropes themselves were largely made of perishable materials, so precious few examples of the objects they were used to construct have survived, and we don’t have a lot of evidence of how they were manufactured either.

The clearest artistic representation of rope use found to date in Europe was unearthed in a Spanish cave back in 2021. The startlingly clear image shows a person scurrying up a rope ladder to try to reach a beehive – or, more precisely, the prized honey within – roughly 7,500 years ago.

Describing the scene in a paper at the time, the researchers said, “In it, a climber, with facial traits, climbs up a rope ladder made up of rope loops. This scene shows an advanced use of rope-making techniques as well as in-depth knowledge of climbing techniques.”

Now, led by Manuel Bea of the University of Zaragoza, the team has returned to the incredible find, using it and other examples of similar art to try to piece together as much as possible about the rope-making technologies favored by ancient humans in the region.

Levantine rock art is unique to this time period and this part of Europe, and more than 1,000 sites have so far been recorded. As the authors explain, “It is a naturalistic art with a strong narrative component, in which humans (men, women and even children) and their material culture (a quite diverse toolkit including bow, arrows, quivers, boomerangs and bags, as well as all sorts of ornaments, clothing, hair accessories, etc.) take part in dynamic scenes that today we describe as hunting, war, social performance or gatherings, among others.”

The researchers cataloged a number of rock art scenes that show ropes in some form or other, most of which are to do with climbing. They noted that most of these depictions have been found in only two geographical areas: the mountainous Meastrazgo and Caroig massif of eastern Spain. This phenomenon has been seen before in Levantine rock art, with particular themes being found only in certain regions, which the authors suggest could be evidence of territorial behavior on the part of ancient humans.

Though some of the artworks show people climbing rigid structures like tree trunks, many showed figures climbing flexible materials – and several of these, the authors say, can be clearly interpreted as ropes and rope ladders.

“These flexible systems are depicted with thinner wavy lines, insinuating their plastic nature and adaptability to the shape of the landscape over which they climb,” they write. “The depicted examples are much longer than previous types, some over 1 [meter] long [3.2 feet] (which, given the scale of the drawings, could equal 25 [meters; 82 feet] in real life).”

Creating and safely climbing these rope ladders would have taken a lot of skill and been very time-consuming. They would have had to be fixed and hung from the top, and some of the scenes even show the climber’s gear left at the bottom of the ladder. The most complex ladder design is that depicted in the 2021 scene – a stirrup ladder, with footholds created by knotting the rope. Incredibly, this same technique (albeit with different raw materials) is still used today in alpine climbing.

It's hard to know for sure why our ancestors so prized honey that they would go to the trouble of constructing complex climbing apparatus and making the treacherous ascent to the hive. Bee products are known to have cultural and culinary significance dating back centuries, with depictions of humans seeking out beehives in many other forms of rock art from around the world. 

“Honey and beeswax must have had a variety of uses for Levantine societies, becoming so valuable as to invest a good deal of time and effort in making such large ropes, and in depicting this type of scene,” the authors conclude. “They also devised and improved climbing systems enabling them to literally hang over the void.”

The study is published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

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The documents comprise the earliest known usage of the phrase ‘red herring’ in English, extremely rare forms of medieval literature, as well as a killer rabbit worthy of Monty Python. This breakthrough alters our perception of English comedic culture during the period bridging Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Throughout the Middle Ages, minstrels traveled between fairs, taverns, and baronial halls to entertain people with songs and stories. Fictional minstrels are common in medieval literature but references to real-life performers are rare and fleeting. We have first names, payments, instruments played, and occasionally locations, but until now virtually no evidence of their lives or work.

Dr. James Wade, from Cambridge University’s English Faculty and Girton College, came across the texts by accident while researching in the National Library of Scotland. He then had a “moment of epiphany” when he noticed the scribe had written: ‘By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink.’

“It was an intriguing display of humor and it’s rare for medieval scribes to share that much of their character,” Wade says. That made him investigate how, where, and why Heege had copied out the texts.

Wade’s study, published today in The Review of English Studies, focuses on the first of nine miscellaneous booklets in the ‘Heege Manuscript’. This booklet contains three texts and Wade concludes that around 1480 Heege copied them from a now-lost memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel performing near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border. The three texts comprise a tail-rhyme burlesque romance entitled The Hunting of the Hare; a mock sermon in prose; and The Battle of Brackonwet, an alliterative nonsense verse.

“Most medieval poetry, song, and storytelling has been lost”, Wade says. “Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art. This is something else. It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. Stand-up comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.”

Part of ‘The Hunting of the Hare’ poem in the Heege Manuscript (p.4 verso), featuring the killer rabbit. The first lines read: “Jack Wade was never so sad / As when the hare trod on his head / In case she would have ripped out his throat.” Credit: National Library of Scotland

 

The booklet’s secrets have been hiding in plain sight because, Wade believes, a previous study has focused on how the manuscript was made and overlooked its comedic significance.

Wade connected multiple clues pointing to a minstrel’s repertoire. All three texts are humorous and designed for live performance – the narrator tells his audience to pay attention and pass him a drink. The texts all feature in-jokes to appeal to local audiences and show a playful awareness of the kind of diverse, celebrating audiences that we know minstrels performed to.

Wade thinks the minstrel wrote part of his act down because its many nonsense sequences would have been extremely difficult to recall. “He didn’t give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember,” Wade says.

“Here we have a self-made entertainer with very little education creating really original, ironic material. To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.”

Many minstrels are thought to have had day jobs, including as plowmen and peddlers, but went gigging at night and on weekends. Some may have traveled across the country, while others stuck to a circuit of local venues as Wade thinks this one did.

Scribe’s note ‘By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink’, in the Heege Manuscript (bottom of p.60 verso). This caught the attention of Cambridge researcher Dr James Wade. Credit: National Library of Scotland

 

Wade says: “You can find echoes of this minstrel’s humor in shows like Mock the Week, situational comedies, and slapstick. The self-irony and making audiences the butt of the joke are still very characteristic of British stand-up comedy.”

The texts add to what we thought minstrels did. Fictional depictions suggest they performed ballads about Robin Hood, chivalric romances, adventure stories, and songs about great battles.

“These texts are far more comedic and they serve up everything from the satirical, ironic, and nonsensical to the topical, interactive, and meta-comedic. It’s a comedy feast,” Wade says.

Killer rabbit

The Hunting of the Hare is a poem about peasants that is full of jokes and absurd high jinks. The poem features fictional peasants including Davé of the Dale and Jack Wade, who could be from any medieval village. One scene is reminiscent of Monty Python’s ‘Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog’:

Jack Wade was never so sad / As when the hare trod on his head / In case she would have ripped out his throat.

Dr. Wade says: “Killer rabbit jokes have a long tradition in medieval literature. Chaucer did this a century earlier in the Canterbury Tales.”

Boozy sermon

The texts include one of the few surviving examples of a mock sermon in Middle English, the most famous being Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue. This example comically addresses its audience as ‘cursed creatures’ and embeds fragments of drinking songs, including:

“Drink you to me and I to you and hold your cup up high” and “God loves neither horse nor mare, but merry men that in the cup can stare.”

Wade explains: “This is a minstrel telling his audience, perhaps people of very different social standing, to get drunk and be merry with each other.”

Earliest ‘red herring’

The mock sermon ridicules the aristocracy, and in doing so makes the earliest recorded use of ‘red herring’ to mean a diversion.

Three kings eat so much that 24 oxen burst out of their bellies sword fighting. The oxen chop each other up so much that they are reduced to three ‘red herrings’.

Dr Wade says: “The images are bizarre but the minstrel must have known people would get this red herring reference. Kings are reduced to mere distractions. What are kings good for? Gluttony. And what is the result of gluttony? Absurd pageantry creating distractions, ‘red herrings’.”

Robin Hood and jousting bears

‘The Battle of Brakonwet’ is an alliterative nonsense verse, which is extremely rare in Middle English.

The text features Robin Hood as well as jousting bears, battling bumblebees, and partying pigs. The poem names several villages close to the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border and so invites audiences to imagine absurd incidents happening in their neighborhood.

The poem includes a skillful demonstration of alliterative verse and a clever double entendre in the line: ‘In a slommuryng of slepe, for-slokond with ale’. ‘For-slokond; could mean both ‘quenched’ and ‘drenched’.

Wade says: “We shouldn’t assume that popular entertainers weren’t capable of poetic achievement. This minstrel clearly was.”

The scribe

Richard Heege was a household cleric and tutor to the Sherbrooke family, part of the Derbyshire gentry, to whom his booklets first belonged. Heege appears to have had a sense of humor and a penchant for literature which others may have thought too lowbrow to preserve in manuscript.

“Heege gives us the rarest glimpse of a medieval world rich in oral storytelling and popular entertainments,” says Wade.

Minstrels and medieval life

When this minstrel was performing, the Wars of the Roses were still being fought and life was hard for most people in England. But, Wade says, “These texts remind us that festive entertainment was flourishing at a time of growing social mobility.”

“People back then partied a lot more than we do today, so minstrels had plenty of opportunities to perform. They were really important figures in people’s lives right across the social hierarchy. These texts give us a snapshot of medieval life being lived well.”

There could be more evidence to be found but Wade emphasizes that minstrel writing is unlikely to have survived and that we should look for other kinds of evidence, like Hegge’s texts, which provide a valuable witness to live performances.

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Prescription opioids are currently used by over 1 million people in the UK, with more than 50,000 of these individuals having used these drugs for half a year or longer. This imposes a substantial financial burden on the NHS, with estimated annual costs reaching up to £500 million.

Recent NHS initiatives have managed to reduce opioid prescribing by eight percent, saving an estimated 350 lives.

New research has found evidence that could help many more people stop their opioid painkiller use.

Despite the evidence that taking opioids long-term is harmful, there are currently no alternative treatments available to safely help people who are coming off opioids and still dealing with chronic, non-cancer pain.

A team of researchers and clinicians have developed and successfully trialed an intervention program designed to guide people in coming off prescription painkillers, taper their opioid intake, and learn how to manage their pain using alternative techniques with a course that combines one-to-one and group support.

1 in 5 people came off opioids within one year

The study, titled I-WOTCH (Improving the Wellbeing of People with Opioid Treated Chronic Pain), found that the intervention program helped 1 in 5 people come off their opioids within one year, without substituting medication and without making their pain worse.

Over 600 people took part in the randomized controlled study between 2017 and 2020 who at the beginning of the trial had been regularly taking strong opioids for at least three months. The participants were recruited from GP practices from the North East of England and the Midlands.

The study compared two treatments, dividing participants randomly into two groups.  One group had access to their existing GP care, plus a self-help booklet and relaxation CD; the second group had the same and also took part in an intervention program specially developed by the study team.

The intervention program included sessions on coping techniques, stress management, goal setting, mindfulness, posture and movement advice, how to manage any withdrawal symptoms, and pain control after opioids.

Participants completed questionnaires about their everyday functioning and painkiller intake at intervals throughout the trial.

After one year, 29 percent of people who took part in the intervention program, were able to fully come off their opioids completely, compared to just 7 percent who were treated with existing GP care, the self-help booklet, and CD.

There was no difference between the two groups in terms of their pain, or how pain interfered with their lives.

Combined group and one-to-one support key to reducing opioid need

Harbinder Kaur Sandhu, Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Warwick, who led the clinical trial said: “Structured, group-based, psycho-educational self-management interventions help people to better manage their daily lives with a long-term condition, including persistent pain, but few of these have specifically targeted patients considering opioid withdrawal.

“The findings from the trial are extremely promising. Many people who have been taking prescription painkillers over a long period of time suffer from harmful side effects but can feel reluctant to come off them because they think it could make their pain worse, or they do not know how to approach this with their clinician.

“Our trial has found a treatment that could help people to come off opioids, in a way that is safe, supportive, and gradual. It’s a supported decision between the patient and the clinician, and not forced tapering. The program helps people to learn alternative ways to manage their pain and help overcome challenges of withdrawal and has the potential to give people an overall better quality of life.”

Opioids have little long-term impact on chronic pain

Professor Sam Eldabe, clinical trial co-lead and consultant in pain medicine at The James Cook University Hospital, said: “Our trial is the culmination of six years of work during which we learned that the harms from long-term opioids extend beyond the individual into their social circle. Patients taking opioids lose interest in social interaction with family and friends and gradually withdraw from society into an opioid-induced mental fog.

“Despite appreciating the social impact of the drugs, most patients utterly dread a worsening of their pain should they attempt to reduce their opioids.

“Our study shows clearly that opioids can be gradually reduced and stopped with no actual worsening of the pain. This confirms our suspicions that opioids have very little long-term impact on persistent pain.”

Colin’s story

Colin Tysall, 81 from Coventry, was prescribed painkillers, including opioids to treat chronic back pain, as a result of working as an aircraft radiologist for 30 years.

“I was an industrial radiologist and wore my back out x-raying aircraft parts and handling heavy castings for jet engines. The castings could weigh up to 200lbs and even though we would move some of the castings around in stillages, it was still a strain. We were having to move these castings around very carefully, with no lifting equipment.”

Colin started experiencing sciatic pain down both of his legs and found that he had three slipped discs in his back. He describes the devastating impact of painkiller dependency:

“The treatment at the time was bed rest and painkillers. The tablets got stronger and stronger until eventually I was prescribed opioids,” said Colin.

“I spent so much time in bed that I lost the use of my legs and fell into a deep depression, so I was prescribed antidepressants too. I couldn’t look after my family, and at one point I tried to take my own life.

“I didn’t like being on tablets. They addled my brain, they made it difficult to think straight, my brain wasn’t functioning as it should. I would have nightmares a lot. As soon as I could come off them, I did.”

After spending 10 years visiting a hospital to treat his back and mental health, Colin turned to alternative treatments to treat his pain.

“I found that the best treatment for me was exercise. I got involved with mental health self-health groups, and I became friends with people experiencing similar problems. We would walk and talk together, which was the opposite of the guidelines at the time,

but I found it helped keep my mind off the pain, and it made it easier to cope.”

After spending a couple of years tapering his medication to a lower level, Colin was eventually able to come off the tablets altogether. Recently he has found that he is no longer suffering from the pain.

Colin retrained as an associate mental health manager, and he continues to work at Coventry and Warwick universities helping to train psychiatric and nursing students.

Most recently, Colin got involved with the University of Warwick’s Clinical Trials Unit and has been helping support patients in the I-WOTCH clinical trial group support sessions as a trained I-WOTCH layperson.

The full intervention program consisted of an 8-to-10-week course and included:

• Group support sessions

The group sessions consisted of three full-day sessions per week. The group sessions included education about opioids and pain, case studies of people who have successfully tapered, learning self-management skills for pain, and challenging beliefs. There was also the opportunity to practice techniques such as mindfulness and distraction. The group sessions were facilitated by a trained I-WOTCH nurse and a trained I-WOTCH layperson (someone who had personal experience with pain and opioid tapering).

• Tailored one-to-one support and opioid tapering

In addition to the group sessions, people in the study were also given one-to-one sessions with the nurse to offer support and most importantly tailored advice for the opioid tapering which was delivered face-to-face and through telephone calls. A tapering app designed for the study was used to calculate a reduction in opioid intake based on current guidance at that time and actioned by the participants’ GPs.

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