Source

Source

The water level of the Yamuna river has increased over the last few days after unusually heavy rain in northern India, including Uttar Pradesh.

The state has received 108 per cent of its normal rainfall since the four-month monsoon season began on June 1.

According to India’s Central Water Commission (CWC), the portion of the river flowing alongside the Taj Mahal rose to 152m on Tuesday evening, well above the warning level for potential danger of 151.4m. The level considered dangerous is 152.4m.

Local media outlets reported that the last time the river reached the walls of the monument, built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his queen Mumtaz Mahal, was 45 years ago, in 1978.

CWC data also indicates that its station near the monument recorded the river’s highest flood level that year at 154.76m.

Visuals from the area on Tuesday showed the red sandstone boundary wall of the Taj Mahal surrounded by muddy water, with the mausoleum itself looming over the scene, untouched by the river.

Officials from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which oversees the Taj Mahal along with several other monuments in the country, said there is “no serious concern” about the monument at present.

“If it rains more, or the water stays this high for some days, we will need to assess the situation again,” said Mr Raj Kumar Patel, superintendent archaeologist with the ASI.

However, several other monuments and gardens located in the vicinity of the Taj Mahal, closer to the banks of the Yamuna, “have been submerged” and damaged, he said.

These include the tomb of Itimad-ud-Daulah, often called “baby Taj”, which dates back to the 1600s, and Mehtab Bagh, also from the same period, whose structure has been damaged and garden area – currently underwater – completely destroyed. REUTERS

Source

“Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors,’’ the weather service said. The need for air conditioning is driving energy demand up. Phoenix, Arizona has reached 110F or higher for 18 consecutive days, tying a record set between June 12 - 29, 1974, the National Weather Service said in a tweet. The forecast for the rest of the week calls for highs of 115 to 116, which will set a new all-time record.

In Mexico, temperatures are forecast to hit 45C (113F) in Baja California and Sonora, and between 40C to 45C in Baja California Sur, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamauilpas, Campeche and the Yucatán, according to Servicio Meteorológico Nacional.

The heat dome across northern Mexico and the southern US is one of four spread around the world. Another is focused over the North Atlantic. A third in North Africa is causing southern Europe and the Mediterranean to bake. The fourth is in southern Asia.

The land isn’t the only thing that is baking. In the waters off Miami, the Atlantic is currently 88.9F while the air temperature is 85.3, according to the U.S. National Data Buoy Center. So you’d have to get out of the water to cool down.

In other weather news:

Europe: The extreme heat blanketing the Mediterranean is set to peak in parts of Italy on Tuesday, triggering fresh warnings as temperatures approach Europe’s all-time high and wildfires hit Greece.

Japan: Temperatures in central Tokyo have soared to nearly 9C (16F) above the seasonal average, as the extreme heat blanketing the world continues to smash historical norms.

India: Heavy to very heavy rainfall is expected to continue in Mumbai and its adjoining areas on Tuesday, according to a bulletin from the India Meteorological Department.

Tropics: Tropical Storm Don, which had lost power Monday, has once again burst back to life with top winds of 40 mph as it travels the Atlantic. In the central Pacific Tropical Storm Calvin could clip the Big Island of Hawaii, where tropical storm warnings have been posted. Some areas could get as much as 10 inches of rain. Typhoon Talim is over land now in China and losing power. Another potential storm could get going east of the Philippines.

Canadian wildfires: Air quality alerts are still out across most of the Northeast, with the exception of New York City, and parts of the Midwest, South and Great Plains. In New York City air quality is moderate as of 6 a.m., according to AirNow.gov.

©2023 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Source

• Google is enlisting employees for a pilot program to work without internet access.

• The search giant, which is undergoing a companywide rollout of AI tools, says its employees are a frequent target of attacks.

• The company originally selected 2,500 employees to participate but then opened it up to volunteers; it will also allow selected employees to opt out.

Google on Wednesday is starting a new pilot program where some employees will be restricted to internet-free desktop PCs, CNBC has learned.

The company originally selected more than 2,500 employees to participate, but after receiving feedback, the company revised the pilot to allow employees to opt out, as well as opening it up to volunteers. The company will disable internet access on the selected desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail. Some workers who need the internet to do their job will get exceptions, the company states in materials.

Some employees will also have no root access, meaning they won’t be able to run administrative commands or do things like install software.

Google is running the program to reduce the risk of cyber attacks, according to internal materials. “Googlers are frequent targets of attacks,” one internal description viewed by CNBC states. If a Google employee’s device is compromised, the attackers may have access to user data and infrastructure code, which could result in a major incident and undermine user trust, the description added.

Turning off most internet access ensures attackers cannot easily run arbitrary code remotely or grab data, the description explains.

The program comes as companies face increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. Last week, Microsoft said Chinese intelligence hacked into Microsoft email accounts belonging to two dozen government agencies, including the State Department, in the U.S. and Western Europe in a “significant” breach. Google has been pursuing U.S. government contracts since launching a public sector division last year.

It also comes as Google, which is preparing a companywide rollout of various AI tools, tries to level up its security. The company has also been trying more in recent months to contain leaks. 

A Google spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

Source

It’s 2013 and the craft beer boom is blooming across the United States. Eager young brewers are placing huge orders for new hop varieties that will soon make IPAs ubiquitous. Citra. Mosaic. Galaxy. Beer cans are churning off distribution lines, ale is flowing from taps, and money is gushing into breweries. But then some of the brewers who ignited the craze take home their cans. They find a glass in the freezer, pop the tab, pour a beautiful head of foam, take a sip—and gag.

Stomping all over those tropical fruit notes is the unwelcome taste of fake movie theater butter. “You’d take a sip and go ‘Wait a minute, that wasn’t there before,’” says J. C. Hill, the brewer and cofounder of Alvarado Street Brewery, a craft beer phenom from Monterey, California, that soared out of the 2010s boom. “I find it to make beer utterly undrinkable,” says Ryan Hammond, head brewer at Oakland’s Temescal Brewing a few hours’ drive north, which charted a similar path.

The odious culprit was a volatile compound called diacetyl, which has a distinctive buttery flavor once common on movie theater popcorn. About 10 years ago it began appearing unexpectedly in hop-heavy beers after they had been canned, turning balanced, fruity IPAs into buttery nastiness.

Brewers like Hill and Hammond can now look back on the diacetyl crisis with some nostalgia. The foul foe has been vanquished by a quieter revolution that has swept through craft beer over the past five years: genetically-modified yeast.

Alvarado and Temescal are both customers of Berkeley Yeast, a San Francisco biotech startup that has grown alongside craft breweries. It sells a “diacetyl-free” yeast with a tiny tweak to its genetic material that makes its cells produce an enzyme called ALDC. The enzyme prevents the diacetyl proliferation that brewers speculate can appear after canning when yeast hasn’t fully fermented some hop compounds. (For a GMO-free alternative, brewers can add off-the-shelf ALDC into brewing vats, but it makes the process more complicated).

Berkeley offers a wide selection of designer yeasts, with some offering process improvements like the diacetyl-killer and others adding flavor. A strain called Tropics produces an enzyme that injects guava and passionfruit overtones. It powers Temescal’s Secret Solutions Double IPA and contributes to the “tropical melange” of Bee Gee IPA from Watts Brewing Company in Bothell, Washington. Another Berkeley strain, Sunburst, adds pineapple flavors, while Galactic produces lactic acid to create sour beers without the lengthy traditional brewing process. More controversially, the company has performed experiments suggesting that engineered yeast can make it possible to brew hoppy beer without hops at all.

Although it’s not easily noticed when quaffing a brew, Berkeley’s yeast strains have brought about perhaps the biggest shift in brewing since the now iconic Citra, Mosaic, and Galaxy hops took off in the 2010s. Craft brewers across the US have switched from traditional yeasts to Berkeley strains for some, and sometimes all, their beers. Berkeley declines to share numbers, but six craft brewers told WIRED that everyone they know in the trade is either using the startup’s strains or considering it. If you’re looking to drink a Berkeley beer, most brewers credit the company’s yeast in their marketing or labeling, especially when it’s used for flavor improvements.

“The diacetyl-free Chico yeast from Berkeley—that’s pretty much exclusively what we use in-house for our beers,” says Tim Sciascia, head brewer at Cellarmaker Brewing, a revered San Francisco brewery. “The crew at Berkeley is messing around at a level that’s just so far beyond what anyone else is doing.”

Trouble Brewing

Berkeley Yeast has its critics. Some beer traditionalists and farmers have complained that the startup is taking the art out of an ancient process and threatening the future of hop farming. Before the company had a string of award-winning brewers as customers, it was just three microbiology PhDs under fire from angry hop farmers.

The startup originated—predictably—in a garage. It was the mid-2010s, and UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Charles Denby was using it to learn home brewing on weekends while working on biofuels in a yeast engineering lab during the week. Discovering that hops were by far the most expensive part of home brewing inspired him to think about connecting his hobby and day job.

“That was the light bulb for me,” Denby says. He began to imagine yeast strains engineered to produce the flavors hops add to beer, potentially removing the need for hops altogether. “If I can get a yeast just to make parts per billion of these flavor compounds during an otherwise normal beer fermentation process,” he recalls thinking, “we could reduce the amount of natural resources that goes into the brewing process.”

Denby started exploring that idea with labmate Rachel Li, who turned the idea of yeast that makes hop flavors into her doctoral thesis. They founded Berkeley Yeast in 2017 with fellow biologist Nick Harris.

Charles Denby and Rachel Li, cofounders at startup Berkeley

Yeast, sample a brew made with one of the company's

genetically engineered yeast strains at its Oakland,

California, research lab.Photograph: Lindsey Shea

In 2018, Denby and Li published a peer-reviewed paper on their project with several collaborators. It described experiments that created yeast strains that produced some of the flavor compounds hops usually add to beer, using the genome-editing technique Crispr and DNA sequences from mint and basil plants. Taste tests performed with California craft brewer Lagunitas showed that beer made with the engineered strains but without hops could taste similarly hoppy to conventional brews. The paper also pointed to the resource-intensive nature of hop farming, which it said consumed about 100 billion liters of irrigation water annually in the US.

While the startup cofounders considered hoppy-tasting but hop-free beer potentially beneficial to brewers and the environment—as Denby said in a New York Times story after the paper was published—some hop farmers felt threatened. They feared engineered yeast could end a farming tradition and hollow out the soul of brewing, a dance of microorganisms, farmers, brewers, and hops stretching back to the 11th century.

Denby declines to talk on the record about the antagonism, which caught the company by surprise, but news of the provocative idea swept through the industry. “Early on, we had hop farmers calling us saying, ‘Crap, are you going to not use hops anymore?’” says Bryan Donaldson, brewing innovation manager at Lagunitas and a coauthor on the 2018 paper. (Some hop farmers are still on edge: “One guy stood up at a hop conference this year and said, ‘We don’t like these yeasts, because these yeasts can make hop flavors. This is the Beyond Meat of beer,” Jeremy Marshall, Lagunitas head brewmaster, recalls.)

Berkeley Yeast quickly pivoted. Denby and his cofounders interviewed more than 100 brewers to ask what the yeast strain of their dreams would do and found there wasn’t actually much interest in eliminating hops altogether, although some brewers wanted to reduce hop usage a little for cost reasons.

The feedback led Berkeley to focus on strains that improve efficiency, such as by removing diacetyl, or enhance natural hop flavors by adding specific compounds or enzymes. One example is the enzyme carbon-sulfur-lyase, which takes flavorless molecules present in malt and hops and frees flavorful components called thiols that in beer taste like tropical fruit. Berkeley created its Tropics strain by modifying a yeast commonly used for hazy IPAs to produce the enzyme.

Drinking Buddies

Since Berkeley Yeast evolved its pitch, many hop farmers have adjusted, too, realizing that new yeasts can make it easier for brewers to highlight nuanced hop flavors that could have otherwise been too difficult to isolate with a standard yeast. “I believe we could see an even bigger push toward hops that work with these new yeast strains,” says Brian Tennis, the founder of the Hop Alliance. “As hop growers, we need to make sure we are growing what the market demands.”

Although a fixture in craft brewing, to really hit the big time Berkeley Yeast will have to win over the largest multinational beer corporations such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and Heineken. Craft brewing makes up only one-quarter of the US beer market.

Major beer companies have been testing the startup’s yeasts, cofounder Denby says, although he declines to name them. Marshall, of Lagunitas—a craft beer powerhouse now owned by brewing giant Heineken—think’s it’s only a matter of time. “Somebody is going to jump in, and we are kind of standing on the precipice of that,” he says. “I don’t know who it’s going to be, but once they do I think it’s going to become commonplace.”

Lagunitas offers beers made with Berkeley strains in its taproom, including the Martial Martian Express that features “Uncanny Pineapple” flavors, but you won’t find any in grocery stores. Marshall says major beer distributors are still unsure whether consumers will be receptive to the concept of GMO yeast and would want to know whether GMO skepticism from the 1990s and early 2000s has dissipated.

Denby says he’s confident the biggest beer makers will eventually, like craft brewers, be unable to resist the creative potential and efficiency offered by engineered yeast. “It will take a longer time to scale, but the broader beer industry is going to change,” he says. Despite his original vision for the company, he’s also convinced that hops are here to stay, saying Berkeley’s goal is to complement the tradition, not threaten it.

Source

(May require free registration to view)

The two skeletons are completely intertwined.

Gang Han

 

A new fossil described this week captures two intertwined animals caught in a life-or-death struggle right before both were entombed in a volcanic event. Published in Scientific Reports this Tuesday, the fossil doesn’t capture one dinosaur attacking another—rather, the predator in this case is a smaller mammal known as Repenomamus robustus, and it died with its teeth clamped upon the herbivorous Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis, a dinosaur three times its size.

 

Gut contents from a Repenomamus fossil described in 2005 prove this same mammalian species ate very young and considerably smaller Psittacosaurus. But the remarkable fossil revealed today is the first evidence of any Cretaceous mammal attacking a larger dinosaur. It’s an astounding snapshot of ancient behavior, challenging previous assumptions of predator/prey dynamics millions of years ago.

A final struggle

These two species in the fossil couldn’t be more different. Psittacosaurus is a type of bipedal ceratopsian dinosaur—an early relative of dinosaurs such as Triceratops—with a large beak-like snout and spiky tail bristles. This was a herd animal, and it's the most commonly found fossil in the Lujiatun Member of the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China. This particular Psittacosaurus was approximately 6.5–10 years old when it died.

 

Repenomamus robustus was an early mammal approximately the size and weight of a Virginia opossum. Its left paw is seen grabbing the dislocated lower jaw of the dinosaur, and the two animal’s hindlimbs are tangled. Because Repenomamus died while biting the dinosaur, the authors couldn’t use its teeth to determine its age. However, they concluded that it was almost an adult based on its fused long bones. This voracious little mammal was a mere 1.42–3.43 kg (approximately three to seven lbs.), Yet its prey was 6–10.6 kg (13–23 lbs).

 

Two of Repenomamus’ ribs may be broken, but whether this occurred in its struggle with the dinosaur or through the fossilization process is unknown.

 

This extraordinary fossil was discovered in the aforementioned Lujiatun Member of the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China in 2012 by a local farmer. It’s an area known as the “Chinese Pompeii,” a nod to the Italian archaeological site, for its level of exquisite fossil flora and fauna that were preserved due to volcanic activity.

 

The authors propose that the dinosaur and mammal were quickly overcome by a lahar—a “volcanic debris flow, which occurs after an eruption, via hydraulic reworking of the deposited ash,” co-author Jordan Mallon explained in an email to Ars.

 

But wouldn’t such a debris flow not only impact the positioning of the animals but also transport them from where they died? At the very least, wouldn’t the animals have noticed something that large and dangerous racing toward them? Not according to a 2007 paper describing a cluster of young Psittacosauruses preserved in the same manner and from the same rock formation in China.

 

“These kinds of flows still happen today and can bury entire villages quite rapidly,” Mallon offered. “We know of other dinosaurs from the Lujiatun beds, including the sleeping Mei long, which indicates that such animals were not [awakened] by the debris flow(s). In the case of the fossil we describe, I would argue that the animals were otherwise [too] occupied to notice the incoming mudflow.”

Is this for real?

Mallon is a palaeobiologist with the Canadian Museum of Nature. He described his initial reaction to this fossil as “pure awe,” but then said he experienced “sober skepticism."

 

"I asked myself, ‘Can this be real?’” he said.

 

It’s a fair question, given some notable forgeries in paleontology. But it’s one that Mallon and his authors address in the paper.

 

Forgeries are often the combination of two separate species. Perhaps the most well-known forgery is “Archaeoraptor,” in which two or more fossil species, including bird and feathered theropods, were presented as one. Another is the Piltdown Man in the UK. Forgeries tend to be considerably less complex and tangled than the two species described in this paper, the team argues. The authors went further by exposing more of the mammal’s left dentary and revealed that it “plunges into the matrix to clasp the dinosaur’s ribs,” something that would be difficult to fake.

 

The fossil was donated in 2020 by lead author Gang Han of the Hainan Vocational University of Science and Technology to the Weihai Ziguang Shi Yan School Museum. Mallon explained that Han “was a key player in the development of the school museum and wanted them to have this as a feature fossil.” It is thanks to “Dr. Hans' intimate knowledge of the Lujiatun beds and the people who dig there and the additional preparation that we were able to do on the fossil [that] alleviated my concerns,” Mallon added.

 

Fion Waisum Ma is a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the research. “I appreciate the authors' effort in checking the fossil's authenticity by conducting additional preparation work,” she wrote in an email to Ars. “This is important, as fossils not directly excavated by professionals may have a risk of forgery.”

 

“This fossil reminds me of the iconic ‘Fighting Dinosaurs’ specimen from Mongolia,” she continued, referencing another extraordinary fossil. “When the preservation conditions are favorable, we can occasionally obtain snapshots of the prehistoric world.”

Going big

But is it truly a snapshot of predation, or could this be the last moments of a mammal scavenging a dead dinosaur? The authors point to important clues that favor the former, including a lack of any other bite marks on the body of the Psittacosaurus, the intimately intertwined position of the animals, and the location of the mammal on top of the dinosaur. If the mammal were scavenging, it could have done so from the ground.

 

Smaller mammals today are known to sometimes attack much larger prey, including wolverines attacking moose or caribou. The team conducted analyses to ensure the size of this dinosaur would not preclude a mammal the size of Repenomamus from being able to tackle it. And the prone position of the Psittacosaurus, the authors note, is similar to today’s prey that simply give up after being exhausted by their attempts to survive.

 

This aggressive predation from a mammal “comes as a bit of a shock” to Mallon. “Dinosaurs and mammals did not overlap in body size during the Mesozoic Era, so traditional knowledge holds that dinosaur-mammal interactions were unilateral, which is to say that the dinosaurs ate the mammals,” he said. “We never would have guessed that small mammals were capable of eating larger dinosaurs were it not for this unique fossil.”

 

Ma agrees. “We know that smaller animals sometimes prey on larger animals,” she said. “But what comes as a surprise is such behavior being captured as a fossil. Understanding the interaction between extinct animals is challenging, as most fossils do not preserve the real-life scenario. Exceptional fossils like this one are key to reconstructing the food chain of ancient ecosystems.”

 

Co-author Xiao-Chun Wu is a palaeobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature who collaborates with Han. “There have been specimens of carnivorous dinosaurs preying on plant-eating dinosaurs before,” he wrote to Ars, “but there has never been an example of mammals preying on dinosaurs.” Although gut contents prove mammals ate dinosaurs in the Cretaceous, he feels “it is more important and meaningful to discover a concrete [specimen] of this mammal preying on the dinosaurs.”

 

Scientific Reports, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-37545-8

 

Source

"Of course we're committed to automated driving," the exec told him. "The numbers don't pencil out any other way."

Wait a minute, Wansley thought. Unless someone invents a robot that can drive as well as humans, one of America's biggest ride-hailing companies doesn't expect to turn a profit? Like, ever? Something was clearly very, very screwy about the business model of Big Tech.

"So what was the investment thesis behind Uber and Lyft?" says Wansley, now a professor at the Cardozo School of Law. "Putting billions of dollars of capital into a money-losing business where the path to profitability wasn't clear?"

Wansley and a Cardozo colleague, Sam Weinstein, set out to understand the money behind the madness. Progressive economists had long understood that tech companies, backed by gobs of venture capital, were effectively subsidizing the price of their products until users couldn't live without them. Think Amazon: Offer stuff cheaper than anyone else, even though you lose money for years, until you scale to unimaginable proportions. Then, once you've crushed the competition and become the only game in town, you can raise prices and make your money back. It's called predatory pricing, and it's supposed to be illegal. It's one of the arguments that progressives in the Justice Department used to bust up monopolies like Standard Oil in the early 20th century. Under the rules of capitalism, you aren't allowed to use your size to bully competitors out of the market.

The problem is, conservative economists at the University of Chicago have spent the past 50 years insisting that under capitalism, predatory pricing is not a thing. Their head-spinning argument goes like this: Predators have a larger market share to begin with, so if they cut prices, they stand to lose much more money than their competitors. Meanwhile their prey can simply flee the market and return later, like protomammals sneaking back to the jungle after the velociraptors leave. Predatory companies could never recoup their losses, which meant predatory behaviors are irrational. And since Chicago School economists are the kind of economists who believe that markets are always rational, that means predatory pricing cannot, by definition, exist.

The Supreme Court bought the argument. In the 1986 case Matsushita Electric Industry Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., the court famously ruled that "predatory pricing schemes are rarely tried, and even more rarely successful." And in 1993, in Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the court said that to convict a company of predatory pricing, prosecutors had to show not only that the accused predators had cut prices below market rates but also that they had a "dangerous probability" of recouping their losses. That effectively shut down the government's ability to prosecute companies for predatory pricing.

"The last time I checked, no one — including the United States government — has won a predatory pricing case since Brooke Group," says Spencer Waller, an antitrust expert at Loyola's School of Law. "Either they can't prove below-cost pricing, or they can't prove recoupment, because a nonexpert generalist judge who buys the basic theory when they read Matsushita and Brooke Group is super-skeptical this stuff is ever rational, absent really compelling evidence."

Lots of economists have come up with solid counter-counterarguments to the Chicago School's skepticism about predatory pricing. But none of them have translated to winnable antitrust cases. Wansley and Weinstein — who, not coincidentally, used to work in antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department — set out to change that. In a new paper titled "Venture Predation," the two lawyers make a compelling case that the classic model of venture capital — disrupt incumbents, build a scalable platform, move fast, break things — isn't the peak of modern capitalism that Silicon Valley says it is. According to this new thinking, it's anticapitalist. It's illegal. And it should be aggressively prosecuted, to promote free and fair competition in the marketplace.

"We think real world examples are not hard to find — if you look in the right place," Wansley and Weinstein write. "A new breed of predator is emerging in Silicon Valley." And the mechanism those predators are using to illegally dominate the market is venture capital itself.

Venture investing is the answer to the question of what would happen if you staffed a bank's loan department with adrenaline junkies. The limited partners in venture funds demand high returns, and those funds are transient things, lasting maybe a decade, which means the clock is ticking. Venture capitalists and the investors who put money into their funds aren't necessarily looking for a successful product (though they wouldn't turn one down). For VCs and their limited partners, the most profitable endgame is a quick exit — either selling off the company or taking it public in an IPO.

Those pressures, Wansley and Weinstein argue, encourage risky strategies — including predatory pricing. "If you buy what the Chicago School of economists think about self-funded predators, you might think it's irrational for a company to engage in predatory pricing for a bunch of reasons," Weinstein says. "But it might not be irrational for a VC." The idea that it's so irrational as to be nonexistent is "a bullshit line that has somehow become common wisdom."

Take Uber, one of their key examples. It'd be one thing if the company had simply outcompeted taxicabs on the merits. Cabs, after all, were themselves a fat and complacent monopoly. "Matt and I don't have any problem with that," Weinstein says. "You have a new product, scale quickly, and use some subsidies to get people on board." Disrupt an old business and make a new one.

But that's not what happened. As in a soap opera or a comic-book multiverse, the ending never arrived. Uber kept subsidizing riders and drivers, losing billions trying to spend its competitors into oblivion. The same goes for a lot of other VC-backed companies. "WeWork was setting up offices right next to other coworking spaces and saying, 'We'll give you 12 months free.' Bird was scattering its scooters all over cities," Wansley says. "The pattern to us just seems very familiar." 

Uber is one of the best investments in history, and it was a predatory pricing.

On its face, it also seems to prove the point of the Chicago School: that companies can never recoup the losses they incur through predatory pricing. Matsushita and Brooke Group require that prosecutors show harm. But if the only outcome of the scaling strategy used by Uber and other VC startups is to create an endless "millennial lifestyle subsidy," that just means wealth is being transferred from investors to consumers. The only victims of predatory pricing are the predators themselves.

Where Wansley and Weinstein break important new ground is on the other legal standard set by the Supreme Court: recoupment of losses. If Uber and WeWork and the rest of the unicorns are perpetual money losers, it sounds like the standard isn't met. But Wansley and Weinstein point out that it can be — even if the companies never earn a dime and even if everyone who invests in the companies, post-IPO, loses their bets. That's because the venture capitalists who seeded the company do profit from the predatory pricing. They get in, get a hefty return on their investment, and get out before the whole scheme collapses.

"Will Uber ever recoup the losses from its sustained predation?" Wansley and Weinstein write. "We do not know. Our point is that, from the perspective of the VCs who funded the predation, it does not matter. All that matters is that investors were willing to buy the VCs' shares at a high price."

Let's be clear here: This isn't the traditional capitalist story of "you win some, you lose some." The point isn't that venture capitalists sometimes invest in companies that don't make their money back. The point is that the entire model deployed by VCs is to profit by disrupting the marketplace with predatory pricing, and leave the losses to the suckers who buy into the IPO. A company that engages in predatory pricing and its late-stage investors might not recoup, but the venture investors do. 

"The single most important fact in this paper is that Benchmark put $12 million into Uber and got $5.8 billion back," Wansley says. "That's one of the best investments in history, and it was a predatory pricing."

This new insight — that venture capital is predatory pricing in a new wrapper — could prove transformative. By translating the Silicon Valley jargon of exits and scaling into the legalese of antitrust law, Wansley and Weinstein have opened a door for the prosecution of tech investors and their anticompetitive behavior. "Courts will have to adjust the way they're thinking about recoupment," Weinstein says. "What did the investors who bought from the VCs think was going to happen? Did they think they were going to recoup?" That, he says, would be a "pretty good pathway" for courts to follow in determining whether a company's practices are anticompetitive.

Capitalism is supposed to allow competition to foster innovation and choice; monopolies quash all that so a few people can get rich.

What makes this argument particularly powerful, from a legal perspective, is that it doesn't reject the basics of the Chicago School's thinking on antitrust. It accepts that consumer welfare and the efficiency of markets are paramount. It just points out that something uncanny — and illegal — is taking place in Silicon Valley. "I'm pro-enforcement and anti-Chicago School, so I'm always looking for areas where I think they're wrong," Weinstein says. "And here's one."

That kind of "serious legal scholarship" can be particularly successful with the courts, according to Waller, the antitrust expert at Loyola. "It's a good, modest strategy to say, 'We think your model's wrong, but even if your model's right in general, it's not right here.' That's both how you win cases and how you chip away at an edifice you want to challenge."

With so many industries imploding into oligopolies — tech, healthcare, pharma, entertainment, journalism, retail — it's a hopeful sign to see the trustbusting mindset stirring to life once more. Capitalism is supposed to allow competition to foster innovation and choice; monopolies quash all that so a few people can get rich. But the new scholarship on predatory pricing could ripple well beyond the courts. Wansley and Weinstein's paper put me in mind of "The Big Con," David Maurer's linguistic study of con artists first published in 1940. Maurer said the most delicate part of a con was the end — the blow-off. After the sucker has been bled dry, the grifter has to ditch the victim, ideally in such a way that they won't go to the cops. In the perfect crime, the mark doesn't even know they've been had. The transfer of lousy tech equity to late-stage investors who have been led to believe it's valuable sure looks like a good blow-off to me.

So now that we know precisely how Silicon Valley's big con works, maybe the marks won't be so quick to fall for it. Once you know what a phishing email looks like, you tend to stop replying to them. The same goes for recognizing the outlines of this particular grift. "It's not a Ponzi scheme, but it favors certain investors," Weinstein says. "If people in Silicon Valley start thinking about this as a predatory pricing scam, then I think the late-stage investors will start asking questions."

And not just about ride hailing or office sharing. Maybe grocery delivery? Or streaming-service subscriptions? The same kind of aha! light that went off for Wansley during his interview with the Lyft executive could start to go off for other people as well. Some of them will be investors who decide not to park their money in predatory tech companies. And some of them, perhaps, will be government regulators who are looking for ways to bust our modern-day trusts.

Source

Ontario’s minimum wage would have to rise to $40 an hour for Toronto workers to comfortably afford a two-bedroom apartment and still have money for food and utilities, according to a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Nearly all Canadians putting in a 40-hour week at minimum wage are allocating more than 30 per cent of their monthly pre-tax income toward rent or mortgage costs — the marker of unaffordable housing — Tuesday’s report found.

And while Ontario has one of the highest hourly minimum wages in the country at $15.50, surpassed only by B.C. at $15.65, the climbing cost of housing in Toronto is eroding any gains made. On Oct. 1, 2022, Ontario’s minimum wage was bumped to $15.50 from $15 an hour, and it will rise to $16.55 in October.

But that’s still a far cry from what’s needed. At an average monthly rent of $2,572, a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto would require the minimum wage to be $33.60 for it to meet the affordability criteria, according to the report. For a two-bedroom apartment, that figure climbs to $40. That means the minimum wage would need to more than double for workers to comfortably afford rent in the city.

< View the graphic at the source page. >

Rent jumped by almost 16 per cent for Toronto condos and apartments in June compared to the same time last year, according to a report from Rentals.ca and real estate data firm Urbanation.

“Higher minimum wages don’t directly translate into better living standards. Hard-fought-for wage increases should improve the material conditions of working families,” said Ricardo Tranjan, Ontario political economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and co-author of the report.

Out of the 37 cities studied in the report, only three have affordable two-bedroom apartments for a minimum-wage earner, the report said — all in Quebec, where the minimum wage was $14.25 during the study in 2022. Minimum wage there is now $15.25. In that province, like many others, affordable housing is in decline while the cost of living is rising.

According to the report, only five cities in Canada have a single neighbourhood where the average two-bedroom apartment is affordable for a minimum-wage worker.

The top five cities with the most unaffordable rent for minimum-wage earners are all in Ontario and B.C., with Vancouver taking the top spot followed by Toronto, Kelowna, Victoria and Ottawa.

< View the graphic at the source page. >

As interest rates rise, higher mortgage costs for landlords are off-loaded to tenants who have seen rents increase in the past year, said David Macdonald, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the report’s co-author.

“This report doesn’t take into account data for late 2022 and 2023,” said Macdonald. “We haven’t taken into account the latest Bank of Canada rate hikes, which have pushed rents even higher in the last eight months. So the situation for renters is even worse than what’s captured in this report.”

While the lack of supply and increased demand is one reason for unaffordable housing, it’s not the entire reason, the report argues. The low supply of purpose-built rentals, which provide more varied unit sizes and security of tenure, is causing rents to skyrocket, as people have fewer affordable options to choose from. And some provinces have introduced legislation that vetoes rent control in certain circumstances.

Source

The 39-year-old Meta Platforms co-founder and CEO recently gave an insight into his training regime when UFC stars Israel Adesanya and Alex Volkanvski joined him for a session.

Zuckerberg won gold and silver medals at a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition this yearCredit: Instagram/Zuck

He was described as “a feisty Jack Russell” by AdesanyaCredit: Instagram/Zuck

News of their training session went public after Adesanya shared a series of photos of the three posing at Zuckerberg’s home in Lake Tahoe, California.

The Instagram shots were captioned: “No fugazi with Mark” along with “This is Serious Business‼️”

Since then, both Adesanya and Volkanvski have given further insight into Zuckerberg’s true ability.

Speaking to Freestyle Bender, Adesanya explained how he “wanted [Zuckerberg] to feel the pressure of what it would be like to have a bigger man going after him.

“So I wasn’t like nice to him. I was coaching him. It was kind of like a crash course in fighting.

“So I was coaching him as we were going along, and he was a smart man. I’ll tell you he’s a smart man.”

Adesanya went on to add that he “was impressed with afterwards he’d like, because I think I’d be done with him, he’d be like ‘Israel can we go another round?’

“I’m like sure and we would just sit down afterwards and he’s like ‘Isreal can we go another round?'”

And it sounds like Zuckerberg also didn’t hold back, with Adesanya describing the billionaire as “tenacious.”

He explained: “He’d fire back, his first strike he threw was a leg kick that was solid. I was like okay!”

Adesanya continued: “He’s a gamer, I like that! He’s tenacious, he’s like a Jack Russell, a feisty Jack Russell!”

As for Volkanvski, he too was left impressed by Zuckerberg’s ability.

He told TMZ: “I guarantee you, you guys would be very surprised.”

Volkanvski described Zuckerberg as an “athlete,” noting: “As you can see from that photo, I think that’s what raised a lot of eyebrows, he’s in shape.”

Clearly impressed by the Harvard alumni, Volkanvski added: “I mean you can see it that he’s in shape but he really is in shape.

“It’s not just looks, he really is, mate. He trains, he’s pretty athletic, he’s coordinated and he’s committed.”

And as for the potential super-fight between Zuckerberg and Musk, Volkanvski believes the former is all-in.

“Man, I’m telling you he’s serious,” he said. “I don’t know how serious Elon is, but I’m telling you, he’s training.”

Musk, the CEO and co-founder of Tesla, seemingly agreed to face off with Zuck in a cage fight during a recent exchange on social media.

After the 59-year-old tweeted that he was “for a cage match if he is,” Zuckerberg responded on Instagram by telling Musk to “send me location.”

This comes at a tense time between the two tech giants after Meta recently launched Threads, an app that looks to rival Musk’s Twitter.

These tensions have even led to Twitter reportedly threatening to sue Meta for allegedly “poaching” their former employees, per Semafor.

Musk has a net worth of $254.7billionCredit: Getty

Source

A study reveals new insights about mannose, a sugar with anti-cancer properties. The research links the “honeybee syndrome” observed in honeybees with mannose’s ability to slow cancer cell replication and enhance chemotherapy’s effectiveness.

New Research on Mannose and Its Anti-Cancer Properties

New research conducted by Sanford Burnham Prebys and the Osaka International Cancer Institute has revealed new insights into the anti-cancer properties of mannose. Mannose is a crucial sugar involved in several physiological processes in the human body, and it is known to inhibit the growth of cancer cells. The study, published today (July 18) in the journal eLife, suggests that mannose could act as a valuable adjunctive treatment for cancer.

“This sugar could give cancer an extra punch alongside other treatments,” says study co-author Hudson Freeze, Ph.D., director of the Human Genetics Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys. “And because mannose is found throughout the body naturally, it could improve cancer treatment without any undesirable side effects.”

Hudson Freeze, Ph.D. Credit: Sanford Burnham Prebys

Role of Mannose in Glycosylation

Mannose is a type of sugar that the body attaches to proteins. This process helps stabilize their structure and facilitates their interaction with other molecules. This process, known as glycosylation, is vital for life, and any malfunctions in glycosylation are linked with rare, but often serious life-threatening, human diseases.

“Until now, the most promising therapeutic use for mannose was to treat congenital disorders of glycosylation, diseases that can cause a wide range of severe symptoms throughout the body,” says Freeze. “But we believe that there may be ways to leverage mannose against cancer and other diseases as well.”

Mannose, Honeybees, and Cancer

Although it has already been established that mannose inhibits the growth of several types of cancer in the laboratory, the underlying mechanism remains elusive. To address this, the research team studied an unusual property of mannose observed in an unlikely subject: honeybees.

“It’s been known for more than a century that mannose is lethal to honeybees because they can’t process it like humans do—it’s known as ‘honeybee syndrome,’” says Freeze. “We wanted to see if there is any relationship between honeybee syndrome and the anti-cancer properties of mannose, which could lead to an entirely new approach to combat cancer.”

Experimental Findings and Future Implications

The research team, using genetically engineered human cancer cells from fibrosarcoma (a rare cancer affecting connective tissue), managed to replicate honeybee syndrome. They found that in the absence of the enzyme necessary to metabolize mannose, cells replicate slowly and become significantly more susceptible to chemotherapy.

“We found that triggering honeybee syndrome in these cancer cells made them unable to synthesize the building blocks of DNA and replicate normally,” says Freeze. “This helps explain the anti-cancer effects of mannose that have we’ve observed in the lab.”

While exploiting honeybee syndrome could potentially serve as a promising auxiliary cancer treatment, the researchers warn that since the effect is dependent on crucial metabolic processes, more research is required to determine which types of cancer would be most responsive to mannose.

The Potential of Glycosylating Sugars for Cancer Treatment

“If we can find cancers that have a low activity of the enzyme that processes mannose, treating them with mannose could give just enough of a nudge to make chemotherapy more effective,” says Freeze. “Many people assume that you always discover treatments in response to the disease, but sometimes you find biology that could be useful for treatment and then have to find the disease to match it.”

Meanwhile, the study highlights the broader potential of sugars involved in glycosylation for cancer treatment, an area of research still in its nascent stages.

“The glycobiology of sugar metabolism within cancer cells is still an unexplored frontier, and it could be an untapped treasure trove of potential treatments just waiting to be discovered,” adds Freeze.

Source

Source

Source

Rural areas saw the strongest fall in poverty, according to the study, which used the United Nations’ Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), based on 12 indicators such as malnutrition, education and sanitation. If people are deprived in three or more areas, they are identified as “MPI poor”.

“Improvements in nutrition, years of schooling, sanitation and cooking fuel played a significant role in bringing down poverty,” said Mr Suman Bery, vice-chairman of the Niti Aayog, the government think-tank that released the report.

The percentage of the population living in poverty fell to 15 per cent in 2019 to 2021 from 25 per cent in 2015/2016, according to the report, which was based on the 2019-2021 National Family Health Survey.

A report by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) released last week said the number of people living in multidimensional poverty fell to 16.4 per cent of India’s population in 2021 from 55 per cent in 2005.

According to UNDP estimates, the number of people, who lived below the US$2.15 (S$2.84) per day poverty line had declined to 10 per cent in India in 2021.

India’s federal government offers free food grain to about 800 million people, about 57 per cent of the country’s 1.4 billion population, while states spend billions of dollars on subsidising education, health, electricity and other services.

Source

During his career, Franklin printed nearly 2,500,000 money notes for the American Colonies using what the researchers have identified as highly original techniques, as reported in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team, led by Khachatur Manukyan, an associate research professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has spent the past seven years analyzing a trove of nearly 600 notes from the Colonial period, which is part of an extensive collection developed by the Hesburgh Libraries’ Rare Books and Special Collections. The Colonial notes span an 80-year period and include notes printed by Franklin’s network of printing shops and other printers, as well as a series of counterfeit notes.

Manukyan explained that the effort to print money for the fledgling Colonial monetary system was important to Franklin not just as a printer but as a statesman as well.

“Benjamin Franklin saw that the Colonies’ financial independence was necessary for their political independence. Most of the silver and gold coins brought to the British American colonies were rapidly drained away to pay for manufactured goods imported from abroad, leaving the Colonies without sufficient monetary supply to expand their economy,” Manukyan said.

However, one major problem stood in the way of efforts to print paper money: counterfeiting. When Franklin opened his printing house in 1728, paper money was a relatively new concept. Unlike gold and silver, paper money’s lack of intrinsic value meant it was constantly at risk of depreciating. There were no standardized bills in the Colonial period, leaving an opportunity for counterfeiters to pass off fake bills as real ones. In response, Franklin worked to embed a suite of security features that made his bills distinctive.

“To maintain the notes’ dependability, Franklin had to stay a step ahead of counterfeiters,” said Manukyan. “But the ledger where we know he recorded these printing decisions and methods has been lost to history. Using the techniques of physics, we have been able to restore, in part, some of what that record would have shown.”

Manukyan and his team employed cutting-edge spectroscopic and imaging instruments housed in the Nuclear Science Laboratory and four Notre Dame research core facilities: the Center for Environmental Science and Technology, the Integrated Imaging Facility, the Materials Characterization Facility and the Molecular Structure Facility. The tools enabled them to get a closer look than ever at the inks, paper and fibers that made Franklin’s bills distinctive and hard to replicate.

One of the most distinctive features they found was in Franklin’s pigments. Manukyan and his team determined the chemical elements used for each item in Notre Dame’s collection of Colonial notes. The counterfeits, they found, have distinctive high quantities of calcium and phosphorus, but these elements are found only in traces in the genuine bills.

Their analyses revealed that although Franklin used (and sold) “lamp black,” a pigment created by burning vegetable oils, for most printing, Franklin’s printed currency used a special black dye made from graphite found in rock. This pigment is also different from the “bone black” made from burned bone, which was favored both by counterfeiters and by those outside Franklin’s network of printing houses.

Another of Franklin’s innovations was in the paper itself. The invention of including tiny fibers in paper pulp — visible as pigmented squiggles within paper money — has often been credited to paper manufacturer Zenas Marshall Crane, who introduced this practice in 1844. But Manukyan and his team found evidence that Franklin was including colored silks in his paper much earlier.

The team also discovered that notes printed by Franklin’s network have a distinctive look due to the addition of a translucent material they identified as muscovite. The team determined that Franklin began adding muscovite to his papers and the size of this muscovite crystals in his paper increased over time. The team speculates that Franklin initially began adding muscovite to make the printed notes more durable but continued to add it when it proved to be a helpful deterrent to counterfeiters.

Manukyan said that it is unusual for a physics lab to work with rare and archival materials, and this posed special challenges.

“Few scientists are interested in working with materials like these. In some cases, these bills are one-of-a-kind. They must be handled with extreme care, and they cannot be damaged. Those are constraints that would turn many physicists off to a project like this,” he said.

But for him, the project is a testament to the value of interdisciplinary work.

“We were fortunate to have student researchers on this project with interests both in physics as well as in history and art conservation. And the core research facilities as well as the Rare Books and Special Collections team were incredible research partners. Without an uncommon level of collaboration across disciplines, our discoveries would not have been possible.”

Source

Also: All about the Benjamins: Researchers decipher the secrets of Benjamin Franklin's paper money

The most recent statistics show a substantial increase in call volume, with nearly 160,000 more crisis calls, chats and texts in May 2023 compared to May 2022—two months before 988's activation on July 16.

Compared to a year before, calls answered in May increased by 45%; chats answered increased by 52%; and texts answered increased by 938%, according to 988 performance stats monitored by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Overall, 988 operators have answered more than 2.3 million calls and nearly 600,000 texts in the past year, Chuck Ingoglia, president and CEO of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, said in a council news release.

"It was a great idea to begin with and has delivered a lot of its promise already," said Dr. Petros Levounis, president of the American Psychiatric Association. "More and more people know about 988, and what's truly great about it is when you call 988, you get a human being to talk with you, not a robot but a trained person who knows how to deal with crisis."

But experts say more progress needs to be made for 988 to reach its full potential.

Most Americans are unfamiliar with the hotline

About 4 out of 5 Americans (82%) remain largely unfamiliar with 988, according to a new poll from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

"If we collectively want to help people in crisis—and save lives—988 cannot be the best kept secret," NAMI Chief Executive Officer Daniel Gillison Jr. said in an organization news release. "Thankfully, the data show more people are beginning to become aware of this important resource—but not nearly enough."

Officials also want to make sure the 988 system is ready to deal with any future increases in calls, not only by having sufficient staff but by having a solid system of mental health clinics ready to take referrals.

"It's important to have a system in place where they can refer you," said Mary-Catherine Bohan, vice president of outpatient and ambulatory services at Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care in New Jersey. "The wait times in traditional programs across the country are very long and it's disheartening if somebody is in crisis, if they have to wait even a day or two to get the care that they need."

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is an outgrowth of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which until last summer had a 10-digit phone number.

At the same time, the Lifeline broadened the help it offers to include not just people who are suicidal, but also those who are having a mental health crisis.

The mental health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic required such a response, experts said.

More than 48,000 people died by suicide in 2021, up 36% from the year before, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Further, suicide was the second leading cause of death for people between 10 and 34 years of age and fifth for 35- to 54-year-olds.

Helping before people reach their breaking point

Broadening the scope of the service was aimed at offering people help well before they reach that breaking point, said Mark Graham, executive director of the Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care National Call Center.

"People are seeing it's more than a suicide crisis line. It's a mental health crisis line or mental health line. If you're not suicidal, you can still call that line and get help," Graham said. "Because if you help somebody when they're struggling mental health-wise, then you're getting ahead of it before they potentially get to that point of crisis."

Unfortunately, the NAMI poll found there is widespread ignorance about 988.

More than 1 in 3 Americans (36%) polled last month had never heard of the 988 Lifeline, and another 31% had heard of it but knew no more about it.

Most also had misconceptions about what to expect if they call 988:

• 53% didn't know the line connects a caller to needed services and support.

• 53% didn't know the line can de-escalate a situation where a person is suicidal.

• 64% didn't know that people in a drug or alcohol crisis can use the line.

• 21% falsely think that a 988 call always results in someone being sent to a hospital, and another 70% didn't know one way or the other.

• 20% falsely thought that 988 callers must disclose personal information to receive support, and 72% didn't know one way or the other.

• 14% falsely thought that a 988 call always leads to someone showing up in-person on your doorstep, and 74% didn't know one way or the other.

The 988 crisis line is, in fact, anonymous, and much of the time the help is provided through the phone call itself, experts said.

Staff is stretched as calls surge

The 988 number routes calls to local and regional centers staffed by trained personnel, and there are concerns that crisis line staff is being stretched thin as the number of calls increases.

"It's a very stressful job as you can imagine, answering crisis calls one after the other," Graham said. "During a shift, that gets hard. If we have more staff, you can break some staff away for training and reduce the caseload for the staff, which reduces their stress and their challenges."

But funding for 988 remains shaky.

So far, only six U.S. states have comprehensive laws to ensure 988 funding, Ingoglia noted. States can choose to fund 988 services through legislation that lets phone companies collect fees from customers.

Further, the federal funding that helped create the 988 line isn't guaranteed to continue.

"We need to have permanent funding for 988," Levounis said. "We're delighted that the federal government funded the initial phase of the project, but we need staffing, and we need this to be something that lives in perpetuity."

Mental health experts say there also needs to be increased funding for Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHC), the system to which people are referred if they need more help than can be provided during their 988 call.

The current system of CCBHCs was set up as part of a federal pilot project to improve mental health services, but the clinics have not yet been adopted as a permanent program, Bohan said.

"There's a lot of effort in terms of getting the CCBHCs established in federal law," she said.

What the future holds

Such follow-up services are critical to those most in need, Levounis said.

"It's one thing to tell people that I'm going to be there for you and we're going to have services to address your needs, and a different thing to be truthful about that and really have the services that people need on the other side," Levounis said. "So it's a matter of infrastructure, it's a matter of workforce building, and we owe it to our people in need to supply these services."

Although these obstacles are daunting, Graham is optimistic that they will be overcome given the mental health needs in the United States.

"Remember when 911 came out many years ago, it was a slow start, but once it got going, they're busy as can be now because everyone knows about it," he said. "That same thing's going to happen to 988, so we need to get in front of the staffing so we don't overwhelm the existing staff. We want to keep them, retain them and build that early on before the volume continues to go up, which it will."

Source

Source

For nearly three days after a sperm meets an egg, the human embryo (a tiny, eight-cell blob) is managed by the egg’s genes. On day three, the embryo strips its entire genome naked, freeing itself of maternal control and exposing its genes for activation. Then, says computational biologist Manu Singh, “the army of the dead invades on day four.”

Or really, it awakens from within. This army is composed of ancient genetic sequences, once belonging to infectious retroviruses but now embedded within normal human DNA after millions of years of being passed from generation to generation. They are mostly harmless now, but some of these sequences still have the power to wreak havoc when they activate by copy-pasting themselves into parts of the genome where they don’t belong. That causes DNA damage and places cells at risk of mutation.

But the embryo is not defenseless. In a June study published in PLOS Biology, Singh’s team uncovered a quality-control mechanism by which embryonic stem cells face off against each other in a death match, ensuring that only the fittest survive.

The survivors are protected by the assimilated remains of another ancient retrovirus: a gene sequence called HERVH. Cells in which HERVH is activated can suppress the attack of damage-causing sequences. Without HERVH as a bodyguard, other cells are more vulnerable to DNA damage—and once they’re overwhelmed, they sacrifice themselves to spare the developing fetus. “I think of it as two dragons, one from the side of death, one from the side of the living,” says Singh, an assistant professor at the Max-Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Gottingen, Germany. “It’s a classical example of fighting fire with fire.”

Nearly 40 percent of our modern genetic material comes from ancient retroviruses, all of which were once capable of “jumping” into parts of the genome where they didn’t belong. Most of these mobile sequences, called transposable elements, have since lost their jumping abilities, tamed by evolution. Today only one family of transposable elements remains active in humans: long interspersed nuclear elements, or LINE-1.

LINE-1 comes to life when the embryo’s genome activates. These elements clone themselves and insert themselves into new parts of the genome at random. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter. But, Singh says, sometimes LINE-1 shoots itself into an important part of the DNA code, impairing the cell’s ability to make crucial proteins. This DNA damage triggers the cell’s innate immune response, but that defense is costly and exhausting. If enough damage builds up, the cell surrenders and undergoes programmed cell death, or apoptosis.

It happens at a crucial time in embryo development. In the short window between fertilization and implantation, embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, gifted with the ability to become any cell type. When they divide, making exact copies of themselves, their daughters inherit this pluripotency. But if a cell accumulates too much DNA damage, they’re no longer able to perfectly replicate—and the embryo is incapable of developing fully. These cells “have to die in order for something to advance,” says Carol B. Ware, a stem cell biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington who was not involved in this study.

The new paper is the result of herculean computational analyses, involving researchers in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, to better understand the role ancient retroviruses play in early embryonic development—how they harm, and how they help. It sprang from work Singh had done as a PhD student at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, when he gathered datasets from 11 studies to painstakingly trace individual embryonic stem cells from fertilization to implantation.

He ran an analysis that grouped cells based on the similarity of their gene expression. Most were clustered according to genetic markers that determine their fate within the growing embryo—for example, if they will become part of the ectoderm, the precursor to skin and brain cells, or the endoderm, which evolves into respiratory and digestive tissues.

But one cluster did not seem marked for any kind of future. Instead, they had the signatures of DNA damage and precursors to apoptosis, a controlled mechanism that the body uses to cull stressed or damaged cells. This damage, Singh suspected, was LINE-1’s calling card. Singh’s team dubbed these damaged cells “REjects,” a nod to their cause of death: RE for “retroelements” like LINE-1, “rejected” from the growing embryo.

On the embryo’s fifth day after fertilization, Singh’s team found, the self-destructing REjects still exist alongside the healthy cells they will sacrifice themselves to protect. But the surviving cells express something that the REjects do not: HERVH. Despite being another ancient invader, HERVH actually suppresses LINE-1, shielding the pluripotent cells from harm and ensuring that they can continue to divide. “It’s kind of a romantic relationship,” says Singh. “These retroviruses had invaded to kill the system, and now they are working to protect the system against other retroviruses.”

The five-day-old embryo is surrounded by an outer layer of cells that will soon become the placenta. LINE-1 is active within these cells too, but unlike REjects, they don’t die. Singh suspects that because the placenta only sticks around for nine months, rather than a whole lifetime, its cells don’t last long enough for DNA damage to matter.

These findings are “remarkable,” says Ware. But drawing strong conclusions about embryonic development in the womb based on a lab study is tricky. While LINE-1 and HERVH expression appeared mutually exclusive—REjects expressed LINE-1 and not HERVH, and vice versa for surviving cells—these researchers had no way to find direct evidence that HERVH controls LINE-1, says Cedric Feschotte, a molecular biology and genetics professor at Cornell University who was not involved in this study. Ware adds that it is also unknown whether REjects are merely garbage, or whether they serve a functional, albeit brief, role in the developing embryo.

Embryonic stem cell research is also hard to do because it’s ethically fraught. Many regions don’t allow it, and in those that do, researchers rely on leftover embryos, frozen at roughly five days old, donated by parents after they’ve had a successful IVF cycle. Since these embryos are observed outside the parent’s body, researchers “can’t quite rule out that some of the results are an artifact of in vitro culture,” says Feschotte.

With the introduction of synthetic embryos, three-dimensional balls of cells derived from stem cells rather than from sperm and eggs, Feschotte thinks scientists may be able to answer some of these lingering questions.

Singh says the ability to pick out pluripotent cells from REject cells within the early embryo will be indispensable for researchers studying regenerative medicine, who need to be able to grow different types of body tissues in order to create laboratory models of diseases. Identifying potential causes of embryonic cell damage also expands our understanding of early pregnancy. Perhaps someday, Feschotte says, monitoring levels of LINE-1 expression in embryos growing in fertility clinics may help explain very early losses at the implantation stage.

But more than anything, these findings illustrate that the genome is not just an instruction manual but an entire ecosystem. “There are interactions between prey and predators,” says Feschotte. “All of these really complicated biological interactions, they’re all happening in the genome.”

Source

(May require free registration to view)

The giant metal object was found by locals at Green Head beach, about 250km (155 miles) north of Perth.

State and federal authorities are investigating the item, which is not currently believed to be from a commercial aircraft.

It is being treated as hazardous, and police have requested people keep a safe distance.

"We want to reassure the community that we are actively engaged in a collaborative effort with various State and Federal agencies to determine the object's origin and nature," police said in a statement.

These include the military and Australia's space agency.

Green Head beach residents said the cylinder was about 2.5m wide and between 2.5m and 3m long, Australia's public broadcaster reported.

Residents visited the site on Saturday night to see the cylinder, the ABC reported, with one local describing it as a "great social evening".

"It was a lovely, still night, the kids were digging sand castles around it," he told the ABC.

Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas said the item was possibly a fuel tank from a rocket that had fallen into the Indian Ocean at some stage in the past 12 months.

The Australian Space Agency said it was possible the giant cylinder could have fallen from a "foreign space launch vehicle" and it would liaise with other international agencies.

If it is a fuel cylinder, experts believe it might be from an Indian rocket and could contain toxic materials.

It is hoped a serial or catalogue number will confirm whether or not this is the case.

There was some speculation the cylinder may have been a part of MH370 - a plane that went missing off the west Australian coast in 2014 with 239 passengers on board - but Mr Thomas said there was "no chance".

"It's not any part of a Boeing 777 and the fact is MH370 was lost nine-and-a-half years ago so it would show a great deal more wear and tear on the debris," he said.

Source

• Southern and eastern Europe is expected to get even hotter this week, with 46C (115F) forecast in Sardinia

• The hottest temperature ever recorded in Europe was 48.8C (120F) in Sicily in August 2021

• Italian authorities have issued red alerts for 16 cities, while a wildfire has broken out in Greece

• China provisionally recorded its highest temperature ever on Sunday - 52.2C in Xinjiang, the UK Met Office says

• In the US, a heat dome over the south-west has left tens of millions of people under extreme heat warnings

• Death Valley in California hit 53.9C (128F ) on Sunday - the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth is 56.7C (134F)

Source

The total area burned is roughly the size of Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and Lake Michigan combined.

Canada surpassed the record set in 1989 for total area burned in one season on June 27 when the figure totalled 76,000 square kilometres, and communities have faced evacuation orders, heat warnings and poor air quality for months.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre says the majority of blazes are now in Western Canada, and British Columbia has the greatest number with 373 active fires.

Wildfire in British Columbia have prompted more than 70 current evacuation alerts or orders as of Sunday, with many clustered in the province’s central Interior.

The Cariboo Regional District issued an order this weekend covering 38 parcels of land in a 160-square- kilometre area around Anahim Peak, northeast of Bella Coola.

That’s on top of an order issued Friday spanning nearly 3,340 square kilometres in the Lhoosk’uz area, west of Quesnel, and several others in the area.

The Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako, meanwhile, has rescinded an evacuation order issued June 30 in response to the Big Creek wildfire.

Residents of a remote area that includes Omineca Provincial Park may return home, although they remain subject to an alert and must be ready to leave right away.

The Peace River Regional District also cancelled an evacuation alert covering 60 properties due to the Donnie Creek blaze, the largest in B.C.’s history.

The alert had spanned a lengthy stretch of Highway 97, along with properties in a remote area north of Fort St. John, for more than two weeks.

Environment Canada continued to warn of smoky skies and reduced visibility on Sunday throughout central and eastern B.C. from the Yukon boundary to the Kootenays.

The weather office also posted severe thunderstorm bulletins for a swath of the central Interior, saying conditions were favourable for the development of storms that may be capable of producing strong winds, heavy rain and hail.

With more than 370 wildfires burning in B.C., the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre said the province has the greatest number of blazes across the country.

B.C.’s drought bulletin shows widespread drought conditions, and fire danger rating is ranked at high to extreme across much of the province.

The Transportation Ministry has warned drivers not to pull over and stop to take pictures of wildfires, saying it’s “very unsafe” to do so.

A statement posted to Facebook says ministry staff have heard reports of people stopping along highways, especially Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George, a route where several “wildfires of note” are burning nearby.

There are 20 highly visible, threatening or potentially damaging blazes burning in B.C., many of which are clustered in the Bulkley-Nechako and Cariboo regions.

Based on forecasted conditions, Natural Resources Canada expects the wildfire season will continue to be unusually intense throughout July and into August.

Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair says the good news is that conditions are expected to improve significantly in Eastern Canada.

Source

Picture this: our universe is not the spry 13.7 billion-year-old entity that we once believed it to be. Instead, it could be a grand 26.7 billion years old.

This finding, according to a new study by Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, fundamentally changes our understanding of the universe and may solve the puzzle of the “impossible early galaxy problem.”

For years, we’ve been estimating the age of the universe using two primary methods. First, by calculating the time that has passed since the Big Bang, the colossal explosion believed to have birthed our universe. And second, by studying the oldest stars, based on the redshift of light coming from far-off galaxies.

The redshift phenomenon happens when light from an object moving away from us stretches towards the red end of the light spectrum. By measuring this redshift, we’ve been able to calculate the age of the universe.

In 2021, using a model called the Lambda-CDM concordance, scientists estimated the universe to be about 13.797 billion years old.

Stars can’t be older than the universe

But there’s a problem. Some stars, like the Methuselah, appear to be older than the universe itself. And that’s not all. The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered early galaxies that seem to be far too advanced for their age.

These galaxies were around just 300 million years after the Big Bang but had the mass and maturity typically seen in galaxies billions of years old. What’s more, they’re much smaller than we’d expect, adding another piece to the puzzle.

This is where Fritz Zwicky’s tired light theory comes into play. According to this theory, the redshift we see might not be due to galaxies moving away from us. Instead, it might be because light loses energy as it travels across the universe.

Reinterpreting redshift to account for our universe’s age

For a long time, this theory conflicted with what we saw in the universe. But according to Gupta, if we let this theory coexist with an expanding universe, we can reinterpret the redshift as a combination of both these phenomena.

But Gupta didn’t stop there. He also introduced a new idea based on physicist Paul Dirac’s hypothesis about “coupling constants”.

These are fundamental physical rules that control how particles interact. According to Dirac, these constants might have changed over time.

If we let these constants evolve, then the time for early galaxies to form extends from a few hundred million years to several billion years. That could explain why the galaxies we see are so advanced for their age.

Finally, Gupta challenges the traditional interpretation of the “cosmological constant.” This represents dark energy pushing the universe to expand faster.

Instead, he proposes a new constant that accounts for the evolving coupling constants. This change could help us understand why the early galaxies were smaller than expected. It also offers a more accurate picture of the universe.

In the words of Gupta, “Our newly-devised model stretches the galaxy formation time by several billion years, making the universe 26.7 billion years old, and not 13.7 as previously estimated.”

The universe might be much older than we thought, and that could shed light on some of its biggest mysteries.

More about the big bang theory

The Big Bang Theory is the prevailing cosmological model explaining the existence of the observable universe. The theory provides a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena. These include the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and the large scale distribution of galaxies in space.

Here’s a breakdown of the key components of the Big Bang Theory:

The Singularity

The Big Bang Theory postulates that the universe originated from a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

A singularity defies our current understanding of physics. To fully understand it would require a unification of general relativity (which describes gravity) and quantum mechanics (which describes the behavior of particles at the smallest scales).

The Expansion

The term “Big Bang” might conjure images of an explosion. However, it’s more accurate to think of it as an expansion. Instead of matter exploding into a pre-existing space, space itself has been and continues to expand, carrying galaxies with it.

This theory of an expanding universe was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist. It was later confirmed by Edwin Hubble’s observations that distant galaxies were moving away from us in every direction.

This is often described as the “redshift” because the light from these galaxies shifts towards the longer (and redder) wavelengths as they move away from us.

Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)

The CMB is one of the key pieces of evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory. It’s the afterglow left from the hot, dense state of the early universe, and it permeates the entire cosmos.

In the 1960s, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the CMB while using a radio telescope for a different experiment. The uniformity of this radiation in every direction was one of the major confirmations of the Big Bang Theory.

Abundance of Light Elements

The Big Bang Theory explains the observed abundance of light elements (like hydrogen, helium, and lithium) in the universe. In the first few minutes after the Big Bang, conditions were right for nuclear fusion to occur. This created these light elements in a process known as Big Bang nucleosynthesis.

Large Scale Structure of the Universe

The Big Bang Theory also provides a framework for understanding the large scale structure of the universe, including the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters, which is believed to be influenced by the distribution of dark matter.

Inflation

In the first fraction of a second after the universe began, it’s thought to have undergone a rapid expansion known as inflation. This concept, proposed by physicist Alan Guth in the 1980s, helps explain why the universe appears homogeneous (or similar) in all directions and resolves other long-standing puzzles in cosmology.

The Big Bang Theory is supported by a wide range of observations and provides the basis for our understanding of the universe’s history and its current structure. It’s important to note that the theory continues to evolve as new observations are made and as physicists refine their models to better reflect the data.

Cosmologists are actively researching topics like dark energy, dark matter, and the nature of the universe’s expansion. This research could further refine our understanding of the Big Bang and the history of the universe.

Source

We gave 101 kids who were 4-17 years old and 99 adults who were visiting a museum in Chicago an opportunity to perform a random act of kindness. They received two museum-branded pencils and were told that they could keep both pencils but were encouraged to give one to another visitor.

The people taking part in this stage of our two experiments then completed a survey asking them to predict how big the pencil's recipient would consider this act of kindness to be, how positive or negative that person would say they felt afterward, and how good or bad the act of giving the pencil away made them feel.

Meanwhile, and out of sight of the people who gave pencils away, the people who received them—or a parent or legal guardian if they were kids—were approached by a researcher and told that someone else taking part in the study chose to give them a pencil as a random act of kindness. Those people then said how big that act of kindness was and how receiving it made them feel.

We compared the predictions of the people who gave pencils away with what the people receiving the pencils experienced and found that, like adults, most of the kids participating in the study underestimated the positive impact of their small act of kindness.

As we explained in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, we found that the vast majority of the people of all ages said they felt better after giving a pencil to a stranger.

Why it matters

Our findings show that doing good feels good, both for those who do good deeds and those who benefit directly from those actions.

Yet, despite the fact that connecting with others is good for your health, the world is experiencing a loneliness epidemic that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated.

What other research is being done

Our findings contribute to a growing body of research suggesting that people may be reluctant to do good deeds because they don't realize how welcome these acts of kindness are.

Related research has cast light on the tendency to underestimate just how much others will appreciate many expressions of kindness, such as unexpectedly hearing from a friend or receiving a compliment. People even misunderstand how willing others are to lend a hand with chores like carrying boxes or stepping in to take a picture.

Some evidence even suggests that people want to give more compliments than they usually do.

Unlike these other experiments, we were able to show that the tendency to misunderstand how much good their small acts of kindness can do begins early in life. Learning what the social consequences of this failure to appreciate just how big of a deal small acts of kindness are requires more research.

Source

Not necessarily, says the director of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Health Skin of Color clinic.

"In general, the best sunscreen is the one you put on consistently," Opene said in a UCLA Health news release.

"While I recommend a broad-spectrum sunscreen with SPF 30 or higher for everyone, there are options: mineral sunscreens made with zinc oxide or titanium dioxide may be better for those with sensitive skin, and young children. Zinc oxide also provides good UVA protection, so I tend to recommend it to those prone to hyperpigmentation," she added.

But these mineral sunscreens can sometimes leave an undesirable white cast on people with darker skin tones, Opene noted.

"While chemical sunscreens usually don't leave a cast, they can be irritating to those with sensitive skin or allergies. So for my patients with darker skin tones, I frequently recommend hybrid sunscreens, with both chemical and mineral filters for protection and improved blendability," Opene said.

Melanin, the dark pigment in skin, provides some protection against the sun's harmful rays, but not as much as people tend to think, Opene said.

"Those with medium to darker skin tones usually develop fewer pre-cancerous growths and have later onset of wrinkles that are due to sun damage. However, in these populations sun damage can present as uneven skin tone or dark spots," she noted.

Opene recommends a tinted broad-spectrum sunscreen to provide not only UVA and UVB protection, but also protection against visible light, which is found both in daylight and in devices. It is a major driver of hyperpigmentation in people of color, she said.

"In general, those with fairer skin that sunburns easily are at highest risk for skin cancer, as are those with a family history. That said, I have diagnosed a fair number of skin cancers on the face or hands of Asian, Latino or African American patients who have worked outdoors for many years," Opene said.

"People of color can also develop skin cancer in 'hidden' areas, such as the palms of the hands and bottoms of the feet," she warned.

Skin cancer is generally treatable if it is caught early, Opene said, adding that people of color often experience barriers to getting dermatologic care. By the time of a dermatologist visit, they tend to have more advanced stages of skin cancer.

"It is especially important that all people check their own skin regularly for any irregular or changing moles and go to their doctor immediately if concerned," Opene said.

Source

Source