From the hottest week on record, the hottest June on record, the highest average sea surface temperature, to the lowest Antarctic sea ice extent for June, and now floods smashing parts of Japan, India and the United States.

What is going on?

The Straits Times asks climate scientists for their take.

Are we on a runaway train?

The United Nations secretary-general, Mr Antonio Guterres, said “climate change is out of control” after data showed the first week of July was the hottest week on record.

Is he right?

Associate professor of urban climate at Singapore Management University Winston Chow said: “I don’t think it is out of control – yet. We can control and reduce future risks of heat and from other climate impacts if greenhouse gas emissions are reduced globally and action is taken to adapt to these impacts, especially in vulnerable areas.”

But, as at right now, we are on a very unsafe trajectory.

Melbourne University professor of environment, climate and global health Kathryn Bowen said: “Without urgent and accelerated action, we will experience continual record-breaking events, whether these are heat records, drought records or accelerated sea ice loss.”

Is what we are experiencing unexpected?

Climate scientists say no.

“It is not surprising that we are seeing records break,” said Professor Mark Howden, director of the Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions at The Australian National University in Canberra. “The thing that is surprising is that some of these things are happening faster and harder than we anticipated from a scientific point of view.”

He added: “The underlying drivers for change have not abated. So, that is our high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. And while that remains the case, we are going to enter, continuingly, record territory, and these are not only individual occurrences, but groups of occurrences – multiple things happening – are likely to increase in the future.”

Prof Bowen concurred: “What we are seeing is what we unfortunately expect, given what the research is telling us, and has told us for decades now.”

She said a substantial amount of climate change is “locked in the system” due to earlier delays in nations committing to strong greenhouse gas reduction commitments.

Why are so many heat records being broken?

Scientists said current El Nino conditions have an additive effect to underlying climate change, pushing temperatures to record highs.

Plus, there has been a reduction in aerosols, which are small particles that can deflect incoming solar radiation.

For instance, rules imposed from 2020 to reduce air pollution from shipping imposed strict limits on the sulphur content of marine fuels.

The decline in sulphur particles contained in ships’ exhaust fumes is now thought to have given global warming a slight boost because more of the sun’s heat is reaching the planet’s surface.

These two factors are most likely to blame for the record-breaking heat, in the atmosphere and in the oceans, said Ms Kimberley Reid, postdoctoral research fellow in atmospheric sciences at Monash University in Melbourne, in a commentary for The Conversation news site on July 6.

Dr Kevin Trenberth, distinguished scholar at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, explained that it is also a matter of timing.

Writing in The Conversation on July 11, he said global mean surface temperature does not continue relentlessly upwards.

The biggest increases, and warmest years, tend to happen in the latter stages of an El Nino event.

The previous big jump in global mean temperatures occurred during the last major El Nino in 2015-16.

Human-induced climate change is relentless and largely predictable.

“But at any time, and especially locally, it can be masked by weather events and natural variability on inter-annual or decadal time scales,” Dr Trenberth said, referring to time scales of a few years to decades.

“The combination of decadal variability and the warming trend from rising greenhouse gas emissions makes the temperature record look more like a rising staircase, rather than a steady climb,” he added.

But why now?

Global land surface temperatures usually hit a peak during the Northern Hemisphere summer simply because there is more land in the northern half of the planet. Land heats up faster than water.

“As land temperature variations are much larger, the highest global mean surface temperatures occur about July,” Dr Trenberth wrote.

For oceans, the timing is different.

As the largest expanse of oceans is in the Southern Hemisphere, which experiences winter from June to August, the highest values for sea surface temperatures occur in March, at the end of southern summer, said Dr Trenberth.

And this fits with the record sea surface temperatures that occurred in April, and which remain high until now.

Joining the dots

“It is really important to join the dots on these events, rather than treating them as separate items,” said Prof Howden.

Combined, they can create much greater threats to human health, even the risk of triggering the failure of crops in key growing areas at the same time.

“What we are seeing are studies looking at complex risk, that is the co-occurrence of risk or cascading risks,” he said.

“As an example of that, when we look at hot years in Australia, it is a combination.

“It is not just the risks of heat stress, but it is the risks of heat stress, plus drought, plus fire, plus smoke.”

What does all this mean for COP28? 

“There is already significant pressure on parties from a multitude of fronts,” said Prof Chow.

The United Nations COP28 climate talks will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates at the end of 2023.

Prof Chow said heat records, human and financial costs from related climate extremes such as fires and floods, could pile on pressure for accelerated action in Dubai that goes beyond just phasing out fossil fuels.

He added: “That pressure urgently needs a release valve – which party will take the lead to trigger that valve?”

Prof Bowen said COP28 needs to secure a liveable future for humanity.

“COP28 is vital to see the ramping up of commitments for an urgent phase-out of coal, oil and gas if we want to see a liveable planet for our children and our grandchildren.”

Is the future hopeless?

Scientists say no.

“The future is ours to choose. We can choose wisely, or we can choose unwisely,” said Prof Howden.

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If you’ve ever thought it would be great to walk into a room and know whether the virus that causes COVID-19 is hanging around, scientists have a device for you. Researchers have created a machine a little bigger than a toaster that can detect airborne SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in minutes.

It takes only five minutes to detect as few as seven to 35 viral particles per liter of air, researchers report July 10 in Nature Communications. That is about as sensitive as PCR nasal swab tests, says Rajan Chakrabarty, an aerosol scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. His team worked “nonstop” for three years to create the detector, he says.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis stand around the SARS-CoV-2 detector they developed (clockwise from front left: John Cirrito, Rajan Chakabarty, Joseph Puthussery and Carla Yuede).
SHUBHAM SHARMA

One of the main challenges when sampling airborne viruses is collecting enough air to concentrate viral particles at detectable levels. Previous attempts have sucked in between 2 and 8 liters of air per minute. This detector pulls in 1,000 liters of air each minute.

To trap the virus, “we create an artificial cyclone inside of the sampler,” Chakrabarty says, by swirling liquid at high speed. Viruses get trapped in the wall of the cyclone and concentrated for analysis. Any viruses not captured in the liquid get filtered out of the air with a HEPA filter attached to the device. After five minutes of collection, the liquid is pumped to a biosensor.

The biosensor consists of an electrode attached to a llama nanobody, a specialized immune system protein made by llamas and their relatives that fights infections much the way antibodies do but is smaller and perhaps tougher than human antibodies (SN: 9/14/20). The nanobody grabs any passing coronavirus by its spike protein. Electricity passing through the nanobody and spike protein causes tyrosine amino acids in the spike protein to oxidize, or lose electrons. Another device attached to the electrode detects that oxidation as a change in voltage, signaling that SARS-CoV-2 is in the air.  

The biosensor is based on a detector for the amyloid-beta protein fragments that form Alzheimer’s disease plaques developed by Chakrabarty’s colleagues Carla Yuede and John Cirrito. 

To test the detector, the researchers sent the device to the apartments of two people who had COVID-19 infections. “The device was detecting even the trace amounts of virus being shed by the patients,” Chakrabarty says. Air collected from an empty, well-ventilated conference room showed no sign of the virus.

“They’ve demonstrated that it works. It’s able to detect [the] virus at low levels that we would be concerned about in the air,” says Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg who studies the spread of viruses. She was not involved in the study but is working on a detector, too.

There are still some challenges to overcome. For instance, the device is about as noisy as a vacuum cleaner or a ringing phone. That’s probably too loud to use continuously in a classroom or office, Marr says, but could be tolerated if run for 10 minutes.

Such detectors cost about $1,400 to $1,900 to build in a research lab, Chakrabarty says. Commercial versions may initially be too expensive for home use, Marr says, but could be used in hospitals, airports and other public areas to survey for the virus. The devices could be linked into HVAC systems, which could ramp up ventilation and filtration if the virus is found, Marr and Chakrabarty suggest.

In the future, Chakrabarty hopes to add llama nanobodies that can detect other respiratory viruses as well, such as influenza or respiratory syncytial virus.

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An Australasian study out today [July 14] showed some positive results for people with treatment-resistant depression when they had ketamine injections.

But we don't know if these effects are sustained in the long term, and there are other ways of delivering ketamine. There are also other treatment options for this type of depression.

What is ketamine?

Ketamine has been used as a powerful general anesthetic for more than 50 years.

It's also an illicit drug of abuse and is considered a psychedelic. Psychedelics dramatically alter some neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) in the brain to create a profound change in perception, mood, and anxiety.

In early animal studies, ketamine led to increase in levels of certain brain chemicals, such as dopamine, by up to 400 percent. This led researchers to trial ketamine in humans to see what would happen in our brains.

Now, doses of ketamine (at those lower than used as an anesthetic) are being used to help treatment-resistant depression. That's when someone has tried at least two antidepressants and shows no improvement.

It is usually prescribed under strict conditions and observation that mitigate some serious risks, such as increased feelings about suicide in some people. So people need to be assessed and monitored not only during treatment but afterward.

But some clinicians have resisted using ketamine due to its potential to become a drug of abuse.

Ketamine is also used to treat other mental health disorders, such as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

How about this new study?

The research involved multiple centers across Australia and New Zealand and compared how well ketamine injected under the skin compared with taking another drug in treating people with treatment-resistant depression.

The trial randomized the 184 study participants into different groups – some receiving ketamine, the rest the drug midazolam, twice a week over four weeks. Neither the study participants nor those assessing the results knew who had ketamine and who didn't.

At the start of the study, all participants had a clinical depression score of at least 20 (moderate depression) using a particular scale known as the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale.

The researchers then looked for a score of less than 11, indicating a shift from a depression to remission.

After four weeks, there was a big difference between people treated with ketamine (19.6 percent in remission) compared with midazolam (2 percent). Another, less-strict way of measuring outcomes is to look for a halving of the depression score. This had an even bigger difference (29 percent compared with 4 percent).

However, four weeks after the treatment had ended, there was only limited sustained improvement in symptoms in the ketamine group. This suggests treatment may be needed over a longer period.

There are other options

In the trial, ketamine was given via an injection under the skin, which is a low-cost and efficient option. But ketamine can also be delivered directly into the bloodstream via an intravenous drip. Neither of these two options are routinely available in Australia and New Zealand outside clinical trials.

A third option uses a different form of ketamine and comes in a nasal spray (approved for use in Australia and New Zealand).

Each option delivers ketamine in different amounts, and research into how these work in practice and how they compare is ongoing.

There are also other drug and non-drug options for treatment-resistant depression. These include:

• transcranial magnetic stimulation, which stimulates parts of the brain to improve mood

• psilocybin, another psychedelic drug that has just been given the go-ahead for use in Australia under strict conditions as part of psychedelic-assisted therapy

• psychotherapy (talking therapy), such as cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance, and commitment therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy

• changing some lifestyle factors, such as diet and exercise, or practicing mindfulness meditation.

In a nutshell

Serious consequences of depression include suicide or a lifetime of anguish. This latest research shows promising outcomes for people whose symptoms are harder to treat. But this option is not yet widely available outside a clinical trial. Only the ketamine nasal spray has been approved for use in Australia and New Zealand.

There are also other treatments. So if your existing treatment is not working for you, discuss this with your doctor who will explain what else is available.

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CALIFORNIA/ BENGALURU: The successful launch of Chandrayaan-3 got the top leadership of start-ups and big companies with Indian roots in Silicon Valley thumping their chest with pride and looking at what lies ahead for India.

Some of the top representatives of the Silicon Valley companies echoed the sentiment that the successful launch of the lunar mission signalled the emergence of India as a global leader in key areas of the technology sector.

An entrepreneur, engineer and venture capitalist Bipul Sinha who co-founded the multi-cloud data control company Rubrik headquartered in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley told PTI, "Chandrayaan is such a proud moment for India as well as every Indian origin person everywhere across the world."

He said, "The implication of Chandrayaan is not just landing on the moon, but it is the technology and inspiration that India is showing to everybody as to what the future could be. How we own the technology future and propel India into the technology future. This will be a huge catalyst for the Indian economy, Indian innovation and overall Indian diaspora across the world."

Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean AI said, "India is now part of the core innovation engine for all companies in the world. All the years of investment done in India in an amazing number of educational institutions and the number of engineers who graduate every year have resulted in India being the future of tech talent and R&D talent. My belief is that we will see a lot more startups and a lot more innovation happening. Unicorns and large multinational companies will actually be born and grow in India and then become multinationals."

Umesh Sachdev, Co-Founder and CEO of Silicon Valley-based Conversational AI company Uniphore said Chandrayaan-3 marked the coming of age of India's science and technology capabilities.

Sachdev said, "It was a big milestone from a global and Indian aerospace industry standpoint. I think what yesterday represented was the coming of age of Indian science and tech. India is not just going to be a follower or be a back office to the companies of the West and developed technologies. India can start to lead in specific industries. And the successful launch of the Chandrayaan mission on Friday is a prime example that India is leading the world in certain areas like low-cost innovation, high-impact innovation. India is showing the world in some places how the playbook can be written."

Connecting the successful launch of Chandrayaan-3 to the recent visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the US, Sahil Chawla, CEO and Founder of Tsecond, a data-tech innovation startup, said "the optics are changing."

California-based Chawla said: "I think India made history in the afternoon of July 14 at a cost of less than 100 million dollars which is Rs 670 odd crores. We are going to the Moon as a country. It is a game changer for all the space sectors in the world. After Prime Minister Modi came here (US) the optics changed. Any industry, even Indian Americans are looking for new AI which is America India. It is very important that this kind of success comes in."

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It is the latest effort by Canada to capitalize on a growing sense from international students and professionals that settling permanently in the U. S.—between evermore competitive visa lotteries and a growing backlog of Green Cards—is too slow and difficult.

The new recruitment strategy, which Canada unveiled at a North American technology conference, Collision, held in Toronto last month, is designed to appeal to out-of-work foreign tech-sector workers in the U.S. whose immigration status is now in jeopardy after a recent series of layoffs, said Canadian Immigration Minister Sean Fraser.

For decades, attending an American university and settling in the U.S. more permanently has been the holy grail for many ambitious young foreigners across the globe. But that well-worn path has started to fray. International students can work for between one and three years on their student visas, but switching onto a work visa after that—most commonly the H-1B for high-skilled foreigners—has recently become dramatically more competitive. Last year, roughly one in five applications to the annual H-1B lottery were granted a visa; this year the number was closer to one in 10.

“With the H-1B lottery getting worse and worse every year, for a lot of these individuals Canada may actually be their only option,” said Chris Richardson, a former U.S. diplomat and co-founder of Argo Visa, a company that advises foreign applicants on the U.S. visa process.

Canada’s proposed work permit would allow H-1B visa holders to move to Canada without a job and look for one once they arrive. The types of immigrants who would qualify for the program, Canadian experts say, could also quickly become permanent residents under the country’s merit-based points immigration system.

Without the fast-track program, they would either need to apply for entry under the regular Canadian process or get a Canadian employer to obtain a work permit for them.

Fraser said at the conference that the situation presents an opportunity for Canada.

“There’s a lot of people who over the course of their careers may not have considered coming to Canada but very much want to stay attached to the North American market,” he said.

English-speaking countries from the U.K. to Australia have all benefited from foreigners’ frustrations with the often-slow and seemingly capricious U.S. immigration system, with universities from the U.K. to Australia all attracting more international students from countries like China and India.

Canada is considered a desirable destination because, under revised rules over the past 15 years, international students have an easier path to permanent residency after graduation, said immigration lawyers, Canadian officials and policy analysts who have studied immigration trends. If they end up working for American companies, they can live in the same time zone as their colleagues. In recent years, more American companies, such as Microsoft and Google, have opened branch offices in Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

For immigrants to the U.S. from India, who make up a disproportionate share of tech recruits, the process of becoming a permanent resident has proved uniquely vexing. That is because the U.S. caps the number of employment-sponsored green cards it awards to applicants of any one nationality, and many more Indians apply each year than there are green cards available for them. Without an intervention from Congress, people from India who newly apply for permanent residency could die before their number is called.

Ketaki Desai moved to the U.S. in 2002 for a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences and first applied for a green card with her husband in 2008. By 2020, the green card had still not come through, and because of Covid-related processing delays, her existing visa was about to expire. Fed up, Desai left her job helping run a $1 billion life sciences fund at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and moved her family to Toronto.

“I was feeling so much frustration and anger,” Desai recalled. “And when we realized we could start off with Canadian permanent residency, it was a no-brainer.” 

She took a job as an executive at a startup fund run by the Province of Ontario and, a year ago, left to start her own tech company building digital tools for children with special needs. This year, she and her family will become Canadian citizens.

Indian immigration to Canada has nearly quadrupled in the last decade, according to an analysis of Canadian immigration data by the National Foundation for American Policy, a Washington think tank.

Canada is making a broader effort to use immigration as an economic tool to fill job vacancies across the economy, given the aging workforce, and fuel economic growth. Technology-industry leaders in Canada estimate the shortage of workers, from software engineers to coders to computer scientists, could hit 250,000 next year.

“The government is trying to use all of the levers at its disposal to try and close that gap,” said Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators, a trade group of Canadian technology companies.

Another carrot Canada has recently offered, with an eye to luring future tech-sector workers, is making it easier for foreign students to become permanent residents. Since 2008, Canada has introduced changes to immigration rules that, among other things, allow international students to obtain a three-year work permit after graduation, and work off-campus during the school year and holiday breaks, without requiring a permit. At the time, Canadian officials said the goal was to retain foreign graduates given their familiarity with Canadian society and potential contribution to the economy.

The result: A surge in the international student enrollment at Canadian colleges and universities. In 2000, there were 122,000 study-permit holders in Canada, according to Statistics Canada data. The most-recent data from Statistics Canada indicate that number has ballooned to about 620,000.

“If I were the U.S. government, I would be very upset that Canada is basically siphoning off American workers,” said Sergio Karas, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer who works with companies to help secure workers from abroad.

But there is one area in which Canada can’t yet compete: salaries. While tech salaries are higher than the national average, they pale in comparison to the compensation employees receive for similar positions in the U.S., and many Canadian tech workers end up leaving the country for higher-paying positions abroad, according to an analysis by Randstad, a global human-resources consulting firm.

Many of the immigrants leaving the U.S. for Canada are, for now, considering it a temporary move.

“For tech workers, the U.S. is the holy grail. More money, more possibilities, more of everything. And Canada is very limited,” in terms of opportunities at large, global companies, Karas said.

Even Desai is looking at her options to return to Pittsburgh, even if it is on a temporary visa.

“We will always be Canadians, because Canada was there for us when the U.S. was not,” she said. “But we miss our community in Pittsburgh.”

Write to Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman@wsj.com and Paul Vieira at Paul.Vieira@wsj.com

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Many of Loeb’s colleagues in the fields of astrophysics and the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Life, or SETI, are highly skeptical of his claims. They’ve also cast doubt on the evidence that CNEOS 2014-01-08 is truly an interstellar object. But Loeb’s claim—and the responding criticism—raise important questions: Just how do you decide whether you’ve found evidence of alien life when the data are often so small, far or away, or just ambiguous? And how do you share your findings?

”It’s a big problem,” Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy at Penn State. “We call these the post-detection protocols in SETI.”

Scientists working on SETI in the 1960s and 1970s, including Carl Sagan and Frank Drake in the US, and Nicolai Kardashev and Iosif Shklovsky in the Soviet Union, created a set of protocols for how they would assess potential radio signals of extraterrestrial origin.

The first step was keeping the claims to a small group. “When you thought you might have found something, you would be able to share it only with other scientists without making it public,” he says. That might sound “incredibly naive today,” he notes, but it made pre-internet sense. After analyzing the signal and ensuring they were not mistaking Earthly radio signatures for aliens, “then you would make a big announcement—you would go to the UN and you would go to the governments.”

What the Cold War Era SETI post-detection protocols didn’t anticipate, Wright says, were more ambiguous signals or evidence. But those began cropping up as early as the 1970s, with a set of experiments on board the NASA Viking missions to Mars.

The tests, which were meant to detect the presence of organic compounds and possibly alien life on the Red Planet, had unclear and conflicting results. A biology experiment on the Viking 1 spacecraft showed one positive result for the presence of organic compounds, one negative result, and a third that was undetermined. The lead scientist for the experiment, the late Gilbert Levin, who died in 2021, argued as recently as 2012 that the experiment had, in fact, found signs of life on Mars. 

Then, in 1996, a team of scientists led by NASA Johnson Space Center’s David McKay began investigating a meteorite of Martian origin, known as Alan Hills 84001. Members of the team became so convinced they’d found evidence of fossilized Martian life in the space rock that it reached President Bill Clinton, who said “it speaks of the possibility of life” in an address to the nation. 

Though the scientific community came to believe McKay and his team were mistaken, they “were reasonably responsible [in the first article they published about it], even if they clearly believed they had something,” Arizona State University astrophysicist Steven Desch says. 

Since the 1996 announcement, scientists have put even more thought into how to gauge the levels of evidence for signs of alien life in different circumstances. The European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission Rosalind Franklin, a rover scheduled to launch to the Red Planet in 2028, will use a complex “biosignature score” rubric, ranking the confidence experiments have found signs of aliens. 

Key to any such evaluation of evidence of alien life is understanding what your confounders are, Wright says. Put another way: What might you detect that you would mistake as what you are looking for? 

For astronomers looking for signs of alien telecommunications, if you’re hoping to eavesdrop on alien radio, you need to rule out radiation signals from Earth. “When they do a SETI search these days, millions and millions and millions of hits, they call them, get detected, and they’re all from terrestrial transmitters,” Wright says. “It’s extremely challenging to rule those out to get rid of them. It’s like being in a crowded room and everyone’s talking at once, and you’re trying to hear the one voice.”

For signs of technological origin, or signs of fossilized life in meteorites, confounders are processes that could produce those objects without an appeal to alien life. Most scientists ultimately concluded that what looked like fossil microbial life in Alan Hills 84001 could be produced by other chemical or geological processes. 

Off the coast of Papua New Guinea, Loeb and his research team used a magnetic sled to drag the sea bed along the expected trajectory of the space rock. They collected small metal spheres. (Authorities from the island nation have suggested the material may have been illegally acquired.) The astronomer announced on his blog that his team had recovered unusual magnetic material consisting of an alloy of iron, titanium and magnesium that “does not resemble known human-made alloys or familiar asteroids.” He asked whether the asteroid might have been manufactured by some alien technology.

But he will also need to rule out that these spherules didn’t originate from the many other sources that create tiny metallic bits on the ocean floor, SETI experts say. 

“You’d have to match them against what are the more mundane possibilities including spherules from [non-intersterstellar] asteroid material hitting the Earth,” Desch says, noting that the seabed is covered in tiny pieces of ordinary meteorites. Then there is volcanic ash and artificial spherules—“stuff comes out of coal fired plants and lands on the seafloor too.” 

And while comparing a possible sign of life to more mundane alternatives, it’s also important to acquire that most essential form of comparison in science—a control sample. Since it landed on Mars in 2021, for example, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been collecting tubes of rock and soil that will be returned to Earth for analysis in the early 2030s. 

To help ensure any signs of life are not actually contamination brought to Mars from Earth, the rover carries five “witness tubes” containing Earth materials that could, in theory, contaminate the rover samples. Briefly opening the witness tubes on Mars will give scientists a pattern of what terrestrial contamination of a Mars sample would look like. 

The same type of measurement is even easier to make when trolling the seabed for signs of interstellar meteorites, according to Desch. “Go 100 miles away and collect the stuff from there and see if it’s any different,” he says. “If you find the same mix of stuff everywhere, it’s not all aliens, it’s just natural.”

For his part, Loeb says his team believes the spheres they found are in fact from the meteor, and not other sources. “The composition of the spherules along the meteor path is different from that of volcanic ash,” he writes in an email to Popular Science. “Our control samples were obtained tens of kilometers away from the meteor path, and revealed an abundance of spherules lower by a factor of 10 from the meteor path.”

Loeb plans to do further laboratory analysis of the recovered materials at the Harvard College Observatory. If history is any guide, that analysis will need to be extremely thorough, as confirming ambiguous signs of alien life has so far proven to be a big and incomplete task. 

But that’s not to say there are no conditions that would point indisputably to the existence of extraterrestrial life. If intelligent, space-faring aliens really are capable of visiting Earth, they could, of course, fulfill a 1950s sci-fi stereotype and land on the White House lawn to ask to see the president. 

“Another example is finding a technological gadget as the relic of an interstellar meteor,” Leob writes. “Such an object could have components that are unfamiliar, including a label: ‘Made on an exo-planet.’”

More convincing than that, however, might be the detection of a radio signal that could not be produced by natural means, according to Wright. “Only technology can produce narrowband radio emission,” Wright says, referring to radio transmissions encoded in a narrow range of frequencies that efficiently use bandwidth to communicate data. He envisions “plenty of scenarios where we’re sure it’s technology and space, and we’re sure it’s not ours, because it’s not local.” The SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, several dishes in California, are designed to hunt for such a signal. 

But even a detection of an alien radio transmitter might set up a whole new level of analysis. Just because you receive the signal, it doesn’t mean it’s for you, that you can decipher it, or that the sender would respond if you tried to talk to them. “We say, ‘Well, that star’s got radio transmissions.’ Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don’t. They’re definitely technological,” Wright says. “Yes, they have radio transmitters. And that’s all we know.”

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As I’m folding laundry in the bedroom, daydreaming about bike rides, late-night swims, and long summer hikes, I hear my 11-year-old son singing in the shower 20 feet away.

“I tried so hard and got so far. But in the end, it doesn’t even matter.” And just like that, I know I’ll be singing the same refrain, maybe all week.

Experts say those few seconds of Linkin Park’s popular hit can trigger a mind trip lasting hours or even days. Fragments of a song or jingles wind up playing on repeat in your head. And as you may be aware, these “earworms” are shockingly common. According to a 2020 study of American college students, 97 percent experienced an earworm in the past month. Some tunes (“Baby Shark,” we’re looking at you!) crawl into your mind even without any audible stimuli.

“Earworms are a universal phenomenon across many different ages and cultures,” says Claire Arthur, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Music in Atlanta. “But what distinguishes an earworm from any other memory that spontaneously pops into your head is that it recurs and repeats, often in a direct loop.”

Desperate to get “In the End” out of my head, I started watching Try Not to Laugh memes on YouTube. After one or two clips, my earworm was gone. It turns out, I’d unknowingly resorted to one of many tactics experts recommend to exterminate an earworm. These enigmatic tunes hook into our minds easily, but fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to eliminate the loop of lunacy.

What Causes Earworms

Scientists aren’t entirely sure why we get songs in our head, but they suspect that something about the mental architecture of our brains allows musical patterns to emerge and play over and over. Studies, like this one published in the journal Psychology of Music, show that earworms typically occur in response to a few basic triggers: recency, familiarity, and boredom.

“Our brain is made up of a massive complex network of neurons that store information, and when the mind is free to wander, it may unwittingly land on a song that has been encoded through recency and repetition,” says Emery Schubert, a researcher and professor at the University of New South Wales. “In fact, composers and artists who write songs intentionally build repetition into their music to boost the odds of creating an earworm.”

Scientists call earworms involuntary musical imagery, or INMI, because they burrow into our heads uninvited and without warning. At our house, we leave a local alternative-music radio station on in the background. The DJs favor a song called “Heatwaves,” by Glass Animals. Let’s just say I’m not a fan, and yet, that’s the song that frequently plays in my mind when I awaken from a dreamlike state: “Sometimes, all I think about is you. Late nights in the middle of June. Heat waves been fakin' me out. Can't make you happier now.” And I know I’ll be singing those few catchy lines while I’m brushing my teeth later that night.

Music that is simple, repetitive, and easy to sing (or hum) is most likely to get stuck. Think Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” and Queen’s classic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the title-says-it-all track “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” by Kylie Minogue. Even the Rocky theme song can fight its way in. Nursery rhymes and kid-friendly tunes are also strong earworm contenders. They’re composed to be catchy, with an ear toward repetition, and as a result, memorization. If the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” crawls into your head, now you know why.

Who’s at Risk

It turns out that certain emotional states, such as when we’re tired or overworked, can trigger earworms. (In a Goldilocks-like quandary, you may be more vulnerable if you’re too stressed or not stressed enough—in other words, bored.) Maybe that’s why I frequently wrestled with earworms when my three sons were young. The combination of simple music and sleep deprivation created a fertile breeding ground for the pesky tunes to take hold.

“We get trapped in ironic processes. Not to think about something requires remembering what it is we’re not supposed to think about,” says James Kellaris, a marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati, also known as Dr. Earworm. “Mind experiment: Try very hard not to think about ‘Who Let the Dogs Out.’” Good luck with that!

At their core, earworms are a form of rumination, and research suggests that people who suffer from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are more prone to earworms. “Their brains are wired to reflect and reflect and reflect,” Arthur says. There’s even a small subset of the population that suffers from earworms on steroids. Dubbed intrusive musical imagery, or IMI, these musical obsessions can last for months, even years, wreaking havoc on the person’s life and work.

(Note: If you’re wrestling with an earworm for more than 24 hours, and it’s interfering with your work or your life, talk to your health care provider. There are other, rare conditions that may be at play here, and they are treatable!)

How to Set Your Earworm Free

Most people aren’t too bothered by the occasional catchy tune playing on a loop in their heads. But sadly, earworms don’t discriminate between tunes you like and ones you despise. They don’t care if you’re happy and you know it (though they might care if you clap your hands as a disruption tactic).

If an earworm has a hold on you, scientists believe the following strategies may help obliterate it:

• Complete the song. When you only know one part of the song, that’s the bit that gets stuck. Once you listen to the whole song all the way through, your brain gets the message that it’s complete, so there’s no need for it to repeat. Don’t have time to play the song in its entirety? Cue the applause. That’s a trick Arthur uses to signal to her mind that the song is over. “I imagine that I’m at a concert, and I hear the audience clapping and cheering in my mind,” she says.
• Distract yourself. It turns out watching memes when you’re trying to ditch an earworm is an expert-approved strategy. Distraction, or coming up with a competing task, sound, or image—something that engages your mind—can help get rid of an INMI. “Even chewing gum can disrupt the phonological loop necessary for imagining through the song,” says Elizabeth Margulis, a professor at Princeton University and director of its music cognition lab.
• Diversify your playlist. If you create a playlist made up of songs with varying tempos and beats, your mind may be less likely to catch on a particular tune. “When you expand your horizons and learn about different kinds of music, there’s a larger repertoire for your mind to draw upon,” Schubert says. In a pinch? Tune into the earworm eraser, a 42-second track that’s designed to disrupt the neural patterns that latch onto a catchy song. “There’s no rhythm, no melody, and it just takes up space in your phonological loop,” Arthur says.
• Mix up the lyrics. The AI tool ChatGPT gets a lot of flak for potentially putting writers out of business, but if you’ve got an earworm, it could provide an antidote. Try this: Tell ChatGPT, “You are Weird Al Yankovic, make these lyrics funny and about Star Wars.” Want an AI-free solution? Try strategically replacing words in the song—so swap out the word “Caroline” in “Sweet Caroline” with another three-syllable word. Let’s say, “establish.” Now try singing it.

While you may be tempted to try to suppress earworms, Kellaris cautions against it. They’re like a cognitive itch. Scratching them (or in this case, fixating on how to annihilate them) will only make the episode last longer. Instead, when a pesky earworm does get trapped in your head, try to remember that “you can’t always get what you want … but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.”

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Twenty-two people have died, 14 are missing and thousands have been evacuated as a third day of torrential rain causes landslides in South Korea.

The downpours caused a major dam in North Chungcheong province to overflow.

The 22 fatalities were reported on Friday and Saturday, all in central and south-east regions, the ministry of the interior and safety said in a report.

An earlier ministry report on Saturday morning said five people had died after landslides caused by torrential downpours buried their houses. Two others also died in landslide-related incidents. But the latest ministry report did not explain the cause of deaths for the additional fatalities.

The report said 14 people had been missing since Tuesday, and 13 others injured since Thursday.

South Korea has been pounded by heavy rains since 9 July. The ministry report said about 4,760 people had been forced to evacuate and thousands of households had been left without electricity in the past seven days. It said more than 2,000 people remained in temporary shelters as of Saturday afternoon.

Local government evacuation orders covered more than 7,000 people at various times, according to provincial authorities.

The tally is expected to rise as more heavy rain is expected on the Korean peninsula on Sunday, the Korea meteorological administration forecasted.

As of 9am, more than 2,700 tonnes of water a second was flowing into Goesan Dam, the maximum it can discharge.

Korea Railroad Corp said it was halting all slow trains and some bullet trains, while other bullet trains might be delayed due to slower operation, as landslides, track flooding and falling rocks threatened safety.

A slow train derailed late on Friday when a landslide threw earth and sand over tracks in North Chungcheong province, the transport ministry said. The engineer was injured, but no passengers were on board.

In a meeting with government agencies on Saturday, the prime minister, Han Duck-soo, called for the military to actively join in rescue activities, working with government officials to mobilise equipment and manpower.

President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was visiting Ukraine on Saturday, asked the South Korean prime minister to mobilise all available resources to respond to the disaster, according to Yoon’s office.

South Korea’s weather agency said some parts of the country would continue to receive heavy rain until Sunday.

Central regions received the largest rainfall, with more than 600 millimeters (24 in) in the city of Gongju and the county of Cheongyang since 9 July, respectively.

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The UK and Switzerland will see a 30% increase in the number of days of uncomfortably hot temperatures if the world heats by 2C, and are two of the countries which need to adapt the most for global heating, scientists have predicted.

The research, published in Nature Sustainability on Thursday, found that while central Africa will see the most extreme temperatures overall, it is mostly northern European countries that will experience the greatest relative increases in uncomfortably hot days.

The people and infrastructure in these countries are not prepared for periods of hot weather, the study, based on climate modelling and data from the UK Met Office, predicts. The estimates by researchers at the University of Oxford are conservative, and do not include external factors such as extreme heatwaves, which would come on top of this average increase.

Norway will also suffer one of the world’s most dramatic increases in days that require cooling interventions, the study finds, with a 28% increase in days with uncomfortably hot temperatures if the world misses the 1.5C target. Eight of the 10 countries with the greatest relative increase in uncomfortably hot days are expected to be in northern Europe.

Researchers said northern European countries had not prepared for sustainable cooling alternatives as homes become uncomfortably hot in the summer months and infrastructure struggles to cope above certain temperatures. Cooling measures needed to face these temperatures include making use of natural ventilation, external solar protection such as window shutters and fans.

“For example, sustainable cooling barely has a mention in the UK’s net zero strategy,” said co-author Dr Radhika Khosla, an associate professor at Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and leader of the Oxford Martin programme on the future of cooling.

She said air conditioning could add to the problem if the grid was not decarbonised and fossil fuels were used to cool homes: “Without adequate interventions to promote sustainable cooling we are likely to see a sharp increase in the use of energy guzzling systems like air conditioning, which could further increase emissions and lock us into a vicious cycle of burning fossil fuels to make us feel cooler while making the world outside hotter.”

Currently, buildings in northern Europe are often made to trap heat in the cold seasons and can become swelteringly hot in summer. This needs to change if the world hits 2C of heating and the country faces a new, hotter climate.

The co-lead author Dr Jesus Lizana said: “If we adapt the built environment in which we live, we won’t need to increase air conditioning. But right now, in countries like the UK our buildings act like greenhouses: no external protection from the sun in buildings, windows locked, no natural ventilation and no ceiling fans. Our buildings are exclusively prepared for the cold seasons.”

What you need to know about the 'extreme' heatwave hitting our oceans – video explainer

The best way to avoid having to take these measures is to keep the world to the 1.5C of heating pledge made in Paris in 2015, but the chances of this are vanishing as countries burn through more fossil fuels. If this does not happen, northern European countries that do not have cooling measures in place can expect large-scale disruption.

The co-lead author Dr Nicole Miranda added: “Northern European countries will require large-scale adaptation to heat resilience quicker than other countries. Extreme heat can lead to dehydration, heat exhaustion and even death, especially in vulnerable populations. It’s a health and economic imperative that we prepare for more hot days.”

Top 10 countries by relative cooling change

1 Switzerland 30%

2 United Kingdom 30%

3 Norway 28%

4 Finland 28%

5 Sweden 28%

6 Austria 24%

7 Canada 24%

8 Denmark 24%

9 New Zealand 24%

10 Belgium 24%

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One group of student in particular stands out in overcoming incredible odds to qualify for participation in this event, and they need financial help to be able to attend. Student from Afghanistan have been restricted from publicly participating in science activities like astronomy due to the presence of the Taliban. Additionally, a majority of the students from Afghanistan who qualified to attend the IOAA are girls, and since the Taliban returned to power nearly two years ago, they have resumed pushing women and girls out of public life and out of schools.

The Afghanistan students who qualified for this year’s IOAA are part of a group called Kayhana. This is a dedicated group of Afghan astronomy enthusiasts whose mission is to inspire and educate youth in their country, particularly young women, in the field of astronomy.

Kayhana was founded in 2018 by Amena Karimyan, a civil engineer and formerly an instructor at Herat Technical Institute who was one of the first women astronomers in Afghanistan. In 2020 her all-girl education group won an award from the International Astronomy and Astrophysics competition, and won a telescope from the International Astronomical Union’s Telescopes For All project. In 2021, Karimyan was chosen by the BBC as one of 100 Inspiring Women of the year.

Students with the Kayhana astronomy group. Image courtesy of Amena Karimyan.

But Karimyan is now living in exile in Germany, driven out of Afghanistan due to her persistence in teaching astronomy. She is asking for assistance so that the students can try to attend the IOAA, and has started a GoFundMe campaign. They are very close to their goal of €10,300, and we are asking Universe Today readers to help push the campaign past their goal.

“Since its inception in 2018, Kayhana has not received any financial support from anywhere,” Karimyan told Universe Today. “I have always worked in the construction engineering part of my academic field and used it for Keyhana. But now I am not really in a position to pay this fee alone. Therefore, for the first time, I created a funding program. This is our last hope.”

Seven people from Afghanistan (five students and two leaders) will travel to Poland. Karimyan said the funds will be used for expenses such as location fees, visa costs, transportation, accommodation, and educational materials. The donations will enable the students to attend the IOAA, while uplifting Afghan youth, and fostering a passion for astronomy despite the adversity they face.

We’ve written previously about the challenges and perils of amateur astronomy in Afghanistan. Kayhana is the only active scientific group in Afghanistan. They have 150 members, with a significant portion of their members being young women. On the GoFundMe page, Karimyan wrote, “By supporting them, you will demonstrate your commitment to empowering Afghan youth and showing solidarity with their pursuit of scientific knowledge.”

Karimyan said Kayhana will soon open a YouTube channel “as the first and most reliable scientific resource in Afghanistan and we are hard at work training our members right now.  Along with the many other committees that exist, we recently got a professor in the Olympiad department.”

Amena Karimyan.

Karimyan’s story is remarkable. When the Taliban returned to power, Karimyan was arrested, whipped and beaten. She was able to find refuge in the Austrian embassy in Islamabad, and had hopes of finding asylum in Austria; however, her visa request was denied. She escaped to Pakistan, and later was able to go to Germany, thanks to a German journalist Evelyn Schalk, who wrote an incredible profile of Karimyan. Recently, Karimyan learned that her father died “under great pressure” in Afghanistan.

“I don’t know how much a person has to sacrifice, and get hurt to be successful. But I am stubborn, and with Kayhana I want to give Afghan students a sense of hope for their future,” she said.

Despite everything she has gone through, she persists in online activities with Kayhana. She said despite threats of death, she and the volunteers at Kayhana intend to resist.   

“In a world where today a woman wants to walk on the Moon in the new Artemis project,” Karimyan said, “and at the same time in that same world there is a place where women not only have no right to education, but also no right to live.”

Students with the Kayhana astronomy group. Image courtesy of Amena Karimyan.

But she sees the chance for Afghan students to attend the IOAA as a big win.  

“I would like people around the world to see that the people of Afghanistan are actually fighting,” she said. “Even though the gates of education are closed, our students want to compete with the superpowers of knowledge. It takes a lot of courage.”

Karimyan asks for everyone’s support, financially if you can, but she said there are other ways people around the world can support them, too.

“We accept any kind of support,” she said. “We are even looking for people to sing for us, because music is the language of the soul. Music is also a big struggle for us. From all walks of life, we welcome any kind of help they would like to give us with open arms, as it will have a profound impact on the lives of Afghan youth and help shape a brighter future for their country.”

For more information, and to learn how to make a contribution, see the GoFundMe page.

Read an article Karimyan wrote for Nature, Women astronomers in Afghanistan need the world’s support

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Published in JAMA Network Open, the findings—some of the most robust on this topic to date—may help older individuals and aged care professionals plan more targeted approaches to reducing dementia risk.

Researchers drew data from 10,318 Australians aged 70 and older participating in the ASPREE project and the ALSOP (ASPREE Longitudinal Study of Older Persons) sub-study.

They found that participants who routinely engaged in adult literacy and mental acuity tasks such as education classes, keeping journals, and doing crosswords were 9-11 percent less likely to develop dementia than their peers.

Creative hobbies like crafting, knitting and painting, and more passive activities like reading reduced the risk by 7 percent. In contrast, the size of someone's social network and the frequency of external outings to the cinema or restaurant were not associated with dementia risk reduction.

The results remained statistically significant even when adjusted for earlier education level, and socioeconomic status. No significant variations were found between men and women.

In 2022, 55 million people globally lived with dementia, with 10 million new cases each year.

Senior author Associate Professor Joanne Ryan, from the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, said identifying strategies to prevent or delay dementia was a huge global priority.

"We had a unique opportunity to close a gap in knowledge by investigating a broad range of lifestyle enrichment activities that older adults often undertake, and assess which of those were most strongly aligned with avoiding dementia," Associate Professor Ryan said.

"I think what our results tell us is that active manipulation of previously stored knowledge may play a greater role in dementia risk reduction than more passive recreational activities. Keeping the mind active and challenged may be particularly important."

The leisure activities assessed encompassed:

• adult literacy activities such as adult education classes, using computers, keeping a journal

• mental acuity tasks like completing quizzes and crosswords, playing cards/chess

• creative hobbies like woodworking, knitting or painting

• more passive activities like keeping up with the news, reading or listening to music

• social network activities like meeting and interacting with friends

• planned excursions such as going to a restaurant, museum or the cinema.

Associate Professor Ryan said the results did not rule out that those naturally drawn to the types of leisure activities linked to cognitive health also had specific personality traits that were otherwise beneficial, or they may generally have had better health behaviors.

"While engaging in literacy and mental acuity activities may not be a magic pill to avoid dementia, if that was your goal and you had to choose, our research certainly suggests these are the activities most likely to support prolonged good cognitive health," she said.

Associate Professor Ryan said social connection may also still be quite important to cognitive health and mental well-being, even though it did not show a clear link with dementia risk in the study.

"The participants were cognitively healthy, and were likely already leading socially active lives, such that the cognitive benefits of strong social networks may be less obvious in this group compared to the general public," she said.

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Sunday, 16 July

The first Starlink mission this week will see SpaceX launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 54 Gen2 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. The mission is scheduled to take off from Space Launch Complex 40 which is in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 3:50 a.m. UTC.

If you use any websites or apps that allow you to find details on Starlink satellites as they fly overhead, this group is designated as Starlink Group 5-15. Amazingly, this is also the 16th flight of the first stage booster - it was used in the Transporter-2 and Transporter-6 missions previously, among others.

As always, you can tune into the launch from SpaceX’s website where presenters will explain what’s going on throughout the launch process.

Wednesday, 19 July

The second Starlink mission will be heading up to space at 2:29 a.m. from Vandenberg AFB in California. This time it will be carrying 22 Starlink Mini satellites to a low Earth orbit.

This batch of satellites will be called Starlink Group 6-15 if you want to try and spot them in the sky when they’re in orbit. This mission will also stream on SpaceX’s website, but the page isn’t available yet so check in closer to launch.

Recap

The first launch last week was a Long March 2C carrying an internet technology test satellite from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in China. It took off at 11:00 a.m. UTC and entered its planned orbit.

Next up, SpaceX launched 22 Starlink satellites using a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral.

A few days later we were back at Jiuquan Space Launch Centre as the private Chinese company Landspace successfully launched its ZhuQue-2 rocket.

Finally, India successfully launched its LVM3 rocket carrying the Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission. It took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

That’s all for this week, check back next time!

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But around 3.9 million people worldwide aged 30-64 live with young-onset Alzheimer's disease – a form of dementia in which symptoms appear before the age of 65.

English journalist and broadcaster Fiona Phillips, 62, recently revealed that she'd been diagnosed with it. In the interview, Phillips shared that the main symptoms she had experienced before her diagnosis were brain fog and anxiety – highlighting just how different young-onset can be from late-onset Alzheimer's disease.

First, symptoms begin much earlier – as young as 30 in some rare cases, though it's typically diagnosed between the ages of 50-64.

And, while people with Alzheimer's disease commonly experience memory loss as the first sign of the disease, people with young-onset Alzheimer's tend to have other symptoms – such as worse attention, less ability to mimic hand gestures and worse spatial awareness.

Some people with young-onset Alzheimer's may also experience an increase in anxiety prior to their diagnosis. This may be due to an awareness of the changes occurring, without a clear reason as to why they're feeling different.

They may think these changes in behaviour are temporary, which can put people off seeking medical help. Healthcare professionals may also misinterpret anxiety as a sign of other health conditions.

But while they may have less cognitive impairment at the time of diagnosis, studies have indicated that those living with young-onset Alzheimer's disease show more rapid changes in their brain.

This indicates that the condition can be more aggressive than late-onset Alzheimer's disease. This may also explain why people with early-onset Alzheimer's tend to have a life expectancy around two years shorter than those with late-onset.

Research shows that people with young-onset Alzheimer's are also more aware of the changes in their brain activity. This can lead to behavioural changes – with conditions such as depression being prevalent in this group.

Within the brain itself, young-onset Alzheimer's disease causes similar chemical changes as those in late-onset Alzheimer's. But the brain areas targeted by these chemical changes can be different.

Research has found that brain areas involved in processing sensory- and movement-related information (called the parietal cortex) show greater signs of damage. There is also less damage to the hippocampus compared to late-onset Alzheimer's – an area of the brain important in learning and memory.

Why it happens

The risk factors for young-onset Alzheimer's disease are similar to those for late-onset Alzheimer's.

For example, poor levels of cardiovascular fitness and lower cognitive ability in early adulthood have been linked to an eight-fold increased risk of developing young-onset Alzheimer's. However, we are yet to fully understand all the factors that influence a person's chances of developing the condition.

One aspect experts are clear on is that genetics play a role in about one in ten cases of young-onset Alzheimer's disease. So far, three genes (APP, PSEN1 and PSEN2) have been linked to young onset Alzheimer's disease.

These genes are all related to a toxic protein that is thought to contribute to Alzheimer's disease (known as amyloid beta). When these genes become faulty, there's an accumulation of toxic amyloid beta, which is linked to symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

Growing evidence suggests there may also be a link between traumatic brain injury and young-onset Alzheimer's disease.

What can people do?

In the UK, people diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer's disease can be prescribed medication which can help manage symptoms.

But in the US, two therapies have been approved which may slow the progression of symptoms. However, these were only tested on people with late-onset Alzheimer's disease, so it's uncertain if they will have as distinct of an effect.

People who may have a family history of dementia or are concerned about their risk can have a genetic test done through a private company. This will confirm the presence of the faulty genes. These tests can be carried out for those showing symptoms, or those with a family history that wish to know their future prognosis.

While it's not possible to modify genetics if you are at greater risk, some research does support the idea that you can strengthen your resilience against the disease through a healthier lifestyle.

One study found that when people who were genetically predisposed to early onset Alzheimer's exercised for more than two-and-a-half hours per week, they scored better in memory tests than those who weren't as physically active.

Alongside being more active, diet choices may also lower risk of young-onset Alzheimer's. An Italian study found that people who consumed high levels of vegetables, dry fruits and chocolate appeared to have lower risk.

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The AUKUS partnership between Australia, the US and the UK isn’t just about nuclear-propelled submarines.

It also includes an information exchange agreement related to a number of new advanced technologies. These include cyber capabilities, electronic warfare, quantum technology, hypersonics, artificial intelligence and autonomous military capabilities.

Although the partners committed to sharing these technologies and information, there’s a problem. The US has strict trade control restrictions that impede certain technologies from being easily exported to Australia, or sold elsewhere by Australian companies after being incorporated into other items.

The restrictions on military items that would fall under the AUKUS agreement are spelled out in the United States’ International Traffic of Arms Regulations (ITAR).

The controls apply to military and dual-use technologies, as well as the information and skills needed to build them – and they are important. The US has international obligations to prevent the proliferation of weapons and military technology globally. It also has domestic concerns about which countries can access US military technology and information.

Australian companies wanting to import US technologies on the International Traffic of Arms Regulations list need to meet certain conditions to obtain a license. This can include vetting their staff, limiting access to the information or technology, and agreeing to onerous monitoring and reporting requirements.

They could be exposed to US criminal laws if they fail to meet these obligations after being granted a license.

Are changes to the US restrictions on the way?

Since the AUKUS agreement was announced, a number of American think tanks, export control experts and senators have spoken out about these onerous requirements.

They have expressed a need to make US and Australian defense trade easier so the AUKUS deal can work as intended.

In late May, US President Joe Biden responded to these calls. In a joint statement with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, he announced the US will take steps to amend its laws to streamline the sharing of technologies with Australia.

This change would deem Australia a “domestic source” in the Defense Production Act of 1950, alongside the US and Canada.

There is a separate proposal before Congress to give effect to this change. Named the TORPEDO Act, it would not only designate Australia a “domestic source”, but also ease restrictions for technology-sharing with Australia and the UK.

In addition, it would create a general license for the export, re-export or transfer of certain defense articles to Australia and the UK under the International Traffic of Arms Regulations.

Meanwhile, another bill, the AUKUS Undersea Defense Act, was introduced in June to facilitate the transfer of nuclear submarines from the US to Australia and the training of Australian personnel on the vessels, as well as proposing other exemptions.

Other experts have called for a US presidential executive order to give Australia an exemption under the regulations.

Whichever path the US takes, it could take years for any of these legislative changes to be accepted and implemented.

What would this mean for Australia?

The proposed change announced by Biden mirrors the exemption Canada currently enjoys with the US government. Canadian arms manufacturers and researchers can now access US technologies and information without going through the onerous licensing requirements under the International Traffic of Arms Regulations.

This would be a boon for the Australian defense industry, boosting our competitiveness in the global market. Trade to the US and Canada would also be simplified, with much greater opportunity to export goods back to those countries.

If passed, however, this change would not amount to an arms trade free-for-all.

US trade controls would still apply to any technologies not included in a pre-approved list, as well as to the trade of equipment or technologies beyond the AUKUS partners.

Other requirements, like security vetting and data protection requirements, would also still apply. Australia’s own export laws will also still be in effect.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, right, meets with US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister of Australia Anthony Albanese in San Diego. Photo: Leon Neal / Getty Pool / AP via The Conversation

Does Australia need to change its own laws?

Although Australia has not exactly followed the American model of defence export controls, our system is quite similar. Australia currently requires licenses to allow items or information on the Defense and Strategic Goods List to be supplied, published or brokered for sale to another country.

However, Australia doesn’t have the same ongoing monitoring obligations the US has. The US system requires that any sales to third countries of equipment containing US-controlled technology are still subject to the stringent International Traffic of Arms Regulations.

This is meant to prevent a country from buying military equipment from the US and then reselling it to a third country, like Russia. Russia has been circumventing international sanctions by buying military equipment like this from third-party states.

Australia’s end-use monitoring is much more limited than this often-criticized feature of the US controls.

Australia also doesn’t have country-specific bans for the trade of defense items. Rather, each export application is dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Australia, for instance, has not replicated the US ban on selling semiconductors to China. This reflects Australia’s different trade policies and relationship with China, compared to the US relationship with China.

Because Australia has less stringent rules (in some respects), the US may expect Canberra to strengthen its regulations when it comes to trading technologies or sharing information.

The AUKUS Undersea Defense Act before Congress, for instance, proposes Australia would first need to be assessed as having a “comparable” export control system to the US in order to qualify for the proposed exemptions. What that means, however, is not clearly defined.

Australia is still drafting updates to its Defense Trade Controls Act to address a host of deficiencies with its export control system, including how to accommodate new technologies like artificial intelligence.

While the US expectations for parity in defense control systems are important, they must be balanced carefully with our independence to manage our own trade partnerships and build a sovereign defense industry.

One can surmise the impending updates to the Australian Defense Trade Controls Act will reveal exactly how this balance will be established.

Lauren Sanders is Senior Research Fellow on Law and the Future of War, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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JUST WEEKS AFTER a third of the US population was hit with air-quality alerts thanks to smoke from climate-change-fueled fires in Canada, 100 million Americans are now under heat alerts. A cap of extra-hot air, known as a heat dome, has settled over the West and South, pushing temperatures relentlessly higher. 

ILLUSTRATION: NWS

 

This follows the hottest June on record globally. “With an evolving El Niño event, that is certain to further increase global temperatures,” says Howard Diamond, climate science program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Air Resources Laboratory. (El Niño is a band of warm water that develops in the Pacific Ocean and influences weather around the world.) “Canada has also experienced multiple bouts of prolonged heat this summer, contributing to the worst wildfire season the country has ever seen,” Diamond adds.

 

A heat dome is essentially stagnation. It forms as a strong high-pressure system. As that air descends to the ground, it compresses and significantly warms up: A few thousand feet up, air might be 80 degrees, but it can reach 100 degrees once it hits the land. 

 

This descending cap of hot air self-perpetuates for days or even weeks. It discourages the formation of clouds, allowing the sun’s energy to hit the landscape full force, further raising ground temperatures. At the beginning of a heat dome, moisture in the dirt and plants evaporates away, somewhat cooling the landscape—it’s sweating, basically. But as the heat continues for days on end, that moisture runs out and temperatures climb higher. 

 

In other words, the heat dome feeds on itself. “There is no cloud cover, there is a lot of solar radiation coming in, there is no precipitation,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “You also trigger this feedback—you dry the soil, and there is no way for things to cool down by evaporation.”

 

That self-perpetuation makes heat domes extremely dangerous. It’s bad enough when temperatures rise above 110 for a single day, especially for people with conditions like asthma, because the heat leads to the formation of ozone, which irritates the airways. But if temperatures soar for days—and especially if temperatures stay high overnight—the body has no time to recover. The stress keeps piling up.

Shifting Focus in Air Pollution Research

Although traditionally, research on air quality and pollution has centered primarily on emissions from transportation, particularly cars, urban areas now tend to experience less pollution from motor vehicles than in the past. In response, scientists heading the AEROMMA project this summer are turning their attention towards other anthropogenic, or human-driven, sources of pollution.

Introducing the AEROMMA Project

The AEROMMA project, which stands for Atmospheric Emissions and Reactions Observed from Megacities to Marine Areas, is a joint initiative by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. From late June through mid-August 2023, the researchers will employ NASA’s DC-8 aircraft, the world’s largest flying science laboratory, to conduct low-altitude flights over several cities and gather data on pollution sources. This aircraft is operated by NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center.

Project Aims and Methodology

The project aims to scrutinize the air quality over some of North America’s most densely populated areas, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Toronto. By using the DC-8 to execute a series of low-altitude flights, the team will explore urban emissions and the atmospheric chemical reactions that influence air quality and climate. These emissions sources encompass everyday items such as personal care products, cleaning agents, smaller gas-burning devices, and even landfills.

Everyday Products as Pollution Sources

Unlike transportation-related pollution, pollution from everyday products remains proportionate to the population, since these items are universally used. Whether it’s a window cleaning agent or a dry shampoo for rushed mornings, the products we frequently use are designed to emit vapors into the atmosphere, either to disseminate scent or facilitate coatings drying. These volatile ingredients are often fossil fuel derivatives and consequently impact our collective air quality, with the effect being particularly tangible and measurable in major cities.

Collaboration and Student Involvement

The AEROMMA project integrates airborne, ground, and satellite observation systems, and leverages cutting-edge air quality and climate models to quantify the flux of anthropogenic emissions over North American cities. The project’s low-altitude flights will be coordinated with high-altitude flights from aircraft operated by NASA’s Langley Research Center as part of STAQS, the Synergistic Tempo Air Quality Science project. In conjunction with other partners engaged in parallel air quality studies — AEROMMA, STAQS, CUPiDS, GOTHAAM — the team aims to create a synergistic observation system that is more comprehensive than any single mission could achieve on its own.

NASA’s aircraft personnel will oversee the project’s safety, while NOAA scientists will spearhead the scientific investigations. Furthermore, both NASA and NOAA teams will mentor undergraduate students from NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), as they contribute to research during the Los Angeles flights.

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Scientists claim to have reverted cells to a younger state by using just a chemical therapy, marking a potential breakthrough in anti-aging research. The study builds on existing research into anti-aging genes that won a Nobel Prize, so the approach certainly warrants a closer look, though it remains experimental and on small cell cultures at this time. 

Previous attempts used a very expensive and time-consuming genetic editing approach, which limits how scalable these therapies can be. The ultra-rich are investing heavily into this technology (understandably) but without more scalable and efficient options, that small group may be all anti-aging is reserved for. 

Instead, the work led by a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School have looked to specific genes called Yamanaka factors. These factors are directly involved in turning cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which have the ability to turn into any other cell in the body. Essentially, they can make a cell young again.

In addition, this process doesn’t appear to create cells that are prone to cancer, a difficult problem for anti-aging research. Aging cells are a mechanism to prevent cells from accumulating harmful mutations that can result in cancer, so stopping or slowing this process can often have alternative effects.  

If they can target these factors and use them to make old cells into iPSCs, it wouldn’t just slow aging – it could reverse it. 

“Until recently, the best we could do was slow aging. New discoveries suggest we can now reverse it,” said David A. Sinclair, Professor in the Department of Genetics and lead scientist on the project, in a statement.  

“This process has previously required gene therapy, limiting its widespread use.” 

In this study, the researchers continued with this approach and screened for new molecules that could be used in conjunction with Yamanaka factors to further reverse aging, and they found promising results. They identified six chemical cocktails that were able to reverse aging, according to new tests they developed, and make cells biologically “younger” in less than a week. 

In previous studies in mice, researchers found administering Yamanaka factors with a viral vector was able to improve eyesight and other hallmarks of aging, suggesting it could be a viable therapy. The authors state that using a drug approach could have far-reaching impacts in the field, with lower costs and timelines for development pushing along our ability to combat aging.  

Now, the team looks to improve on their findings while the anti-aging field awaits human trials of a genetic therapy in 2024. It remains to be seen whether the drugs will work on humans, but the approach certainly looks promising.  

The study is published in the journal Aging.

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To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the JWST a brand new image has been released of the closest star-forming region to Earth, capturing star birth in a way we have never seen before.

The JWST is the largest and most powerful telescope ever made. Launched into space on Christmas Day 2021 at a cost of around $10 billion dollars, it can peer further back in time than any other telescope to capture the formation of stars and planets, and even the birth of the first galaxies in the early universe. One year in and it has surpassed expectations – and this is just the beginning.

“In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing light from faraway corners of the universe for the very first time," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "Every new image is a new discovery, empowering scientists around the globe to ask and answer questions they once could never dream of.”

In this image you can see the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It's actually a relatively small and quiet stellar nursery located just 390 light-years away, which allows for such a spectacularly detailed close-up image.  

In the region shown there are around 50 young stars all with a mass similar to or smaller than our Sun. Huge jets of molecular hydrogen dominate the image, which occur when a star bursts through its baby envelope of cosmic dust and gives a biiiig stretch shooting out jets in opposite directions into space.

“Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar lifecycle with new clarity. Our own Sun experienced a phase like this, long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another’s star’s story,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, who was JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore throughout the first year of operations.

From unprecedented views of the planets of the Solar System to JWST's first Deep Field, this has been an incredible first year of science with discoveries that may change what we think we know about the universe.  

“The breadth of science Webb is capable of exploring really becomes clear now, when we have a full year’s worth of data from targets across the sky,” said Eric Smith, JWST program scientist. “Webb’s first year of science has not only taught us new things about our universe, but it has revealed the capabilities of the telescope to be greater than our expectations, meaning future discoveries will be even more amazing.”

Congratulations to NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and everyone involved, we can’t wait to see what comes next!

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Dipping your toes in crystal clear blue waters might be a thing of the past, new research has revealed. By studying changes in surface ocean color, using satellites, for over 20 years, researchers have discovered that now 56 percent of our ocean is green, not blue. This represents a region that is greater than the total amount of land area on Earth. It is likely that human-induced climate change is to blame. 

The change observed in the color is particularly prevalent in the tropical oceans near the equator. This suggests that something has changed in the ecosystems below the waves since the color of the ocean is a reflection of the flora and fauna within the waters.

Even in lower latitudes, surface ocean ecosystems have become greener over the past 20 years. While the team cannot be 100 percent certain as to the cause of this green shift, they think human-induced changes to the climate are largely the force behind this.

“I’ve been running simulations that have been telling me for years that these changes in ocean color are going to happen,” said study co-author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the Center for Global Change Science, in a statement. “To actually see it happening for real is not surprising, but frightening. And these changes are consistent with man-induced changes to our climate.”

The researchers analyzed the color of the ocean using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite. The MODIS is capable of taking measurements in seven visible wavelengths, including two wavelengths associated with measuring chlorophyll.

Chlorophyll is the natural compound present in green plants and algae that gives them their green color, it is also present in photosynthesizing phytoplankton, a hugely important part of the ocean ecosystem, both in terms of the food web, but also carbon dioxide sequestration.

By tracking changes in the chlorophyll, the team can assess how the ocean’s color is changing over time. The researchers looked at both year-on-year changes and the bigger picture over a timeframe from 2002 to 2022. This helped to work out what was naturally occurring variation in the ocean color and what could be considered above the normal.

The results were then compared to two models created from previous work. Both models predicted changes in the ocean color, one without greenhouse gases present, and one with. The greenhouse gas model predicted that over a 20-year period over 50 percent of the world's oceans would change color, almost exactly in line with what the more recent study has discovered. 

“The color of the oceans has changed,” Dutkiewicz said. “And we can’t say how. But we can say that changes in color reflect changes in plankton communities that will impact everything that feeds on plankton. It will also change how much the ocean will take up carbon, because different types of plankton have different abilities to do that. So, we hope people take this seriously. It’s not only models that are predicting these changes will happen. We can now see it happening, and the ocean is changing.”

The study is published in Nature.

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Image Credit: NMGiovannucci via Wikimedia Commons, (CC BY-SA 4.0)

 

After seeing the sheer size of Niagara Falls, it is almost impossible to think that such a volume of water could ever stop, but it has – twice, in fact, and one of those was entirely down to humans. 

 

The first was a simple tale of unfortunate timing. On March 29, 1848, local people woke to find the enormous waterfall no longer had any water flowing over it. The river had entirely stopped, causing the entire area to dry out, creating an otherworldly sight. It happened because huge blocks of ice in Lake Erie suddenly got caught in strong winds that pushed them toward the source of the Niagara River. Somehow, the entire channel got blocked, creating a natural dam that prevented all water from passing through.

This blockage remained in place for around 30 hours before the winds shifted, releasing the ice as the weight of the water caused it to fail. 

 

The only other time that Niagara Falls has stopped, though, is a fascinating effort from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

 

Niagara Falls is made of three falls, the second largest of which is American Falls. It is easily spotted by the huge build-up of rock at the base of the falls, called a talus, that has slowly accumulated over the years due to rockslides. This became a concern for the US, as they worried that continued deposits of rock would shorten the water drop and perhaps stop the falls entirely.  

 

So, the US and Canada came to an agreement – they would stop the flow of water over American Falls for five months. During this time, they would study how the waterfall deposited rock, its geological composition, and whether they would need to intervene and remove some debris. 

 

The mission was a gargantuan effort. Over 1,200 trucks delivered around 28,000 tonnes of rock into the river upstream of American Falls over the course of three days in 1969. The water was diverted towards Horseshoe Falls and the water supply to American Falls dwindled to just a trickle, drying out the massive cliff of rocky debris.  

 

The dewatered falls from another angle. Image Credit: James St. John, photo by the New York Power Authority, via Flickr.com (CC BY 2.0)

 

The dry waterfall revealed millions of coins that had been thrown into the river over the years, causing a mad rush of residents and tourists. Two bodies were pulled out, which sounds macabre but was actually a surprisingly low amount for such a large river – particularly one infamous for suicides and daredevil stunts.

 

Probing into the rock, the engineers looked for fault lines and points of stress, trying to understand whether any more areas were ready to give way. They reinforced areas of weakness with bolts and drilled holes to allow water an alternative path, reducing points of overwhelming pressure. In doing so, the team could identify how likely it was that further rockfall would occur and over what timeframe.  

 

After the study period, the engineers decided against removing any rock – it would be a mammoth task and cost a huge amount of money which isn’t usually reserved for making waterfalls prettier. The dam was removed and water flowed across the falls once more, marking the last time it was dry. All that remains is a few images of the rocky falls, which look rather strange without thousands of gallons of water flowing over them.  

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Music lessons have a positive impact on brain health in older adults and can even lead to an increase in gray matter, according to a recent study. The findings spark hope for a new non-pharmaceutical intervention to help protect the brain from gradually declining over time.

Many of us are concerned about what will happen to our brains as we age. Even excluding serious conditions like dementia, some loss of cognitive functioning is almost inevitable. While some drug treatments are available, they’re not suitable for everyone, so there’s been a push toward other interventions that could also help stop brain aging in its tracks.

Previous studies have found that taking part in musical activities can be hugely beneficial for the wellbeing of older people, and recent research adds to this by demonstrating how music lessons can actually increase the volume of gray matter in the brain.

The team recruited 132 people aged between 62 and 78. All participants were retired, and none had ever taken music lessons for longer than a six-month period at any point in their lives.

“We wanted people whose brains did not yet show any traces of plasticity linked to musical learning. Indeed, even a brief learning experience in the course of one’s life can leave imprints on the brain, which would have biased our results,” explained first author Damien Marie in a statement.

To see whether there might be a difference between practical and theoretical music classes, the participants were split into two groups. One had piano lessons, while the other took part in what the authors called “musical culture” classes – these comprised musical analysis and appreciation, music theory, and elements of music history, but actually making music (e.g., through singing or clapping) was avoided. 

In both cases, the classes were for one hour per week. They were expected to practice or complete homework for 30 minutes per day, five days a week. The study lasted for one year, and the participants were also followed up six months later.

“After six months, we found common effects for both interventions,” said senior author Clara James. “Neuroimaging revealed an increase in grey matter in four brain regions involved in high-level cognitive functioning in all participants, including cerebellum areas involved in working memory. Their performance increased by 6 percent and this result was directly correlated to the plasticity of the cerebellum.”

The researchers clarified that it’s not possible to conclude that musical training was restoring areas of the brain where aging was already causing damage – rather, it looks like the training can help prevent aging in particular regions. 

There were some differences between the groups. For example, gray matter volume in the right primary auditory cortex – which is important in sound processing – did decline in the music theory group, whereas it remained stable in the piano group. Other factors, like the amount of time spent practicing, did have an impact on participants' results, so it may not be enough to just enroll yourself in a few lessons.

Overall, though, the results show that both playing and listening to music can be a fun and drug-free way of promoting better cognitive health in an aging population. The authors say they now want to test the intervention in those with more severe symptoms, a condition known as mild cognitive impairment, which in some is a precursor to serious diseases like dementia.

So, if you’ve been thinking of having music lessons, or just getting more serious about music appreciation, you may find the benefits are even greater than you bargained for.

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Following the trial by researchers in Israel, three adults and one child who could only sense brightness of light found that after gene therapy they were able to tell a red object apart from its darker background.

Achromatopsia is caused by defects in genes that control cone cells, our eyes' color-sensors. The approximately 1 in 30,000 people affected see all the vibrant colors of the world as blurry shades of gray.

A single gene mutation caused the congenital condition in the volunteers, and the researchers hoped that inserting functional copies of the gene into cone cells would allow them to see color.

They found treated 'achromats' can perceive red color, albeit in a very limited way, and differently than normally sighted controls.

"Treated patients with achromatopsia did not open their eyes after the surgery with a feeling of a miracle," neuroscientist Ayelet Mckyton from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her colleagues write in their published paper, suggesting the different shades of gray were not replaced by a range of rainbow colors.

"Nevertheless, color detection was evident in all patients' treated eyes."

A summary of the experimental procedure. (McKyton et al., Current Biology, 2023)

The researchers used a viral vector to transport a functional copy of the gene into the retina which houses cone cells, in one of each participant's eyes.

The volunteers' vision didn't change dramatically, but tests indicated they could all identify red stripes against dark backgrounds with their treated eye, where previously they saw no color at all.

"When the adult patients were asked to describe how they perceive the red stimulus in the treated eye (when presented in a way that allows them to detect it), they often admitted that they had no appropriate words to describe it," the researchers write.

"Encouraged to find the exact wording, they said it glows differently, shines, or appears on a different plane than the background."

The three types of cone cell in a typical human eye peaks in response to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The activity of the cones, individually and combined, provides our brain's visual system with the information it needs to create the rich rainbow of colors many of us take for granted.

A: Normalized absorption by rods and S, M, and L wavelength cones. B: Examples of objects that patients reported seeing differently following treatment.

(McKyton et al., Current Biology, 2023)

Because bright light stimulates their rod cells, which increase and decrease in response to light intensity and are typically most active at night, people with achromatopsia aren't able to discriminate wavelengths, or colors, leaving them with a monochrome view of the world.

It's possible that the active rod cells interfered with the treated cone cells' ability to produce a signal, preventing the trial participants from seeing in full color.

They may have been able to see red due to rod cells being particularly insensitive to red's longer wavelength. The rod cells could have remained inactive when exposed to red, meaning the cone cells' signals weren't disturbed.

Patients were all tested again a year after the treatment and the results were much the same. To those of us who experience the world in every visible wavelength of color, it may not seem like much, but it's an important step.

Red-green color blindness in adult squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) was treated with gene therapy in 2009, with similar benefits and drawbacks. After treatment, monkeys were able to see both red and green discs against a gray background, whereas before treatment, only the red disc was visible.

That the monkeys could detect both colors is not the same as proving that they could distinguish colors (like telling red from green), and this study doesn't show that either. Restoring wide-ranging color vision requires the ability to distinguish between wavelengths, according to McKyton and team.

"However, in contrast to the treated dichromatic animals, the ability to detect a wavelength cue out of gray level cues is a completely new skill for the complete colorblind patients," they write, "and therefore a necessary first step toward color vision."

The study has been published in Current Biology.

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The artificial sweetener aspartame is now considered “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” declared the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which evaluates substances’ risk of causing cancer, late on Thursday EDT. The agency specifically found that consumption of artificially sweetened beverages was associated with an increased risk of a type of liver cancer called hepatocellular carcinoma.

The ruling does not mean you need to stop consuming all aspartame-containing products, nor does it change the acceptable daily intake put forth by the World Health Organization (WHO). In a separate ruling released at the same time, the Joint Food and Agriculture Organization/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), which evaluates the levels of exposure to food additives that pose a risk, found there was no convincing evidence for harm with aspartame consumption below the current acceptable daily intake limit of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. That limit was established by JECFA in 1981. For a 70-kilogram (155-pound) person, it’s equivalent to about 14.5 cans of Diet Coke.

The rulings leave consumers with the confusing message that aspartame could possibly cause cancer but that consuming less than the currently recommended limit is probably not a big risk. Nevertheless, both groups called for more research to assess any potential harms of consuming the popular sweetener.

“The working group classified aspartame as possibly carcinogenic to humans—that is, group 2B—based on limited evidence for cancer in humans,” said Mary Schubauer-Berigan, acting head of the IARC Monographs program, in a press briefing on Wednesday. “The IARC classification reflects the strength of the scientific evidence as to whether an agent can cause cancer in humans, but it does not reflect the risk of developing cancer at a given exposure level.”

IARC is a WHO agency. Based on available data, the committee categorizes substances as group 1 (“carcinogenic to humans”), group 2A (“probably carcinogenic to humans”), group 2B (“possibly carcinogenic to humans”) or group 3 (“not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans”). IARC put aspartame in group 2B based on “limited” evidence that it causes cancer in humans. There was also limited evidence it causes cancer in laboratory animals and limited mechanistic evidence that it shows key characteristics of a human carcinogen.

The increased liver cancer risk finding was based on three studies of four large cohorts in the U.S. and in 10 European countries, according to Schubauer-Berigan.

IARC concluded the evidence of human carcinogenicity was “limited” because the agency was not able to rule out all other factors that could explain the results. It also could not rule out reverse correlation—that people who have other risk factors for cancer may be more likely to consume foods or drinks sweetened with aspartame. In addition, there aren’t many long-term data on aspartame consumption because it has only been incorporated into foods since the mid-1970s.

JECFA concluded that “there’s no convincing evidence from experimental or human data that aspartame has adverse effects after ingestion within the limits established by [the] previous committee, which is the acceptable daily intake of 40 [milligrams] per kilogram body weight,” said Francesco Branca, director of the department of nutrition and food safety at the WHO, in the news briefing. JECFA analyzed studies of cancer-causing genetic mutations in both living subjects and in lab-grown cells, but the investigations gave conflicting results and did not find evidence of such toxicity, he said. The committee also did not find evidence linking aspartame to other diseases risks, except for one paper that showed a risk of type 2 diabetes. The analyzed studies were not sufficient to justify changing the recommended daily limit, Branca said.

Should people who consume aspartame-containing foods or drinks change their behavior? That depends on why you are consuming nonsugar sweeteners. At the briefing, Branca noted that the WHO recently stated that long-term consumption of artificial sweeteners for weight loss is not effective. “If consumers are faced with the decision of whether to take cola with sweeteners or one with sugar, I think there should be a third option considered, which is to drink water instead and to continue to limit the consumption of sweetened products altogether,” he said. “This is particularly important for young children,” who are developing lifelong taste preferences.

IARC rulings are famously cautious—the agency has previously declared everything from aloe vera to pickles to cell phones to be possible carcinogens. Angelo Moretto, a professor at the department of cardiothoracic and cardiovascular sciences and public health at the University of Padua in Italy, and his colleagues wrote in the online publication the European Scientist that the IARC Monographs are like the supercomputer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: In that book, Deep Thought’s answer to the question of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” is “forty-two.” Yet no one seems to remember what the question itself was.

Like Deep Thought, “the ‘42’ answer that IARC has for everything is ‘carcinogenic’ because its pronouncements are limited to: carcinogenic, probably or possibly carcinogenic to humans, or ‘I don’t know,’” Moretto and his colleagues wrote. “But as another famous line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us, ‘Don’t Panic.’”

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