The preliminary data confirm the satellite observations: Last week was the hottest ever recorded on the planet, continuing the trend set the previous month. June 2023 was also the hottest June on record. Sea surface temperatures were the highest ever recorded, and Antarctic sea ice was at its lowest ever extent.

The incredible temperatures are showing just how much humans have impacted the climate. Japanese reanalysis data is yet to be confirmed, but it is consistent with the European Copernicus satellite data that people have been discussing over the last week. For this reason, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has shared the data.

“This is worrying news for the planet.”

Prof. Christopher Hewitt

 

It shows that the average global temperature on July 7, when the temperature peaked after many days of record-breaking temperatures, was 17.24 °C (63.03 °F). Before last week, the record for hottest temperatures was registered on August 16, 2016, at 16.94 °C (62.49 °F). 2016 was a strong El Niño year – but in 2023, El Niño is only just getting started. Which is troubling.

“The exceptional warmth in June and at the start of July occurred at the onset of the development of El Niño, which is expected to further fuel the heat both on land and in the oceans and lead to more extreme temperatures and marine heatwaves,” Professor Christopher Hewitt, WMO Director of Climate Services, said in a statement.

“We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Niño develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024,” Professor Hewitt continued. “This is worrying news for the planet.”

Comparison between the preliminary 2023 data and the 2016 data.

The reason why the data is considered preliminary is due to the fact that official values are compiled by combining multiple data sets, from land stations, ships, and satellites, as well as models that can fill in the gaps where measurements are not taken. Given the unprecedented nature of these measurements and how they all paint the same dramatic picture, the WMO has decided to share them as it produces the official values.

The unfolding climate crisis and the increase in global temperature average don’t mean that all places are much hotter all the time. The record-breaking June showed a much hotter Africa, Canada, and Europe, but unseasonably cooler temperatures in the United States, Western Australia, part of Brazil, and Russia. The ocean temperatures are also of great concern, as the North Atlantic experienced temperatures higher than what the models had predicted.

“The North Atlantic is one of the key drivers of extreme weather. With the warming of the Atlantic there is an increasing likelihood of more hurricanes and tropical cyclones. North Atlantic sea surface temperature is associated with heavy rain or drought in West Africa,” added Dr Omar Baddour, chief of climate monitoring at WMO.

The ice extent in Antarctica has also been dramatically lower than expectations, with 2.6 million square kilometers of loss compared to the long-term average and 1.2 million square kilometers (463,323 square miles) of loss compared to the previous record set in 2022. That’s about one-eighth of the area of the United States.

The WMO also highlights the dramatic hydrogeological changes, with many areas of the world experiencing unexpected droughts while others are facing torrential rains and floods. A meter of rain has fallen in Mumbai, India in just a fortnight.

The climate crisis will continue to change the planet, but bold action taken today will avoid the most catastrophic consequences for humanity and the other living creatures we share this world with.  

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At a rockshelter in Oregon, archaeologists have unearthed an animal tooth that's been dated to be over 18,000 years old. If their interpretation of the artifact and other relics at the site is on point, this could suggest the shallow cave is one of the oldest sites of human occupation in North America.

The Rimrock Draw Rockshelter, found just outside the small town of Riley, has been carefully dug up by archaeologists led by the University of Oregon since 2011. Over the years, stone tools and tooth fragments from extinct mammals from the Pleistocene era have been unearthed.

In 2012, the team identified camel teeth fragments under a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption of Mount St Helens that was dated over 15,000 years ago. They also found two finely crafted scrapers made from orange agate, one covered in preserved bison blood residue and another buried in volcanic ash.

Now, radiocarbon dating of the camel tooth enamel has revealed a more precise date: 18,250 years before present.

“The identification of 15,000-years-old volcanic ash was a shock, then [the] 18,000-years old dates on the enamel, with stone tools and flakes below, were even more startling,” Patrick O’Grady, an archaeologist from the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History Archaeological Field School, said in a statement. 

Part of the camel tooth recently dated to over 18,000 years old.

“This is a very exciting development for the archaeological community,” added Heather Ulrich from the Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington Archaeology.

The question is whether the animal tooth fragment from 18,000 years ago can categorically prove human occupation at the site. The presence of crafted stone tools suggests so, but the interpretation might not necessarily convince everyone.

The subject of humans’ first forays into North America is one of the most hotly debated subjects in archaeology. Until recently, the commonly held view was that the earliest inhabitants in the Americas were a single group known as the "Clovis culture" that settled in the continent around 15,000-13,000 years ago. 

That date has been continually pushed back by a number of archaeological finds in the past few decades, but a consensus is yet to be reached. In 2020, archaeologists carried out a dig at Chiquihuite Cave in central Mexico, which contains an array of some 2,000 stone tools, plant remains, and environmental DNA. Dating of the site suggests the cave was inhabited by humans seasonally 25,000-33,000 years ago, although other archaeologists argue there would “undoubtedly be challenges to this interpretation.” 

The researchers from the recent Rimrock Draw Rockshelter excavation hope to carry out further analysis of their finds to gain sturdier evidence. This will include further testing of other camel and bison teeth fragments, as well as studying plant remains found at the site of a fire. 

The team also made the point that passers-by and campers should keep their hands off any potential archaeological discoveries they stumble across as it might scupper their hard work. 

“These discoveries highlight the importance of good stewardship of our public lands. Damage, destruction, or removal at an archaeological site is a federal crime. Leave what you find and do not collect artifacts or otherwise harm archaeological sites on public lands,” the Bureau of Land Management Oregon said in the announcement.

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In recent years a growing movement has arisen to argue that humans have changed the Earth so much we should consider ourselves in a geological timescale known as the Anthropocene. Geologists use markers in rocks at specific sites to define when these epochs begin, so if the Anthropocene is to get general recognition it needs one too. Now a committee established to recommend one has released its report of where and when it began but it’s already proving controversial.

If humans were to go extinct aliens visiting in the future would have little trouble detecting our presence in the geologic record. Whether it be a layer of plastic, radioactivity from nuclear tests, some astonishingly sudden extinctions, or even the surge of chicken bones, the Anthropocene would not be hard to find.

Defining it is a different matter. Some see its beginnings in the 20th century with the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb or the invention of plastics, while others date it much earlier, for example, the mass transportation of species between Eurasia and the Americas. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was created to offer a solution, and they have chosen the presence of plutonium from nuclear tests found in Lake Crawford, Canada.

The AGW is recommending the lake to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) because its sediments provide a particularly clear record of recent environmental events. The layers of its deep waters do not mix (officially termed meromictic) allowing sediment cores to reconstruct centuries of pollution and ecological change. It’s close enough to Toronto for easy study, but its location in a conservation area reduces local effects and has been suggested as the place to define the Anthropocene for a while. 

“Seasonal changes in water chemistry and ecology have created annual layers that can be sampled for multiple markers of historical human activity. It is this ability to precisely record and store this information as a geological archive that can be matched to historical global environmental changes which make sites such as Crawford Lake so important,” said AWG Secretary Dr Simon Turner of University College London in a statement.

Chemical digestion of Crawford Lake samples to extract plutonium.

The key marker the AWG chose to look for was plutonium, spread around the world by nuclear bombs prior to the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.  “The presence of plutonium gives us a stark indicator of when humanity became such a dominant force that it could leave a unique global ‘fingerprint’ on our planet,” said Professor Andrew Curry. Twelve secondary locations have been chosen that show the same boundary, albeit a little less clearly than Lake Crawford.

Technically what AWG is recommending is known as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), often referred to as a “golden spike”. These are usually established at locations where a sudden shift in rock types marks the passage from one era or epoch to another. Some are simple to identify, such as the layer of metal-enriched material that divides the Cretaceous from the Paleogene.

Not all geologic divisions are so clear, since change usually comes much more gradually, and choosing the best GSSP (and name) can become quite contentious. Such battles, however, usually only involve a small subsection of geologists. This one could become a much wider topic of debate because it raises so many questions with wider implications. This was recognized by including social scientists along with the more usual geologists and stratigraphers on the AWG.

By setting the marker in the 1950s, the GSSP, if accepted, will treat everything that came before as part of the Holocene, including events such as the industrial revolution and the near extinction of the North American bison.

Even establishing the AWG met with opposition, although in the end it was passed overwhelmingly, as some geologists rejected even the idea of the Anthropocene.

The AWG’s Jan Zalasiewicz told AFP differences in definition are one of the reasons the GSSP needs to be agreed upon. "I am concerned that if the word 'Anthropocene' continues to mean different things to different people, then it will lose its significance and simply fade away,” he said. Yet those differences may make it hard to win votes for Lake Crawford, or any site chosen in its place.

There’s plenty of opportunity for this debate to play out. The proposal must first go to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy which founded the AWG, and if it survives that to the full International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). Then finally it will go to the International Union of Geological Sciences for official ratification.

In the time the AWG has been operating the two most prominent advocates for recognizing the Anthropocene, Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen and Professor Will Steffen have died, Steffen just months ago.

The Anthropocene has been designated an epoch, although it will be a long time before anyone knows if this is the right decision. The longest geological categories are Eras, which are broken down into periods that in turn consist of epochs and ages. One might question whether humanity will be around long enough for our dominance to deserve to be considered an epoch not an age, but if we aren’t there probably won’t be anyone around to quibble.

Whether it is a geological category matters less, however, than the psychological change its advocates hope will come from the Anthropocene’s recognition. Civilization’s astonishing success was a product of the mostly mild conditions provided by the Holocene. Acknowledging those have gone may be the only way to get them back.

"Science is basically trying to establish what's real as opposed to what's not," Zalasiewicz said. "And the Anthropocene is real."

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Six people died and three others were missing after the “heaviest rain ever” triggered floods and landslides in south-west Japan.

The Japan meteorological agency warned residents in Kyushu – one of the country’s four main islands – to stay alert for more landslides, a common hazard in mountainous areas after heavy rainfall.

However, the agency on Tuesday downgraded an earlier special warning for heavy rain covering more than 1.7 million people in northern parts of the island.

Japan has been hit by unusually heavy rain and powerful typhoons in recent years, raising fears about its vulnerability to the climate crisis.

“This is the heaviest rain ever experienced” in the region, said Satoshi Sugimoto, a meteorological agency official. “The situation is such that lives are in danger and their safety must be secured.”

The chief cabinet secretary, Hirokazu Matsuno, said up to six people were thought to have died as a result of heavy rain that caused rivers to burst their banks and disrupted to bullet train services, as well as cutting off roads and water supplies.

Flood debris in Kurume, Fukuoka prefecture, Kyushu island. Photograph: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images

The prime minister’s office said a taskforce had been set up to coordinate a response.

“We have received reports that several rivers have flooded … and that landslides have occurred in various parts of the country,” Matsuno told reporters.

“The government is doing its best to get a complete picture of the damage and taking measures while putting people’s lives first.”

A 77-year-old woman was confirmed dead after she and her husband were found trapped inside their house, which had been engulfed in mud, in Fukuoka prefecture, local authorities said, adding that the husband had survived.

Three other Fukuoka residents died, including one whose car had been washed away by a flooded river.

The city of Kurume saw precipitation of 402.5mm in the 24 hours to 4pm on Monday – the highest ever recorded there – the meteorological agency said.

A mudslide in the city hit seven houses, burying 21 people. Six were able to escape, while workers extracted nine alive and were working to remove five others. A man in his 70s was later confirmed dead.

The body of another man was found next to rice fields near a flooded river, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and public broadcaster NHK.

“The rain and gusts of wind were very, very strong, and there was lightning,” said Takashi Onizuka, a 62-year-old resident of a town near Kurume. “It was so horrible.”

While Tokyo experienced blistering heat on Tuesday, other parts of the country bore the brunt of the annual rainy season.

Scientists say global heating is increasing the risk of heavy rain in Japan. The weather agency said it had already been raining for more than a week in parts of northern Kyushu.

Officials in the city of Asakura said they believed the rain had peaked, but warned there was still a risk of flooding.

“Water levels in rivers are rising so we are staying vigilant against the possibility of overflowing,” said Takaaki Harano, a local official.

Landslides represent a serious risk in Japan, where many homes are built on flat land at the foot of hills and mountains.

In 2021, a landslide in the hot spring resort of Atami killed 27 people; and in 2018, floods and landslides killed more than 200 people in western Japan during the rainy season.

With Agence France-Presse

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A storm that left up to two months’ worth of rain in Vermont has cut off the capital of Montpelier from the rest of the state while the deadly deluge that has saturated parts of New England and New York continues to spark flash flood warnings.

Amid fears of dams failing if water wasn’t released – exacerbating the dangerous flooding – and the further collapse of roadways, many roads on Tuesday remained closed in Vermont including several along the spine of the Green Mountains, and in upstate New York.

The National Weather Service has issued flash flood warnings and advisories across Vermont from the Massachusetts line north to the Canadian border. In the south and west, states were blistering under a worsening heatwave, as the US embarked on another week of extreme weather and experts warned that the human-caused climate crisis is driving the record-breaking conditions.

More than 13 million Americans were under flood watches and warnings from eastern New York state to Boston and western Maine to the north-east, the National Weather Service said in its forecast on Monday, and there have been more than 50 rescues by boat.

The slow-moving north-eastern storm, dumping extreme amounts of water as it lingered over communities on Sunday and Monday, reached New England after hitting parts of New York, where one person died as she tried to leave her home during a flash flood and was swept away by storm waters in front of her fiance, officials said

Joe Biden, who is in Vilnius, Lithuania, attending the annual Nato summit, declared that a state of emergency was confirmed in Vermont and authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to help coordinate disaster relief efforts and provide assistance.

Montpelier, Vermont, on 10 July 2023. Photograph: Maggie Lenz/Reuters

The White House will continue to monitor the effects of the flooding, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing on Tuesday, urging people in affected areas “to please, please be safe, and follow safety protocols”.

Some communities received 7-9in (17.78-22.86cm) of rain in less than 24 hours.

Flooding affected Montpelier, the Vermont state capital, where Interstate 89, a major highway, was closed in both directions between Montpelier, Middlesex and north of Montpelier.

Montpelier, VT is cut off from the rest of the state.

WeatherNation Field Correspondent @jpetramala reports from the historic flooding in the state capital. #VTwx #flood pic.twitter.com/WbqOjCip1C

— WeatherNation (@WeatherNation) July 11, 2023

Montpelier town manager Bill Fraser warned that the Wrightsville dam several miles to the north on the north branch of the Winooski River could exceed capacity, something that’s never happened before.

“There would be a large amount of water coming into Montpelier which would drastically add to the existing flood damage,” he said, adding that there are very few evacuation options remaining.

“People in at-risk areas may wish to go to upper floors in their houses.”

Vermont’s governor, Phil Scott, said the state had not seen rainfall like this since Tropical Storm Irene hit the region in August 2011, which killed six in the state, washed homes off their foundations, and damaged or destroyed more than 200 bridges and 500 miles (805km) of highway. What’s different is that Irene lasted just about 24 hours, Scott said.

A car slowly navigates over a washed-out road in Winchester, New Hampshire on 10 July 2023. Photograph: Cj Gunther/EPA

“This is going on. We’re getting just as much rain, if not more. It’s going on for days. That’s my concern. It’s not just the initial damage. It’s the wave, the second wave, and the third wave,” he said.

Shelters were set up at churches and town halls. Some people canoed to the Cavendish Baptist church in Vermont, which had turned into a shelter while volunteers made cookies for firefighters working on rescues.

“People are doing OK. It’s just stressful,” shelter volunteer Amanda Gross said.

Vermont state representative Kelly Pajala said she and about a half dozen others evacuated early on Monday from a four-unit apartment building on the West River in Londonderry.

“The river was at our doorstep,” said Pajala. “We threw some dry clothes and our cats into the car and drove to higher ground.”

People in New York and Connecticut were cleaning up from earlier rain. The National Weather Service in Burlington said rain in the northern part of Vermont was expected to lessen on Tuesday, but more rain was forecast for Thursday.

One of the worst-hit places was New York’s Hudson Valley, where a woman identified by police as Pamela Nugent, 43, died as she tried to escape her flooded home with her dog in the hamlet of Fort Montgomery.

Officials say the storm has already caused tens of millions of dollars in damage.

Atmospheric scientists say destructive flooding events are spurred by storms forming in a warmer atmosphere, making extreme rainfall a reality.

The additional warming that scientists predict is coming will only make it worse.

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Also -- must read -- Northeast storms dump over 2 months’ worth of rain on Vermont: Live weather updates.  View the video of the devastation.

Latest -- must read -- Vermont capital Montpelier prepares for worst as major dam is just ONE FOOT from bursting: Two months of rain falls in two days as homes flood and owners are told it's TOO LATE to evacuate

Over 9 million people are under flood alerts across the Northeast on Monday, including parts of New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine – as well as across the country in Washington and Alaska. Flash flood emergencies and landslides are expected, with heavy rainfall expected throughout the day.

The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency warning for central Vermont on Monday, where 19 people have been rescued by boat and 25 others have been evacuated, Vermont’s Urban Search and Rescue team coordinator Mike Cannon told reporters.

Two areas in the state, Weston and South Londonderry, are currently inaccessible due to flooding, and search and rescue teams are working to regain access and perform welfare checks, Cannon said.

Gov. Phil Scott declared a state of emergency Sunday as the weather service warned flash flooding could become “extremely dangerous.”

 “My friends, this is the new normal,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said, addressing the havoc that the storm is wreaking in the state, where more than 8 inches of rain fell within a 24 hour period in some locations in the state.

A 35-year-old woman died Sunday, swept away by floodwater as she tried to evacuate her Orange County home. The flooding has caused “easily tens of millions of dollars in damage,” county Executive Steve Neuhaus said Monday.

Many residents who tried to drive out of the area, which includes the US Military Academy at West Point, were trapped Sunday, Neuhaus said. “We saw many cars that tried to go for it through the water, didn’t make it, and got stuck,” he said, adding that he saw “active duty Army soldiers up to their bellies … we were walking to cars to make sure people got out.”

In western New York’s Ontario County, door-to-door checks were conducted at about 120 homes, which prompted the voluntary evacuation of more than a dozen individuals and five pets, according to Hochul. Officials in the area have set up a temporary shelter.

Hochul said FEMA and White House officials have offered to assist with the response.

“While the storm has already passed through the southern part of New York, conditions remain dangerous in further north where there are ongoing extreme weather conditions. I urge all New Yorkers to remain vigilant, monitor local forecasts and have an evacuation plan ready if you’re in a danger zone,” Hochul said.

The Red Cross has opened three shelters for people displaced by the flooding: one in Highland Falls, New York; one in Reading, Pennsylvania; and one in Barre, Vermont. On Sunday night, around 25 residents in Pennsylvania and 11 in New York were seeking refuge at the shelters, the Red Cross told CNN.

Once-in-a-millennium rainfall

Rainfall in West Point, New York, totaled more than 7.5 inches in six hours Sunday afternoon, according to preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s a 1-in-1,000 year rainfall event for the area, according to a CNN analysis of NOAA’s historical rainfall frequency data.

A once-in-a-millennium rainfall event is one that is so intense, the chances of it happening in any given year is just 0.1%.

Reading, Pennsylvania, received 5.35 inches of rain Sunday, shattering its old daily rainfall record of 3.47 inches, set in 1952.

Areas across New England could see 3 to 5 inches of rain Monday, which could bring rainfall totals for this storm up to 12 inches.

A moderate risk, Level 3 of 4, of excessive rainfall is in place in New England through early Tuesday. Rainfall totals across the area are expected to range from 3 to 5 inches.

New York could see 1 to 2 inches of rain per hour on Monday, the NWS warned.

In Vermont, the heavy rain has left at least seven people trapped in their homes as of Monday evening, Emergency Management Director for Londonderry Richard Phelan told CNN.

Rescuers cannot reach them due to several road closures, Phelan said, and officials are advising those residents over the phone to get to the highest ground they can in their homes.

Most of the town’s roads are impassable and Londonderry is cut off from the rest of the state, according to Phelan. “It’s the worst we’ve seen in many, many years,” Phelan said.

Numerous rivers across Vermont have been rising as a result of the heavy rainfall, with some rising more than they have since Hurricane Irene in 2011. The rainfall could push isolated storm totals towards 12 inches when combined with rainfall from the weekend, according to the weather service.

The Winooski River at Montpelier swelled above major flood stage Monday and continues to rise quickly. The river has risen nearly 14 feet since early Monday morning and is now expected to crest overnight at 22.7 feet.

“Downtown Montpelier will be inundated, and local roads will be covered by water. Route 2 and railroad tracks along the river will be covered with water,” the National Weather Service said, noting this flood stage would be equivalent to a “1 percent annual chance flood,” or 100-year flood.

The White River in West Hartford has similarly risen 10 feet in 10 hours since Monday morning and is expected to crest above 20 feet for the first time since Irene in 2011.

Nearly a dozen different locations across Vermont from the Connecticut River in the south to the Missisquoi River in the north will experience moderate or major flooding before river levels begin dropping Tuesday.

Emergency personnel tend to a resident in Stony Point, New York, after rescuing the man from his flooded home Sunday.

Seth Harrison/The Journal News/USA Today Network

 Officials have made 50 rescues across the state, including using boats to help people trapped in their homes or in cars that were swept away in fast-moving waters.

Windham and Windsor County have been the worst hit by the flooding, according to Cannon, from the state’s Urban Search and Rescue Program.

In a Monday Facebook post, Scott said the state was enacting an “all-hands-on-deck” response to the extreme flooding. “We have not seen rainfall like this since Irene, and in some places, it will surpass even that,” the governor said.

In New York, six counties are under a state of emergency and state officials are scrutinizing roads and bridges to ensure they’re not “structurally compromised,” Gov. Hochul said at a Monday news conference.

New York City’s Emergency Management Department cautioned residents living in basement apartments “to be prepared to move to higher ground.” Heavy rains continuing through Monday morning “may cause rapid flooding to basements with little to no notice and can be life threatening,” an alert from the agency sent Sunday afternoon reads.

When torrential rain from Hurricane Ida caused flooding in New York City in 2021, most of the homes where residents were found dead were illegally converted basement or cellar apartments, city officials said.

“Do not underestimate the power of fast-moving water,” Hochul said. “Two feet of fast-moving flood water will float your car, and water moving at two miles per hour can sweep cars off a road or bridge.”

And in Massachusetts, the towns of Williamsburg, Clarksburg, Deerfield and Becket, as well as the city of North Adams, have all declared emergencies, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency told CNN. Residents should expect rivers, creeks and streams to rise gradually through Tuesday.

Trapped drivers had to swim out of their cars

Two dozen residents were evacuated and two town employees were rescued from flooding Monday in Ludlow, Vermont, where routes in and out of the city were blocked, Ludlow Emergency Management Director Angela Kissell told CNN. “There’s currently debris and water blocking the main roads. We’re an island right now,” Kissell said.

Ten people were rescued from a campground in Andover, Vermont when a bridge at Horseshoe Acres Campground was washed out, leaving campers trapped, said Jeannette Haight, the town clerk and treasurer.

Girl Scouts Heart of the Hudson canceled camp on Monday due to the heavy flooding in Rockland and Orange counties on Sunday.

Girl Scouts Heart of the Hudson

n the same county, the town of Cornwall issued a “No travel Advisory” Sunday after storms flooded multiple roads, triggered mudslides and forced rescues from stranded cars. In nearby Rockland County, state police also reported “numerous motorists stranded” due to flooding in the area.

Over 150 water related call including dozens of water rescues. Currently state fire, Monroe county water rescue, Ontario county water rescue and several other agencies are assisting. pic.twitter.com/bvNMKjPkKd

— Canandaigua Fire (@IAFF2098) July 10, 2023

 Firefighters in Canandaigua in Ontario County, New York, received over 150 water related calls and performed dozens of rescues, Canandaigua Fire officials tweeted Sunday, sharing a photo of people kayaking through deluged streets.

Eastern Pennsylvania also saw “significant” flash flooding Sunday afternoon, according to the weather service. The Fleetwood Police Department shared images of deluged roadways in Berks County and urged residents to avoid all travel, adding that crews were out responding to rescues and flooded basements Sunday.

CNN Meteorologist Brandon Miller and CNN’s Kristina Sgueglia, Polo Sandoval, Michelle Watson, Christina Maxouris, Joe Sutton, Sara Smart, and Zoe Sottile contributed to this report.

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Much of Florida is seeing its warmest year on record, with temperatures running 3 to 5 degrees above normal. While some locations have been setting records since the beginning of the year, the hottest weather has come with an intense heat dome cooking the Sunshine State in recent weeks. That heat dome has made coastal waters extremely warm, including “downright shocking” temperatures of 92 to 96 degrees in the Florida Keys, meteorologist and journalist Bob Henson said Sunday in a tweet.

“That’s boiling for them! More typically it would be in the upper 80s,” tweeted Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV in Tampa.

The temperatures are so high that they are off the scale of the color contours on some weather maps.

The warmth registers as a Category 3 out of 5 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine heat wave scale. NOAA defines a marine heat wave as a period with persistent and unusually warm ocean temperatures, “which can have significant impacts on marine life as well as coastal communities and economies.” The agency describes Category 3 as “severe.”

Such warm water temperatures “would be impressive any time of year, but they’re occurring when the water would already be rather warm, bringing it up to bona fide bathtub conditions that we rarely see,” Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami and hurricane expert for Capital Weather Gang, said in an email.

The toasty waters are influencing temperatures on land by raising the humidity, which makes it harder for temperatures to cool off at night. Numerous records for temperatures and heat indexes have been broken since mid-June, and the heat wave is expected to continue for at least a week. According to McNoldy, Miami’s heat index soared to 110 degrees on Monday and has reached at least 100 on 30 straight days.

Miami, Tampa and Fort Myers are expected to hit a heat index of 105 or higher on each of the next seven days, according to the The Washington Post’s heat tracker.

“It’s an astounding, prolonged heat wave even for a place that’s no stranger to sultry weather,” said McNoldy, who also cautioned that the warm waters could make tropical storms or hurricanes stronger. “It’s not something we like to see near land simply because it would allow a storm to maintain a high intensity right up to landfall or rapidly intensify as it approaches landfall.”

Hurricane forecasters have recently upped their predictions for the season in response to the rising ocean temperatures.

The marine heat wave is also causing coral bleaching, which can leave corals vulnerable to deadly diseases. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch has recorded an “Alert Level 1” off the coast of South Florida. That is the second-highest level, described by NOAA as “significant bleaching likely.”

Berardelli credited unusually light winds since late May, in addition to the heat dome, as contributing to the warming sea surface: “Typically Florida sees a nice breeze from the [southeast] but this summer pattern has been resilient,” he tweeted. “The water is warming under this stagnation!” Light winds can lead to stagnant waters, which prevent deeper, colder water from churning to the top, allowing the ocean surface to heat more quickly.

Sea surface temperature differences from normal in the Gulf of Mexico. (Ian Livingston)

 The hot waters around Florida are connected to record-breaking ocean heat worldwide. About 40 percent of the world’s oceans are facing a marine heat wave, NOAA reported. That is the highest percentage on record, and it could reach 50 percent by September.

Scientists also attribute the widespread heat of the global ocean waters to human-caused climate change, which has helped boost the oceans to record-warm levels.

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 More than 50 million Americans in the southwestern United States are under heat advisories or excessive heat warnings as a blistering heat dome maintains its grip on the region. The heat will place additional stress on the energy grid, elevate the threat of wildfires and increase the risk of heat-related illnesses.

Temperatures will climb to levels unusual even for the notoriously hot region of the U.S., putting long-standing records in jeopardy. A sprawling area of high pressure that is positioned over the Southwest, known as a heat dome to meteorologists, is the culprit behind the extreme temperatures.

“This [pattern] will help to keep most showers or storms at bay and allow for sunny skies that will help boost temperatures,” explained AccuWeather Meteorologist Andrew Johnson-Levine.

AccuWeather meteorologists say that the scorching conditions can intensify heading into the weekend and even expand into parts of the Central states and Southeast by next week.

 Numerous records will be challenged

Several records will likely be challenged throughout mid-July across this corner of the country, including metro areas like Phoenix. Daily highs can be at risk throughout the upcoming week in Arizona's Valley of the Sun, with the peak of the heat this week likely to occur by Thursday. In addition to daily high-temperature records being at risk, a separate, long-standing record also stands a chance of being broken.

Observations show that Phoenix has reached the 110-degree mark or higher each day since June 30. AccuWeather forecasters say the area can challenge the existing 18-day record for that temperature mark as July trudges on. The previous record was set almost 50 years ago, in 1974.

In addition to setting records, there remains an outside chance that parts of the Phoenix area can reach 120 degrees.

"While the 120-degree mark is not a certainty for Phoenix, it is possible late this week and this upcoming weekend as a high-pressure area and northward bulge of the jet stream simultaneously strengthen and force the core of the hottest air westward for a time," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said.

 "Phoenix has only reached the 120-degree Fahrenheit mark three times since records have been kept dating back to 1929. The last time temperatures topped that mark was on July 28, 1995, when a high of 121 was recorded. The all-time record high of 122 was set on June 26, 1990," Sosnowski added.

As long as the dome of high pressure across the Four Corners keeps thunderstorms at bay this week, locations including Phoenix may stand a chance of climbing near or to the 120-degree mark by late week. Currently, the city is forecast to meet or exceed the existing daily max temperature record on more than one occasion later this week, and experts warn that residents are unlikely to get relief from the heat once the sun goes down.

The record for most consecutive days above 100 degrees for El Paso, Texas, was broken Sunday when the mercury topped 100 F for the 24th consecutive day. The previous record of 23 consecutive days was set back in 1994. High temperatures are forecast to remain above 100 in El Paso through at least this coming weekend.

Residents face risk of heat-related illnesses

"Aside from daytime temperatures, heat may stick around at night. Summertime temperatures in the desert usually plunge into the 70s or 80s. Later this week, some spots, including Phoenix, may be stuck near 90 overnight," said Johnson-Levine.

Elevated overnight temperatures can pose hidden health dangers, particularly to those in highly urbanized areas that face the urban heat island effect. Metropolitan areas constructed of a high density of buildings and roadways are often made up of materials that can absorb the daytime heat more easily than rural or vegetative landscapes, allowing surfaces such as concrete or asphalt to continue to release heat after the sun goes down.

During a heat wave, residents can still face elevated temperatures during the overnight hours compared to what is typically observed, which can place additional strain on the heart as the body tries to regulate the internal temperature. With overnight low temperatures this week expected to linger in the upper 80s to mid-90s F, residents are urged to take steps to stay cool at night.

Very high cooling demands are expected to persist in the Southwest this week and even into next week as fans and air conditioners are cranked into high gear.

"While the Desert Southwest cities are usually quite hot in July, this week will bring heat that is highly anomalous. In Las Vegas, daytime highs usually hover around 105 degrees in July, with Phoenix a few degrees warmer. As temperatures may surge into the 120s, this will not be typical heat for the region," said Johnson-Levine.

This week, Albuquerque, New Mexico, is forecast to climb to 100 on multiple days. After coming close to the century mark on multiple days, the city finally had its first 100-degree high of the year Sunday. Last year, the city reached the 100-degree mark roughly a month earlier, on June 10.

Meanwhile, America's hottest location will reach levels of heat that are noteworthy over the next week. In Death Valley, California, high temperatures are set to reach the 120s beginning Wednesday and may even climb close to 130 degrees over the weekend. Even overnight, the temperature may only fall into the middle or upper 90s.

When will moisture return to the Southwest?

As the heat dome lingers in place across parts of the West this week, chances for any substantial moisture across the Four Corners region will be limited. Afternoon thunderstorms will be possible at times this week, but coverage will be rather spotty across Arizona and New Mexico.

Experts warn that although the storms may be widely separated across the region, they can be mainly dry and still contain lightning. Given the dry conditions and baking heat, lightning strikes could ignite wildfires.

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Mexico ranks No. 1 as the top destination for expats, with 90% of people saying they’re happy with their lives abroad in the country, compared to 72% globally.

The “Expat Insider” report ranks 53 destinations based on five indices: quality of life, ease of settling in, working abroad, personal finance and an “expat essentials” index, which covers housing, administration, language and digital life.

Expats living in Mexico rate it highly for how easy it is to settle in there, as well as the friendliness of locals and ease of building your own community.

International workers in Mexico say it’s easy to adjust to the country’s culture, and its affordable living makes it easy to find housing. While it scores lower on political stability, expats say they enjoy their leisure options throughout the country.

Spain comes in as the No. 2 best destination for expats, where 87% are happy with their lives abroad, thanks to its robust leisure scene (like access to recreational sports and a temperate climate). Newcomers enjoy good work-life balance, though roughly 1 in 3 is unhappy with the local job market.

Rounding out the top 3 is Panama, where people say it’s easy to make friends, they feel secure in their personal finances, and 81% are happy overall.

Here are the top 10 destinations for expats to live and work abroad:

•     Mexico

•     Spain

•     Panama

•     Malaysia

•     Taiwan

•     Thailand

•     Costa Rica

•     Philippines

•     Bahrain

•     Portugal

Many of the top 10 destinations perform highly in areas around friendliness, ease of settling in, fun and work-life balance, but are more moderate in terms of their career opportunities they offer.

For career-oriented expats, workers in Taiwan are the most satisfied with their jobs compared with counterparts around the world. International workers in Taiwan say they enjoy job security, a strong local economy and fair pay at work.

Several top-rated destinations also have their own digital nomad visas — including Mexico, Spain, Panama and Portugal — further incentivizing global remote workers to start a new life in a different country.

Meanwhile, the bottom-ranked destinations for expats includes Kuwait, Norway, Turkey, South Korea and Germany. Expats living in Kuwait, Norway and South Korea say it’s difficult to get settled in and find new friends, while those in Turkey and South Korea say they’re dissatisfied with the demanding work culture there.

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Just ask any passenger sweltering on the London Underground or New York City subway, and they'll perspire telling you about how underground transport systems are spewing heat.

As that heat diffuses into the ground, it's raising ground temperatures, which new research shows has shifted soils underneath one US city ever so slightly – but more than most buildings are built to withstand.

Using the Chicago Loop district as a case study, and three years of data from a network of wireless temperature sensors, civil engineer Alessandro Rotta Loria of Northwestern University in Illinois built a 3D computer model to simulate how rising temperatures have impacted the subsurface environment.

His simulations span a century, from 1951 (the year Chicago completed its subway tunnels) to 2051, and reveal "a silent yet potentially problematic impact of subsurface urban heat islands on the performance of civil structures and infrastructures," Rotta Loria writes in his peer-reviewed paper.

Ground temperatures (a) at three depths beneath Chicago's Loop district. Darker colors represent higher temperatures. Average temperature trends (b) for different soil types. (Rotta Loria, Communications Engineering, 2023)

Only recently we learned how New York City could be sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers. Add heat to the mix, and the ground beneath cities can slowly shift, settle, and subside as soils dry out and compact.

Aside from bustling subway tunnels, that heat comes from underground pipelines and electrical cables which crisscross our cities; the ground is studded with the footings of buildings and parking garages that also leak heat.

While all built environments absorb heat from the Sun, fine-grained clay sediments like those below Chicago are particularly prone to shrinking or swelling with heat and water.

Buildings are unlikely to collapse because of slow-moving, heat-related deformations, Rotta Loria says. But subtle subsurface changes of only a few millimeters can strain or mobilize foundations and affect the durability or performance of construction materials over time.

"The ground [in Chicago] is deforming as a result of temperature variations, and no existing civil structure or infrastructure is designed to withstand these variations," explains Rotta Loria who found Chicago's ground temperatures are currently warming at around 0.14 °C per year.

"Although this phenomenon is not dangerous for people's safety necessarily, it will affect the normal day-to-day operations of foundation systems and civil infrastructure at large."

Vertical strain variations on the ground beneath Chicago, at varying depths (a) and times (b). (Rotta Loria, Communications Engineering, 2023)

Scientists have known about underground climate change (or subsurface heat islands) for a few decades, recording hotspots in soils and groundwater beneath cities such as Amsterdam, Istanbul, Nanjing, and Berlin.

In Rotta Loria's study, he found larger ground temperature variations in the northern, more densely built part of Chicago's Loop district compared to its sparser, southern end.

Averaged across the whole district, temperatures within distinct soil layers varied by about 1-5 °C (1.8-9 °F). Depending on the soil type, warmer temperatures caused displacements of 8-12 millimeters under various buildings, the modeling found.

While a few millimeters might sound small, and buildings are designed to tolerate some flex, older buildings and other infrastructure were not built to withstand temperature variations seen today, Rotta Loria says.

"It's very likely that underground climate change has already caused cracks and excessive foundation settlements that we didn't associate with this phenomenon because we weren't aware of it," he says.

While cutting emissions to reduce global temperatures would surely ease the strain, some cities are experimenting with using waste heat from transport systems like the Paris Metro to heat apartment blocks and hot water systems.

Called heat recycling, scientists say it's a feasible idea that might become increasingly necessary as the world warms and our cities expand.

"Ongoing underground climate change should be mitigated to avoid unwanted impacts on civil structures and infrastructures in the future," Rotta Loria concludes in the paper.

The study has been published in Communications Engineering.

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The temperatures over the weekend in the Northwest Territories exceeded previous records, weather experts say.

The latest extreme weather comes as Canada battles the worst wildfire season it has ever seen. Millions have been impacted by the harmful smoke.

Unofficial records show Earth saw its highest ever temperatures on Thursday.

The global average of 17.32C (63.17F) for the planet came after the single-day record was surpassed twice earlier that same week.

With a Saturday temperature of 37.4C, Fort Good Hope in the Northwest Territories (NWT) saw "the hottest temperature recorded that far north in Canada," says Environment Canada meteorologist Jesse Wagar.

"Each summer is just getting hotter and hotter," says Ms Wagar.

Of the top five temperatures ever recorded in the NWT, four occurred in the past eight years, she says. Three of those were in the last three summers.

With a temperature of 37.9C (100.2F), the mercury in the community of Norman Wells just south of Fort Good Hope was just 0.1C lower than the hottest temperature recorded for the near-Arctic region, extreme-weather historian Christopher Burt told BBC News.

The reading there was just shy of the record set at a similar latitude in Verkhoyansk, Russia, in June 2020 of 38C.

According to Ontario-based Weather Network, Ottawa's all-time high temperature is 37.8C - meaning that the temperature in Norman Wells was higher than the highest record seen in a city with a latitude 1,400 miles (2,250) to its south.

"These temperature records aren't just sneaking by," says Ms Wagar, adding that they have smashed the previous records "often by several degrees".

This latest heat wave has attracted a lot of attention, but "May, June and July have all seen pretty incredible temperature records and temperature records are falling at a pretty significant rate", she says.

In the first nine days of July the NWT has already seen 17 temperature records surpassed. In July of last year, 18 records were surpassed. In June 2023, 24 records were surpassed, compared with four in June 2022.

The heat wave affecting Canada's north is expected to begin to cool on Wednesday, according to Environment Canada. But temperatures are still forecast to remain dangerously high.

Some experts say climate change is causing the Arctic to warm two-to-four times faster than the rest of the planet.

Meanwhile, Canada's unprecedented wildfire season continues to worsen.

In a briefing last week, officials said that 639 active fires are burning across Canada, with 351 burning out of control.

An unprecedented number of residents have been forced to flee, said the Canadian Forest Service.

South of the NWT, hundreds of lightning strikes over the weekend tripled the number of fires burning in British Columbia.

On Monday the province announced that it was banning all campfires in an effort to prevent human-caused blazes.

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It's a question that people have pondered and attempted to explain for centuries, going as far back as the Hebrew Bible's Book of Job. Theodicy is this attempt to understand and justify the contrary co-existence of evil, the love of God, and affirmation of God's power.

Although theodicy has been identified as a theological and philosophical concern, little empirical research has been conducted about how it affects individuals psychologically, especially for those experiencing hard times.

Professor Crystal Park in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences developed a tool to measure theodical struggling. Park is also a principal investigator at UConn's Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention and Policy.

The study was published in May in Current Psychology, an international peer-reviewed psychology research journal.

"This growing research on theodicies suggests their importance in myriad aspects of health and well-being. To advance research on this question, we created an assessment tool to explicitly measure the extent to which people experience their suffering as in conflict with their beliefs about God as loving, powerful and protective," says Park.

Focusing on Christian beliefs, Park worked with co-investigator Professor M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall from Biola University to develop a suite of meaning-related measures, including the Theodical Struggling Scale. They also partnered with Biola University Professor Jason McMartin, Professor Eric J. Silverman from Christopher Newport University, Professor Kelly M. Kapic from Covenant College, Associate Professor Laura Shannonhouse from Georgia State University, and Jamie D. Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College.

The team conducted four consecutive studies to develop and refine the set of scales. The researchers conducted interviews with diverse Christian denominations to determine broad representations of Christian views. Along with a measure of theodical struggle, they developed measures of lament, intimacy with God, spiritual surrender, suffering with Jesus, and Christian flourishing.

"Results of the four studies taken together provide a solid foundation for future work to better understand how and why people struggle to reconcile their beliefs about God with their experiences of suffering and how their struggling might resolve. This work likely has implications for intervention to help people who are suffering from highly stressful or traumatic situations," says Park.

According to Park, the measure may pave the way for further research on how different types of suffering, such as a natural disaster or motor vehicle accident, impact theodical struggling and one's reconciliation with God.

"With this scale in hand, many research questions can be posed to advance our understanding of theodical struggling and how people engage in struggling," says Park.

Another publication in the journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice was published earlier this year. Park and her colleagues conducted three separate studies evaluating spiritual surrendering among Christians to develop the Christian Spiritual Surrender Scale (CSSS). Spiritual surrender is a religious coping practice in which an individual actively chooses to submit to God's will.

The CSSS aims to measure the relationship of Christian spiritual surrender and well-being. Results from the studies indicate that spiritual surrender is closely connected to well-being and may potentially alleviate the impacts that negative events can have on one's satisfaction with life.

In addition to broadening the researchers' understanding of spiritual surrender, the project has clinical implications, as it could be used to evaluate positive religious coping. This may be particularly important for clinicians working with those facing chronic or terminal health conditions. The CSSS could illuminate how clients turn over their suffering to God and the benefits of doing so and may help care providers identify positive forms of surrender.

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• Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are at it again.

• Zuckerberg has been mocking Musk on Threads, and Musk responded by calling Zuckerberg a "cuck" and proposing a "dick measuring contest."

• Insider reached out to Twitter and Meta for comment. Twitter responded with a poop emoji.

Twitter executive chairman — and self-appointed "Chief Twit" — Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are at it again.

The two men's ongoing internet feud reached embarrassing heights over the weekend, with Zuckerberg mocking Musk's style of tweeting on Threads and Musk responding by proposing a "literal dick measuring contest."

Zuckerberg, 39, responded to two users' posts on Threads, which is Meta's Twitter competitor, with the word "concerning," along with a crying laughing emoji. As Insider reported, Musk has replied to tweets with the word "concerning" at least 26 times.

Musk, 52, hit back at Zuckerberg by calling him a "cuck" in response to a tweet featuring a screenshot of an interaction between Zuckerberg and the fast-food chain Wendy's.

"hey @zuck, you should go to space to just really make him mad lol," Wendy's posted on Threads, referring to Musk, who owns SpaceX.

Zuckerberg responded with the crying laughing emoji.

"Zuck is a cuck," Musk tweeted in response to the screenshot. A little over eight hours later, he replied to his own tweet saying, "I propose a literal dick measuring contest," along with the ruler emoji.

The digital war of words comes after Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a "cage match" last month. After confirming with Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, that Musk was serious about fighting him, Zuckerberg responded by saying, "Send Me Location."

White told The New York Times that the fight would be an exhibition match and that while the details were still being worked out, it would likely take place in Las Vegas.

On June 30, Musk tweeted that there was "some chance fight happens in Colosseum." That came after TMZ reported that an Italian government official had reached out to Zuckerberg about staging the match at the Roman Colosseum.

Italy's Ministry of Culture released a statement following the report, saying that "there has been no formal contact from the ministry, nor any written document," and that if Zuckerberg and Musk want to fight at the Colosseum, "they would have to make a non-violent challenge."

The Times reported that people close to Zuckerberg have been generally supportive of the match and that while Musk dislikes sports and lacks the discipline needed to regularly train, nothing can be ruled out with him.

Musk is also attacking Zuckerberg on the legal front, accusing Threads of copying Twitter and sending a cease-and-desist letter. The letter from Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro alleged that Meta misused Twitter's trade secrets and hired ex-Twitter employees who used proprietary information to design Threads.

Meta communications director Andy Stone told Semafor that Twitter's allegations are meritless, saying that "no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that's just not a thing."

Insider reached out to Musk, Twitter, Tesla, Meta's press office, and a spokesperson at Meta. Twitter responded with a poop emoji.

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On August 25th, 2012, humanity became an interstellar species. There was no fanfare or galactic welcome party as a humble robotic probe, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, crossed an invisible threshold. It slipped between the region dominated by the physics of the Sun and into the thin milieu of plasma between the stars.

 

Whatever fate befalls us now, whatever future civilizations rise and fall, whether we heal the Earth or continue our self-destructive path, we will still, and always, have this. A monument, a marker, a testament to the existence of our species and the ingenuity of our minds. It’s unlikely that any alien civilization will encounter our spacecraft, yet it will still exist, circling the center of the Milky Way for eons to come.

 

In the coming decades, Voyager 1 will be joined by other craft sent along solar-escape trajectories: the Pioneer probes, New Horizons, and more. And now that we’ve crossed this astrophysical threshold, we are forced to ask a difficult question: Is this it? Is this all we’ll ever accomplish beyond the Solar System, a scattering of wayward probes sent out into the infinite night?

 

For decades, scientists, engineers, and dreamers have worked to develop technologies that can radically expand our presence outside the Solar System. But they all face one enormous challenge: the brain-breaking enormity of the cosmos. Sustained interstellar travel is simply beyond the means of our technology, and any reasonable projection of anything we’ll develop over the next few generations.

 

Thankfully, that doesn’t mean our space dreams are dead. We’ll have to learn to love the one we’re with and stop looking beyond to impossible frontiers and instead turn our curious eyes and minds to the wonders and mysteries of our own Solar System.

The slow way

To put the challenge of interstellar travel in perspective, let’s build a scale model of our local neighborhood. Go find a couple willing volunteers (friends, relatives, sleeping cats, whatever). Place one in the center of the room—that’s the Sun. Place yourself, playing the part of the Earth, and stand three feet away from them. That’s our Solar System, with those three feet representing the 93 million miles between our planet and our star.

 

Your second volunteer will be Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, which sits 4.246 light-years away. Our choice of light-year as a unit here masks the true monstrosity of the distance, tucking it away inside a term that’s really beyond comprehension instead of letting us appreciate what the numbers mean. To get that appreciation, play a game with your second volunteer: Ask them to position themselves where they think Proxima should be in the scale model.

 

Then pack them a lunch and shove them in the car because they have to travel over 200 miles away.

 

The Voyager 1 probe has been playing the real-life version of this. Launched on September 5th, 1977, the spacecraft reached Neptune, the outer sentinel of the Solar System, over a decade later.

 

And since then, it has not encountered another world.

 

Voyager 1 has enough speed to overcome the gravitational pull of the Sun. Save for a freak cosmic accident, it’s never coming back. Cruising at a speed of over 56,000 kilometers per hour (35,000 mph)—it could circumnavigate the Earth in less than 45 minutes—it managed to cross the heliopause after roughly 35 years of travel time. The heliopause is widely considered to the boundary of the Solar System and is a region marked by a sharp change in the density of charged particles that constantly float through space. The interior of the heliopause is dominated by the particles emanating from the Sun itself; beyond it, you’ll find yourself in a mixture generated by billions of distant stars.

 

In that sense, interstellar space doesn’t seem that far away. That’s just one generation, a fraction of a human lifetime, to make it to the edges of our Solar System. But Voyager’s journey has only just begun. Beyond the heliopause sits the Oort cloud, a loose sphere of small, icy comets lazily orbiting the Sun, leftovers scattered from the formation of the Solar System billions of years ago. Here in the Oort cloud, those bodies spend lonely lives, knowing the Sun as only a point of light slightly brighter than all the rest.

 

The inner edge of the Oort cloud is somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 thousand Astronomical Units (AU, the length of the typical Earth-Sun distance) away. At its current speed, Voyager will reach that shell of material between 600 to 1,500 years from now, long after it runs out of power.

 

Put another way, if the Byzantine emperor Justinian had launched the Taxidiótis probe from his capitol in Constantinople in the year 540 AD, it would just now, in the modern era, be reaching the Oort cloud. (Assuming Taxidiótis could hit similar speeds).

 

The outer edge of the Oort cloud is even more uncertain. At its maximum possible extent, it’s spread across nearly a light-year. Voyager 1 will have to silently cruise for nearly 20,000 years to make it through to the other side. Not that there will be any risk of an encounter; the five Earth masses' worth of material that inhabit the Oort cloud are spread so thinly that collision is nearly impossible.

 

If Voyager were headed toward Proxima Centauri—and it’s not—it would take roughly 80,000 years to complete its journey.

 

Eighty thousand years. Modern humans were all still in Africa 80,000 years ago, while Europe and Asia were the domains of Neanderthals and Denisovans. That encompasses the appearance of abstract language, the development of art and music, the beginnings of monumental construction, the spread of agriculture, the birth of cities, and, in the last few thousand years, the awakening of written history. Everything that we can associate with modern humans—our culture, our ways of living, even our ways of thinking—can be contained in the length of a single voyage to our nearest star.

The fast way

If we want to travel among the stars, we have to figure out a way to conquer the unfathomable gulfs of nothingness that separate us. Let’s leave aside the idea of sending humans on that kind of expedition anytime soon, if ever. We can’t even send people to Mars, the next nearest planet, without intense investment to solve the engineering challenges associated with such a journey.

 

So let’s focus on robotic probes for now, as that will have to do for several generations to come. If we want to get to Proxima Centauri quickly, we have to accelerate our craft to a decent fraction of the speed of light (and even that’s not that fast; a probe capable of near-light speed would still take nearly half a decade).

 

But we can’t achieve these kinds of speeds with conventional means—rockets powered by chemical reactions. One of the nastiest aspects of space travel is known as the "tyranny of the rocket equation." Essentially, to go faster or go farther, you need more fuel. But the more fuel you have, the heavier you become. So you need yet more fuel to overcome that weight, which makes you heavier. Soon enough, certain objectives—like, say, traveling to the nearest stars in less than a generation—become impossible. Not "really hard." Impossible.

 

One answer to the rocket equation is known as the Breakthrough Starshot Project. Funded to the tune of $100 million by Soviet-Israeli venture capitalist Yuri Milner, the project aims to develop the benchmark concepts and technologies needed to launch a probe to the nearest star that could reach it in less than a human lifetime. While that’s not nearly enough funding to actually build anything, the hope is that it will be enough to lay the groundwork, which will attract more serious funding (something surely in the tens of billions of dollars) to actually do the thing.

 

To achieve this extremely ambitious goal, the current Starshot thinking is to use a lightsail, which is a spacecraft attached to a large reflective membrane. The lightsail itself doesn’t carry any fuel onboard, freeing itself from the tyranny of the rocket equation. Instead, a gigantic laser on the ground will be used to accelerate the spacecraft. The radiation from the laser doesn’t have mass, but it does have momentum, so by bouncing off the sail, the photons can impart a small, but crucially not-zero, amount of thrust to the spacecraft.

 

As long as the laser fires, the spacecraft can continue accelerating right up to the edge of the speed of light. The only limiting factor is the power of the laser. And the ability to maintain its focus over large distances. And the reflectivity of the lightsail membrane.

 

The current reference design for Starshot is to run a 100 Gigawatt laser for roughly ten minutes, which will accelerate a spacecraft to roughly 10 percent of the speed of light. At that speed, a Starshot-style probe could buzz by Proxima Centauri in less than half a century. While that would make it longest spaceflight ever achieved in human history, it’s at least shorter than the typical human lifetime, so the same people who launched the probe could conceivably see it to its successful completion—a completion that would entail a high-speed zoom through the Proxima system (don’t even think about slowing down, let alone returning to Earth). Its data describing what it encountered there would take another four years to make it back to Earth.

 

While this design is not outright impossible, the difficulties in actually achieving it highlight just how far humanity has to go before interstellar is as banal as intercontinental.

 

The energy required for the laser, for starters, is 100 gigawatts. That’s roughly the energy output of all of the nuclear power stations in the entire United States combined. There are more powerful lasers out there, reaching up to a petawatts and even zettawatts, but those lasers get away with less total energy expenditure by firing for only a brief amount of time—usually around a femtosecond, which is 10-15 seconds.

 

The Starshot laser will have to take the entire nuclear energy output of the United States and run continuously for around 10 minutes, which is about a billion billion times longer than we can currently sustain such intense laser pulses.

 

The lightsail material will have to be the most reflective substance ever created. If even a tiny percentage of the laser light is absorbed, it will impart enough energy that the lightsail will simply melt away.

 

This is all assuming that we can accurately point the laser through our ever-shifting atmosphere at the increasingly distant, and thereby smaller, lightsail. (We’ll also assume that once the world’s most powerful laser is completed, it won’t be used to take over the world, à la Dr. Evil).

 

To make the math work—the power of the laser, the size of the lightsail, the maximum speed—there’s an upper limit to the size of the Starshot spacecraft. That limit is around one gram.

 

For reference, that’s about the mass of a paperclip.

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The college student whose Twitter account monitored the course of Elon Musk’s private jet has moved his tracking project to Meta’s newly launched Threads.

On Thursday, Jack Sweeney, a Florida college student and aviation enthusiast, launched his first post on Threads under the handle @elonmusksjet after Twitter suspended his tracking operation last December.

“ElonJet has arrived to Threads!” Sweeney wrote in the post which has since garnered over 7,700 likes and over 200 replies on Twitter’s newest rival.

In a following post, Sweeney addressed Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, writing: “@zuck will I be allowed to stay.” The tongue-in-cheek post appears to be a subtle jab at Twitter boss Elon Musk, who suspended Sweeney’s jet-tracking account last year after imposing new conditions on all of Twitter’s users that the sharing of anyone’s current location was prohibited.

Prior to getting suspended from Twitter, Sweeney ran “bot” accounts that used flight information from public domains to track the flight paths of Elon Musk as well as other celebrities’ airplanes including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, Sweeney also started tracking the flight paths of various Russian oligarchs.

Musk’s decision to suspend Sweeney’s account last year came shortly after he promised not to, saying last November: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”

Musk later said: “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.” He vowed legal action against Sweeney, who he said “supported harm to my family”.

Since Meta launched Threads, the new social media platform saw 70 million users in less than 48 hours. In response, Twitter has threatened to sue Meta, with Musk accusing Zuckerberg of violating “intellectual property rights”.

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The researchers found that 529 million people had diabetes in 2021 and that the climb in diabetes numbers would increase the prevalence of the disease from 6 percent of the world’s population to nearly 10 percent by 2050. The study’s findings are based on the analysis of data from more than 27,000 sources in 204 countries and territories.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 37 million people in the United States have diabetes. Diabetes is a chronic disease that develops when a person’s blood sugar (glucose) level is too high. Ideally, the body converts most of the food you eat into glucose and releases it into your bloodstream, and your pancreas releases insulin, a hormone, to help get the glucose into your cells for energy.

 For people who have diabetes, however, the body may make little or no insulin (Type 1 diabetes) or may not make or use insulin properly (Type 2), leaving too much glucose in the bloodstream. Over time, this can lead to serious health problems, including heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, nerve damage and vision loss.

The researchers found that about 96 percent of people worldwide who had diabetes in 2021 had Type 2, noting that the increasing prevalence of Type 2 diabetes worldwide is “primarily due to a rise in obesity.” They wrote that “the continued global spread of diabetes presents a massive public health challenge” for policymakers, health-care professionals and patients.

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There’s a major downside to semaglutide, the drug originally developed for diabetes and now prescribed for weight loss under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy: People often stop taking their medication. But what if the drug only needed to be given once to have lasting benefits?

That’s the idea behind Fractyl Health’s treatment for type 2 diabetes—which could also be used for weight control. The Lexington, Massachusetts-based biotech company is in the early stages of developing a one-time gene therapy intended to lower blood sugar and body weight using the same mechanism as semaglutide. “You have this problem where you need to stay on therapy for efficacy,” says Harith Rajagopalan, a cardiologist by training and CEO and cofounder of Fractyl Health. “That’s the Achilles heel.”

Ozempic and Wegovy, which are both taken as weekly injections, mimic a human hormone called GLP-1, which is released in the gut in response to eating. One job of GLP-1 is to cue the pancreas to make insulin, which regulates blood sugar. In type 2 diabetes, the pancreas either doesn’t produce enough insulin or it resists insulin. This causes blood sugar to build up, which over time can cause permanent damage to the eyes, nerves, kidneys, and blood vessels.

GLP-1 also interacts with the parts of the brain involved in appetite and signals a feeling of fullness. This is how semaglutide leads to weight loss: People taking the drug tend to have fewer cravings and eat less.

But the drugs are expensive and can come with side effects like nausea, diarrhea, and constipation—factors that cause some people to stop treatment. Others may accidentally miss a dose, or simply go off the drugs once they reach their weight-loss goals. But when these treatments stop, blood sugar levels rise, appetite returns, and often so do the pounds.

Rajagopalan hopes to prevent this with a one-and-done treatment that would last for years. The company wants to deliver an artificial gene to the pancreas that continuously produces the GLP-1 hormone so there’s no need for weekly injections. The approach, called gene therapy, uses inactivated viruses to carry a therapeutic gene to pancreatic cells. (Viruses are used because of their natural ability to deliver genetic material to cells.)

So far, Fractyl has only tested this approach in animals. Scientists at the company wanted to see how well the experimental gene therapy could reduce fasting blood sugar—an indicator used to test for diabetes. Using mice bred to develop type 2 diabetes, they gave a single infusion of the gene therapy to one group and weekly injections of semaglutide to another. After 10 weeks, they found that the gene therapy decreased fasting blood sugar by 70 percent, slightly more than semaglutide, which lowered blood sugar by 64 percent.

Scientists with the company presented the findings at the American Diabetes Association conference at the end of June, along with separate findings that the therapy also reduced body weight in mice by 23 percent compared to control mice.

The weight loss was surprising, says Rajagopalan. Ozempic and Wegovy are injected into the fatty tissue of the thighs, waist, or upper arm. From there, it enters the bloodstream, where it somehow communicates with the brain. Since Fractyl’s gene therapy is delivered directly to the pancreas, company scientists didn’t expect to see significant weight loss.

One explanation is that the gene therapy is producing enough GLP-1 in the pancreas that some is entering the circulatory system and talking to the brain, says Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. Another possibility, he says, is that there is an unknown signaling mechanism in the pancreas that tells the brain to stop eating.

To deliver the therapy to the pancreas, the company developed an endoscopic procedure that involves threading a thin needle attached to a catheter that travels down the throat and into the GI tract. Fractyl scientists tested the procedure for safety in 50 pigs, which have a pancreas that’s anatomically similar to that of humans. The team confirmed that the procedure successfully delivered the gene therapy to pancreatic cells but did not test whether it led to blood sugar or weight changes in the pigs. No adverse side effects were observed in the animals.

But Drucker is skeptical about injecting a therapy directly into the human pancreas. “The pancreas is a very fragile and important organ,” he says. “If it’s poked or prodded, it can induce inflammation.”

In addition to producing insulin, the pancreas makes digestive enzymes that help break down food. But when it becomes inflamed—a condition called pancreatitis—these enzymes can attack the pancreas instead. Pancreatitis can be short-lived or chronic, the latter causing permanent damage to the organ.

Gene therapy could prove an expensive approach to treating diabetes. Several gene therapies are already on the market for other conditions, and they come with sky-high prices. One of them, which treats a blood disorder called beta-thalassemia, costs $2.8 million. Another, for hemophilia B, costs $3.5 million.

Maria Escobar Vasco, an endocrinologist and diabetes expert at UT Health San Antonio, says the idea of a one-time gene therapy is intriguing, but more testing will be needed. “The question is, how safe is it? I don’t think we know yet,” she says. The company is aiming to begin an initial human trial by the end of 2024, so those answers are still a few years away.

In the meantime, there is already an alternative way of delivering semaglutide: by pill. Novo Nordisk, which manufactures Ozempic and Wegovy, also makes Rybelsus, a tablet used in diabetes treatment, and is now testing a higher-dose version for weight control. Competitor Pfizer is developing its own pill that also mimics GLP-1. Pills can help people stick to a dosing regimen because they are more convenient than injections—but they still carry a risk of gastrointestinal side effects and also have to be taken repeatedly.

Whether Fractyl’s gene therapy will cause similar side effects is still unknown. With Ozempic and Wegovy, these effects often occur in the early stages of taking the drug, when the dose is steadily increased. Usually, these go away on their own.

“The effect for the drug to cause nausea actually happens in the brain,” says Randy Seeley, a professor of surgery and obesity specialist at the University of Michigan who is an adviser to Fractyl. Since Fractyl’s gene therapy is delivered to the pancreas, this may avoid the problem of side effects. But if some GLP-1 makes it into the bloodstream, Seeley says there could be side effects similar to those with current drugs.

If a one-shot gene therapy does work—and is safe—it could be a game changer for managing diabetes and weight, however. “Type 2 diabetes is a chronic condition that needs to be treated chronically. Obesity is a chronic condition that needs to be treated chronically,” says Seeley. “If you only have to give people access once, rather than every week, the use of this strategy will go up and benefit more patients.”

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As he struggles to fall asleep, the hours start to creep by. He becomes frustrated about how he will cope tomorrow. This is a pattern Martin has struggled with for many years.

But what's going on when your mind is racing at night? And how do you make it stop?

It can happen to anyone

In bed, with no other visual or sound cues to occupy the mind, many people start to have racing thoughts that keep them awake. This can happen at the start of the night, or when they awake in the night.

The good news is there are effective ways to reduce these racing thoughts, and to help get some sleep. To do this, let's take a step back and talk about insomnia.

What is insomnia?

If you are like Martin, you're not alone. Right now, up to six in every ten people have regular insomnia symptoms. One in ten have had these symptoms for months or years.

Insomnia includes trouble falling asleep at the start of the night, waking up during the night, and feelings of daytime fatigue, concentration difficulties, lethargy or poor mood.

Just like Martin, many people with insomnia find as soon as they get into bed, they feel alert and wide awake. So what's going on?

The more time we spend in bed doing things other than sleep, the more our brain and body start to learn that bed is a place for these non-sleep activities.

These activities don't just include worrying. They can be using a mobile phone, watching TV, eating, working, arguing, smoking or playing with pets.

Gradually, our brains can learn that bed is a place for these other activities instead of rest and sleep. Over time the simple act of getting into bed can become a trigger to feel more alert and awake. This is called "conditioned insomnia".

Here are six ways to spend less time awake in bed with racing thoughts.

1. Re-learn to associate bed with sleep

Stimulus control therapy can help re-build the relationship between bed and sleep.

Follow these simple steps every night of the week:

• only use your bed for sleep and intimacy. All other activities should occur out of bed, preferably in another room

• only go to bed if you are feeling sleepy (when your eyes are heavy and you could easily fall asleep). If you are not feeling sleepy, delay getting into bed. Use this time to do something relaxing in another room

• if you are still awake after about 15 minutes in bed, get out of bed and go to another room. Do something else relaxing until you are feeling sleepy again, such as reading a book, listening to the radio, catching up on some chores or doing a crossword puzzle. Avoid anything too stimulating such as work or computer gaming

• repeat the above two steps until you are asleep within about 15 minutes. This can take several cycles of getting in and out of bed. But during this time, you body's natural need for sleep will increase, and you will eventually fall asleep within 15 minutes of getting into bed

• get out of bed at the same time each morning, no matter how much you slept the night before

• avoid long daytime naps, which can make it harder to fall asleep that night.

Over several nights, this therapy builds the relationship between bed and sleep, and reduces the relationship between bed and feeling alert and having racing thoughts.

2. Distract yourself with fond thoughts

Negative thoughts in bed or worrying about the consequences of losing sleep can make us feel more alert, worried, and make it more difficult to sleep.

So try something called "cognitive re-focusing". Try to replay a fond memory, movie, or TV show in your mind, to distract yourself from these negative thoughts.

Ideally, this will be a memory you can recall very clearly, and one that causes neutral or slightly positive feelings. Memories that are overly positive or negative might cause an increase in alertness and mental activity.

3. Relax into sleep

Relaxation therapy for insomnia aims to reduce alertness and improve sleep.

One way is to progressively tense and relax muscle groups throughout your body, known as guided progressive muscle relaxation therapy.

You could also try breathing exercises, soothing music, visual imagery or other relaxation exercises that feel right for you.

Part of relaxing into sleep is avoiding doing work in the late evening or screen-based activities right before bed. Give yourself a "buffer zone", to allow yourself time to start relaxing before getting into bed.

4. Worry earlier in the day

Schedule some "worry time" earlier in the day, so these thoughts don't happen at night. It can also help to write down some of the things that worry you.

If you start to worry about things during the night, you can remind yourself you have already written them down, and they are waiting for you to work through during your scheduled "worry time" the next day.

5. Know waking in the night is normal

Knowing that brief awakenings from sleep are completely normal, and not a sign of ill health, may help.

Sleep occurs in different "cycles" during the night. Each cycle lasts for about 90 minutes, and includes different stages of light, deep, and dreaming (REM) sleep.

Most of our deep sleep occurs in the first half of the night, and most of our light sleep in the second half.

Everyone experiences brief awakenings from sleep, but most people don't remember these the next morning.

6. What if these don't work?

If these don't work, the most effective next step is "cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia" or CBT-i.

This non-drug therapy targets the underlying causes of insomnia, and leads to long-lasting improvements in sleep, mental health and daytime function.

You can do a self-guided online program, or access it via your GP or a psychologist. More details, including links to online programs, are available via the Sleep Health Foundation.

We are providing free access to online CBT-i through a research study. To find out more, contact me.

The Sleep Health Foundation has several evidence-based resources about sleep health and insomnia.

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While lower-level alcohol use can be protective against certain diseases, it can have significant adverse health effects for many other diseases.

The authors urge greater awareness that any level of alcohol use can increase a person's risk of developing serious, even fatal, diseases.

The review examined high-quality studies of the dose-response risk relationships between alcohol use and disease for 18 diseases identified by international health organizations as having a causal relationship with alcohol use and which, in most cases, can be fatal. For all conditions included in the review, the risk of developing the disease increased as alcohol use increased.

At all doses examined, alcohol use was associated with significant increases in risk for tuberculosis, lower respiratory infections, oral cavity and pharyngeal cancers, esophageal cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, laryngeal cancer, epilepsy, hypertension, liver cirrhosis and, in men, pancreatitis. Low-dose alcohol use had protective effects against coronary heart disease, stroke, and brain hemorrhage in both men and women and against diabetes and pancreatitis in women. However, low-dose alcohol use increased the risk for other diseases.

Men who had one standard drink per day had a significant protective effect against stroke; but had significant increases in health risks for tuberculosis, lower respiratory infections, diabetes, epilepsy, hypertension, atrial fibrillation, cirrhosis, pancreatitis, and several types of cancer, including or the pharynx, esophagus, liver, larynx, colon, and rectum.

Similarly, low-level alcohol use by women conferred a significant protective effect against the risk for diabetes, stroke, and pancreatitis, but at those same levels, their risk significantly increased for high blood pressure, epilepsy, hypertension, atrial fibrillation, cirrhosis, tuberculosis, lower respiratory infections, and many types of cancer, including breast cancer, oral cavity, and pharynx cancer, esophageal cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, larynx cancer.

The authors culled through 6,000 articles published between 2017 and March 2021, selecting the fourteen meta-analyses that met the study criteria to include in their systematic review, updating the findings of the 2020 Australian Guidelines to Reduce Health Risks from Drinking Alcohol (2007–2020).

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He spent the next two years bouncing around — switching teams, watching project leaders get promoted despite, he said, producing nothing of substance, and generally spinning his wheels. Graham was paid more than $300,000 a year but had little work to show for it. Feeling adrift with nothing to do, he gradually disengaged from his job and was eventually put on Amazon's formal performance-management plan.

Facing the threat of firing, Graham was finally put on a project to use machine learning to improve Amazon's music recommendations, which he described as "the first really interesting thing I worked on." He was happy to feel like a valuable member of the team, but Graham's manager told him something stunning: The finished project, which Graham worked on for more than a month, wouldn't see the light of day. It was simply an exercise to satisfy the terms of his performance plan and string out his employment, he was told. Graham left Amazon soon after.

As tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of employees this year, venture capitalists and executives have leaned on the term "fake work" to describe the output of employees like Graham. The layoffs are necessary and even prudent, the argument goes, because thousands of workers at Big Tech firms such as Google and Meta are sitting around trying to look busy while doing very little productive work.

"There's nothing for these people to do — it's all fake work," Keith Rabois, a famous tech investor, opined at a March event hosted by the investment bank Evercore. "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do? They go to meetings."

Some tech workers seemed to confirm Rabois' claims on social media, sharing stories of being paid by giant tech firms to do very little. In one viral TikTok video, Brit Levy, Meta's former diversity, equity, and inclusion policy analyst, said she had to "basically fight to find work" and the company was simply holding on to employees "like Pokémon cards."

But based on conversations with over 30 people involved in the tech industry, including current and former tech employees, some in management positions, the conception of lazy employees raking in big paychecks to do little lays the blame in the wrong place. Oftentimes, employees are getting plenty of work done; it's just that the projects are of little to no importance to the company's bottom line. The tech employees spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.

"Most workers want to come and work. They want to show up, give a fair eight hours of work, and they want to feel good about themselves," said Scott Latham, a strategic-management professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who worked in the tech industry during the start of the internet boom.

There's only one real culprit for the culture of "fake work," he said. "It's lazy management."

What we talk about when we talk about 'fake work'

"Fake work," as consultants Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson define it in their 2009 book of the same name, is "effort under the illusion of value." The crimes, they wrote, include pointless meetings, reports, and presentations. In the tech industry, specifically, the term "fake work" is used to conjure up an image of lazy engineers "resting and vesting" — long-tenured, high-paid employees doing very little work while waiting on a lucrative payday from their company stock.

Rich Moran, a venture capitalist, consultant, and author of several books about the workplace, prefers to call it a "false sense of activity" and said it's "more rampant" among tech companies. "The tech sector is more willing to try different things," he told us. "And so you get assigned to a project that you know may be going nowhere, but they have a hard time saying, well this isn't going anywhere."

The latest version of fake work emerged as part of the tech industry's pandemic-driven boom and bust. Lockdowns and work from home meant Amazon, Google, Meta, Shopify, and many other giants saw an explosion of demand for their products. Assuming the consumer shift was a harbinger of a new normal of shopping, socializing, and working online all the time, companies aggressively hired thousands of recruits. But firms often gave little thought about where to place them or what their role would be, insiders say.

"I think COVID was an accelerator for fake work because a lot of these tech companies hired. Then they weren't sure what to do with a lot of the people," Moran said.

One former Google manager told us she was instructed to lower her standards for hiring earlier in the pandemic and watched as teams she worked with doubled in size. As new hires flooded in, it felt as if teams were reorganized on a weekly basis, making it harder for people to do solid work.

The sudden head-count increase was destabilizing, but the real trouble began when business started to slow down. Rather than a permanent reorientation, many of the behaviors people adopted turned out to be short-term modifications. And as the economy turned on the tech industry, companies scrambled to figure out what to do with all the employees they no longer needed. That's when the "fake work" talk, finger-pointing, and unceremonious layoffs took off.

"There was just no guidance at all," an ex-Meta worker said of his two months at the company, when he was waiting to be placed on a team as an entry-level data scientist. "I remember one day literally having absolutely nothing to do, and I just went surfing instead because I'm remote. I have no one to report to. It seems like no one knows I'm here."

One former Google employee said many employees were assigned work that served no purpose for the company. Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Another ex-Meta employee said that there were so many workers in his department when he joined in 2022 that on multiple occasions, he'd complete a project to learn that as many as four other people had been given the same assignment separately. The former employee described the work he did at Meta as "intern-level' — putting together graphs based on preexisting data, polishing presentations, or practicing how to "work a problem backward" — despite having nearly a decade of experience in tech. He said he found the environment "stifling" and was often deterred from trying to increase the scope of his work.

Sure, there were some employees, as pundits and executives have suggested, who could have helped tackle projects but chose not to. But for the most part, insiders told us, workers were stuck in circumstances beyond their control.

"I think there's very few people sitting around doing nothing," Moran said. "I think people are very skilled at filling their time. Whether or not it helps the organization is another question."

Some people were assigned plenty of tasks, but they ended up serving no mission-critical purpose. The former Google program manager said that people were working hard but what qualified as work had seemingly changed. "They gave us a lot of work that was just a waste of time," she said.

Others, like Graham, were assigned to seemingly key parts of the company, only to find that there wasn't enough work to go around. The former Googler also noticed this type of fake work. "There were so many of us, people just started trying to look busy," she told us. "There were too many chefs in the kitchen," she added.

One former contract worker hired by Meta during the pandemic became so frustrated with feeling idle that she took on a second contract job at Microsoft at the same time (neither company knew she was working for the other). She decided if "they're not going to give me anything to do then I guess I'm just getting paid."

"It's a little bit of a symbiotic relationship where the people that you report to aren't saying that you're not doing anything and you're not saying that you're not doing anything," she told us.

Empty empires

While the pandemic's boom and bust brought the issue into stark relief, the various types of fake work have been growing within tech companies for years. Many of these issues come down to one fundamental problem: managers trying to get ahead.

At almost all tech companies, current and former employees said, bosses were rewarded for overhiring since it made them look important.

Bloated org charts resulted in too many people fighting for work, a poor understanding of what each segment of the company was doing, and a rise in projects spun up merely to help managers get themselves promoted.

"People are often measured not in contribution but in head count." Moran said.

"The bigger your team you have, the more qualified people you have in your team, the more weight you have in the company," Graham, the former Amazon employee, said. "It's what we call empire building. You're not focused on building a product; you're focused on building an empire.

That leads to fake work and unnecessary bloating."

The more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization.

To create an empire, managers simply add employees underneath them with little sense of what they should be doing. "Instead of planning in the most efficient way, they just say, 'I need a head count,'" Anna Tavis, a clinical professor of human-capital management at New York University's School of Professional Studies, said.

The former Meta employee who joined the company in 2022 felt that stuffing teams was a byproduct of middle managers looking for a promotion, leading to employees having less to do. One of his managers hired so many people that within three months, there became four levels between him and the person who was supposed to be managing him. "A lot of the time, my managers had no idea what I was doing," he said.

In addition to the incentive structure encouraging projects to nowhere, there's a lack of oversight from the top into how these miniature empires are being run, employees said. And in many cases, executives are oblivious to the value of the work that's presented to them. Some executives have even admitted that there seems to be little incentive to address company bloat. Former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast that without financial hurdles, managers had every reason to keep hiring.

"The more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization," he said.

To secure their fiefdoms, managers often pitch projects they created that are sometimes referred to as "vanity projects" or "promo projects."

These may ultimately contribute zero to a company's top line, but the flashy presentations and demos associated with the projects often lead to a promotion and nice pay bump for the person leading the work. One Google manager who recently left the company said the head-count process at Google "rewards bad behavior" by promoting people based on "having a bigger team and creating decks." Google had "dozens" of teams, he said, that did "think tank-like strategy work with no real practical way of impacting the business or a customer or user."

"I do think that process favored the people who were better at bullshitting and storytelling," he told us.

Graham, a former Amazon employee, said the incentive structure at the company led to "fake work and unnecessary bloating." LINDSEY WASSON/Reuters

At Meta, one current employee said it was common to see employees all the way up to vice presidents invent workshops or "sprints" to set "strategic visions" for projects, while only a small fraction made it onto a road map, an actual timeline for a product to launch to the public, the employee said.

"I've rarely seen a large-scale vision be referenced after it's presented, despite the fact that upwards of 20 people are called to participate, usually by making and remaking decks for leadership," they added. "You can always tell when performance reviews are about to happen because there's almost always one or two workshops on the calendar a month before."

When that manager gets promoted — or the project falls apart — the team is sometimes shuffled into other parts of the business. Several tech employees told us these situations led to a lot of work that ultimately made little or no material impact on the business.

"One reorg after another led to fake work," a former longtime Google employee said. "I got used to getting introduced to a multiyear product, for a project I would look at and say, 'This is a poster piece for some executive to implement while job hunting for another role so they can go be a CEO somewhere.' They were show products."

The power-jockeying adds layers of unnecessary complication, making it nearly impossible to complete simple tasks. One former manager at Salesforce said the company had in recent years become stuffed with middle managers and power structures that sucked up resources but made it hard to get anything of substance done.

"Trying to get anything done in that organization takes 40 people to get aligned," the former employee told us. He said the meeting culture at the company had also gotten out of hand and "work" was defined as "making slide decks and giving speeches and having a really full calendar that shows you're in a lot of meetings."

What's next?

Over the past year, tech companies have made it very clear how they plan to deal with fake work — layoffs

In almost every layoff announcement — those from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and others — executives have focused on the need to get more efficient. After announcing the company's first round of job cuts last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 would be the "year of efficiency." Other tech CEOs, such as Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, have also talked of increasing their companies' productivity.

Some companies have also shown signs that they're trying to curb busywork. In September, Google told staff it would cut down "redundant meetings" and asked employees to make stronger and specific agendas for the meetings they did have. In January, Zuckerberg told staff that he could no longer tolerate a company structure of "managers managing managers," the newsletter Command Line reported. He also told middle managers to find roles as individual contributors or leave.

While many big tech companies have emphasized the need for more "efficiency" over the past six months, they have also generally downplayed concerns about their workplace cultures. In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said that Graham's story "doesn't reflect the experience of most employees." A Google spokesperson denied that managers had been told to lower hiring standards during the pandemic and pointed us to to an interview with Bloomberg where CEO Sundar Pichai remarked that the company was "sharpening its focus." Representatives from Salesforce, and Microsoft declined to comment. Meta did not respond to requests for comment.

Greg Selker, a managing director at the executive-search and consulting firm Stanton Chase, said he thought the fake-work phenomenon was already reaching a natural conclusion. The "smartest companies" that overhired have already gone through significant bloodletting, while others will soon realize they have to do the same, he said

But not all insiders are convinced. Some said these companies would need to make more drastic changes to the culture if they wanted to undo years of "fake work." "The dirty secret of these layoffs is that they're not materially changing these businesses," a former longtime Google executive said.

Addressing the issue of bloat and poor management takes more than a few layoffs. Jessica Kennedy, an organizational expert out of Vanderbilt University, said it came down to clear communication and proper incentives, adding that the issue could be solved with better organization and a clearer, more transparent differentiation between roles.

We have a good leader, which makes all the difference.

"It's natural for a worker to try and find a way to increase their status or differentiate themselves, but cultures are set by the people at the top of the organization, and it's their job to incentivize the right things," Kennedy said. "This is probably an issue a company would face if it focused too much on rewarding social status instead of performance. It's important employees understand the overlying purpose of the work they do. Good leaders know how to properly motivate their employees."

Some level of redundancy is a good thing if companies want to "build for resilience and innovation," but there needs to be careful thought given to it, NYU's Tavis said. "Companies making profits can become lazy around really planning for what they want," she told us. "Yes, you need to create resilience and innovation, but you need to plan for it."

As for Graham, he's since moved to another tech company, where he said he felt his contributions were more valued. "It's really good work so far," he said. "We have a good leader, which makes all the difference."

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That is the conclusion of scientists whose findings are offered as proof that rapid expansion of human appetites and activity so radically altered natural systems as to tip Earth into a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, or the "era of humans".

There will be other telltale clues in mud and rocks of a planetary-scale rupture around the mid-20th century: the sudden rise of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases; radioactive detritus from nuclear bomb tests; omnipresent microplastics; and the spread of invasive species.

But chicken bones could be among the most revealing findings, and tell the story in more ways than one.

To begin with, they are a human invention.

"The modern meat chicken is unrecognisable compared to its ancestors or wild counterparts," said Carys Bennett, a geologist and lead author of a 2017 study in Royal Society Open Science laying out the evidence for the animal as a "marker species" of the Anthropocene.

"Body size, the shape of the skeleton, bone chemistry and genetics are all distinct."

Their very existence, in other words, is evidence of humanity's capacity to hack nature and intervene in natural processes.

The modern broiler chicken's origins are in the jungles of Southeast Asia, where its forebear, the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus), was first domesticated some 8,000 years ago.

The species has long been prized for its meat and eggs, but its engineered breeding into the rotund, short-lived creature found in supermarkets the world over started only after World War II.

"It usually takes millions of years for evolution to occur, but here it has taken just decades to produce a new form of animal," Jan Zalasiewicz, an emeritus professor of palaeobiology at the University of Leicester, told AFP.

Last year, the official Anthropocene Working Group he chaired for more than a decade determined that the Holocene Epoch -- which began 11,700 years ago as the last ice age ended -- gave way to the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century.

On Tuesday, it will announce which spot on Earth best exemplifies that shift.

Another line of evidence is the omnipresence of broiler chickens: virtually anywhere on Earth there are people, there will also be copious remains of our species' favourite source of animal protein.

While many societies shun the eating of beef or pork, there is virtually no culture in the world that refuses to eat chicken
HOANG DINH NAM

Today, there are some 33 billion of the flightless birds worldwide at any given time, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The biomass of domesticated chickens is more than three times that of all wild bird species combined.

At least 25 million are culled every day, whether for chicken tikka in the Punjab, yakitori in Japan, poulet yassa in Senegal or McDonald's nuggets everywhere.

And while many societies shun the eating of beef or pork, how many cultures in the world do not have chicken on the menu?

"Chickens are a symbol of how our biosphere has changed and is now dominated by human consumption and resource use," said Bennett, formerly a researcher at the University Of Leicester and now an officer at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Britain.

"The enormous number of distinctive chicken bones discarded worldwide will leave a clear signal in the future geological record," she said.

The Barron's news department was not involved in the creation of the content above. This story was produced by AFP. For more information go to AFP.com.

© Agence France-Presse

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