The site is among those being considered for designation as a "golden spike", a location that offers evidence of a new geological epoch defined by our species: the Anthropocene.

The path to agree the new era has been long and controversial, with scientists wrangling for years over whether the Holocene epoch that began 11,700 years ago has really been replaced by a new period defined by human impact on the Earth.

Key to their discussions has been picking a site that clearly documents the way we have changed our environment, from contaminating it with plutonium from nuclear tests, to littering it with microplastics.

Twelve sites around the world have been proposed as golden spike locations, including a peatland in Poland, an Australian coral reef, and the basin-like Beppu bay in Japan's southwestern Oita.

Michinobu Kuwae, an associate professor at the Ehime Centre of Marine Environmental Studies, has been studying the area for nearly a decade.

He began with investigations of how climate change affected fish populations, with layers of deposited fish scales in the bay's sediment offering clues about the past.

It was only more recently he began to consider the location as a potential golden spike, given the many "anthropogenic fingerprints, including manmade chemicals and radionuclides, layered in the bay's sediment."

The layers allow scientists to pinpoint "the precise date and level of an Anthropocene-Holocene boundary," he told AFP.

"There are the most diverse anthropogenic markers."

That perfect preservation is the result of several unique characteristics, explained Yusuke Yokoyama, a professor at the University of Tokyo's Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, who has analysed core samples from the site.

The bay floor dips down quickly from the shoreline, creating a basin that traps material in the water column and "kind of creates a miso soup," he told AFP.

Water can flow in, but only moves back out at the surface, and a lack of oxygen means there are no organisms disturbing the sediment or disrupting deposits.

"It's like Baumkuchen, the cake, a stack of pancakes, and you can count those pancakes to get the precise age," he added.

For a site to be considered a golden spike location, it must meet several conditions, including offering a record of at least the last century, along with specific "anthropogenic signals" like nuclear bomb testing, ecosystem change and industrialisation.

It also needs to offer a complete archive of the period covered, and markers that allow scientists to identify which layer represents which year.

Coral is considered by some to be a good candidate because it grows in layers like a tree trunk and absorbs elements dissolved in water, including signatures from nuclear testing.

But it cannot capture materials that do not dissolve in water, like microplastics.

The sediment of Beppu Bay, by contrast, captures everything from agricultural fertiliser run-off to deposits from historic floods recorded in official documentation, as well as fish scales and plastics.

The most compelling feature however, according to Kuwae and Yokoyama, are the signatures from a series of nuclear bomb tests carried out across the Pacific ocean from 1946 to 1963.

The tests produced atmospheric radiation that was detectable globally, but also direct signatures that registered in places close to the testing sites.

"We can detect both," said Yokoyama.

"Because Beppu Bay is located downstream... we can identify the particular signatures of certain tests."

Core samples collected from Beppu Bay showed peaks in plutonium that correlated with individual nuclear tests, and matched similar findings in coral in nearby Ishigaki.

Whichever site is chosen as a golden spike, Beppu Bay and other candidate locations are expected to remain important resources for understanding human impact on the Earth.

And Kuwae hopes an official designation of the Anthropocene will be a "warning bell" for humanity.

"Deterioration of the global environment, including global warming, is rapidly progressing," he said.

"We will be in a state where the original safe earth, once lost, can no longer be recovered."

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Soaring greenhouse gases, ubiquitous microplastics, pervasive "forever chemicals", the global upheaval of animals, even old mobile phones and chicken bones -- all have been put forward as evidence that the world entered the Anthropocene, or era of humans, in the mid-20th century.

Jan Zalasiewicz, a British geologist who chaired the Anthropocene Working Group for over a decade, paused for a moment when asked if there was anywhere on Earth that lacked signs of human influence.

"It's hard to think of a more remote place" than the Pine Island glacier in Antarctica, Zalasiewicz told AFP.

Yet when scientists drilled deep below the glacier's ice a few years ago, they found traces of plutonium.

It was lingering fallout from nuclear weapon tests that began in 1945, leaving behind a radioactive presence unlike anything before.

Zalasiewicz said these radionuclides represented perhaps "the sharpest signal" to mark the start of the Anthropocene epoch 70 years ago.

But "there's an awful lot to choose from," he added.

On Tuesday, the Anthropocene Working Group is expected to announce its choice for the epoch's "golden spike" location, selecting the site that most clearly represents the many ways humans have changed the world.

However the announcement will not make the Anthropocene an official geological time unit just yet, as the world's geologists continue to sift through the evidence.

Another major calling card of the Anthropocene will likely come as little surprise: the rapid surge in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are heating the world.

Many things changed "once humans developed the technology to pull fossilised sunshine -- in the form of oil, coal and gas -- out of the ground," Zalasiewicz said.

Humans have consumed more energy since 1950 than was used in the previous 11,700 years of the Holocene epoch, the Anthropocene scientists have shown.

This new power was used to dominate the world in a way not previously possible. Both land and animals were deployed to feed the exploding human population.

Humans and their livestock make up 96 percent of the biomass of all land mammals on the planet, with wild mammals representing just four percent, researchers estimated in 2018.

Supermarket chickens, bred by humans to grow far larger than natural, account for two thirds of the biomass of all birds, Zalasiewicz said.

Humans also reshuffled species across the globe, introducing invasive species such as rats to even the most remote Pacific islands.

In 2020, researchers estimated that the mass of all objects made by humans has now exceeded the weight of all living things on the planet.

The Anthropocene researchers called these objects "technofossils".

Successive generations of mobile phones, which so quickly become obsolete, were just one example of a technofossil that will "be part of the Anthropocene record," Zalasiewicz said.

Smaller pieces of plastic called microplastics have been detected on the planet's highest peaks and at the bottom of the deepest oceans.

Substances called PFAS or "forever chemicals," created for products such as non-stick cookware, are also being increasingly identified across the world.

Pesticides, fertilisers, increasing levels of nitrogen of phosphorus, even the buried skeletons of humans -- the list of potential Anthropocene markers goes on.

The scientists say that hundreds of thousands of years into the future, all of these markers will be clearly preserved to give our future ancestors -- or any other beings who care to look -- insight into this human era.

But what will this future geologist see happen next?

"One of the signals that you would want to see from the Anthropocene is humanity responding in a positive way," said Mark Williams, a British palaeontologist and member of the Anthropocene Working Group.

The fossil record does not yet show a mass extinction, but one "is now very much on the cards," he told AFP.

"We go two ways from here," he added.

So is there somewhere left on Earth that does not bear a human fingerprint?

The scientists agreed that the only such place was likely somewhere under the ice in Antarctica.

But if nothing changes, these ice sheets will be steadily melted by global warming, Zalasiewicz warned.

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Roads in several parts of the capital were submerged in knee-deep water as it was inundated with 153 millimetres of rain, the highest precipitation in a single day in July in 40 years.

With at least another day of heavy rain forecast, authorities have ordered schools shut in New Delhi on Monday.

The Press Trust of India news agency on Sunday reported that 15 people had been killed in the past 24 hours in six northern Indian states.

Hill states were the worst affected, leaving six dead in Himachal Pradesh alone, where landslides blocked about 700 roads, Omkar Sharma, a disaster management official told AFP.

India’s meteorological department has forecast more rain across large parts of northern India in coming days.

Official data shows monsoon rains across the country in the first week of July have already produced about 2 per cent more rainfall than normal.

The summer monsoon brings South Asia 70-80 per cent of its annual rainfall, as well as death and destruction due to flooding and landslides.

The rainfall is hard to forecast and varies considerably, but scientists say climate change is making the monsoon stronger and more erratic. AFP

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Are you feeling anxious about climate change? You're not alone. And it's precisely that connection that two psychologists think can help explain where climate anxiety comes from and help ease it.

Writing in Nature Climate Change, psychology researchers Anne van Valkengoed and Linda Steg make the case that the sickening anxiety many people feel about how fast Earth is heating up is a "healthy and empathetic" response to the incalculable loss of millions of species and human lives that we're told is in the cards.

Citing recent research and interviews, they go on to argue that climate anxiety manifests not from people's fears of how they may personally be impacted, as other researchers have suggested, but out of concerns for "global and societal consequences of climate change and impacts on animals and vulnerable populations."

"At least in the Global North, many people experience climate anxiety primarily out of concern for others and the natural world," the pair from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands write in their commentary, a response to an earlier article suggesting that climate anxiety stems from personal risks to people's livelihoods.

For those in low-lying island nations, the direct impacts – of rising sea levels, stronger hurricanes, and increasing storm surges – may rightly be their biggest and most immediate concern. The effects of climate change are already hitting hard and uprooting communities.

For those of us watching from afar (for now), we may hold fears for their future and that of younger generations, who face increasing heatwaves, droughts, and crop failures.

Recognizing how this empathy gives rise to anxiety "has key implications for how people can cope with climate anxiety," van Valkengoed said on Twitter.

This has key implications for how people can cope with climate anxiety. Adapting to climate change risks will unlikely be a helpful strategy for people who experience strong climate anxiety, in contrast to what previous authors have argued:https://t.co/J0j4eTfYoF
    — Anne van Valkengoed (@AnneValkengoed) June 29, 2023

"Adapting to [personal] climate change risks will unlikely be a helpful strategy" for coping with climate anxiety so long as the threat to other people and nature remains, she adds.

That said, if more research can help health professionals understand when and why people experience climate anxiety, they could better offer appropriate strategies for dealing with it.

The initial commentary from climate modelers Jeremy Fyke and Andrew Weaver suggests that individuals may benefit from finding ways to reduce their personal exposure to climate hazards rather than just coping with feelings of anxiety.

"Starting to plan personal climate adaptation actions is a powerful tonic for sustainably reducing climate anxiety," they write.

Being proactive may help people regain a sense of control, and joining community-led initiatives fosters connections, which may be a salve or the first kindling of hope.

But many people might not have the financial resources to relocate or fortify their homes. And it takes time for the outcomes of collective actions to materialize.

So we still need strategies to cope with feelings such as grief that may arise and which many scientists share while banding together to take steps to switch to renewable sources of energy and be done with fossil fuels.

Because it almost goes without saying that seeing governments and companies actually reducing emissions to address the root cause of climate change itself would go a long way to easing people's anxiety about the trajectory of our planet.

The point of this academic back-and-forth is no one can jettison themselves from global climate change, though some people will feel the heat more than others, and it's empathy for our fellow planeteers that moves us towards a better future for all.

Both commentaries have been published in Nature Climate Change.

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Memories are shadows of the past but also flashlights for the future.

Our recollections guide us through the world, tune our attention, and shape what we learn later in life. Human and animal studies have shown that memories can alter our perceptions of future events and the attention we give them. “We know that past experience changes stuff,” said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. “How exactly that happens isn’t always clear.”

A new study published in the journal Science Advances now offers part of the answer. Working with snails, researchers examined how established memories made the animals more likely to form new long-term memories of related future events that they might otherwise have ignored. The simple mechanism that they discovered did this by altering a snail’s perception of those events.

The researchers took the phenomenon of how past learning influences future learning “down to a single cell,” said David Glanzman, a cell biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not involved in the study. He called it an attractive example “of using a simple organism to try to get understanding of behavioral phenomena that are fairly complex.”

Although snails are fairly simple creatures, the new insight brings scientists a step closer to understanding the neural basis of long-term memory in higher-order animals like humans.

Though we often aren’t aware of the challenge, long-term memory formation is “an incredibly energetic process,” said Michael Crossley, a senior research fellow at the University of Sussex and the lead author of the new study. Such memories depend on our forging more durable synaptic connections between neurons, and brain cells need to recruit a lot of molecules to do that. To conserve resources, a brain must therefore be able to distinguish when it’s worth the cost to form a memory and when it’s not. That’s true whether it’s the brain of a human or the brain of a “little snail on a tight energetic budget,” he said.

On a recent video call, Crossley held out one such snail, a thumb-size Lymnaea mollusk with a brain he called “beautiful.” While a human brain has 86 billion neurons, the snail’s has only 20,000—but each of its neurons is 10 times larger than ours and much more accessible for study. Those giant neurons and their well-mapped brain circuitry have made the snails a favorite subject for neurobiology research.

Researchers at the University of Sussex traced a learned behavior in Lymnaea snails to a circuit of just four neurons in its brain.

Photograph: Michael Crossley; Kevin Staras/Quanta Magazine

The tiny foragers are also “remarkable learners” that can remember something after a single exposure to it, Crossley said. In the new study, the researchers peered deep into the snails’ brains to figure out what happened at the neurological level when they were acquiring memories.

Coaxing Memories

In their experiments, the researchers gave the snails two forms of training: strong and weak. During strong training, they first sprayed the snails with banana-flavored water, which the snails treated as neutral in its appeal: They would swallow some but then spit some of it out. Then the team gave the snails sugar, which they gobbled up avidly.

When they tested the snails as much as a day later, the snails showed that they had learned to associate the banana flavor with the sugar from that single experience. The snails seemed to perceive the flavor as more desirable: They were much more willing to swallow the water.

In contrast, the snails did not learn this positive association from a weak training session, in which a bath flavored with coconut was followed by a much more diluted sugar treat. The snails continued to both swallow and spit out the water.

So far, the experiment was essentially a snail version of Pavlov’s famous conditioning experiments in which dogs learned to drool when they heard the sound of a bell. But then the scientists looked at what happened when they gave the snails a strong training with banana flavoring followed hours later by a weak training with coconut flavoring. Suddenly the snails learned from the weak training, too.

When the researchers switched the order and did the weak training first, it again failed to impart a memory. The snails still formed a memory of the strong training, but that didn’t have a retroactive strengthening effect on the earlier experience. Swapping the flavors used in the strong and weak trainings also had no effect.

The scientists concluded that the strong training pushed the snails into a “learning-rich” period in which the threshold for memory formation was lower, enabling them to learn things they otherwise would not have (such as the weak-training association between a flavor and dilute sugar). Such a mechanism could help the brain direct resources toward learning at opportune times. Food could make the snails more alert to potential food sources nearby; brushes with danger could sharpen their sensitivity to threats.

A Lymnaea snail that associates flavored water with sugar rapidly opens and closes its mouth to swallow it (right).

A snail that has not learned that association keeps its mouth closed (left).Video: Michael Crossley, Kevin Staras/Quanta Magazine

However, the effect on the snails was fleeting. The learning-rich period persisted for only 30 minutes to four hours after the strong training. After that, the snails stopped forming long-term memories during the weak training session, and it wasn’t because they had forgotten their strong training—the memory of that persisted for months.

Having a critical window for enhanced learning makes sense because if the process didn’t turn off, “that could be detrimental to the animal,” Crossley said. Not only might the animal then invest too many resources into learning, but it could learn associations harmful to its survival.

Altered Perceptions

By probing with electrodes, the researchers found out what happens inside a snail’s brain when it forms long-term memories from the trainings. Two parallel tweaks in brain activity occur. The first encodes the memory itself. The second is “purely involved in altering the animal’s perception of other events,” Crossley said. It “changes the way that it views the world based on its past experiences.”

They also found that they could induce the same shift in the snails’ perception by blocking the effects of dopamine, the brain chemical produced by the neuron that activated the spitting behavior. In effect, that turned the neuron for spitting off and left the neuron for swallowing constantly on. The experience had the same carryover effect that strong training did in the prior experiments: Hours later, the snails formed a long-term memory of the weak training.

The researchers thoroughly and elegantly map out the process from “the behavior to the electrophysiological underpinnings of this interaction between past and new memories,” said Pedro Jacob, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study. “Having the knowledge of how mechanistically this happens is interesting because it’s probably conserved across species.”

Frank, however, isn’t fully convinced that the failure of the snails to ingest flavored water after the weak training means they carried no memory from it. You can have a memory but not act on it, he said, so making that distinction may require follow-up experiments.

The mechanisms behind learning and memory are surprisingly similar in mollusks and mammals such as humans, Glanzman said. As far as the authors know, this exact mechanism hasn’t been shown in humans, Crossley said. “It may be a broadly conserved feature and therefore one which deserves further attention,” he said.

It would be interesting to study whether a shift in perception could be made more permanent, Glanzman said. He suspects that this might be possible if the snails are given an aversive stimulus, something that makes them sick instead of something they like.

For now, Crossley and his team are curious about what happens in the brains of these snails when they perform multiple behaviors, not just opening or closing their mouths. “These are quite fascinating creatures,” Crossley said. “You don’t really expect these animals to be able to do these kinds of complex processes.”

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Extended periods of solitude can leave many of us climbing the walls for something to occupy our minds. Those who are creatively minded, however, relish the freedom to escape into their own mental universe.

US psychologists from the Universities of Arizona, Arkansas, and Minnesota, surveyed over 2,000 volunteers to better understand how creativity kicks in when we've got nothing better to do.

Individuals who were better at divergent thinking were less likely to experience boredom when left alone with their thoughts.

Though far from a surprising finding, it emphasizes differences between our minds in an unoccupied state, potentially impacting research that relies on comparing scans of brain activity while at rest.

It could also inform better ways to encourage people to appreciate their down time without feeling obligated to fill it with chores, work tasks, and odd jobs.

"Understanding why different people think the way they do may lead to promising interventions to improve health and well-being," says senior author Jessica Andrews-Hanna, a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Arizona.

A global pandemic taught us that long periods of isolation are a condition few of us enjoy. There are a number of ways people cope with the pressures that come with solitude, not all of which are healthy.

For some, social distancing was a precious opportunity to take more frequent trips inside their own minds, filling those long hours with imagined stories, wild speculation, and unfettered leaping between loosely connected thoughts.

"In today's busy and digitally connected society, time to be alone with one's thoughts without distraction may be becoming a rare commodity," says Andrews-Hanna.

To get a better sense of what this looks like in real time, the researchers invited 90 volunteers to sit alone in a room without digital distractions for a whole 10 minutes, and simply blurt out whatever popped into their unconstrained minds.

A divergent thinking test provided the researchers with data on each participant's tendency to explore unconventional solutions to open questions like "How would you make money with 100 rubber bands?"

Analyzing the chain of ideas as they were spoken aloud gave the researchers some insight into the processes that allowed some to think outside the box.

"While many participants had a tendency to jump between seemingly unrelated thoughts, creative individuals showed signs of thinking more associatively," says Quentin Raffaeli, a psychology grad student at the University of Arizona.

They also spoke more, reflecting the free-flow of ideas, and rated themselves as less bored for that alone time.

In a second study, the team assessed 2,612 participants' responses to an online survey concerning creativity. The self-reported evaluations supported the first study's findings – suggesting creative people were less bored during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Keeping in mind the subjectivity of self-identifying as creative, and challenges involved in making sense of the volunteers' musings on the economics of rubber band collections, it's clear we don't all occupy quiet time in the same way.

As quick as many of us might be to fill that 'dead time', losing focus and zoning out isn't as unproductive as we might imagine. Learning how to embrace our inner creativity and enjoy those moments could be beneficial.

"As we become more overworked, overscheduled and addicted to our digital devices, I think we need to do a better job in our homes, our workplaces and our schools to cultivate time to simply relax with our thoughts," says Andrews-Hanna.

This research was published in the Creativity Research Journal.

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In a video that’s gone viral on TikTok, Shawn Warner was selling his young adult mystery novel, “Leigh Howard and The Ghosts of Simmons-Pierce Manor,” at a grocery store on July 1 when someone decided to record and plug his book on the social media platform.

@internetfamouslol I was just shopping when i noticed this man trying to promote his new book. I honestly dont even read books nowadays. But something just told me to get a couple. #booksoftiktok #booktok #newauthor #showlovenothate #fyp #newbook #murdermystery #murdermysterybook #bookgiveaway ♬ original sound – Red

Warner can be seen describing his book in the clip as the TikTok user posted the line, “I just wanted to show a stranger some kindness.” The user later added, “I imagined all the times I worked so hard and never got any recognition.”

That video had amassed over 18 million views and 3 million likes as of Saturday.

There are thousands of comments expressing the commenters’ desire to grab a copy of the book.

“Awe I’m gonna have to get this book. That’s so awesome that you took the time to promote him!!!” one user wrote.

And that was all it took for the book to shoot to the top of Amazon and hold the current No. 1 position as of Sunday morning Eastern Time.

In a follow-up video, Warner expressed his appreciation for the whole event. “It was just an amazing thing that happened after that, and it’s all on you for your kindness and generosity,” Warner said. “Thank you.”

@shawnwwrites #stitch with @Red I set out to write books that are fun to read. What’s happened has been beyond my imagination. I’m so grateful. #booktok #booksoftiktok #viral #grateful ♬ original sound – Shawn

Warner jokingly said, “You’d think as a writer, I’d have words for it, but I don’t — just thank you.”

All it took was someone taking a few minutes out of a day to change Warner’s life and make a lifelong dream come true.

“This is like, textbook, how kindness works,” Warner said.

The author said an audiobook and a hardback version are both currently in the works.

The veteran explained that “the Lord helps those who help themselves” and that perseverance and hard work were key to his newfound success. He added that he would frequently pray to God for something like this to happen.

“A few minutes of kindness can really make a huge impact in somebody else life,” Warner said.

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Thirty years ago, kidney stones were considered a disease of the middle-aged white man. Now doctors are increasingly seeing a different kind of patient suffering from the extremely painful condition, especially during summer.

Kidney stones, hard deposits of minerals and salts that can get caught in the urinary tract, are now occurring in younger people, particularly among teenage girls, emerging data shows.

Experts aren’t sure why more children and teens are developing the condition, but they speculate that a combination of factors are to blame, including diets high in ultraprocessed foods, increased use of antibiotics early in life and climate change causing more cases of dehydration.

Doctors who spoke to NBC News said they see more kids with kidney stones in the summer than any other season.

Kidney stones is a metabolic disorder, also known as nephrolithiasis, that occurs when minerals such as calcium, oxalate and phosphorus accumulate in urine and form hard yellowish crystals as small as a grain of sand or as large as a golf ball in severe cases. Some stones make their way out the urinary tract with no issue, but others can get stuck, blocking the flow of urine and causing severe pain and bleeding.

In recent years, hospitals across the country have opened pediatric “stone clinics” to keep up with demand, where children can meet with urologists, nephrologists and nutritionists to get the care they need to treat and prevent future kidney stones.

Kidney stones in adults are linked to conditions such as metabolic syndrome, obesity, hypertension and diabetes.

"In children, we’re not seeing that," said Dr. Gregory Tasian, a pediatric urologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. "They’re otherwise healthy and simply come in with their first kidney stone for unclear reasons.”

Much of the nephrolithiasis research in children in the U.S. has been led by Tasian and his colleagues and is focused on finding the cause. "Clearly something has changed in our environment that is causing this rapid shift,” he said.

About 10% of people in the U.S. will have a kidney stone at some point in their lives, according to the National Kidney Foundation. Stones can be found in children as young as 5 years old.

Chloe Carroll, now 14, was only 8 years old when she found blood in her urine during a dance recital. Doctors diagnosed her first kidney stone — a surprise for a young athlete with no underlying medical conditions.

Less than a year later, she was struck with a second stone. At age 11, she developed another — all three stones required surgical removal.

“It’s still nerve-wracking to have to go through it again and again,” Carroll, now 14, said through tears as she recalled the fear of undergoing surgery. “But I know it’s a part of life, and I have to keep moving forward.”

How many children develop kidney stones?

Kidney stones aren't common in children, although the rate is unclear because most research has focused on adults.

One estimate comes from a 2016 study Tasian led that included nearly 153,000 adults and children in South Carolina who received emergency, inpatient or surgical care for nephrolithiasis.

The research, published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, found that the annual incidence of kidney stone disease rose 16% from 1997 to 2012, with 15- to 19-year-olds experiencing the greatest increase. Within this age group, kidney stone incidence was 52% higher among girls and women. The disease became more common in men beginning at age 25.

Overall, the risk of kidney stone disease doubled during childhood for boys and girls, while women saw a 45% increase of risk in their lifetime over the 16-year study period. Black adults and children in the study also developed kidney stones at greater rates than whites.

Similar trends have been reported in other studies, including one conducted in Olmsted County, Minnesota, which found that the kidney stone incidence rate among children ages 12-17 increased 6% a year from 1984 to 2008.

Is diet linked to kidney stones?

Experts believe that kids’ worsening diets may play a role.

High amounts of sodium from potato chips, sandwich meats, sports drinks and packaged meals can force extra minerals into the urine that can clump into kidney stones. It's especially likely if a child doesn’t drink enough water or drinks too many sweetened beverages high in fructose corn syrup.

It’s like trying to dissolve sugar into a nearly empty cup of coffee, said Dr. David Chu, a pediatric urologist at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago who conducts research with Tasian.

Hotter summers cause more kidney stones

The more hot and humid it is, the more you sweat and less you urinate, allowing minerals to bond in the kidneys and urinary tract. Children are especially vulnerable to heat.

Dr. Christina Carpenter, interim chief of pediatric urology at the New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, said she has already been treating more children with kidney stones in the summer.

Studies have found that the number of people seeking medical care for kidney stones increases as daily mean temperatures rise. Other research shows that the southeastern U.S. — known as the “kidney stone belt” — has as much as a 50% higher prevalence of kidney stone disease than the Northwest.

One 2008 study predicted the “belt” will inevitably expand upward, with the fraction of the U.S. population living in “high-risk zones” growing from 40% in 2000 to 70% by 2095.

An antibiotic link to kidney stones

Antibiotics may alter the gut microbiome in a way that favors kidney stone development, Tasian said.

In 2018, Tasian’s team found that people who took any of five commonly prescribed oral antibiotics were associated with a 1.3- to 2.3-fold increase in the odds of developing kidney stones. The risk decreased over time, but remained high for up to five years after taking the medication — and was greatest when given at earlier ages.

Because many antibiotics are prescribed unnecessarily in the U.S., Tasian called it a “leading theory” for the increase in children developing kidney stones.

The earlier a person develops kidney stones, the more time they have to develop a more severe form of the disease and long-term health issues associated with it, Tasian said. Some of the consequences include loss of kidney function, decreased bone mineral density that could lead to fractures, and higher risk of heart disease in adulthood.

Children who develop a stone have about a 50% chance of developing another one within five to seven years, according to the National Kidney Foundation.

Each stone that passes through the urinary tract increases their risk of developing a ureteral stricture, which is the narrowing of the tube that drains urine from the kidneys into the bladder, Carpenter said.

When this happens, kids may need to undergo invasive surgery to fix it.

The trend is also worrisome because there’s limited evidence about how to best treat children with kidney stone disease, experts say.

Symptoms of kidney stones

According to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease symptoms include:

•     Sharp pains around the back, lower abdomen and groin.

•     Pink, brown or red blood in the urine.

•     A constant need to urinate.

•     Cloudy or foul-smelling urine.

•     Irritability, especially in younger children.

Some children may not experience any symptoms. However, symptoms can sometimes be “more nonspecific” in kids, particularly younger ones, said Carpenter, so they might complain about stomach aches, rather than back pain or nausea, for example.

To avoid kidney stones

Drink plenty of water, especially during warmer months, experts say.

Not sure you’re drinking enough? Make sure your urine resembles a light lemonade color, Carpenter said. If it’s darker, hydrate more.

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The latest data show that between 2010 and 2023, identification as LGBTQ+ has almost tripled among the student body at Brown (from 14% in 2010 saying they were not heterosexual to 38% now). "The Herald’s Spring 2023 poll found that 38% of students do not identify as straight — over five times the national rate," The Brown Daily Herald reported. "Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ identification has increased across the nation, with especially sharp growth at Brown."

Other sexual orientations have seen massive increases. "Since Fall 2010, Brown’s LGBTQ+ population has expanded considerably. The gay or lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by 232%," the student newspaper reported. "Students identifying as other sexual orientations within the LGBTQ+ community have increased by 793%."

The idea of LGBT identification as a social contagion is one that continues to draw criticism among academics. For example, the head of an academic journal that published a paper that supported the theory of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria faced a cancellation attempt, along with the Northwestern University professor who wrote the paper.

Coincidentally, Dr. Lisa Littman, who popularized the idea of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, once taught at Brown University before being forced out over the controversy.

Dr. Littman argued that some girls who identified as transgender were doing so due to peer pressure from within their social circles. The 38% identification tracks with research from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which found similar levels among elite colleges.

The researcher on that project, Eric Kaufmann, noted in comments to the College Fix that his research has found sexual behavior has not kept pace with the identification.

In other words, bisexual identification outstrips bisexual sexual activity.

"If this was about people feeling able to come out, then we should have seen these two trends rise together," he told the College Fix. "What we find instead is that identity is rising much faster than behavior, indicating that people with occasional rather than sustained feelings of attraction to the opposite sex are increasingly identifying as LGBT."

Coming out as not heterosexual is trendy and wins social plaudits. But the notion that social pressure plays a role in LGBT identification is only controversial because the group is a sacred cow. However, the idea that peer pressure plays a role in our behaviors and lifestyles is acknowledged in other less controversial areas. It follows then that if teenagers can pressure each other to partake in some actions, they can encourage them to identify as LGBT as well.

For example, the American Lung Association says that marketing, pressure from friends, and seeing their parents smoke cigarettes can contribute to higher rates of smoking. "Peer relationships" are also linked to alcohol abuse and drug use. On the positive side, peer support groups can be helpful in weight loss and paying off debt.

Social pressure is encouraging at least some people to identify as gay, bisexual, or transgender and the Brown University survey is further evidence of that theory.

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The modeling tools that produced these estimates can provide an early warning of extreme heat events, even if they aren't as precise as monthly and yearly reports produced by leading agencies, say experts.

Who is producing the data?

The University of Maine has established an online tool called Climate Reanalyzer, which shows the curves of average global temperature for each day since 1979.

On Monday, July 3, this curve reached a high of 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 degrees Fahrenheit). That record was surpassed on Tuesday with 17.18C (62.92F), and again on Thursday with 17.23C (63.01F).

Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service, which has a similar tool, later confirmed the records of Monday, then Tuesday, albeit with slightly different figures – 16.88C (62.38F) and 17.03 (62.65F), respectively.

How do they arrive at their figures?

The estimates are produced through a combination of actual temperature measurements – from ground stations, satellites, and more – with computer modeling.

The two tools are conceptually similar but differ in their exact sources and methods, leading to the slightly different results.

The University of Maine relies on public model output data produced by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for forecasting.

NOAA, for its part, said that although it was seeing record warm surface temperatures being recorded at many locations across the globe, it could not "validate the methodology or conclusion of the University of Maine analysis."

NOAA instead vouches for its own monthly and annual temperature reports.

The fact that both results converge is reassuring, Zeke Hausfather, a climatologist at Berkeley Earth, told AFP.

The European tool is considered "very much state of the art," by the wider community, he added.

What are the limitations?

"These are estimates, unofficial records," University of Maine climate scientist Sean Birkel, who developed Climate Reanalyzer, told AFP.

"The greatest emphasis should be placed on an annual and monthly timescale," he added, with these reports subject to greater checks and verifications than is possible for daily records that rely on near real-time information.

On Thursday, Copernicus separately released its analysis for the past month, announcing it was the hottest June on record. A similar monthly report from NOAA is expected next week.

Surface air temperature anomaly for June 2023 relative to the June average for the period 1991-2020. (Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF)

These reports are based "solely on observations" from the land and sea, and gather far more data points, explained Hausfather.

In general, climate experts prefer to focus on long-term trends and changes, in order to eliminate variations simply related to weather.

What's more, the concept of a global average temperature is a bit abstract and not necessarily as meaningful for the general public.

"No one lives in the global average," said Hausfather.

What is the value of daily record estimates?

Despite these limitations, the value of daily records is "we can start to identify extreme events," which could have climate significance, said Birkel.

Though temperature at the daily timescale is weather, not climate, adding in 40 years' worth of data provides important climate context, he says.

"These provisional records provide another piece of evidence of the global climate pattern shifts due to climate change and the evolving El Nino episode," said Omar Baddour, chief of climate monitoring at the World Meteorological Organization.

"I think this is a sign that we're heading into a very hot period. June was the warmest June on record by a pretty big margin," said Hausfather. "At this point, it looks increasingly likely that 2023 as a whole will be the warmest year since records began in the mid-1800s."

© Agence France-Presse

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Texas and part of the south-west of the US are enduring a searing heatwave. At one point, more than 120 million Americans were under some form of heat advisory, the US National Weather Service said. That is more than one in three of the total population.

In the UK, the June heat didn't just break all-time records, it smashed them. It was 0.9C hotter than the previous record, set back in 1940. That is a huge margin.

There is a similar story of unprecedented hot weather in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

No surprise, then, that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather forecasts said that globally, June was the hottest on record.

And the heat has not eased. The three hottest days ever recorded were in the past week, according to the EU climate and weather service, Copernicus.

The average world temperature hit 16.89C on Monday 3 July and topped 17C for the first time on 4 July, with an average global temperature of 17.04C.

Provisional figures suggest that was exceeded on 5 July when temperatures reached 17.05C.

These highs are in line with what climate models predicted, says Prof Richard Betts, climate scientist at the Met Office and University of Exeter.

"We should not be at all surprised with the high global temperatures," he says. "This is all a stark reminder of what we've known for a long time, and we will see ever more extremes until we stop building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

When we think about how hot it is, we tend to think about the air temperature, because that's what we experience in our daily lives.

But most of the heat stored near the surface of the Earth is not in the atmosphere, but in the oceans. And we've been seeing some record ocean temperatures this spring and summer.

The North Atlantic, for example, is currently experiencing the highest surface water temperatures ever recorded.

That marine heatwave has been particularly pronounced around the coasts of the UK, where some areas have experienced temperatures as much as 5C above what you would normally expect for this time of year.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has labelled it a Category 4 heatwave. The designation is rarely used outside of the tropics and denotes "extreme" heat.

"Such anomalous temperatures in this part of the North Atlantic are unheard of," says Daniela Schmidt, a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

At the same time, an El Niño is developing in the tropical Pacific.

El Niño is a recurring weather pattern caused when warm waters rise to the surface off the coast of South America and spread across the ocean.

With both the Atlantic and the Pacific experiencing heatwaves, it is perhaps not surprising that global sea surface temperatures for both April and May were the highest ever recorded in Met Office data that goes all the way back to 1850.

If the seas are warmer than usual, you can expect higher air temperatures too, says Tim Lenton, professor of climate change at Exeter University.

Most of the extra heat trapped by the build-up of greenhouse gases has gone into warming the surface ocean, he explains. That extra heat tends to get mixed downwards towards the deeper ocean, but movements in oceans currents - like El Niño - can bring it back to the surface.

"When that happens, a lot of that heat gets released into the atmosphere," says Prof Lenton, "driving up air temperatures."

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t's easy to think of this exceptionally hot weather as unusual, but the depressing truth is that climate change means it is now normal to experience record-breaking temperatures.

Greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase year on year. The rate of growth has slowed slightly, but energy-related CO2 emissions were still up almost 1% last year, according to the International Energy Agency, a global energy watchdog.

And the higher the global temperature, the higher the risk of heatwaves, says Friederike Otto, a climatologist at the Grantham Institute of Climate Change at Imperial College London.

"These heatwaves are not only more frequent, but also hotter and longer than they would have been without global warming," she says.

Experts are already predicting that the developing El Niño is likely to make 2023 the world's hottest year.

They fear it is likely to temporarily push the world past a key 1.5C warming milestone.

And that is just the start. Unless we make dramatic reductions to greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures will continue to rise.

The Met Office said this week that record June temperatures this year were made twice as likely because of man-made climate change.

These rising temperatures are already driving fundamental and almost certainly irreversible changes in ecosystems across the world.

The record June temperatures in the UK helped cause unprecedented deaths of fish in rivers and canals, for example.

We cannot know what impact the current marine heatwave will have on the UK, cautions Prof Schmidt of the University of Bristol, because we have never seen one this intense before.

"In other regions, around Australia, in the Mediterranean, entire ecosystems changed, kelp forests disappeared, and seabirds and whales starved," she says.

The world is effectively in a race.

It is clear we are speeding towards an ever hotter and more chaotic climate future, but we do have the technologies and tools to cut our emissions.

The question now is whether we can do so rapidly enough to slow the climate juggernaut and keep the impacts of global warming within manageable boundaries.

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Monday, July 10

The first launch on Monday is a Falcon 9 carrying 22 Starlink mini satellites from Cape Canaveral. The mission is due to launch at 12:36 a.m. UTC and will be streamed on SpaceX’s website. The mission was delayed from July 9.

Wednesday, July 12

The second launch this week comes from China’s Landspace which will be launching the Zhuque ZQ-2 rocket on its second flight. The launch will take place at an unspecified time from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre.

In this launch, the first stage will be expendable but the company hopes to be able to make it before a vertical landing in the future so that it can be reused, similar to what SpaceX has achieved.

Thursday, July 13

At 4:35 a.m. UTC on Thursday, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying a batch of Starlink satellites into orbit. This group is known as Starlink Group 5-15 and can be found on astronomy apps with this label.

The first stage of the rocket has flown before in a previous launch. If you’re interested in tuning in, the event will be streamed on the SpaceX website.

Friday, July 14

We’ve got two launches on Friday, the first is the Indian space agency’s LVM3 rocket carrying the Chandrayaan 3 lunar lander to the moon. The lander is a replacement for the previous Chandrayaan 2 lunar lander and consists of a Lander module (LM), Propulsion module (PM), and a Rover which will demonstrate technologies for use in interplanetary missions.

The mission will take off from Sriharikota in India at 9:05 a.m. It’s not clear if or where the launch will be streamed live but the ISRO website or YouTube would be good places to look if you’re interested.

Finally, Rocket Lab will send up one of its Electron rockets carrying four Starling Satellites for NASA, LEO 3 for Canadian comms company Telesat, and two CubeSats for Spire Global.

The mission is due for launch at 8:23 p.m. UTC and the event will be live-streamed on Rocket Lab’s website.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was an Ariane 5 carrying the Heinrich Hertz and Syracuse 4B satellites. Sadly, this is the final flight of the Ariane 5 rocket, it’ll be replaced by Ariane 6.

The second and final launch of the week was a Falcon 9 from SpaceX carrying 48 Starlink satellites. The first stage of the Falcon 9 also landed safely.

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

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Observations from both satellites and the Earth’s surface are indisputable — the planet has warmed rapidly over the past 44 years. As far back as 1850, data from weather stations all over the globe make clear the Earth’s average temperature has been rising.

In recent days, as the Earth has reached its highest average temperatures in recorded history, scientists have made a bolder claim: It may well be warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years.

Tracing climatic fluctuations back centuries and millennia is less simple and precise than checking records from satellites or thermometers. It involves poring through everything from ancient diaries to lake bed sediments to tree trunk rings.

But the observations are enough to make paleoclimatologists, who study the Earth’s climate history, confident that the current decade of warming is exceptional relative to any period since before the last ice age, about 125,000 years ago.

Our understanding of conditions so long ago is far less detailed than modern climate data, meaning it’s impossible to prove how hot it might have gotten on any given day so many thousands of years ago. Still, the Earth history gleaned from fossils and ice cores shows the recent heat would have been all but impossible over most of those millennia.

“There’s no way to drop one hot day into the middle of the ice age,” Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University, said.

Temperature reconstruction dating back more than 2,000 years. (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

If climate records are like a cassette tape, the tape gets fuzzier and fuzzier the older they get, Peter Thorne, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland, explained. But even the oldest tapes make a sound.

Records from the most recent decades are, of course, the most detailed. Data from the 1800s is slightly less rich, and slightly less precise, but still thorough. For a period going back about 2,000 years, scientists and historians have used artifacts and geologic observations to piece together climate patterns and extreme events on a scale from decades to single years.

Any earlier, data exists on scales averaged across decades to centuries. For example, a fossil of a fern found beneath a glacier tells scientists that conditions there were once much warmer. They can’t pinpoint the year the fern became trapped in sediment, but they can get a sense of how long ago climate patterns were such that a fern could grow in a given spot.

Measuring up a warm spell 6,000 years ago

If any a single day in the past 100,000 or 125,000 years could have been as hot as the Earth this week, scientists said it could only have occurred about 6,000 years ago. At that time, the planet had warmed with the end of the last ice age, and a period of global cooling began that would continue until the Industrial Revolution.

Scientists are confident that, apart from the global warming of recent decades, it was Earth’s warmest period in the past 100,000 years. They estimate that temperatures averaged somewhere between 0.2 degrees Celsius and 1 degree Celsius (0.36 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than they were from 1850-1900.

In comparison, during a record-warm June last month, global temperatures averaged 1.36 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than 1850-1900, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

During the stretch 6,000 years ago, the warmth was largely the result of fluctuations in Earth’s orbit, which is elliptical rather than circular. While nowadays Earth gets closest to the sun in early January each year, at that time it happened around this time of year, during the Northern Hemisphere summer. That had an overall planetary warming effect because the Northern Hemisphere contains more land than the Southern Hemisphere, and land heats up quicker than oceans.

It’s possible that, even though average temperatures were probably similar to current conditions, day-to-day extremes could have been greater because the planet was so much closer to the sun during the Northern Hemisphere summer, Thorne said. That makes some paleoclimatologists reluctant to say for sure that this week produced the hottest single days in more than 100,000 years.

That conclusion is “certainly plausible,” said Michael Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania known as a pioneer in studying historical climate data. But technically, without 120,000 years of daily temperature data, it becomes “a plausibility argument, rather than a definitive statement,” Mann wrote in an email.

Tree rings from centuries past may help reveal a warming planet’s future (Cassidy Araiza for The Washington Post/FTWP)

Unlike any previous warm period, this one was caused by people

That is not to say the current heat isn’t extreme.

“I’m pretty damn certain it’s the warmest day in the last 2,023 years,” said Thorne, who was a coordinating lead author of a chapter exploring long-term changes to Earth’s climate in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment.

That assessment states with “medium confidence” that temperatures from 2011-2020 exceed those of any multi-century period of warmth over the past 125,000 years.

Further, there is no evidence anywhere in scientists’ understanding of Earth’s history of warming that occurred nearly as rapidly as the ongoing spike in temperatures, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gases.

If a hotter day happened on Earth anytime in the past, Alley said, it was the result of natural processes.

“The current rise is not natural, but caused by us,” he said.

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Bubba Nulisch was hospitalized with a bacterial infection and put into an induced coma on April 18th.

After waking from his coma three weeks later he was desperate to see his four-year-old dog Bullet.

However, while still in the hospital, Bubba received a call to tell him his beloved pooch had gone missing from his home in Grand Prairie, Texas.

On the suggestion of some of the hospital nurses, he immediately took to Facebook and asked for help in lost pet groups in the hope someone had spotted Bullet in the area.

He had adopted Bullet after being forced to retire from his truck driving job for medical reasons in October 2015 and says the dog pulled him out of a “deep depression.”

As it happened, someone had seen him—43-year-old Kim Joppie who runs a dog rescue in Dallas. Bullet had made it to Joppie’s rescue center on June 4th, and after she learned who he belonged to, she stepped up to make sure he was back at Bubba’s side as fast as possible.

Neutered and microchipped, Joppie drove the dog out to Bubba and was delighted with what happened after she arrived.

“When they were reunited, I can’t describe the pure emotion that came from him,” said Kim. “They were so bonded. It was so beautiful, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Bubba adopted Bullet after some friends’ dog had a litter of puppies.

“The people I was staying with at the time had a dog who had babies. One of them wouldn’t leave my side ever,” said Bubba. “I don’t know why but he started hanging out with me, so I adopted him.”

“He was my reason to keep on going. He really helped me through emotionally and brought me so much happiness and joy,” he said. “Him being gone was the hardest part of waking up.”

Bubba said that he and Bullet are now back at home safely and are continuing to enjoy watching their favorite TV shows together.

“Kim is an angel. I’m so thankful to her for bringing him back to me. I’ll never forget what she’s done.”

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Also:  His dog was gone when he awoke from a coma. A stranger helped reunite them.

Mosier had has mind set on bragging after experiencing what Hayden was prepared to do to help him out of even the most innocuous of jams.

Mosier had just tried to pay with a card, but the charge of $8,00 was declined. Before the customer even knew what was happening, Hayden had whipped out his own debit card to pay the bill, saying “I got you, don’t worry about it.”

“I said no no, just void it, please,” Mosier recounted on his Facebook page. “[Hayden] said, ‘No sir, I got it.’ The only cash I had was 4 one dollar bills, I made him take the 4 bucks and told him I would be back.”

Well, Hayden wasn’t backing down. He wanted to pay something forward, and ended up having the final word when he left a surprise for Mosier in his meal bag.

Another McDonald’s worker paying it forward was recorded at a store in Tile Hill, in the UK, where a drive-through worker named Enya who was making around $9.24 per hour paid for the meal of a customer after she heard him call his mom to ask if she wanted anything.

Josh Henry was having a “depressing day” when he arrived at the McDonald’s, and said Enya’s random act of kindness cheered him up.

“I’m at a high risk of redundancy, [but] I will pay this kind act forward tomorrow for sure.”

A girl called “Enya” who works at Tile Hill @McDonaldsUK just paid for my meal as her act of kindness for the day. Proper cheered me up after having a depressing day with the fact I’m at high risk of redundancy. I will pay this kind act forward tomorrow for sure. ❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/8puiCUAkKy

    — Absolute Fitness (@Josh_henry_1) September 22, 2020

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That’s when ferry terminal worker William Patterson invited all ten of them to stay at his house for the night.

It was in the early evening that 79-year-old Kip Goodwin and his wife from Hawaii had finished calling every hotel and Airbnb in the Olympic Peninsula’s Port Townsend—they were all fully booked for the summer holiday season.

Neither had they luck at the YMCA or Red Cross—even the campgrounds were unavailable. Fearfully looking at each other amid the sound of howling wind, Patterson interrupted their worrying to tell them they would all be staying with him and his wife Arianna.

Nestled among the pines on the Admiralty Inlet, Port Townsend is serviced by the United States’ largest ferry network, but the Port Townsend-to-Coupeville route, which Goodwin and the others were hoping to take after a day trip to Port Townsend and Whidbey Island, was canceled after winds picked up and the ferries had to remain tied to their moorings.

All three round trips were canceled, starting at 6:45 pm and on to 9:00 pm.

Arianna Patterson joked with the Seattle Times that her husband always threatened he’d bring a “straggler” home one day. William called and asked if they could make space for the Goodwins.

“I said, ‘We have enough space for two, no big deal,’” Arianna said. “Then he called back and said, ‘We have eight or nine other people.’ I said, oh.”

Like the Goodwins, most of the passengers were over 60 years of age, so the Pattersons were just happy they could get the visitors out of the weather. At the home, there was space on the couch and an extra bed, but pretty quickly people were on the floor, borrowing blankets that their hosts had from their time welcoming foster kids.

Early the next morning, William went out to the cafe he runs along with his work at the ferry terminal to make pastries and coffee for them all.

“It was unbelievable,” said Fred Dente, 79, who lives in Langley and was visiting with his wife and their two friends from Hawaii. “It was the way humans should treat humans. In this day and age, it was exceptional.”

That morning was crisp and clear, and at 7:00 am the ferries set sail.

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Google has approached the Supreme Court of India alleging that the Competition Commission of India (CCI) told the company to make changes to its business model to protect Amazon. To this effect, Google has asked the Supreme Court to have the CCI's order quashed as the company believes that the regulator acted in bad faith.

According to Reuters, Amazon had reached out to the CCI earlier claiming that Google's gatekeeping prevented the company from developing Fire OS, an Android fork for Amazon devices. In a filing submitted to the court, Google argued that the CCI took Amazon's word and handed down a fine to Google without reviewing the facts:

    Globally, FireOS failed commercially due to poor user experience. In India, the Fire Phone was not even launched.

    Thus, the Commission called Amazon’s lack of attempt to compete in India a failure and attributed it to Google’s agreements.

The CCI had earlier reached a conclusion that Google's restrictions had "reduced the ability and incentive of device manufacturers to develop and sell" Android folks which was not in line with the consumer's interest. Google is currently arguing that it should not be required to pay the penalty as it did not abuse its market position, while Amazon noted that it took "substantial resources" and man hours to create the Fire OS.

A lower court had earlier ruled out against Google noting that the CCI was within its rights to fine Google for anti-competitive practices. However, Google has challenged the decision and plans to fight it out in the Supreme Court. The case is expected to be heard in the coming days.

Last October, the CCI had fined Google to the tune of $113 million for not allowing third-party developers to use an alternative payment processing system. This led Google to make changes to its business model as well as introduce User Choice Billing (UCB) system. Unfortunately for Google, earlier this year, CCI opened up an inquiry into Google for abusing the UCB system, after several companies lodged complaints with the regulators.

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In May, Micron Technologies, the Idaho chipmaker, suffered a serious blow as part of the U.S.-China technology war. The Chinese government barred companies that handle crucial information from buying Micron’s chips, saying the company had failed a cybersecurity review.

Micron said the change could destroy roughly an eighth of its global revenue. Yet in June, the chipmaker announced that it would increase its investments in China — adding $600 million to expand a chip packaging facility in the Chinese city of Xian.

“This investment project demonstrates Micron’s unwavering commitment to its China business and team,” an announcement posted on the company’s Chinese social media account said.

Global semiconductor companies are finding themselves in an extremely tricky position as they try to straddle a growing rift between the United States and China. The semiconductor industry has become ground zero for the technology rivalry between Washington and Beijing, with new restrictions and punitive measures imposed by both sides.

U.S. officials say American products have fed into Chinese military and surveillance programs that run counter to the national security interest of the United States. They have imposed increasingly tough restrictions on the kind of chips and chip-making equipment that can be sent to China, and are offering new incentives, including grants and tax credits, for chipmakers who choose to build new operations in the United States.

But factories can take years to construct, and corporate ties between the countries remain strong. China is a major market for chips, since it is home to many factories that make chip-rich products, including smartphones, dishwashers, cars and computers, that are both exported around the world and purchased by consumers in China.

Overall, China accounts for roughly a third of global semiconductor sales. But for some chipmakers, the country accounts for 60 percent or 70 percent of their revenue. Even when chips are manufactured in the United States, they are often sent to China for assembly and testing. We can’t just flip a switch and say all of sudden you have to take everything out of China,” said Emily S. Weinstein, a research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

The industry’s reliance on China highlights how a close — but extremely contentious — economic relationship between Washington and Beijing is posing challenges for both sides.

Those tensions were reflected during Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen’s visit to Beijing this week, where she tried to walk a fine line by faulting some of China’s practices while insisting the United States was not looking to sever ties with the country.

Ms. Yellen criticized punitive measures China has recently taken against foreign firms, including limiting the export of some minerals used in chip making, and suggested that such actions were why the Biden administration was trying to make U.S. manufacturers less reliant on China. But she also affirmed the U.S.-China relationship as strategic and important.

“I have made clear that the United States does not seek a wholesale separation of our economies,” Ms. Yellen said during a roundtable with U.S. companies operating in China. “We seek to diversify, not to decouple. A decoupling of the world’s two largest economies would be destabilizing for the global economy, and it would be virtually impossible to undertake.”

The Biden administration is poised to begin investing heavily in American semiconductor manufacturing to lure factories out of China. Later this year, the Commerce Department is expected to begin handing out funds to help companies build U.S. chip facilities. That money will come with strings: Firms that take funding must refrain from expanding high-tech manufacturing facilities in China.

The administration is also weighing further curbs on the chips that can be sent to China, as part of a push to expand and finalize sweeping restrictions it issued last October.

These measures could include potential limits on sales to China of advanced chips used for artificial intelligence, new restrictions for Chinese companies’ access to U.S. cloud computing services, and restrictions on U.S. venture capital investments in the Chinese chip sector, according to people familiar with the plans.

The administration has also been considering halting the licenses it has extended to some U.S. chipmakers that have allowed them to continue selling products to Huawei, the Chinese telecom firm.

Japan and the Netherlands, which are home to companies that make advanced chip manufacturing equipment, have also put new restrictions on their sales to China, in part because of urging from the United States.

China has issued restrictions of its own, including new export controls on minerals used in chip manufacturing.

Amid tighter regulations and new incentive programs from the United States and Europe, global chip companies are increasingly looking outside China as they choose the locations for their next major investments. But these facilities will likely take years to construct, meaning any changes to the global semiconductor market will unfold gradually.

John Neuffer, the president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents the chip industry, said in a statement that the ongoing escalation of controls posed a significant risk to the global competitiveness of the U.S. industry.

“China is the world’s largest market for semiconductors, and our companies simply need to do business there to continue to grow, innovate and stay ahead of global competitors,” he said. “We urge solutions that protect national security, avoid inadvertent and lasting damage to the chip industry, and avert future escalations.”

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India is preparing to launch a spacecraft carrying a lander to the Moon on 14 July. If the mission is successful, India will become only the fourth country ever to make a controlled lunar landing, after the United States, the former Soviet Union and China. The 6-billion-rupee (US$73-million) mission, called Chandrayaan-3, is the second attempt by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to land a craft safely on the Moon.

Chandrayaan-3 will send a lander and rover from the spaceport of Sriharikota, off India’s east coast, to a site near the Moon’s south pole. After the craft lands, scientists at ISRO plan to deploy the rover to study the Moon’s properties. If successful, the mission will be first to land in the vicinity of the south pole; previous Moon missions have landed at lower latitudes.

ISRO says that the lunar south pole is of special interest because parts of it remain permanently in shadow, raising the possibility of sampling Moon ice for the first time. Moreover, the large craters near the lunar south pole might contain clues to the composition of the early Solar System.

“The south pole region has very different geology from the region around the [US] Apollo missions, so Chandrayaan-3 will provide a close-up view of an entirely new region of the Moon,” says planetary geochemist Marc Norman at the Australian National University in Canberra.

A successful landing could also be an important step towards future Indian Moon missions and is seen as a demonstration of India’s growing geopolitical ambitions.

India’s Moon missions

Chandrayaan-3 follows the successful lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008, and the partially successful Chandrayaan-2, in 2019. The second mission successfully launched a lunar orbiter with eight functioning instruments, but the lander carrying the rover crashed into the Moon during the final moments of its descent in September 2019.

ISRO chairman Sreedhara Somanath said recently that the crash was due to a software error.

India’s third Moon mission will focus on the Moon landing. A three-stage rocket will place Chandrayaan-3 into an elliptical parking orbit of approximately 170 kilometres by 36,500 km. A two-tonne propulsion module will then bring the lander–rover complex into a circular orbit at about 100 km from the Moon’s surface. The 1.75-tonne lander, named Vikram, contains a 26-kilogram, six-wheeled robotic rover called Pragyan that is designed to ramble around the Moon for the equivalent of about 14 days on Earth.

ISRO engineers and scientists say they have made changes to the software and hardware of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, especially for the lander thrusters, in the wake of the problems with Chandrayaan-2. ISRO has developed improved soft-landing sequences and the lander has four thruster engines instead of five, sturdier legs and larger solar panels, and will carry more fuel.

ISRO has not publicly released a report analysing the failure of Chandrayaan-2. But a retired ISRO engineer has said that the cause was insufficient ‘throttling’ — gradual reduction in speed — by the engines, a crucial requirement during lunar descent.

Moon science

The propulsion module will serve as a communications relay satellite, and the orbiter from Chandrayaan-2 will be used as a backup relay. The propulsion module has one instrument, the Spectro-polarimetry of HAbitable Planet Earth (SHAPE), to gather data on the polarization of light reflected by Earth so that researchers can look for other planets with similar signatures.

The lander will be equipped with instruments that will measure the density of ions and electrons near the surface of the Moon and how this changes over time; measure the temperature of the Moon’s surface; scan for moonquakes; and investigate the dynamics of the Moon system.

Similar measurements were made by the US Apollo and Chinese Chang’e missions when they landed nearer the Moon’s equator, but this will be the first analysis of the environment at one of the poles. Thermal conductivity in particular depends on the grain size and packing of regolith — the surface layer of loose rubble — and so will be useful for characterizing the landing site, Norman says. Such data cannot be obtained from orbit. “And any time you study a new area, there is always the possibility of discovering something unexpected,” he says.

Although the science goals might be relatively modest, “The mission is seen as a critical step toward future operations on the lunar surface, both manned and robotic,” says Tomas Hrozensky at the European Space Policy Institute in Vienna. He says Chandrayaan-3 will help to achieve the goal of establishing a long-term presence of humans on the Moon and other planets. “Recent examples, with a few failures, suggest that landing and a long-term presence on the Moon remain an immense challenge.”

If successful, India’s Moon landing will have “important technological and geopolitical dimensions, arguably without a dramatic impact on foundational scientific knowledge,” says Hrozensky.

“Landing on the Moon continues to be a highly valued political target for some nations.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02217-0

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Sometimes you can feel the future’s shadow looming over the present—formless, cold, Lovecraftian. So it was with the BlackBerry. Its capacity to inject digital events into the ordinary world even when they weren’t wanted inaugurated the smartphone age: one of constant online life everywhere. But it wasn’t like that yet. Back then mostly executives had the new device, and government officials, and people who thought they were important. (I was the last kind; I made software.) My co-workers and especially my wife were repulsed by the “CrackBerry,” and my compulsive grasping at it, like Gollum with his ring.

Over the years that followed, I kept clicking on my keyboard phones until eventually the iPhone replaced them. I have memories of using a Palm Treo on the train and my BlackBerry at lunch through most of the 2000s. But I can’t remember how I’d spent my idle time in the years before, on the train or at lunch or at any other time of day when we found ourselves between things. Literally, what did we do? I cannot recall.

Some things are easy to reconstruct. Email came to you at your desk, which means you didn’t receive it while at lunch or once you’d left the office. MapQuest was around, but you had to print out directions before you went anywhere. Photography was less a part of daily life, absent social media on which to post. Some dumbphones had cameras, but they were terrible, and stand-alone digital cameras were still expensive and mostly used to generate images for printing.

Okay, fine, but how did people occupy the time, attention, and perceptual orientation that have now been overtaken by smartphone use?

Answering this question seems important, because smartphone use is supposedly deleterious. Extreme use is often blamed for contributing to anxiety, depression, and compulsivity—and almost everyone seems to use these devices to extremes. Smartphones are also said to disconnect us from the world and from one another. Instead of enjoying lunch or tourist attractions, people take photographs of them, frequently to secure approval from their peers, who are also using smartphones. The sociologist Sherry Turkle famously lamented how these devices encourage people to live “alone together.”

I asked some middle-aged friends to think back to life in the old days, when we still lived together together—and then to tell me what they remembered doing. “What the heck did I do?” one replied. Some fragments of childhood life could be recovered: shooting hoops in the driveway, or passing notes in class, or burning time hunting for friends to burn time with. But the nature of our idle life as adults evaded memory. Even surfing the early web, the precursor to today’s scrolling, was made tedious by slow connections. Other things took longer too: consulting a paper map before driving anywhere, finding and then conversing with a salesperson to select an appliance. Daily non-activities—waiting at the supermarket line, sitting in traffic, walking the dog—took place under different circumstances. Worse ones.

A spine-chilling revelation: We couldn’t remember what we did because there was nothing to remember having done. We did nothing, and it was horrible. Filling the nothingness with activity of any sort became a constant exercise. Talking on the phone offered one approach, however poor. Telephones were the only way to connect with your friends synchronously from afar. They worked astoundingly well, and except for the cost of tying up the line or getting a crick in your neck, local calls were free. Advice, ideas, and tips weren’t as accessible before the internet arrived and then matured, so you might phone a friend or a business for information, not just for chatter.

But telephonic banter back then was similar to smartphone social life today. Phone calls were just as mediated as text exchanges. People pursued them to get away from whoever else was in the house or the office, just like they do with text messaging today. A phone call filled the empty time, even if it also helped create a social bond. And the calls could also strain the very bonds they helped sustain, by setting them against the burden of paying for long distance, or the trick of reaching people at their homes, where their phones were wired to the wall. Old-fashioned telephones caused longing and deferral too.

Television was another way of killing time. We watched a lot of it. Game shows, daytime soaps, sitcoms, the evening news, MTV—television was just sort of on, sort of all the time. In homes, if people were there to watch them. But also in airports, doctors’ offices, and laundromats. Some train and bus stations had tiny, coin-operated televisions bolted to the arm rests of their seats, a reminder of the desperation people felt when confined.

And we scrolled for ambient information by flipping pages, in whatever newspapers, magazines, or catalogs happened to be nearby. Like smartphones do today, these offered ways to see something—anything—that we hadn’t seen before, while waiting for the next thing to happen. Periodicals were spread in waiting rooms, in airline seat-backs, on benches in the park. Free alt-weeklies and classified rags were godsends when no other options were on offer—during a long wait for a restaurant table, perhaps, or while stuck at the auto-repair shop. In the idle time we now spend on our phones, people used to read anything and everything they saw—junk mail, subway ads, the backs of cereal boxes, the story on the restaurant placemat, the labels on the condiments. In the beginning people sneered at social media: Who cares about whatever meaningless trifles you found around you? But previously, we cared desperately for exactly those things, absent an alternative.

I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you: waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you’d stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block. You’d pace, or sulk, or stew.

The despair that accompanied this dead time implied and almost required an existentialist orientation to life itself: absurd and pointless, a sea of doldrums that never washed up to shore. My generation’s penchant for malaise must be a direct result of being alone with ourselves so much, with so little reason. We’d read an oral-hygiene pamphlet or a shampoo bottle. We’d follow the smooth-spinning hands of the clock. Yes, sure, other and better and more useful acts were possible, but only if we knew in advance exactly how much time we had to kill, and where, and under which circumstances. But we never did know until it was too late.

Before smartphones, people didn’t invest their in-between time into forging social bonds or doing self-improvement. They mostly suffered through constant, endless boredom. So let us not lament or malign the time we waste on smartphones, at least not so much. It is bad to be seduced into argument or conspiracism, to shop or lust or doomscroll, to bring one’s job into the dentist’s chair or the living-room recliner. But it was also bad to suffer the terror of monotony. Now there is too much happening, but before, ugh, nothing ever happened.

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Addressing attendees at the annual meeting of the Daily Journal, the 99-year-old highlighted his own formative years during the 1930s. Munger recalled the profound challenges Americans faced during the Great Depression, expressing his surprise at the comparatively lower levels of happiness observed today.

Munger explained, "It's weird for somebody my age, because I was in the middle of the Great Depression when the hardship was unbelievable."

Studies prove Munger is right — Americans aren't as happy as they once were. The General Social Survey, which has been assessing American happiness levels since 1972, reveals a recent shift. Prior to the pandemic, more people reported being "very happy" than "not too happy." But in the latest survey, a record 24% expressed being "not too happy," while a record low of 19% claimed to be "very happy."

Munger also expressed concern about the role envy plays in people's lives today. He pointed out that before the 1800s, life was more challenging, lacking basic comforts and conveniences such as the printing press, air conditioning and modern medicine. Munger's comments highlight the significant progress made in recent centuries.

According to him, "It is the nature of our species that we look around us at other people and are envious of them if they have more than we do. That envy has always been a big problem."

Studies suggest that about 75% of individuals experience envy toward others each year, supporting Munger's observations about the prevalence of envy in today's world.

A study from the University of California, San Diego published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology reveals that younger adults experience more envy compared to older adults. The research shows that younger people are envious of looks and various other things, with both men and women more likely to envy peers of similar age.

The study surveyed over 900 people ages 18 to 80 and found that over three-fourths of participants reported experiencing envy in the past year. Envy declines with age, with around 80% of those younger than 30 feeling envious compared to 69% of people older than 50.

Munger acknowledged the persistence of discontent among many people, despite significant improvements in various aspects of life. He noted that even when things have improved by around 600%, there will always be people who possess more, fueling feelings of unhappiness and perceived mistreatment.

Healthcare & Investing

It’s no secret the world is becoming increasingly online. The pandemic has certainly contributed to the rise in social isolation. This, among many others, are likely contributing factor to decreased happiness around the globe. But this shift has also opened the door to a number of opportunities for individuals looking to increase their access to healthcare. For example, Amazon.com, Inc. recently rolled out their subscription product, Amazon Pharmacy and startups like iRemedy are helping to increase access to healthcare while decreasing costs. While it’s not a perfect solution, these will cut costs and decrease healthcare burdens on those affected.

This article Charlie Munger Says Hardships Faced In His Day Were 'Unbelievable,' But People Today Are Miserable, Despite Having it Easy — He Blames Envy originally appeared on Benzinga.com.

© 2023 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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