The UN secretary general has said that “climate change is out of control”, as an unofficial analysis of data showed that average world temperatures in the seven days to Wednesday were the hottest week on record.

“If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation, as the last two records in temperature demonstrates,” António Guterres said, referring to the world temperature records broken on Monday and Tuesday.

The average global air temperature was 17.18C (62.9F) on Tuesday, according to data collated by the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), surpassing the record 17.01C reached on Monday.

< View the graphic at the source page. >

For the seven-day period ending Wednesday, the daily average temperature was .04C (.08F) higher than any week in 44 years of record-keeping, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer data.

That metric showed that Earth’s average temperature on Wednesday remained at the record high of 17.18C.

Climate Reanalyzer uses data from the NCEP climate forecast system to provide a time series of daily mean two-metre air temperature, based on readings from surface, air balloon and satellite observations.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose figures are considered the gold standard in climate data, said on Thursday it could not validate the unofficial numbers.

It noted that the reanalyzer uses model output data, which it called “not suitable” as substitutes for actual temperatures and climate records. The NOAA monitors global temperatures and records on a monthly and an annual basis, not daily.

“We recognise that we are in a warm period due to climate change, and combined with El Niño and hot summer conditions, we’re seeing record warm surface temperatures being recorded at many locations across the globe,” the NOAA said.

Nevertheless, scientists agree they indicate climate change is reaching uncharted territory and that the increased heat from anthropogenic global heating combined with the return of El Niño would lead to more record-breaking temperatures.

The UN confirmed the return of El Niño, a sporadic weather pattern, on Tuesday. The last major El Niño was in 2016, which remains the hottest year on record.

“Chances are that the month of July will be the warmest ever, and with it the hottest month ever … ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian [interglacial period], which is indeed some 120,000 years ago,” Dr Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University, said.

Various parts of the world have been experiencing heatwaves and on Thursday the EU’s climate monitoring service said the world had experienced its hottest June on record last month.

The southern US has been sweltering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks, including on the national 4 July holiday on Tuesday. In parts of China, an enduring heatwave has continued, with temperatures reaching above 35C.

Overall, one of the largest contributors to this week’s heat records is an exceptionally mild winter in the Antarctic. Parts of the continent and nearby ocean were 10-20C (18-36F) higher than averages from 1979 to 2000.

“Temperatures have been unusual over the ocean and especially around the Antarctic this week, because wind fronts over the Southern Ocean are strong pushing warm air deeper south,” said Raghu Murtugudde, professor of atmospheric, oceanic and earth system science at the University of Maryland and visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.

Chari Vijayaraghavan, a polar explorer and educator who has visited the Arctic and Antarctic regularly for the past 10 years, said global warming is obvious at both poles and threatens the region’s wildlife as well as driving ice melt that raises sea levels.

“Warming climates might lead to increasing risks of diseases such as the avian flu spreading in the Antarctic that will have devastating consequences for penguins and other fauna in the region,” Vijayaraghavan said.

With Associated Press

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Canadian officials have warned that the country faces a “long, tough summer” of wildfires as the current season shatters previous records and forecasts predict even hotter temperatures to come.

Federal data showed that on Friday more than 9m hectares (22.2m acres) of the country had burned, shattering a 34-year record.

“This number is literally off the charts, with at least three more months left in the active wildfire season,” Michael Norton, director general of the Northern Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service, told reporters late on Thursday. “It’s no understatement to say that the 2023 fire season is and will continue to be record-breaking in a number of ways.”

Previously, the worst fire season on record was in 1989, when 7.8 million hectares burned.

More than 155,000 people have been forced from their homes, the highest figure in 40 years, with more than 4,500 evacuees across Canada – the majority of whom are First Nations.

Nearly 3,800 provincial firefighters are on the ground, with aid from the Canadian Armed Forces. But the unseasonably warm temperatures across the country–including in regions unaccustomed to out of control blazes– has also necessitated what officials called an “unprecedented level of international support”.

Nearly 1,800 personnel from 11 countries have arrived to help quell the blazes, with fire crews from South Korea recently landing. In recent days, Canada signed a wildfire assistance agreement with Portugal, similar to a deal struck with the US in late June. Since the fire season began, 3,258 firefighters from across the world have helped.

“The firefighting effort has now truly become a global effort,” said Norton.

Not only are this fires larger than usual, they are also abnormally numerous.

This season has seen 20% more fires than the decade average – and that number is expected to rise in the coming months, said Norton.

As of late Thursday there were 143 blazes still burning in Quebec and 109 in Alberta. 100 fires were still active British Columbia, including the Donnie Creek fire, which has grown to become the province’s largest ever fire at 571,000 hectares.

In recent days, many regions of the country had a glimpse of the intense heat that could arrive in the coming months, with warnings in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec. Earlier this week, Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec hit nearly 34C (93F) – hotter than Miami.

“Drought is a major contributing factor affecting parts of all provinces and territories, intensifying in some regions,” he said. “When coupled with forecasts for ongoing above normal temperatures across most of the country, it is anticipated that many parts of Canada will continue to see above normal fire activity.”

Officials say more than 17,000 pieces of equipment have moved between provinces and territories, to help fight fires but also to aid with airlifts of evacuees.

“While there is serious fire risk in several parts of the country, I want to assure Canadians that there are sufficient resources to respond and to keep Canadians safe,” the emergency preparedness minister, Bill Blair, told reporters.

But officials also cautioned that wildfire smoke, which has blanketed major Canadian and US cities, poses a signifiant health risk.

“It’s really the fine particles, the ones that are very small and not visible to the human eye that get deep into our lungs and bloodstream – those are the ones we’re most concerned with in terms of health risk,” Marie-Ève Héroux, manager of air quality assessment for Health Canada, told reporters. She said the smoke, which made Toronto’s air some of the worst in the world last week, is comprised of gases, particles and water vapour that can cause chest pains, coughs and shortness of breath.

Norton said that while fire suppression efforts typically cost $C1bn annually, this year will probably set a new record.

“The total cost of wildfires to the economy and society is a much bigger question,” he said.

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•     Layoffs, long hours, and stress have some executives turning to substances to cope, the survey said.

•     The study polled 501 tech executives at companies with at least 1,000 employees.

Many people go into tech wanting to work in a fast-paced, innovative field, and holding a senior position or C-suite title may seem like an enviable position.

But Silicon Valley and the tech industry has hit choppy waters recently, with a long list of layoffs and executives talking about battening down of the hatches amid concerns of an economic downturn.

Meanwhile, recent research suggests that many leaders working in tech are turning to alcohol and substances to cope with the high stress and uncertainty of their jobs.

All Points North, an addiction treatment center in Colorado, published a report examining the findings of a survey conducted by Censuswide among 501 tech executives working in firms with over 1,000 employees. The survey, titled "2023 Mental Health in Tech Report," was taken between April 27, 2023 and May 15, 2023. The results showed high rates of heavy alcohol use or alcohol use disorder, substance use and misuse, and poor mental health among tech executives.

Many tech leaders also reported being worried about the future of their careers — and whether or not they will have a job. Layoffs and the rise of artificial intelligence make some executives feel insecure in their positions, according to the survey. APN's report showed 77% of executives saying that layoffs have negatively impacted their mental health, and 74% worry that improvements in AI will render their positions obsolete.

Along with long-term fears of job loss, some tech executives reported struggling day to day. Long hours and high stress levels cause executives to turn to substance use. 45% of executives surveyed reported using painkillers like Codeine, Oxytocin, and Vicodin, according to the survey. The use of stimulants and sleeping pills is also common, at 34% and 35% respectively, according to the report's findings.

Many tech executives use painkillers, stimulants, sleeping pills, or prescription medication to cope with poor mental health, long work hours, and stress, according to a recent survey. Steven Tweedie/Business Insider © Steven Tweedie/Business Insider

Along with controlled substances, heavy alcohol use was reported by tech executives. Half of APN's respondents self-identified as heavy drinkers, or those that consume between three and seven alcoholic drinks a day. 51% of respondents report smoking cigarettes or nicotine vapes within the last three months.

During the pandemic, CEOs saw high turnover rates due to burnout, Insider reported in July 2022. During the first quarter of 2022, CEO turnover rose to 29%. This high rate has continued into 2023. According to APN's report, 1 in 3 C-suite level tech executives say they are looking for new jobs.

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Yes, Einstein wrote something along the lines of “time is an illusion.” But it’s not altogether clear what Einstein meant — and to understand what he might have been saying, we must dig into the circumstances that caused him to write it.

A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion

A close friend of Einstein’s, Michele Besso, passed away in 1955. Only a month before his own death, Einstein wrote to Besso’s grieving family.

His letter said, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Obviously, at the time of his writing Einstein had some profound thoughts about the nature of time.

Unfortunately for us, he did not further explain his thoughts in this letter; nor did he ever indicate in any of his previous work that he thought of the distinction between past, present and future (which is generally what we refer to as time) as an illusion.

Some physicists and philosophers have taken the statement at face value. Indeed, Einstein was not the first person to wonder if time is an illusion — and his own theory of special relativity may make the statement plausible.

Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity

One of the key aspects of relativity, for example, is that observers are never guaranteed to agree on what now is. This stands in stark contrast to the physics of Newton, and even everyday intuition.

Because we synchronize our clocks around the world, it’s easy to assume that this synchronicity extends throughout the universe. If you snap your fingers, then everyone throughout the universe should be able to agree on the instant that you snapped your fingers, right?

But relativity makes this false.

Different observers, depending on their speed, will disagree on what now is. And the fact that signals must travel no faster than the speed of light means that now only applies to observers close to one another.

If you snap your fingers, therefore, an astronaut on Mars won’t find out for about 3 minutes. Now means something different to Martians than it does to you.

What Is the Relativity of Simultaneity?

But as wonky as the concept of now becomes in relativity, some things — like causality — are preserved. All observers traveling slower or at the speed of light will always agree on the sequence of events, even if they disagree about the duration of time between those events.

So, even in relativity, causes always lead to effects. And the past always takes place before the present, which always takes place before the future. We won’t always agree on how quick that rate of progression is, but we’ll always agree on the order.

This “relativity of simultaneity” allows physicists to expand upon a philosophical notion.

Humans have an intuitive sense that the past already exists and is locked in place, inaccessible to us except through our memories, while we continually experience the present. Meanwhile, the future is also inaccessible and unknowable to us, until we get there and it becomes the present.

But perhaps that experience of time is just that — an experience. Perhaps the future is just as locked in place as the past, and we simply can’t access it for some psychological reason. Perhaps our consciousness demands a “flow” from past to present to future, when in reality there is no such strict direction.

What Is the Block Universe?

This concept, where all events that have occurred and have yet to occur already exist, is known as the block universe.

In it, all dimensions — the three of space and the one of time — exist as a single unit; we travel down the line of time, experiencing a flow to events that is not really there, creating a story from a sequence of events that was always going to happen anyway.

Perhaps this is what Einstein had in mind when he wrote a letter to his friend’s heartbroken family. From this viewpoint, the distinction between past and future is as arbitrary and simple as the distinction between up and down or left and right.

But even Einstein himself reflexively referred to time in his letter: “Now he has departed … ahead of me.”

Einstein may have believed in something like the block universe, but even the block universe doesn’t abolish time itself or call it an illusion.

Instead, it calls into question our subjective experience of the flow of time, something that is definitely up for philosophical debate.

For now, of course.

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The call comes as the researchers publish the results of their study into the after-school habits of 12-year-olds. Their research, "Watching the watchers: assessing the nature and extent of children's screen time using wearable cameras," published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, finds children are spending a third of their after-school time on screens, including more than half their time after 8 p.m.

Senior researcher Dr. Moira Smith from the University's Department of Public Health says this is considerably more than the current guidelines, which recommend less than two hours of screen time per day (outside school time) for school-aged children and adolescents.

The results are from the innovative Kids'Cam project, with the 108 children involved wearing cameras that captured images every seven seconds, offering a unique insight into their everyday lives in 2014 and 2015.

Children were mostly playing games and watching programs. For 10% of the time the children were using more than one screen.

Screen use harms children's health and well-being. "It is associated with obesity, poor mental well-being, poor sleep and mental functioning and lack of physical activity," Dr. Smith says. "It also affects children's ability to concentrate and regulate their behavior and emotions."

Screen use is now a regular part of children's everyday lives and is likely to have increased since the Kids'Cam data was collected.

"Screen use rose rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and children in 2023 are frequently spending time online, particularly on smartphones.

According to the latest media use survey, YouTube and Netflix are the most popular websites for watching programs, with one in three children under 14 using social media, most commonly TikTok, which is rated R13."

She says children are being exposed to ads for vaping, alcohol, gambling and junk food, and experiencing sexism, racism and bullying while online.

"Cyberbullying is particularly high among children in Aotearoa, with one in four parents reporting their child has been subjected to bullying while online."

Dr. Smith says current New Zealand legislation is outdated and fails to adequately deal with the online world children are being exposed to.

"While screen use has many benefits, children need to be protected from harm in this largely unregulated space."

She says the Government is to be applauded for proposing more regulation of social media in its recent consultation document from the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), which notes concern about children accessing inappropriate content while online.

The Otago researchers are currently studying the online worlds of children in Aotearoa using screen capture technology, with the results expected to be published soon.

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The tick has a lifespan of two to eight years and spends most of its time waiting. It waits to transform from larva to nymph after its first meal. It waits to become an adult after the second meal. The third meal is the last.

The tick larva is a tiny tick, not like elongated butterfly caterpillars, but as small as the smallest dot you can make with a pencil. As soon as it has eaten its fill, it falls to the ground. After a while it goes dormant to develop into a nymph.

The nymph goes through the same cycle: finds a meal, falls to the ground, hibernates and transforms into an adult.

Sucks blood while mating

Between meals, the tick waits to mate. The male tick waits for a potential mate in the fur of an animal. And while the female tick sucks blood, the male takes the opportunity to mate.

After mating, the female waits a few days before laying about 1,000 eggs. Then its life's task is done, and it dies. Now new ticks are on the way.

Every spring and summer these headlines appear in the newspapers. The tick has become bigger. It has become more dangerous. And now it's coming to get you.

Myths about ticks

UiA's associate professors Randi Eikeland and Vivian Kjelland are experienced tick researchers.

Eikeland is a doctor and neurologist and a specialist in tick-borne diseases. Her research is particularly concerned with how Lyme disease affects the nervous system.

Kjelland is a molecular biologist and tick researcher and has, among other things, studied which pathogens ticks carry.

The researchers say:

•     No, the tick hasn't gotten bigger.

•     No, it can't fly.

•     No, it can't jump. No, it won't come after you.

The tick researchers tell us there are things we should be aware of:

• Yes, ticks can carry bacteria and viruses that could cause serious illnesses.

• Yes, you have to grab around it and pull it out to get rid of it.

• No, it cannot be brushed away like a mosquito, ant or a fly.

• No, it cannot be washed off in the shower.

• No, it won't die and won't let go if you go swimming in the sea.

• No, it doesn't die after sucking blood, it falls to the ground and if it is not already an adult, it transforms into a nymph or an adult tick.

• Yes, it will survive in the washing machine if you wash your clothes at 40 degrees or less.

• Yes, the male also sucks blood, but less than the female, and it will roam around more on its host because it is looking for a female tick to mate with.

In forests and gardens

The tick lives in the forest. It likes moist deciduous woodland and tall grass, but also open grassland and heather.

You can easily find it in your garden too. There are a lot of ticks especially along the coast in Eastern Norway, Agder and Rogaland. Tick season is from April to September.

Pets may crawl into bushes and thickets and bring them home with them.

Headless spider that feeds on blood

The tick has no eyes or nose. It has a biting tool where other arachnids have a head.

Kjelland points out that it is not an insect but belongs to the spider family and is a parasite.

The tick feeds on the blood of mammals, birds and reptiles. It needs blood in its intestines to survive and grow.

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It's an essential act that requires no thought. But thinking about it can alter your physical and mental health.

That's because breathing isn't just about the lungs, said Daniel Craighead, an assistant research professor in the department of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder. It affects the nervous and cardiovascular systems and more. Changing how much we inhale affects more than just the amount of oxygen we get. "When we breathe, that actually impacts how much blood is ejected from our hearts."

Breathing happens regardless of whether we pay attention, said Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang, an integrative pulmonologist in private practice in Encinitas, California. "But what's a bit more miraculous about breathing is that, contrary to a lot of other bodily functions, we can also control our breathing."

To understand how that can be healthy, it helps to start with knowing how breathing both affects and is affected by the nervous system.

Breathing and heart rate are regulated by the same parts of the brain, and each "talks" to the other to work in sync. When we inhale, our lungs expand, and pressure on the heart and blood vessels changes. That stimulates sensory nerves that, in return, affect how hard we breathe.

When we encounter a threat—such as an attacking tiger or an angry boss—it triggers the "fight or flight" response. "Along with that comes the increase in heart rate, the increase in sweaty palms and the increase in muscle tension," said Liang, who also is a voluntary assistant professor at the University of California San Diego and a mindfulness teacher. We breathe faster, and blood rushes to the muscles as the body braces for action.

That's the work of the sympathetic nervous system.

Conversely, when we're relaxed, we breathe more slowly. Heart rate decreases, blood vessels dilate and more blood flows to the gut to help with digestion. This "rest and digest" response is managed by the parasympathetic nervous system.

Breathing is affected by these systems, but by consciously slowing our breathing we can manipulate them. Research suggests that controlled breathing can trigger the "rest and digest" response by stimulating the vagus nerve, which controls many involuntary functions, including heart rate.

If you take a slow, deep breath to calm down, that's actually working physiologically by affecting the nervous system, Craighead said. "It's not just all mental."

Craighead, a cardiovascular physiologist, led research demonstrating just how much a specific breathing activity can affect one important measure of health: blood pressure.

He and his team measured the effect of inspiratory muscle strength training, or IMST, which involves the use of a handheld device that makes it harder to inhale. In a group of healthy adults, those who practiced high-resistance IMST for 30 breaths a day for six weeks saw their systolic blood pressure—the first number in a reading—drop by 9 millimeters of mercury. A control group that had sham training with low breathing resistance saw no improvement, according to the results published in 2021 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Other research has shown that deep breathing can improve blood glucose in healthy people. Breathing exercises also have been shown to bolster mental health by lowering stress and reducing feelings of anxiety and depression. Just learning to manage stress has its own health benefits.

Controlled breathing is also a well-established tool for pain control, Liang said. Pain, for most people, is perceived as a threat. "It's something that stresses our body out," she said. Mindfulness and breathing have been shown to help decrease pain, she said, by calming the sympathetic nervous system and encouraging the parasympathetic.

There are limits to what controlled breathing can do, Liang said. For example, deep breathing may not provide as much relief for severe pain resulting from a traumatic chest injury or a blood clot in the lungs. And controlled breathing cannot cure severe depression or anxiety or treat serious psychological problems, although applying mindfulness and deep breathing may help with symptoms.

And, Craighead said, the type of breathing he studied can't replace a full workout. "I definitely wouldn't replace aerobic exercise with IMST," he said. "Aerobic exercise has lots of other health benefits that we haven't seen" in breathing research, such as helping to control weight and cholesterol levels.

But Craighead, a marathoner, has incorporated resisted breathing into his routine. Resistance is measured in centimeters of water; look for a device that provides at least 150, he said, but check with a doctor first.

Liang regularly recommends controlled breathing to her patients. Four well-known approaches, which she said are rooted in Indian traditions of pranayama, or yogic breathing, are:

4-7-8 breathing

Inhale through your nose for four counts, hold for seven counts, and exhale through your mouth for eight.

"This can be used by anyone who doesn't have chronic lung disease in circumstances of heightened stress, anxiety, or where you feel like you're not able to wind down at the end of your day or have some trouble falling asleep," Liang said. Making the exhale longer than the inhale helps to activate the vagus nerve and bring on the parasympathetic nervous system, she said.

Pursed-lip breathing

Inhale, then exhale through your mouth through pursed lips, as if you're blowing out birthday candles, two to four times longer than your inhale. This works for anyone who has trouble holding their breath, such as people with chronic lung disease.

Pursing your lips creates pressure that opens the airways a bit, Liang said, and the long exhale helps get rid of unexchanged gas in the lungs and makes room for more fresh air.

Box breathing

I

nhale through the nose for four counts, hold your breath for four more, exhale for four, then hold for four. "When you breath-hold, that increases your carbon dioxide level temporarily. And when you increase your carbon dioxide level in your bloodstream, that decreases your heart rate. And so it helps to bring on that parasympathetic physiology online as well."

Liang recommends box breathing for people who "need to remain focused and alert, yet calm at the same time. For instance, before taking a big test or before speaking to a large audience."

Diaphragmatic breathing

Place both hands on your abdomen, inhale through the nose, letting the abdomen balloon out, and exhale through your mouth. Liang said that the focus on the abdomen and hands makes this approach helpful for people who get anxious if they have to focus too much on their airflow.

Anyone with a medical condition related to the heart or lungs or who has a mental health condition should check with a health care professional before trying any method, Liang said.

"I don't recommend people to do these breathing practices more than three to five breath cycles at a time, especially if they're just starting out," she said. Beginners might find that exhaling too much carbon dioxide can make them dizzy. "So be cautious about the dosage."

But she also encouraged people to embrace the wonder that comes with the power of breath.

"The body works in a very miraculous way," Liang said. "And there's a lot of science behind it. And the way that we're wired, and the way that all of our organ systems are interconnected is pretty remarkable."

Copyright © 2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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Data analysed by a group of US scientists shows the global average temperature on Thursday was 17.23C.

It breaks the 17.01C record set on Monday, surpassed just a day later when the average temperature reached 17.18C.

The temperatures are being driven by human-induced climate change and the naturally-occurring weather pattern known as El Niño, scientists say.

The El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO as it is also called, is the most powerful fluctuation in the climate system anywhere on Earth. It happens every three to seven years, and in the warming phase, warmer waters come to the surface of the tropical Pacific and push heat into the atmosphere.

"Climate scientists aren't surprised about the global daily temperature record being broken, but we are very concerned," Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said.

It "should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks the world needs more oil and gas," she added.

Before this week, the last time the record was broken was in August 2016.

Experts warn that many societies have not yet adapted to more extreme heat and the impacts it has on people and the environment.

The temperature readings come from a tool called Climate Reanalyzer. Scientists at the University of Maine use a combination of readings from surface, air balloon and satellite observations as well as computer modelling to assess average global temperatures.

The readings are not an official government record, but they are closely watched as an indicator of how temperatures are fluctuating.

On Thursday the US weather service National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it could not confirm records that come partly from computer simulations, according to Associated Press.

"But we recognize that we are in a warm period due to climate change," NOAA said.

Scientists warn that it is uncommonly hot and it is likely the records will continue to be broken this summer.

"El Niño hasn't peaked yet and summer is still in full swing in the Northern Hemisphere, so it wouldn't be surprising if the daily temperature record is broken again and again in 2023," Dr Paulo Ceppi, lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said.

Higher global temperatures are likely to make heatwaves even hotter and wildfires more severe, he added.

Last month was the hottest June on record, the EU's climate monitoring service Copernicus said on Thursday.

In the UK, record-high June temperatures saw "unprecedented" fish deaths and threatened the survival of insects as plants they feed from wilted, warned environment groups.

A study by the UK Met Office concluded that climate change made the June heat more than twice as likely.

Scorching heat is continuing to hit parts of the world, with North Africa seeing temperatures of near 50C and parts of China suffering under 40C.

Southern Europe could see more than 60 days this summer when conditions are dangerous for humans, the European Environment Agency warned in June.

Higher-than-average heat also affects crops and raises the risk of wildfires.

Heat increases in seas have also been detected in recent weeks, including a marine heatwave in the UK and Ireland.

And Antarctic sea ice reached its lowest extent for June - 17% below average - since satellite observations began.

Governments globally are committed to reducing their carbon emissions to reach net zero - the point when humans will stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Global temperatures will only start to approximately stabilise once the world reaches net zero, Dr Ceppi explains.

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Australia’s purchase of nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement has been framed in terms of the jobs that would be created in submarine construction, rather than the security benefits that would flow to Australia from their deployment some decades hence.

This is a longstanding tradition. Because defense is an essential function of any national government, military spending has rarely — if ever — been subject to benefit-cost analysis. 

And in the absence of any specific rationale for particular defense expenditure projects, such as a current or imminent war, a variety of economic benefits have been cited as reasons for approving those projects.

Decision-making with respect to military expenditure should begin with a single central objective, that of national self-defense against invasion, with other possible uses of military force being regarded as peripheral.

In any such assessment, expenditure that significantly reduces the existential risk of invasion, air attack or naval blockade can be regarded as essential.

Any other use of military power needs to be assessed in terms of opportunity costs and benefits. That is, military spending should be compared to alternative public and private expenditures — ideally those with comparable benefits. 

For example, contributions to Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion could be compared to civilian forms of overseas aid. Such an assessment could include both direct benefits, such as protecting civilians from war and hunger, as well as global public goods, including upholding international law and reducing the instability associated with mass poverty.

Various claims are frequently made to present a strong case for military expenditure, but they are rarely subject to careful scrutiny. The Australian government’s assertion that the AUKUS nuclear submarine purchases are needed to protect vital international shipping routes, such as to Singapore or through the South China Sea, is one example of such a claim.

A Royal Australian Navy sailor working on an anti-aircraft gun aboard the HMAS Canberra. Photo: Screengrab / NTV

Generally, such shipping routes are convenient rather than vital. Except for trade with China itself, all shipping that currently flows through the South China Sea could take alternative roundabout routes if necessary. In the worst case, shipping from Europe to East and Southeast Asia could travel south of Australia.

This is not merely hypothetical. The Suez Canal was long regarded as a vital route, but when it was blocked shipping had to go around the Cape of Good Hope. The resulting cost increases were large relative to the shorter route, but tiny in relation to the national income of the countries involved in trade. Similar points can be made with even more force about problems such as piracy.

By contrast, a full-scale naval blockade — of the kind seen during the world wars aimed at starving the target nation into submission — does represent an existential risk. But the risk of such a blockade for Australia is negligible except in the event of a new world war, which would probably involve the use of nuclear weapons, against which no current defense is feasible.

Claims about the usefulness of military power to seize resources are obsolete, as observed by Norman Angell in his 1911 book, “The Great Illusion.” Though Angell’s arguments were ignored, the First World War proved his point in disastrous fashion for all of the major participants. A century of subsequent experience has yielded ample confirmation that war never yields net economic benefits.

This is particularly true of the oil, gas and fishery resources of the South China Sea, which have been the subject of disputes for decades. Despite regular saber-rattling and occasional low-level conflict, the actual conduct of the countries in the region reflects the fact that these resources are not worth fighting over.

The crucial issues for Australia arise in relation to expeditionary forces, typically deployed as part of operations undertaken by the United States. Before considering the possible benefits of such deployment, it is worth observing that outright failure – as seen in Afghanistan and Vietnam – has been the most common outcome and that successes, such as in Iraq and Syria, have been equivocal at best.

The number of expeditionary operations is large enough to consider benefits and costs. To evaluate the benefits, Australia’s relationships with regimes where expeditionary forces were defeated can be compared with those where forces were “successful” in military terms. It is hard to see a difference sufficient to justify the loss of lives and money.

The AUKUS nuclear submarine deal is making ripples across the Indo-Pacific. Image: US Embassy in China

On AUKUS, approaches to public investment, whether military or civil, based on counts of “jobs created” are rarely satisfactory. In most cases, the workers filling these jobs are diverted from other, higher-value activities, with no effect on the level of employment and unemployment. 

In this context, it is perhaps churlish to observe that the estimated cost of AU$18 million per job created by AUKUS is massively more than in a typical domestic boondoggle.

The real question yet to be answered about the AUKUS deal is how, if at all, the submarines that Australia is buying will protect us against the fortunately remote threat of foreign conquest.

John Quiggin is Australian Laureate Fellow at the School of Economics at the University of Queensland.

This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.

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Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of Einstein’s expanding universe.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant – and hence ancient – universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as ‘clocks’.

“Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower,” said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.

“If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second – but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.”

The research was published on July 3 in Nature Astronomy.

Professor Geraint Lewis in the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. Credit: The University of Sydney

 

Professor Lewis and his collaborator, Dr. Brendon Brewer from the University of Auckland, used observed data from nearly 200 quasars – hyperactive supermassive black holes at the centers of early galaxies – to analyze this time dilation.

“Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding,” Professor Lewis said.

“This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today.

“In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang.”

Previously, astronomers have confirmed this slow-motion universe back to about half the age of the universe using supernovae – massive exploding stars – as ‘standard clocks’. But while supernovae are exceedingly bright, they are difficult to observe at the immense distances needed to peer into the early universe.

By observing quasars, this time horizon has been rolled back to just a tenth the age of the universe, confirming that the universe appears to speed up as it ages.

Professor Lewis said: “Where supernovae act like a single flash of light, making them easier to study, quasars are more complex, like an ongoing firework display. 

“What we have done is unravel this firework display, showing that quasars, too, can be used as standard markers of time for the early universe.”

Professor Lewis worked with astro-statistician Dr. Brewer to examine details of 190 quasars observed over two decades. Combining the observations taken at different colors (or wavelengths) – green light, red light, and into the infrared – they were able to standardize the ‘ticking’ of each quasar. Through the application of Bayesian analysis, they found the expansion of the universe imprinted on each quasar’s ticking.

“With these exquisite data, we were able to chart the tick of the quasar clocks, revealing the influence of expanding space,” Professor Lewis said.

These results further confirm Einstein’s picture of an expanding universe but contrast earlier studies that had failed to identify the time dilation of distant quasars.

“These earlier studies led people to question whether quasars are truly cosmological objects, or even if the idea of expanding space is correct,” Professor Lewis said.  

“With these new data and analysis, however, we’ve been able to find the elusive tick of the quasars and they behave just as Einstein’s relativity predicts,” he said.

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The world’s population hit a staggering 8 billion on November 15, 2022. As this number continues to rise, the looming question is: how can we ensure everyone has enough to eat? The challenge is further amplified by issues such as climate change, depletion of natural resources, soil degradation, and the environmental impact of fossil fuel-dependent agriculture. There’s a pressing need for change, but the question is, what form should this change take?

In response to this, Barath Raghavan, an associate professor of computer science at USC Viterbi, is turning traditional farming practices on their head. He is spearheading the creation of computational tools that could potentially revolutionize the way farmers conceive, implement, and manage sustainable farming methods.

Horticulture enthusiast and computer scientist Barath Raghavan is rethinking traditional farming practices. Credit: Noe Montes

 

Raghavan, a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers organization, currently grows more than 150 different edible plants in his yard. A decade ago, he started to combine his interests by researching how computing could make agriculture more sustainable.

Raghavan calls this new area of research “computational agroecology,” uniting technology and farming expertise to develop diverse agricultural landscapes based on natural ecosystems. From crop selection to planting to irrigation, the method allows farmers to explore thousands of different potential designs to optimize food production without fossil fuel-derived pesticides.

“How can we design an ecosystem that is as productive and sustainable as a natural forest, but instead of producing food for wildlife, it’s producing food for people?” said Raghavan.

“It’s an incredibly hard problem because designing an ecosystem is a super complex, dynamic, natural system. We’re trying to build computing tools that can figure out how ecosystems work, so we can grow food plentifully and sustainably.”

“A totally new way to think about agriculture”

In a new paper recently published in PNAS Nexus, Raghavan and his colleagues propose “a totally new way to think about agriculture and the benefits it can have for research and farming,” said Raghavan.

In this study, the researchers reconceptualize agriculture as a search through a “state space,” which represents all possible configurations of a system—in this context, agricultural land.

To better understand the concept of a state space, imagine a box of blocks: each block could be red, blue, or yellow. The state space would consist of all the possible ways to arrange these blocks, such as all red, blue, or green, or a combination of the three colors.

In the same way, a state space for an agricultural system might consist of all the possible variables that the system can take—such as crop or soil type, weather conditions, irrigation, fertilization, or pest control.

This allows agricultural researchers and farmers to explore the different paths and strategies available—taking different “blocks” or variables and placing them together to see what works.

Essentially, an agricultural “sandbox” to determine optimal configurations to increase crop yield, improve sustainability, and discover entirely new combinations of crops that grow well together.

For instance, the framework enables analytics and machine learning that could allow researchers to analyze the patterns between crop yield and soil moisture content or simulate growing different types of crops together for biodiversity.

“Once we can conceive of a farm this way, we can then reframe many research questions and farming planning questions as a search through the space of all possible states the farm could possibly end up in, with certain states being more desirable than others,” said Raghavan.

“This allows us to compare and contrast different approaches to farming, explore and combine techniques, and then search the state space in simulation for new farming techniques that have never been tried before and where trial and error in the real world would be far too expensive and time-consuming.”

“Playing a chess game with nature”

For example, in Southern California, farmers have recently discovered that high-quality coffee can grow plentifully between avocado trees. But figuring out the right way to do that, and maybe even add another couple of crops that work well together, is site specific.

“Each farmer doesn’t have the time or ability to do trial and error for years to figure out the right way to grow a half dozen crops on their land,” said Raghavan.

“Instead, with the conceptual framework and eventually software framework of state spaces, a farmer could spell out an objective—such as diversified harvest with high yield and possible high profit for a specific piece of land—and have the system explore the state space and produce possible plant mixtures, placement, and management techniques that meet the farmer’s criteria.”

Raghavan compares the process to “playing a chess game with nature, but one that is both competitive and collaborative.”

“You’re making moves on the chessboard, which is your land, and nature is making moves too. Pests are going to eat one crop; a flood is going to damage another. What we are building is a computational framework that allows you to explore all the different ways that you might ‘play’ this game of chess with nature so that we can come up with the best one for your land.”

The group including Raghavan recently received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture for their research in this area. Now, the team is working through possible use cases with researchers and farmers to incorporate specific use cases and to develop software that can make it easy to simulate and explore state spaces.

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• The human nucleus is metabolically active, according to the findings of a new study in Molecular Systems Biology by researchers at the CRG in Barcelona and CeMM/Medical University of Vienna.
• In a state of crisis, such as widespread DNA damage, the nucleus protects itself by appropriating mitochondrial machinery to carry out urgent repairs that threaten the genome’s integrity.
• The findings represent a paradigm shift because the nucleus has been historically considered to be metabolically inert, importing all its needs through supply chains in the cytoplasm.
• Cancer hijacks cellular metabolism for unfettered growth. The findings can help guide future lines of cancer research by offering new clues to overcome drug resistance and eventually the design of new treatments.

The image illustrates the location of DNA damage (in the nucleus of these four cells – green) and the colocalization of PRDX1 (in red, same place). Credit: Sara Sdelci / CRG

 

A typical human cell is metabolically active, roaring with chemical reactions that convert nutrients into energy and useful products that sustain life. These reactions also create reactive oxygen species, dangerous by-products like hydrogen peroxide which damage the building blocks of DNA in the same way oxygen and water corrode metal and form rust. Just how buildings collapse from the cumulative effect of rust, reactive oxygen species threaten a genome’s integrity.

Cells are thought to delicately balance their energy needs and avoid damaging DNA by containing metabolic activity outside the nucleus and within the cytoplasm and mitochondria. Antioxidant enzymes are deployed to mop up reactive oxygen species at their source before they reach DNA, a defensive strategy that protects the roughly 3 billion nucleotides from suffering potentially catastrophic mutations. If DNA damage occurs anyway, cells pause momentarily and carry out repairs, synthesizing new building blocks and filling in the gaps.

Despite the central role of cellular metabolism in maintaining genome integrity, there has been no systematic, unbiased study on how metabolic perturbations affect the DNA damage and repair process. This is particularly important for diseases like cancer, characterized by their ability to hijack metabolic processes for unfettered growth.

Picture of the group led by Dr. Sara Sdelci at the premises of the Centre for Genomic Regulation, in Barcelona. Credit: CRG

 

A research team led by Sara Sdelci at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and Joanna Loizou at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna addressed this challenge by carrying out various experiments to identify which metabolic enzymes and processes are essential for a cell’s DNA damage response. The findings are published today in the journal Molecular Systems Biology.

The researchers experimentally induced DNA damage in human cell lines using a common chemotherapy medication known as etoposide. Etoposide works by breaking DNA strands and blocking an enzyme that helps repair the damage. Surprisingly, inducing DNA damage resulted in reactive oxygen species being generated and accumulating inside the nucleus. The researchers observed that cellular respiratory enzymes, a major source of reactive oxygen species, relocated from the mitochondria to the nucleus in response to DNA damage.

The findings represent a paradigm shift in cellular biology because it suggests the nucleus is metabolically active. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and where there are reactive oxygen species there are metabolic enzymes at work. Historically, we’ve thought of the nucleus as a metabolically inert organelle that imports all its needs from the cytoplasm, but our study demonstrates that another type of metabolism exists in cells and is found in the nucleus,” says Dr. Sara Sdelci, corresponding author of the study and Group Leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation.

The researchers also used CRISPR-Cas9 to identify all the metabolic genes that were important for cell survival in this scenario. These experiments revealed that cells order the enzyme PRDX1, an antioxidant enzyme also normally found in mitochondria, to travel to the nucleus and scavenge reactive oxygen species present to prevent further damage. PRDX1 was also found to repair the damage by regulating the cellular availability of aspartate, a raw material that is critical for synthesizing nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA.

“PRDX1 is like a robotic pool cleaner. Cells are known to use it to keep their insides “clean” and prevent the accumulation of reactive oxygen species, but never before at the nuclear level. This is evidence that, in a state of crisis, the nucleus responds by appropriating mitochondrial machinery and establishes an emergency rapid-industrialization policy,” says Dr. Sdelci.

The findings can guide future lines of cancer research. Some anti-cancer drugs, such as etoposide used in this study, kill tumor cells by damaging their DNA and inhibiting the repair process. If enough damage accumulates, the cancer cell initiates a process where it autodestructs.

During their experiments, the researchers found that knocking out metabolic genes critical for cellular respiration – the process that generates energy from oxygen and nutrients – made normal healthy cells become resistant to etoposide. The finding is important because many cancer cells are glycolytic, meaning that even in the presence of oxygen they generate energy without doing cellular respiration. This means etoposide, and other chemotherapies with a similar mechanism, are likely to have a limited effect in treating glycolytic tumors.

The authors of the study call for the exploration of new strategies such as dual treatment combining etoposide with drugs that also boost the generation of reactive oxygen species to overcome drug resistance and kill cancer cells faster. They also hypothesize that combining etoposide with inhibitors of nucleotide synthesis processes could potentiate the effect of the drug by preventing the repair of DNA damage and ensuring cancer cells self-destruct correctly.

Dr. Joanna Loizou, corresponding author and Group Leader at the Center for Molecular Medicine and the Medical University of Vienna, highlights the value of taking data-driven approaches to uncover new biological processes. “By using unbiased technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 screening and metabolomics, we have learned about how the two fundamental cellular processes of DNA repair and metabolism are intertwined. Our findings shed light on how targeting these two pathways in cancer might improve therapeutic outcomes for patients.”

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Hydrogen has recently been spotlighted as a clean and effective source of energy. But is it truly eco-friendly? Currently, the most prevalent type of hydrogen is “grey hydrogen,” which is derived from fossil fuels. Considering the greenhouse gas emissions generated during its production, grey hydrogen is not truly environmentally friendly. The age of “green hydrogen,” which doesn’t produce any carbon emissions, is still on the horizon.

The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS), under the leadership of President Hyun-min Park, has showcased a potential solution for the durable and efficient photoanode with protective film, which is instrumental in hydrogen production through solar-powered water splitting. This is expected to bring forward the era of environment-friendly “green hydrogen.”

Green hydrogen is produced without carbon emissions by using renewable energy sources. A representative method to produce green hydrogen is photoelectrochemical water splitting using a photoanode which is directly immersed in electrolytes and can absorb sunlight. As a result, the photoanode directly splits contacting water into hydrogen and oxygen using absorbed solar energy. However, as the photoanode is in direct contact with an electrolyte, it is prone to surface corrosion. Surface protective coatings were deposited on the surface to prevent surface corrosion.

Typically, oxide materials such as titanium dioxide (TiO2) are used as protective films for photoanodes. Although oxide materials are poor conductors of electricity, their conductivity can be modulated when oxygen defects, serving as a channel for charge transport, are formed. The key to extending the lifespan of photoanodes is to develop a protective film durable enough to prevent electrode corrosion and capable of maintaining optimal electrical conductivity.

For the efficient PEC water splitting, it is crucial to balance two factors by systematically controlling the defect density in TiOx passivation layer of n-Si photoanode, which are (1) accessible density of state for carrier transportation in forbidden gap and (2) favorable interface energetics. Credit: Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS)

 

KRISS has developed the world’s first technology for systematically modulating the levels of oxygen defects in a titanium dioxide (TiO2) protective film of photoanode to maximize hydrogen production efficiency. In order to explore the role of oxygen defects in the charge transfer mechanism, the research team determined the optimal levels of defects that maximize photoanode lifespan and hydrogen production by using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and electrochemical analysis.

Unlike past studies that relied on spontaneously formed oxygen defects in the protective film during the manufacturing process, this research proposes a direct method of production that controls the levels of oxygen defects, enabling mass production.

According to the experimental results, the photoanode without a protective film showed a rapid degradation in lifespan within an hour, causing the hydrogen production efficiency to fall below 20 % compared to the initial state. On the other hand, the photoanode with optimized protective film maintained a hydrogen production efficiency of over 85 % even after 100 hours.

This achievement has the potential to enhance the efficiency and lifespan of photoanodes and can be applied to other clean technologies that rely on photoanodes. The artificial photosynthesis technology that captures carbon dioxide and converts it to a chemical energy source using solar energy is one of the examples.

Dr. Ansoon Kim, a principal researcher at KRISS Interdisciplinary Materials Measurement Institute, said, “This approach can improve photoanode lifespan by approximately 10 times and significantly contribute to the commercialization of green hydrogen.”

KRISS plans to conduct further research to unveil the optimal levels of oxygen defects and underlying principles that maximize the lifespan of photoanodes.

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• As the Arctic warms, shrinking glaciers are exposing bubbling groundwater springs which could provide an underestimated source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, finds new research published today (July 6) in Nature Geoscience.
• The study, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway, identified large stocks of methane gas leaking from groundwater springs unveiled by melting glaciers.
• The research suggests that these methane emissions will likely increase as Arctic glaciers retreat and more springs are exposed. This, and other methane emissions from melting ice and frozen ground in the Arctic, could exacerbate global warming.

“These springs are a considerable, and potentially growing, source of methane emissions — one that has been missing from our estimations of the global methane budget until now,” said Gabrielle Kleber, lead author of the research who is from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.

Scientists are concerned that additional methane emissions released by the Arctic thaw could ramp up human-induced global warming. The springs the researchers studied hadn’t previously been recognized as a potential source of methane emissions.

Kleber spent nearly three years monitoring the water chemistry of more than a hundred springs across Svalbard, where air temperatures are rising two times faster than the average for the Arctic. She likens Svalbard to the canary in the coal mine of global warming, “Since it is warming faster than the rest of the Arctic, we can get a preview of the potential methane release that could happen at a larger scale across this region.”

Glacier cave on Svalbard, Norway formed by large volumes of glacial meltwater that flows through it during summer. During winter, an extensive proglacial icing forms at its mouth and extends across the entire floodplain in front of the glacier, which is visible through the cave opening in the picture. Credit: Gabrielle Kleber

 

Professor Andrew Hodson, study co-author from the University Centre in Svalbard said, “Living in Svalbard exposes you to the front line of Arctic climate change. I can’t think of anything more stark than the sight of methane outgassing in the immediate forefield of a retreating glacier.”

Previously, research has centered on methane release from thawing permafrost (frozen ground). “While the focus is often on permafrost, this new finding tells us that there are other pathways for methane emissions which could be even more significant in the global methane budget,” said study co-author Professor Alexandra Turchyn, also from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.

Hodson added, “Until this work was conducted, we didn’t understand the source and pathways of this gas because we were reading about studies from completely different parts of the Arctic where glaciers are absent.”

Glacier cave on Svalbard, Norway. Credit: Gabrielle Kleber

 

The methane-delivering springs they identified are fed by a plumbing system hidden beneath most glaciers, which taps into large groundwater reserves within the underlying sediments and surrounding bedrock. Once the glaciers melt and retreat, springs appear where this groundwater network punches through to the surface.

The researchers found that methane emissions from glacial groundwater springs across Svalbard could exceed 2,000 tonnes over the course of a year — which equates to roughly 10% of the methane emissions resulting from Norway’s annual oil and gas energy industry.

This source of methane will likely become more significant as more springs are exposed, said Kleber, “If global warming continues unchecked then methane release from glacial groundwater springs will probably become more extensive.”

Glacial groundwater springs aren’t always easy to recognize, so Kleber trained her eye to pick them out from satellite images. Zooming in on the areas of land exposed by the retreat of 78 glaciers across Svalbard, Kleber looked for tell-tale blue trickles of ice where groundwater had leaked to the surface and frozen. She then traveled to each of these sites by snowmobile to take samples of the groundwater at locations where the ice had blistered due to pressurized water and gas build up.

When Kleber and the team profiled the chemistry of the water feeding these springs, they found that all bar one of the sites studied were highly concentrated with dissolved methane — meaning that, when the spring water reaches the surface, there is plenty of excess methane that can escape to the atmosphere.

The researchers also identified localized hotspots of methane emissions, which were closely related to the type of rock from which the groundwater emerges. Certain rocks like shale and coal contain natural gases, including methane, produced by the breakdown of organic matter when the rocks formed. This methane can move upwards through fractures in the rock and into the groundwater.

“In Svalbard, we are beginning to understand the complex and cascading feedbacks triggered by glacier melt — it seems likely that there are more outcomes like this which we have yet to uncover,” said Kleber.

“The amount of methane leaking from the springs we measured will likely be dwarfed by the total volume of trapped gas lying below these glaciers, waiting to escape,” said Hodson, “That means we urgently need to establish the risk of a sudden increase in methane leakage, because glaciers will only continue to retreat whilst we struggle to curb climate change.”

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When British geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor made his daring venture through East Antarctica in 1911, his expedition stumbled across a terrifying sight: the edge of a glacier appearing to ooze a stream of blood. After a century of speculation, the cause of the Blood Falls has been pinpointed. 

Scientists in the US used powerful transmission electron microscopes to analyze samples of Blood Falls' water and found an abundance of iron-rich nanospheres that turn red when oxidized.

"As soon as I looked at the microscope images, I noticed that there were these little nanospheres and they were iron-rich, and they have lots of different elements in them besides iron – silicon, calcium, aluminum, sodium – and they all varied," Ken Livi, a research scientist in the Whiting School's Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement.

Known for its rich red color, iron oxide had previously been a prime suspect in the mystery of Blood Falls. However, this fancy imaging technique has helped researchers get a clearer picture of why its leaking waters are such a vibrant red hue – and why some previous studies have fallen flat.

"In order to be a mineral, atoms must be arranged in a very specific, crystalline, structure. These nanospheres aren't crystalline, so the methods previously used to examine the solids did not detect them," explained Livi.

You might assume its blood-red waters are the most unusual feature of the Antarctic’s Blood Falls, but this geological feature is full of oddities. 

Scientists have found that the red water seeping out of the Blood Falls originates in a saltwater lake that’s lain trapped in the ice for 1.5 to 4 million years. In fact, this lake is just one part of a much larger underground system of hyper-salty lakes and aquifers.

Analysis of the water indicated that the buried bodies of super salty water are home to a rare subglacial ecosystem of bacteria – despite an almost total absence of oxygen. This means the bacteria are persisting for millions of years without photosynthesis and likely sustain themselves through cycling iron from the brine. 

Given these otherworldly properties, scientists believe that Blood Falls could be studied to gain a deeper understanding of other planets elsewhere in the solar system. 

"With the advent of the Mars Rover missions, there was an interest in trying to analyze the solids that came out of the waters of Blood Falls as if it was a Martian landing site," Livi said. "What would happen if a Mars Rover landed in Antarctica? Would it be able to determine what was causing the Blood Falls to be red? It's a fascinating question and one that several researchers were considering.”

The new study was published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

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Henry Cort, a British entrepreneur born in Lancaster around 1740, has long been regarded as discovering a metallurgical technique that was crucial to the Industrial Revolution. However, a new study has shown that Cort actually stole the practice from Black metal smiths in Jamaica. 

The traditional story

Cort is a somewhat unknown figure despite the impact his “discovery” had on the industrial world he was part of. We do know that he and his family were deeply embedded in the enslavement system which was a “staple” of Lancaster at the time. At a young age, Cort inherited a fortune and went on to have a successful career in finance. In 1775, he took over the ironworks of a naval officer client who was in debt. Although it was located within the Portsmouth dockyards, a prosperous site of industry, Cort struggled to break even and lost a substantial amount of money.

Then, five years later, he was approached by the Royal Navy for a contract to supply iron hoops for barrels. The contract was a poor one, however, as it required Cort to take on the Navy’s scrap iron and somehow turn it into a high-quality product that could be used for the hoops. At the time, there was no known way to do this; yet again, it looked like Cort would be at a loss. But suddenly, in 1783, Cort patented a new process where scrap iron could be heated in a modified furnace and fed through special grooved rollers. 

Aspects of this technique were already in circulation among metallurgists, but no one had combined them in the way that Cort’s patent did. The metal was still impure, but it was nevertheless significantly stronger and could be used for much larger constructions than just barrel hoops. 

Unfortunately for Cort, things did not go well. To fund his operations, Cort borrowed a considerable sum of money from Adam Jellicoe, a Navy employee who had actually embezzled Navy funds. Upon Jellicoe's death in 1789, Cort became liable for his debts, which forced him into bankruptcy. He quickly lost control of the patents, which was unfortunate for him but, so the story goes, a huge boon for British industry. 

Now, his innovative technique was free to use by any budding industrialist and became the basis for suspension bridges, ship building, and textile mills. 

The plot thickens

One of the enduring mysteries surrounding this story is how Cort apparently came up with his innovation. In 1783, he claimed that this novel approach was the result of “great study, labour, and expence [sic], in trying a variety of experiments and making many discoveries”. And yet there is no evidence of him undertaking any such experiments. It was like he had pulled the technique out of the air, but in reality, he had actually pulled it from across the Atlantic. 

According to Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at University College London, Cort had stolen the idea from enslaved metal smiths in Jamaica. 

During her research, Bulstrode found an archaeological report of a foundry in Jamaica that was using Cort’s technique before he apparently invented it. Through careful detective work, Bulstrode has now reconstructed a sequence of events that show how Cort had become aware of this foundry. 

In 1772, John Reeder, an Englishman, established “Reeder’s Pen”, a lucrative foundry near Morant Bay in southeast Jamaica. This site produced boilers and rollers for the manufacturing of sugar and was manned by 76 Black metallurgists. In most instances, these workers had been taken from Africa by British slavers, but a few were Jamaican Maroons – individuals who had escaped slavery and preserved their freedom. 

These Black metallurgists had perfected a method that allowed them to turn 3,000 tonnes of scrap iron into bars through furnaces and rollers. Crucially, the grooved rollers had been used for processing sugar cane but had never been used for iron. 

According to Bulstrode, in the spring of 1781, Cort’s cousin John Cort visited Jamaica and was there at the time when one of the foundry workers was big news – a man named Kwasi, a Maroon, had killed a notorious freedom fighter called Three-Finger Jack.

John would have certainly heard of this incident while he was there. Then, later that year, John’s ship experienced difficulties and headed to Portsmouth, where he met Henry. 

Remember, Henry’s business was struggling at the time, and, coincidentally, so was Reeder’s Pen. It turns out that the foundry was actually illegal under British colonial law as anti-slavery rebels had used similar facilities to make weapons in the past. As such, in 1782, Reeder’s Pen was forced to shut down. But rather than disappearing from the world, the foundry was dismantled and shipped to Portsmouth.

“And the next thing you get is sugar rollers in Henry Cort’s foundry in Portsmouth," Bulstrode told New Scientist. 

The story represents a significant example of why the history of science, and history more generally, should listen to the voices of under-represented actors. In this instance, the expertise of enslaved people played a crucial and hitherto under-appreciated role in the history of the Industrial Revolution. From this perspective, it also shows the extent to which the ideas and intellectual inputs of enslaved people could be claimed by their owners. 

Increasingly, scholars are coming to appreciate the knowledge and expertise of these traditionally marginalized people. According to Bulstrode, the regions of west and west-central Africa where the British slave trade operated were also “some of the most significant iron-working regions in world history”.

 The paper is published in History and Technology. 

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The United Nations (UN) nuclear watchdog has officially approved Japan's plan to release treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear disaster into the Pacific Ocean. While the plan has been deemed safe by a variety of agencies and some experts, the idea of dumping tainted water in the sea is not sitting well with everyone.

In a report presented to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Tuesday, July 4, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded that the plans to release treated water stored at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station into the sea are safe.

This year marks 12 years since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. It started on March 11 2011 when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the east coast of Japan. The tremors triggered a 15-meter (50-foot) tsunami that killed over 18,000 people along Japan’s northeast coast and struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant with a violent wave of water, breaking its power supply and cooling systems. This led to a meltdown in three of its reactors, which sent significant amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.

The dilemma of what to do with the Fukushima disaster’s wastewater has been hanging around for years. As part of the ongoing clean-up, around 1,000 specialized tanks were built to store the colossal quantities of water that flooded in from the tsunami wave or were used to cool the melted reactors. 

In total, over 1.3 million tonnes of treated wastewater have accumulated at the site. Much of the water has been treated through the removal of dangerous radioactive nuclides, although it remains slightly radioactive due to the presence of tritium, a relatively harmless isotope of hydrogen that's tough to separate from water.

After much debate, the IAEA has reviewed the problem and finally concluded it’s safe to release the treated wastewater into the sea. 

“Based on its comprehensive assessment, the IAEA has concluded that the approach and activities to the discharge of ALPS treated water taken by Japan are consistent with relevant international safety standards,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a foreword of the report.

“Furthermore, the IAEA notes the controlled, gradual discharges of the treated water to the sea, as currently planned and assessed by TEPCO, would have a negligible radiological impact on people and the environment,” he added.

Despite many reassurances from experts, the plan has proved highly controversial among some environmental groups, local residents, and the international community. 

Two of Japan’s most prominent neighbors, China and South Korea, have been highly critical of the plan, while Greenpeace has accused the owner of the nuclear plant of “using the Pacific Ocean as a dumping ground.”

Despite these reservations, however, it’s now looking almost certain the plan will go ahead. 

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In the past few weeks, climate records have shattered across the globe. July 4 was the hottest global average day on record, breaking the new record set the previous day. Average sea surface temperatures have been the highest ever recorded and Antarctic sea ice extent the lowest on record.

Also on July 4, the World Meteorological Organization declared El Niño had begun, “setting the stage for a likely surge in global temperatures and disruptive weather and climate patterns”.

So what’s going on with the climate, and why are we seeing all these records tumbling at once?

Against the backdrop of global warming, El Niño conditions have an additive effect, pushing temperatures to record highs. This has combined with a reduction in aerosols, which are small particles that can deflect incoming solar radiation. So these two factors are most likely to blame for the record-breaking heat, in the atmosphere and in the oceans.

It’s not just climate change

The extreme warming we are witnessing is in large part due to the El Niño now occurring, which comes on top of the warming trend caused by humans emitting greenhouse gases.

Moderating the trend in global average surface temperature over time (1985–2022), La Niña (blue) has a cooling influence, while El Niño has a warming influence (red). Volcanic eruptions (orange triangles) can also have cooling effect. Image Credit: Dana Nuccitelli, using data from Berkeley Earth, author provided

El Niño is declared when the sea surface temperature in large parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean warms significantly. These warmer-than-average temperatures at the surface of the ocean contribute to above-average temperatures over land.

The last strong El Niño was in 2016, but we have released 240 billion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere since then.

El Niño doesn’t create extra heat but redistributes the existing heat from the ocean to the atmosphere.

The ocean is massive. Water covers 70% of the planet and is able to store vast amounts of heat due to its high specific heat capacity. This is why your hot water bottle stays warm longer than your wheat pack. And, why 90% of the excess heat from global warming has been absorbed by the ocean.

Ocean currents circulate heat between the Earth’s surface, where we live, and the deep ocean. During an El Niño, the trade winds over the Pacific Ocean weaken, and the upwelling of cold water along the Pacific coast of South America is reduced. This leads to warming of the upper layers of the ocean.

Higher than usual ocean temperatures along the equator were recorded in the first 400m of the Pacific Ocean throughout June 2023. Since cold water is more dense than warm water, this layer of warm water prevents colder ocean waters from penetrating to the surface. Warm ocean waters over the Pacific also lead to increased thunderstorms, which further release more heat into the atmosphere via a process called latent heating.

From the surface to 400 metres deep, the Pacific Ocean along the equator is heating up. Image Credit: Bureau of Meteorology, Author provided

This means that the build up of heat from global warming that had been hiding in the ocean during the past La Niña years is now rising to the surface and demolishing records in its wake.

An absence of aerosols across the Atlantic

Another factor likely contributing to the unusual warmth is a reduction in aerosols.

Aerosols are small particles that can deflect incoming solar radiation. Pumping aerosols into the stratosphere is one of the potential geoengineering methods that humanity could invoke to lessen the impacts of global warming. Although stopping greenhouse gas emissions would be much better.

But the absence of aerosols can also increase temperatures. A 2008 study concluded that 35% of year-to-year sea surface temperature changes over the Atlantic Ocean in Northern Hemisphere summer could be explained by changes in Saharan dust.

Saharan dust levels over the Atlantic Ocean have been unusually low lately.

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On a similar note, new international regulations of sulphur particles in shipping fuels were introduced in 2020, leading to a global reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions (and aerosols) over the ocean. But the long-term benefits of reducing shipping emissions far outweighs the relatively small warming effect.

This combination of factors is why global average surface temperature records are tumbling.

Are we at the point of no return?

In May this year, the World Meteorological Organization declared a 66% chance of global average temperatures temporarily exceeding 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels within the next five years.

This prediction reflected the developing El Niño. That probability is likely higher now, since El Niño has developed.

It is worth noting that temporarily exceeding 1.5℃ does not mean we have reached 1.5℃ by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change standards. The latter describes a sustained average global temperature anomaly of 1.5℃, rather than a single year, and is likely to occur in the 2030s.

This temporary exceedance of 1.5℃ will give us an unfortunate preview of what our planet will be like in the coming decades. Although, younger generations may find themselves dreaming of a balmy 1.5℃ given current greenhouse emissions policies put us on track for 2.7℃ warming by the end of the century.

So we are not at the point of no return. But the window of time to avert dangerous climate change is rapidly shrinking, and the only way to avert it is by severing our reliance on fossil fuels.

Kimberley Reid, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Atmospheric Sciences, Monash University

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

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On Monday, we reported that the Earth’s average temperature had reached a record high, making it the hottest day since measurements began. But that’s now old news having been beaten on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, as temperatures soared to an average of 17.18°C (62.9°F).

These record conditions were reached on Tuesday, July 4, and sustained on July 5, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which provides global average temperatures for every day of the last 44 years.

Prior to Monday, when the global average temperature reached 17.01°C (62.62°F), the previous record – 16.92°C (62.46°F) – was set in August 2016 and equaled last year.

Per AP News, Tuesday’s high was almost 1°C (1.8°F) higher than the 1979-2000 average, which itself topped the 19th- and 20th-century averages.

The figures are not an official record but use data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction’s climate forecast system to estimate the temperature 2 meters (6.6 feet) off the ground based on satellite, air balloon, and ground-based weather station measurements.

“This is showing us an indication of where we are right now,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chief scientist Sarah Kapnick told AP, indicating that NOAA will take these latest figures into consideration for its official calculations.

Various parts of the world have been experiencing extreme heat of late, including the southern US, China, and North Africa, where temperatures have reached 50°C (122°F), Reuters reports. Even Antarctica, which is currently in its winter, has recorded abnormally high temperatures. 

“Chances are that the month of July will be the warmest ever, and with it the hottest month ever … ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian, which is indeed some 120,000 years ago,” Dr Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University, told The Guardian.

2023 has already seen several other devastating climate records, including all-time high greenhouse gas emissions and record-low Antarctic sea ice levels. And scientists have been warning for months that La Niña, the cooling phase of the oceans, was giving way to El Niño, the warming phase. On Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that El Niño had indeed returned, which could lead to yet more record-breaking temperatures.

“When’s the hottest day likely to be? It’s going to be when global warming, El Niño, and the annual cycle all line up together. Which is the next couple months,” Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at Oxford University, told The Washington Post. “It’s a triple whammy.”

“Looking to the future, we can expect global warming to continue and hence temperature records to be broken increasingly frequently, unless we rapidly act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero,” added Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute.

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“When you overheat your body, you can basically cook your cells, essentially, and that will cause cell death and cell dysfunction,” said Rebecca Stearns, the chief operating officer of the Korey Stringer Institute, a nonprofit housed at the University of Connecticut dedicated to studying and preventing heatstroke in athletes.

It’s important to know the risks of heatstroke and take it seriously. Not only does heatstroke have a relatively high mortality rate, but those who recover still may face future health problems, said Orlando Laitano, assistant professor of applied physiology and kinesiology at the University of Florida. “We now believe that heatstroke is almost like concussion.”

In one recent study, Laitano and his colleagues found that heatstroke in mice could change the genome and create more susceptibility to future heat and immune diseases.

Currently, approximately 30 percent of the human population is exposed to dangerous environmental heat for at least 20 days every year, according to a recent study. This number may increase up to 74 percent of the global population by the year 2100 if anthropogenic climate change continues unabated.

“In the face of global warming and climate change, that becomes — no pun intended here — a hot topic,” said Laitano, who co-authored a recent review on heatstroke.

Understanding heat stroke and heat illness

Anyone can develop a heat-related illness, though older adults and young children are especially vulnerable. High humidity, strenuous physical activity and consecutive sweltering nights also increase our risk.

Heat illness can range in severity from mild heat exhaustion to life-threatening heatstroke. Heat exhaustion is more common, and may involve symptoms such as dizziness, fatigue, nausea or headache but not a dramatic increase in body temperature.

Heatstroke is typically defined as having a core body temperature that is above 104 or 105 Fahrenheit, which causes severe dysfunction of the central nervous system, including confusion, dizziness and unconsciousness, and can lead to multiorgan injury and more.

However, there can be significant differences in individual heat tolerance and there are people who collapse below this threshold, Laitano said.

Another potential challenge is that heat illness can distort judgment, and the person affected may be unaware that they are in trouble.

How our brain coordinates temperature regulation

The cells in our body function properly only in a relatively narrow band of temperatures, which is regulated to be between 98 and 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit (36.7 and 37.5 degrees Celsius) in a healthy human. Extreme heat damages our cells, degrades proteins and harms DNA.

“Whenever you have that, you’ll see the cascade of effects that causes things to shut down and causes damage to your body,” Stearns said.

Our central nervous system works hard to coordinate control over our body’s temperature to prevent harm. Temperature sensors in our skin and internal organs, called thermoreceptors, are specially tuned to different temperature ranges and send signals to our brain’s touch cortex, which allows us to perceive the heat and respond to it, such as getting out of the sun and heading indoors.

We also have an internal thermostat located in our brain’s hypothalamus called the preoptic area. By sensing our core body temperature, it can activate automatic autonomic systems to begin cooling the body when it reaches a certain temperature, such as through sweating and dilating our blood vessels.

The primary way we cool ourselves is through sweating through our sweat glands. As the sweat evaporates, it cools our skin. This evaporative cooling accounts for about 80 percent of our cooling capacity during exercise, Stearns said.

Sweating, however, is a “double-edged sword,” Laitano said. “It’s very important because it will help you thermoregulate, but also leads to dehydration.”

Our brain’s internal thermostat also activates the sympathetic nervous system causing blood vessels in our skin to dilate. Our heart more than doubles its output to meet the increased demand, and pumps warm blood from our body’s core to the surface, where it should cool off — if the outside air isn’t hotter.

Hot, humid days are particularly dangerous for heatstroke because they challenge our natural abilities to thermoregulate. The hot air raises our skin’s temperature instead of lowering it, and the higher the humidity, the harder it is for our sweat to evaporate and cool us.

The two types of heatstroke

There are two types of heatstroke: classic heatstroke and exertional heatstroke.

Classic heatstroke is caused by passive heating from the external environment, such as during heat waves. It typically affects children and older adults who are less able to regulate their body temperature. In young children, sweat glands may not be fully developed. And with age, we begin to lose our ability to both sense thirst and thermoregulate effectively.

Exertional heatstroke occurs when we physically exert ourselves with strenuous activity in hot weather. Physical activity heats up our skeletal muscles when it consumes energy. The more intensively the muscle contracts, the more heat is produced, which heats up our body from the inside in addition to the ambient heat of the environment.

Exertional heatstroke can affect anyone doing physical activity, but is more likely to affect younger adults, particularly athletes and military personnel.

“In everyday life, we don’t see a lot of it outside of competitive scenarios because people are smart, and they’ll stop if they’re not feeling good, before they reach the point of heatstroke,” Stearns said.

But people in sports and military contexts may be motivated to push past their thermoregulatory limits. Exertional heatstroke is the third leading cause of mortality for athletes during physical activity, behind only heart problems and head or neck trauma.

It is estimated that the mortality rate of exertional heatstroke could reach around 27 percent, while mortality in classic heatstroke could be much higher, due to its predominance in already vulnerable people.

How heatstroke can damage the brain

Early data show that 10 to 28 percent of patients who survive heatstroke may sustain long-term cognitive or neurological damage, particularly involving dysfunction of the cerebellum, a brain region important for coordinating our movement.

Brain imaging months or years following heatstroke has also found damage to cells in the cerebellum and other brain areas, including the hippocampus, midbrain and thalamus can also be damaged.

“This is going to sound really sad. It’s very rare to have somebody who has long-term damage from heatstroke and survives,” Stearns said. “Most of those cases, unfortunately, perish. But there are many cases that require lifelong care that are out there.”

How to prevent and treat heatstroke

G

ive yourself time to acclimate to the heat and stay hydrated. “The first 10 to 15 days of anyone doing any new activity in a warm environment are really important to progressively and gradually do that. Because you allow your body time to adapt,” Stearns said.

Don’t exercise outdoors alone, and learn to recognize the signs of heatstroke in yourself and others. Getting out of the heat, even for a few hours, is protective during heat waves. Air conditioning and electric fans can help, but may not always be available, such as during a power outage. Dousing the skin in water may be an effective alternative.

If you feel unwell, weak, confused or agitated, those are all “red flags,” Stearns said. Stumbling, collapsing or inability to coordinate movement are also signs to look out for in yourself and others around you.

Begin cooling immediately even before a full diagnosis if heatstroke is suspected, experts say. “There is a big association between how fast you cool someone and the prognosis, what the outcome is,” Laitano said.

You can apply ice wrapped in towels to the neck, groin or the extremities. Cold water immersion, where the person’s whole body is immersed in iced water, is the first-line treatment for heatstroke.

With better education, more public awareness and prompt treatment, “heatstroke doesn’t have to be deadly,” Stearns said.

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The hypertension drug rilmenidine has been shown to slow down aging in worms, an effect that in humans could hypothetically help us live longer and keep us healthier in our latter years.

Rilmenidine was picked for this latest study because past research has shown it mimics the effects of caloric restriction on a cellular level. Reducing available energy while maintaining nutrition within the body has been shown to extend lifespans in several animal models.

Whether this translates to human biology, or is a potential risk to our health, is a topic of ongoing debate. Finding ways to achieve the same benefits without the costs of extreme calorie cutting could lead to new ways to improve health in old age.

In a series of tests conducted by an international team of researchers, young and old Caenorhabditis elegans worms treated with the drug – which is normally used to treat high blood pressure – lived longer and presented higher measures in a variety of health markers in the same way as restricting calories, as the scientists had hoped.

"For the first time, we have been able to show in animals that rilmenidine can increase lifespan," said molecular biogerontologist João Pedro Magalhães, from the University of Birmingham in the UK. "We are now keen to explore if rilmenidine may have other clinical applications."

The C. elegans worm is a favorite for studies, because many of its genes have similarities to counterparts in our genome. Yet in spite of these similarities, it is still a rather distant relation to humans.

Further tests showed that gene activity associated with caloric restriction could be seen in the kidney and liver tissues of mice treated with rilmenidine. In other words, some of the changes that caloric restriction gives in animals and thought to confer certain health benefits also appear with a hypertension drug that many people already take.

Another discovery was that a biological signaling receptor called nish-1 was crucial in the effectiveness of rilmenidine. This particular chemical structure could be targeted in future attempts to improve lifespan and slow down aging.

"We found that the lifespan-extending effects of rilmenidine were abolished when nish-1 was deleted," write the researchers in their published paper in January. "Critically, rescuing the nish-1 receptor reinstated the increase in lifespan upon treatment with rilmenidine."

Low-calorie diets are hard to follow and come with a variety of side effects, such as hair thinning, dizziness, and brittle bones. It's early days still, but the thinking is that this hypertension drug could confer the same benefits as a low-calorie diet while being easier on the body.

What makes rilmenidine a promising candidate as an anti-aging drug is that it can be taken orally, it's already widely prescribed, and its side effects are rare and relatively mild (they include palpitations, insomnia and drowsiness in a few cases).

There's a long way to go yet in figuring out if rilmenidine would work as an anti-aging drug for actual humans, but the early signs in these worm and mice tests are promising. We now know much more about what rilmenidine can do, and how it operates.

"With a global aging population, the benefits of delaying aging, even if slightly, are immense," said Magalhães.

The research has been published in Aging Cell.

A version of this article was first published in January 2023.

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Winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine tend to reduce their research output after claiming the prestigious honor, according to a new study – suggesting that bagging the prize isn't so desirable for those who want to stay productive and relevant.

Analyzing data on Nobel Prize winners from 1950 to 2009, researchers from Stanford University in California and the University of Waterloo in Canada looked at three measures: the number of published papers, the novelty of these papers (how new the ideas in them were), and the number of citations in other articles.

Researchers matched this data against people of similar age who had won the Lasker Award, another well-respected medical science prize. They performed the comparison to minimize the risk of individuals' ages affecting the results – Nobel Prizes are more often given out late in people's careers when they might be expected to work less anyway.

In all three measures, Nobel Prize winners scored higher than Lasker Award winners before getting the prize – and then the trend flips afterward. Post-Nobel, scientists dropped to the same level or below as those who had won the Lasker Award.

"These declines may reflect diversionary effects of the Prize, changed incentives, or intrinsically different career arcs for medical researchers who win the Nobel Prize," write the researchers in their paper.

The Lasker Award winners also saw a decline in productivity after being officially recognized, but not as much as those who got a Nobel. On average, in the 10 years after winning, Lasker winners published one more study a year than Nobel winners.

While the data analysis isn't detailed enough to prove cause and effect, it shows an interesting pattern. Although the implication isn't that these Nobel Prize winners are putting their feet up and taking it easy, there might be a debate to be had about how the status of winners changes and the impact that has on research.

"The Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology provides a platform to serve as ambassadors for science," write the researchers. "Laureates often step onto this platform."

The Nobel Prize, founded by Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901, undoubtedly raises the profile of science and encourages young scientists. The question raised here is whether it might also cause a decline in innovative, high-quality research.

That's a very difficult call to make, not least because the benefits and drawbacks are hard to quantify properly. One idea put forward by the team behind this new study is recognizing scientists earlier in their careers through the Nobel or other awards.

"Future work should more explicitly study the productivity effects of winning an early career research award," write the researchers.

A working paper on the research has been published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, though it hasn't been peer-reviewed.

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BEIJING – China has seen an increase in suicides among young people in recent years, prompting researchers to call for a special programme to help them deal with academic pressure.

The number of children aged five to 14 years old who died by suicide jumped nearly 10 per cent annually from 2010 to 2021, according to a recent study from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

The figure for people aged 15 to 24 fell 7 per cent through 2017, then posted a nearly 20 per cent increase over the next four years.

The increase is small in absolute numbers. Yet it contrasts with a decline of 5.3 per cent annually in the 2010-2021 period among all age groups in China, a drop that researchers said was due to a nationwide mental health programme.

They said children and adolescents have faced severe mental disorders and elevated suicide risks from intense competition to do well at school. Half of people suffering from depressive disorder in China are students, according to a 2022 national survey.

Researchers called on the government to prioritise developing programmes targeting children and adolescents that adopt best practices from abroad and allow for the early identification of suicidal behaviour.

Young people in China have long engaged in fierce competition to get ahead in school and get good jobs upon graduation.

Three years of the Covid-19 pandemic – which in China meant snap lockdowns, including many imposed on college campuses – and record youth unemployment have also piled pressure on the youth.

Earlier in 2023, the apparent suicide of a boarding school student named Hu Xinyu gained widespread attention in China, both because the 15-year-old boy expressed concern beforehand about his grades and how the police handled their investigation.

Also, many people took to Chinese social media on Thursday to express sadness over the death of Hong Kong-born singer and songwriter Coco Lee. The 48-year-old had been suffering from depression for several years, her sisters said in a statement posted on Facebook.

One person wrote on Weibo that “Coco’s passing is also a wake-up call for us to take our mental health seriously”.

In 2021, Beijing unveiled a sweeping overhaul of its education tech sector, banning tuition companies that teach the school curriculum from making profits. Many parents complained that pressure to engage private tutors caused excessive anxiety at home.

Researchers also warned that the widespread belief among parents and teachers that getting good scores trumps anything else risks obscuring mental health issues plaguing children. BLOOMBERG

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