Time Trends in the Proportion of Adults in England Reporting Any Psychological Distress (Moderate or Severe) and Severe Psychological Distress, April 2020 to December 2022 Lines represent modeled weighted prevalence by survey month, modeled nonlinearly using restricted cubic splines (5 knots). Shaded bands represent SEs. Points represent observed weighted prevalence by month. Credit: JAMA Network Open (2023). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.21959

The number of people reporting feelings of severe distress in England has steadily risen since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL, King's College London and the SPECTRUM Consortium.

The research, published in JAMA Network Open, establishes that rising levels of severe distress are being reported in all age groups and population subgroups outside of older adults aged over 65, with young adults aged 18–24 showing the most striking rise. One in five 18 to 24-year-olds were classified as experiencing "severe distress" in the most recent survey in December 2022.

Researchers suggest that this provides evidence of a growing mental health crisis in England and underscores an urgent need to address the cause of this and adequately fund mental health services.

Between April 2020 and December 2022, 51,861 adults provided data to the Smoking and Alcohol Toolkit study on how often in the last 30 days they had experienced various negative feelings, such as worthlessness or hopelessness. Responses were on a 5-point scale, and classified as "severe" using established cut-offs.

When analyzing the data, researchers found that the proportion of adults reporting severe distress rose steadily over the course of the study, from 5.7% to 8.3%. The researchers observed a rise in rates of severe distress across all subgroups under the age of 65, but the sharpest rise was seen in 18 to 24-year-olds in the second half of the study's period—from 13.6% in December 2021 to 20.2% in December 2022. In contrast, the proportion of adults reporting any distress remained steady at about a third.

Participants from low-income backgrounds also saw sharp rises in reports of severe distress, which researchers suggest could be due to the cost-of-living-crisis. A survey conducted in July 2022 found more than two fifths (42%) of people living in the most deprived areas in England had cut back on food and essentials, compared with 27% of those living in more well-off areas.

Lead author Dr. Sarah Jackson (UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care) said, "The high burden of mental health problems in England is not necessarily a new concern, but recent events appear to have exacerbated the problem and caused existing inequalities in mental health to deepen."

"Groups with particularly high rates of distress include young adults, women, non-binary people, people working in routine and manual occupations, and people who smoke. This burden has been made worse by a particularly sharp rise in severe distress since 2021 among 18 to 24-year-olds. Focused action is urgently needed to tackle the causes of poor mental health in the population and provide support to those who need it."

Dr. Leonie Brose, the study's senior author from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, said, "The last three years have seen an unprecedented series of events that can be seen to be contributing to a worsening in people's mental health; a pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, and a healthcare crisis."

"Our study shows that England's well-being is steadily getting worse. The number of people reporting severe distress is growing in all age groups from all economic backgrounds—only the over 65s appear to be avoiding this. What's required now is a strategy that puts equality, well-being and sustainability at the heart of society's response."

Mark Rowland, CEO, Mental Health Foundation and Chair of the Mental Health and Smoking Partnership, said, "These findings illustrate the urgent need to address the mental health consequences of the pandemic. If we don't prevent high levels of psychological distress, particularly among young and disadvantaged groups, this will feed through into greater mental and physical ill-health, impacting productivity and requiring more support from already stretched services."

"It is a false economy not to invest in public mental health approaches that build social capital and support those at risk. We urgently need to turn words about prevention into a dedicated strategy from government that drives greater investment into preventing mental health problems across our population."

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The limit is somewhere between 104 and 122 degrees Fahrenheit if you're sitting perfectly still, according to a small study conducted in the United Kingdom.

Researchers say they are starting to hone in on the high temperatures that begin to overwhelm the human body's defenses against heat, or what they call the upper critical temperature.

"We find that some individuals, but not others, exhibit an increase in metabolic rate at rest when ambient temperature gets high," said senior researcher Lewis Halsey, a professor at the University of Roehampton School of Life and Health Sciences in London.

"An increase in metabolic rate will increase heat generated by the body," Halsey said. "Those people exhibiting a substantial increase in metabolic rate are going to be less well-adapted to being in the heat, because when things get hot outside their bodies produce even more heat."

The study also found that humidity makes things worse, because it causes your sweat to be less effective in cooling off the body, Halsey added.

"When it's hot and humid, if there are increases in metabolic rate, those increases tend to be bigger," he said.

Halsey planned to present his latest findings this week at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

This upper critical temperature for humans will be critical to understand as climate change causes searing heat domes to settle over different parts of the world, said Dr. Christopher Lemon, an assistant professor of emergency medicine with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

"We're going to be operating in extreme heat, and understanding a little bit more about the effects on the body and at what point we push too far sounds like that would be extremely important for us moving forward," Lemon said.

The new study came out as the world baked under its hottest day on record. On Monday the globe experienced an average global temperature of 62 degrees F, CNN reported.

A heat dome killed 13 people in Texas and one in Louisiana last week, and many U.S. cities are expected to reach record high temperatures during early July, the Associated Press said.

Much is already known about the lower critical temperature for humans, which is around 82 degrees F, researchers said in background notes.

Below that temperature, the human body needs to expend more energy to maintain the necessary core temperature of 98.6, researchers said. When it's colder, the body will resort to reactions such as shivering as a means of producing more body heat.

Given that, it would make sense that there is an upper critical temperature as well, where the body isn't able to cool itself without expending more energy, researchers said.

The human body responds to heat by producing sweat, which cools the skin as it evaporates, Halsey said. The body also shunts more blood out to the skin, to give the blood a better chance to cool off thanks to sweating.

To track these and other responses to heat, Halsey and his team recruited 13 healthy people to spend an hour on three separate occasions in an environment chamber.

In the chamber, participants were exposed to temperatures between 104 and 122 degrees and humidity between 25% and 50%. They were asked to remain at rest, and wore a light vest and shorts.

Researchers observed a particularly large increase in metabolic rate between the baseline of 82 degrees and the higher heat of 104 degrees.

There also was another large increase in metabolic rate at 122 degrees when humidity jumped from 25% to 50%, the study says.

"In humidity, sweating doesn't work very well because sweating involves evaporation of water from the body and evaporation is scuppered by humidity in the air, because there's already a high-water-vapor pressure in the air that stops evaporation working," Halsey said.

As would be expected, participants struggled most at 122 degrees and 50% humidity, results showed.

Researchers also observed increases in heart rate as heat and humidity rose, demonstrating that the body was working hard to get blood out to the skin for cooling.

Compared to the baseline of 82 degrees, participants experienced a 16% increase in heart rate at 104 degrees and a 64% increase at 122 degrees with 50% humidity.

"That increase in heart rate is greater in women than in men," Halsey added.

How heat can harm the body

Extreme heat can damage the body in a number of ways, experts said.

For starters, increases in heart rate and blood pressure puts an enormous strain on the heart, said Dr. Howard Weintraub, clinical director of the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at NYU Langone Health in New York City.

The body's attempts to cool off also can affect the performance of organs, said Dr. Barrak Alahmad, a research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Department of Environmental Health.

"When the body is heated, the blood shifts away from the organs to under the skin in an attempt to cool it down, so you get all this blood moving away from your organs, so it affects the kidneys, for example," Alahmad said.

Dehydration caused by sweating further destabilizes the body, as do changes in enzyme function that can occur with high body temperatures, Weintraub added.

"When you get dehydrated, your heart is going to have to work a whole lot harder and your heart rate goes up. Your blood pressure may suffer. So there's numerous biologic processes that are adversely influenced under adverse thermal environments," Weintraub said.

At some point, the body will fail, Lemon said.

"You get this cascade of physiologic changes and, unfortunately, they can only go so far before there's a system shutdown, until they can't compensate anymore," Lemon said.

What about bodies in motion?

While this study is a good start, experts said more needs to be done to understand the body's response to high temperatures.

For example, this experiment was conducted with people who were lying still, Weintraub said. Studies need to be done in people who are working or exercising in high temperatures.

"What you're really worried about is not what happens to you when you sit still, but when you're doing things," Weintraub said. "What happens to the guy who has to be outdoors when it's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit? That would have more impact."

Future studies also should take into account different coping mechanisms, such as working in shade or using a fan to help perspiration evaporate and cool the body, Alahmad said.

In their study, Halsey and his team recommended that researchers first focus on air temperatures between 90 and 104 degrees F, to pinpoint the average temperature at which the body starts expending more energy in its efforts to cool off.

They also call for research into which types of people are more vulnerable to higher temperatures.

"Some respond to increases in ambient temperature by increasing metabolic rate and some don't," Halsey said. "We don't know which individuals are doing that, or we can't characterize it."

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people 65 years and older are at higher risk from extreme heat, as are kids 2 years and under and folks with chronic diseases and mental illness.

Results from Halsey's work also have appeared previously in the journal Physiological Reports.

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The study finds the number of deaths due to external causes per 100,000 population increased from 65.6 in 1999 to 103.5 in 2020, with poisonings making up most of the difference at +31.18, followed by firearms at +4.18.

Between 1999 and 2020, death rates from poisoning increased annually at an average rate of 7%. This alarming increase was likely due to the opioid prescription crisis, followed by the secondary street drug market for those addicted to opioids as the prescription market tightened. Death rates due to poisoning more than tripled between 1999 to 2020, nearly overtaking all other injuries as the leading external cause of death.

Since 2008, poisoning death rates from suicide have decreased annually, which may not reflect an uptick in good mental health so much as easier access to more lethal means, such as firearms, or a masking of suicide data amid the opioid prescription epidemic.

From 1999 to 2020, firearm death rates increased by 1.1%. Narrowing the view to 2014 to 2020 homicides shows that homicides with guns increased by an average of 6.9% annually.

African Americans had the highest rates of firearm deaths throughout the study period, several times higher than those of Asian and Pacific Islanders, who had the lowest (24.5 vs. 3.3 per 100,000 population, respectively). Native American and Alaska Native individuals experienced the most rapid increase in annual firearm death rates at 3%.

From 2019 to 2020, death rates from poisonings, firearms, and all other injuries increased, with the largest increases again observed for poisoning deaths (8.92 per 100,000 population). A 28% increase from 2019 to 2020 in the poisoning death rate was three times greater than the average annual increase from 2013 to 2020[.]

Sorting the data by intent, the largest relative increases in death rates were intentional firearm-involved homicides and unintentional poisonings.

The study findings highlight the need for multilevel public health interventions to counteract the increasing national trends in mortality due to external causes. The authors state that the rapid increase in deaths due to unintentional poisonings and firearm homicides is a national emergency that requires urgent attention at the local and national levels.

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Earth’s average temperature on Wednesday remained at an unofficial record high set the day before. And for the seven-day period ending Wednesday, the daily average temperature was .08 degrees Fahrenheit (.04 degrees Celsius) higher than any week in 44 years of record-keeping, according to data from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition.

The average global temperature for Tuesday and Wednesday was 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius). That follows a short-lived record set Monday, at 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (17.01 Celsius). The Climate Reanalyzer figures are unofficial but significant data, and an indication that climate change is reaching uncharted territory.

“It’s certainly an alarming sign of the times,” said U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq, noting that the warming trend is a predicted consequence of nations not working fast enough to address climate change. “We might be facing greater climate catastrophes if we do not take action.”

More frequent and more intense heat waves are disrupting life around the world and causing life-threatening temperatures.

In Timbuktu, Mali — at the gateway to the desert — 50-year-old Fatoumata Arby said this kind of heat is new. “Usually, at night it’s a bit cool even during the hot season, but this year, even at night, it’s been hot - I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Arby, who rarely leaves her hometown. “I’ve been having heart palpitations because of the heat. I’m starting to think seriously that I’m going to leave Timbuktu.”

Last week, Egypt experienced one of its many summer heatwaves, with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celsius), according to Egypt’s national weather forecaster. To combat heat and humidity, children on Thursday frolicked in the Nile River while pedestrians hunted the shade.

One of the largest contributors to this week's records is an exceptionally mild winter in the Antarctic. Parts of the continent and nearby ocean were 18-36 degrees Fahrenheit (10-20 degrees Celsius) 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, Bombay.

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.

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A Canadian judge has ruled that the “thumbs-up” emoji is just as valid as a signature, arguing that courts need to adapt to the “new reality” of how people communicate as he ordered a farmer to pay C$82,000 ($61,442) for an unfulfilled contract.

In a recent case the Court of King’s Bench in the province of Saskatchewan heard that a grain buyer with South West Terminal sent a mass text message to clients in March 2021, advertising that the company was looking to buy 86 tonnes of flax at a price of C$17 ($12.73) per bushel.

The buyer, Kent Mickleborough, spoke with farmer Chris Achter on the phone and texted a picture of a contract to deliver the flax in November, asking the farmer to “please confirm flax contract” in the message.

Achter, who lives in the community of Swift Current, responded with a thumbs-up emoji. But Achter did not deliver the flax in November – and by that time, prices for the crop had increased.

Mickleborough and Achter dispute the meaning of the emoji. The buyer pointed to previous contracts confirmed by text message, suggesting the emoji meant Achter was agreeing to the terms of the contract.

But Achter said that the emoji indicated only that he had received the contract in the text message.

“I deny that he accepted the thumbs-up emoji as a digital signature of the incomplete contract,” Achter said in an affidavit. “I did not have time to review the Flax Contract and merely wanted to indicate that I did receive his text message.”

At one point in the proceedings, Achter’s lawyer objected to a cross examination of his client into the meaning of the thumbs up, arguing his client “is not an expert in emojis”.

Justice Timothy Keene, who at one point used a dictionary.com definition of the symbol, lamented that the case “led the parties to a far flung search for the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone in cases from Israel, New York State and some tribunals in Canada, etc. to unearth what a 👍 emoji means”.

“This court readily acknowledges that a 👍 emoji is a non-traditional means to ‘sign’ a document but nevertheless under these circumstances this was a valid way to convey the two purposes of a ‘signature,”’ he wrote.

Keene also dismissed defence concerns that allowing the thumbs up emoji to signify acceptance “would open up the flood gates” to new interpretations of other emojis, including the ‘fist bump’ and ‘hand shake’. In finding that the thumbs-up can be used to enter into contracts, Keene said the court “cannot (nor should it) attempt to stem the tide of technology and common usage” of emojis.

“This appears to be the new reality in Canadian society and courts will have to be ready to meet the new challenges that may arise from the use of emojis and the like.”

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CNN - Almost half of the tap water in the US is contaminated with chemicals known as “forever chemicals,” according to a new study from the US Geological Survey.

The number of people drinking contaminated water may be even higher than what the study found, however, because the researchers weren’t able to test for all of these per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS, chemicals that are considered dangerous to human health.

PFAS are a family of ubiquitous synthetic chemicals that linger in the environment and the human body. PFAS exposure is linked to problems like cancer, obesity, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, decreased fertility, liver damage and hormone suppression, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In June 2022, based on the latest science, the EPA issued health advisories that said the chemicals are much more hazardous to human health than scientists originally thought and are probably more dangerous even at levels thousands of times lower than previously believed.

There are more than 12,000 types of PFAS in total, according to the National Institutes of Health, but only 32 of the compounds can be picked up by lab tests developed by the US Geological Survey.

Previously, there was limited information on exactly how much PFAS chemicals are in residential tap water, said the authors of the research, published Wednesday in the journal Environmental International. They added that this study is the most comprehensive to date that includes both private wells and public water sources.

The scientists collected water samples directly from taps at 716 locations – 269 from private wells and 447 from public sources – between 2016 and 2021. Based on their findings, they estimate that at least one PFAS chemical would be detected in 45% of US drinking water samples.

Most of the contamination came from water sources near urban areas and in areas that generated PFAS, like manufacturing that uses the chemicals in its products or sites where waste was collected.

The highest concentrations of PFAS in drinking water were found in the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the Eastern Seaboard and Central/Southern California, the study said.

Concentrations were similar between private wells and public supplies.

PFAS can be found in many places, studies show, so toxicologist Dr. Jamie DeWitt is not surprised that it is in so much drinking water.

“There’s been almost no place scientists have looked where they have not found PFAS,” said DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology in the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology at East Carolina University who was not involved in the new study.

PFAS are found in hundreds of household items. The chemicals are used to make carpets and clothes stain-resistant. They keep food from sticking to pans and food packaging, and they’re good at keeping grease and water from soaking through. PFAS are in mobile phones, commercial airplanes and low-emission vehicles, in the foods you can buy at the farmers market or the grocery store, and in rainwater and dental floss. They’re even in the dust that collects in your home.

A 2019 study suggested that PFAS chemicals could be found in 98% of the US population. With that in mind, the new 45% number may sound low, but DeWitt said there could be a couple factors at play. For one, a number of utilities have been making an effort to remove PFAS from the water. Homeowners could also have filters on their systems that make it so PFAS are not as easily detectable.

“I think that’s still a pretty high number, considering,” she said.

DeWitt said that it’s important for people to know what’s in their drinking water but that they don’t necessarily need to be scared.

“I don’t think people should be afraid, but they should be aware and armed themselves with knowledge so that they can get information that will help them to make decisions,” she said.

She recommended looking at your local utility website to get its most recent water report. Utilities will disclose what’s in the water and what they are doing to reduce contaminants.

A carbon filter can help, but it has to be changed regularly. If used too long, the filter can become saturated with chemicals and not work as well. Households can also use reverse osmosis filtering systems, but those can be expensive.

The EPA has proposed the first national drinking water standards for six PFAS chemicals. The proposed limits set the allowable levels for these chemicals so low that they could not be easily detected.

If the standards are finalized, water systems will have to determine whether levels of these PFAS pose a potential risk. They may also need to install treatment or take other actions, the EPA said, and may even need to switch to different water sources.

If PFAS is in 45% of US water systems, the country will have a lot of work to do, said Dr. Graham Peaslee, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and concurrent professor of chemistry and biochemistry who does PFAS research at the University of Notre Dame.

 “I think that we should try our best to work on how to clean this up. My fear is that this is, global warming aside, this is probably the most expensive environmental problem we’re ever going to face,” said Peaslee, who was not involved in the new study. ”There’s nothing that will magically fix it. It’s fairly expensive to clean this up. And it’s a recurring cost, and there’s no permanent solutions to it for any particular utility. It looks frightening.”

But the cleanup will have to be done, he said, because these chemicals carry real health consequences, and people can’t exactly avoid drinking water.

“It’s really insidious, this poison,” Peaslee said. “We are going to have to get inventive on how to filter it out for all of our days.”

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Over the past several decades, the number of forest fires around the world has increased, as have their intensity and size. This change has been attributed to climate change, which dries brush, grasslands and forests, making them more likely to burn. One area that has experienced some of the worst such fires is the North American West, and California in particular.

In this new effort, the researchers wanted to know if this increase in fires means more exposure to fires by people living in the U.S. To find out, they obtained data on more than 15,000 wildfires in the lower 48 states since the year 2000. They looked at maps showing where the fires occurred and compared them to populations of people living in these areas. They were able to make estimates of the number of people exposed to such fires.

They found that approximately 21.8 million people living in the lower 48 states lived within three miles of a large wildfire over the past two decades—with 600,000 of them living within such fire zones. This proximity, the researchers note, would have meant evacuation and loss of homes or places that residents have grown used to visiting.

As part of their analysis, the researchers also found that the number of people exposed to wildfires in the U.S. has been growing steadily over the past 20 years, a trend that appears to likely to continue. They also found that three-fourths of the increase is not attributable to an increase in population or new encroachment on primitive land; instead, it's due to the fact that wildfires have been increasingly encroaching on preexisting communities.

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As a result, some scientists believe July 4 may have been one of the hottest days on Earth in around 125,000 years, due to a dangerous combination of climate change causing global temperatures to soar, the return of the El Niño pattern and the start of summer in the northern hemisphere.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

In the United States, 57 million people were exposed to dangerous heat on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post’s extreme heat tracker. At the same time, China was gripped by a sizzling heat wave, the Antarctic is hotter than usual during its winter, and temperatures in the north of Africa reached 122F, Reuters reported.

Tuesday’s global average temperature was calculated by a model that uses data from weather stations, ships, ocean buoys and satellites, Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute, explained in an email Wednesday. This modeling system has been used to estimate daily average temperatures starting in 1979.

“This is our ‘best guess’ of what the surface temperature at each point on earth was yesterday,” he said.

Instrument-based global temperature records go back to the mid-19th century, but for temperatures before that, scientists are dependent on proxy data captured through evidence left in tree rings and ice cores. “These data tell us that it hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial,” Ceppi said, referring to a period of unusual warmth between two ice ages.

The last time the record was broken was on Monday, when the temperature was 62.62 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the same data. Before that, the highest recorded average temperature in history was 62.46 degrees Fahrenheit as measured on Aug. 14, 2016, during the previous El Niño cycle.

Unless action is taken to combat carbon emissions, experts agree that temperatures are likely to get even hotter.

“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,” said Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at Oxford University, in a phone interview Wednesday. “It’s a triple whammy.”

Tuesday’s record-breaking temperature is partly explained by climate change causing the world to heat up, Allen said, adding that global temperatures are already 1.25 degrees Celsius (2.25 degrees Fahrenheit) above their preindustrial average. “It’s warming 0.25 degrees Celsius a decade,” he said. “That’s why we see records broken continuously, rather than just as one-offs.”

Last year, a report from a United Nations panel of 278 top climate experts warned that the planet was on track to surpass the globally agreed target of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). Beyond that threshold, scientists fear that people will not be able to adapt to climate-induced disasters such as heat waves, famines and infectious diseases.

“If we want to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, which is the world’s governments’ aim, we’ve got very little time to stop the warming,” Allen said. “You don’t need a climate model to know that — it’s just a matter of braking distances.”

We looked at 1,200 possibilities for the planet’s future. These are our best hope. An analysis by The Washington Post of more than 1,200 scenarios for climate change shows some 230 different paths that would leave Earth below 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century. The best-case scenarios, however, require the world to go well beyond any “net zero” goal for fossil fuel emissions and to begin removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it puts in.

“The solution to the problem is actually rather simple,” Allen said: “Capturing carbon dioxide, either where it is generated or recapturing it from the atmosphere and disposing of it back underground. If we did this, we would definitely use much less fossil fuels.”

Over the coming months, scientists are expecting more days of record-breaking heat due to the return of El Niño after a four-year hiatus. In June, scientists declared that the phenomenon — which encourages the atmosphere to trap more heat — was back.

“The global temperature record is a combination of natural variation in the climate and the underlying global warming trend,” Ceppi said, with the natural variation largely explained by El Niño.

The pattern describes how the ocean “inhales” and “exhales” heat every few years, Ceppi said. “We’re currently in a phase where the ocean is releasing heat to the atmosphere.”

“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,” Ceppi warned.

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Also: Tuesday was world’s hottest day on record – breaking Monday’s record.

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Gary Smith describes the problems with today’s science in his new book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science. He recounts endless examples of disinformation, data torture, and data mining, much of which we already knew. Taken together, however, and as I described in this review, they are mind-blowing.

He argues that many of these problems come from things scientists do such as p-hacking during statistical analysis, too little emphasis on “impact” in statistical analyses, outright data falsification, and the creation of the Internet, which can be a huge disinformation machine in addition to a valuable resource. In the last chapter, he also offers some solutions such as ending the artificial thresholds for p-values such as 0.05, requiring online publication of data, and restricting some of the most egregious examples of disinformation.

He also recommends a better science education. A paragraph in the last chapter says:

“Memorizing the names of the parts of cells and then forgetting the names after a test is not scientific understanding. Nor is deciphering the periodic table or memorizing trigonometric formulas. Science is fundamentally about being curious-about how things work and why they sometimes don’t work. Richard Feynman’s journey to Nobel laureate began with a boyhood curiosity about how radios work. He tinkered with them, took them apart, and put them back together. He fixed other people’s radios. He loved it.”

He quotes Richard Feynman because Feynman often talked of science education in the later years of his life (he died in 1988), including what we should know and understand about the natural world. In one video he says:

“See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.”

In another video, he distinguishes between knowing and understanding. Using several examples, he says that knowing is being able to do calculations that agree with experiments. Understanding is being able to explain the underlying phenomena.

For instance, the Mayans knew positions of the moon and could predict eclipses, but they didn’t understand the reasons for their correct calculations. That understanding did not come until Newton and others explained gravity and its impact on rotating bodies. And the lack of understanding allowed the Mayans to falsely attribute things to gods, and not to physical laws.

Feynman also understood that good explanations are difficult to provide because so many explanations emphasize technical jargon. He says: “When we speak without jargon, it frees us from hiding behind knowledge we don’t have. Big words and fluffy ‘business speak’ cripples us from getting to the point and passing knowledge to others.” Feynman understood that his expertise would prove to be a barrier to his students learning and that as such he would need to take actions to ensure his knowledge was accessible; something all educators should do.

Feynman was also very critical of exams:

“You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting.”

Knowing vs. Understanding

Today’s educational systems, in most every developed country, focus almost entirely on knowing, not understanding, and mostly knowing names of something, from birds to parts of cells. Exams ask students to repeat names of things ad nauseum, and then the students who perform well are given high grades and accepted at top universities. Whether the students “understand” science or not is peripheral, they are able to regurgitate information better than other students, so they are the ones who graduate from the top universities and are given the best paying jobs in consulting companies, scientific laboratories, and engineering companies.

Parents know this so they focus their children’s efforts on “knowing” the names of things. If their children can’t remember them, send them to after-school classes where they will learn to recite more of these names, and forget the old adage about trying to “expand their minds” or “build character.”

The impact on kids has been known for decades. Carl Sagan, another well-known scientist whose 13-part PBS television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was watched by at least 500 million people across 60 countries beginning in the 1980s, once said:

“[W]hen you talk to kindergartners or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. They ask deep questions. They ask, ‘What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?’ These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them. You go talk to 12th graders and there’s none of that. They’ve become incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade.”

Don’t Kill Curiosity

These problems extend far beyond America’s borders. In Singapore, where I live, the curiosity is gone by third or fourth grade because there are few if any open question-and-answer sessions. Instead, there are weekly or biweekly tests beginning in third grade that go on for years and that drum out any curiosity. When my 10-year old son (fifth grade in 2023) has told teachers he has read this book or that book about some type of science that has yet to be covered (or I have told teachers outside of his school about books he has read such as Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive), teachers always tell him or me that the school doesn’t cover that topic until secondary school. There is no attempt to increase my son’s interest in the topic, and my son no longer attempts to converse with his teachers and much of his excitement about science (and school) is gone.

Gary Smith knows that some of the problems with scientific research begin with science education. He rightfully begins his book with what scientists do in their jobs today, showing the over emphasis on p-values and the reverse engineering of these p-values to get published. He describes increases in the number and magnitude of these problems as scientists do more reverse engineering through data mining, and correctly points out the artificial intelligence will likely make this worse.

He only mentions science education at the end of the book, arguing that some of today’s distrust of science indirectly comes from a poor education in science, not only for scientists, but for everyone. In the last chapter, “Restoring the ‘Lustre of Science,'” he recommends changes in the way this science is done, and there will be much resistance to his proposed changes. But we also need changes in science education because the public at large, and perhaps even scientists themselves, are woefully mis-educated at an early age, and discouraged from ever “understanding” science, a prerequisite to making significant scientific advances.

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The Ariane 5 rocket has had a long run, with nearly three decades of service launching satellites and spacecraft. Over that time, the iconic rocket, with a liquid hydrogen-fueled core stage and solid rocket boosters, has come to symbolize Europe's guaranteed access to space.

But now, the road is coming to an end for the Ariane 5. As soon as Tuesday evening, the final Ariane 5 rocket will lift off from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. A 90-minute launch window opens at 5:30 pm ET (21:30 UTC). The launch will be webcast on ESA TV.

And after this? Europe's space agency faces some difficult questions.

History

The Ariane 5 rocket made its debut in June 1996 with a launch failure, and its second launch a year later was also a partial failure. But after that, the rocket has had a commendable record of success across 116 total launch attempts. For most of its history, the rocket was a true workhorse, launching dozens of commercial satellites into geostationary space and ensuring that the nations of Europe could get their national security payloads into orbit.

The rocket has also lifted a number of important space science missions, including the Rosetta, Herschel, Planck, BepiColombo, and JUICE spacecraft. Perhaps the rocket's most notable launch came in December 2021, when it lofted the James Webb Space Telescope for NASA into a very precise orbit.

Because Webb did not need to expend any on-board fuel to correct its orbit, NASA was able to double its estimated lifetime for the mission. A NASA systems engineer, Mike Menzel, said an agency analysis found that Webb has enough propellant on board for 20 years of life, up from its original estimate of 10 years.

Looking to the future

That is the sweet part of the Ariane 5 rocket's story. The bitter part comes as Europe looks to the future. Nearly a decade ago, the continent's space leaders recognized that the Ariane 5 was not particularly price-competitive with newer rockets, particularly SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. So they decided to develop a next-generation booster, the Ariane 6, to be more price competitive.

This new rocket was largely a modernization of the Ariane 5, including an updated design for the solid rocket booster and its Vulcain main engine. European space officials said the Ariane 6 rocket would be ready for its debut flight in 2020.

Unfortunately, as of July 2023, it's clear that the Ariane 6 rocket will not fly before next year, and probably not until at least the summer of 2024. Recently, at the Paris Air Show, officials from Arianespace and other European entities declined to provide a new estimated debut launch date. There remains a lot of work to be done, including an additional hot fire test of the rocket's upper stage, flight software qualification tests, and assembly of the rocket on the launch pad.

Real-world consequences

These delays are not good for Europe's launch industry. Recall, the continent developed the Ariane 6 rocket to be competitive with the Falcon 9. Now, due to its ongoing delays, the European Space Agency is having to move some of its most valuable missions onto the SpaceX rocket.

On Saturday, for example, Europe launched its high-value Euclid space telescope on the Falcon 9 rocket because an operational Ariane 6 rocket would not be available for the mission until at least 2025.

Delays in the Ariane 6 have also prompted the European Space Agency to agree to launch its Hera asteroid probe on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in 2024. And the space agency's director general, Josef Aschbacher, said an Earth science satellite called EarthCARE will also have to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 due to problems with its European Vega C rocket.

In some recent comments, Aschbacher acknowledged that Europe has fallen significantly behind SpaceX in launch capabilities.

"SpaceX has undeniably changed the launcher market paradigm as we know it," he wrote in May. "With the dependable reliability of Falcon 9 and the captivating prospects of Starship, SpaceX continues to totally redefine the world’s access to space, pushing the boundaries of possibility as they go along. Once successful, Starship will carry payloads of around 100 tonnes into Low Earth Orbit while reducing the launch cost by a factor of 10. Falcon 9 aims to launch 100 times in 2023. Europe, on the other hand, finds itself today in an acute launcher crisis."

So as the final Ariane 5 takes flight, Europe is sailing into uncertain seas until the Ariane 6 can finally get going.

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AT LEAST FOUR people in Florida and one in Texas have been diagnosed with malaria that they must have caught near where they live—because, according to health officials, none of them traveled outside the US or their own states. The very unusual discovery has left infectious disease specialists wondering: Who else might be ill, and will local doctors recognize what’s wrong?

Malaria isn’t completely unprecedented in the US: About 2,000 residents contract it every year, but almost always because they traveled to a place where it’s endemic, were bitten by an infected mosquito there, and fell ill once they came home. Locally acquired malaria is extremely rare. It arises from a chain of transmission that probably starts with a US mosquito biting a tourist, migrant, or refugee who has been in an endemic country and is carrying the infection in their blood. Then the insect passes it along by biting someone else. That hasn’t occurred in the US since 2003.

There are roughly 247 million cases of malaria in the world each year, according to the World Health Organization, and in every one a mosquito is only the vector. Humans are the disease’s natural host; mosquitos transport it between people. (Unlike with Covid and some other diseases, animals don’t play a role.) So when experts learn someone has been diagnosed, and can be confident that person hasn’t traveled, their first impulse is to ask, who else was infected but has not been found?

“If there are five cases right now, that means there's got to be a lot more mosquitoes out there that are infected,” says Ross Boyce, a physician and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, who runs a malaria research program in Uganda. “And there may even be more people that are infected than we know about at this point.”

The five people identified by health authorities, in Sarasota County on Florida’s west coast and Cameron County at the southernmost tip of Texas, have already received treatment and are recovering, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In both areas, mosquitoes have been trapped and analyzed, and mosquito-control districts are spraying insecticide to knock down local populations.

Those are familiar actions in parts of the US, because they were key to defending against the epidemic of Zika that swept through North and South America in 2016 and landed in Brownsville, Texas, within Cameron County, late that year. Florida has been combating outbreaks of dengue, another mosquito-borne virus, for more than a decade, after it appeared in Key West and then moved north to Miami.

But malaria hasn’t been persistently present in the US since it was eliminated here in 1951, in a campaign that gave rise to the CDC. (The agency was originally called the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, tasked with reducing the disease’s impact on soldiers headed to World War II and bases producing tanks and ships.) Thus malaria experts worry that doctors, especially primary care physicians, may not know it when they see it.

“Malaria often has very nondescript symptoms—you have fever, or feel like you have the flu,” says Amy Bei, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, who spoke from a research collaboration site in Senegal. “And not all doctors are going to have that as their first thought. When you start to have local transmission, it’s an important thing for clinicians to be thinking about.”

If there’s any good news in these recent discoveries, it is in the species of parasite causing them. All five types of malaria parasites fall within the genus Plasmodium, and all of them destroy red blood cells. But the species in these new cases is P. vivax, which is more widely distributed geographically, but less frequently lethal, than the dominant form P. falciparum. Vivax still makes people gravely ill, though, and it possesses an evolutionary trick that falciparum does not. After the initial infection, it can lie dormant in the liver, causing no symptoms and not registering on blood tests until it reactivates—so a person who thinks they have recovered may not know they remain a danger to others.

The risks posed by dengue and Zika, and also West Nile virus, have caused Americans to start thinking about the impact of climate change on diseases spread by mosquitoes. The species that spread those viruses—Aedes aegypti for dengue and Zika, and several Culex species for West Nile—seem to be expanding their ranges, and the severe storms and warm nights caused by climate change may make areas friendlier to mosquitoes than they had been.

But malaria is transmitted by species in a different genus, Anopheles, and those are already present in much of the US. Climate change has expanded the regions where Anopheles circulate in Africa, and some modeling studies suggest that climate change will intensify risks in multiple countries where mosquitoes are already present, for instance by encouraging larger populations of insects or expanding the number of months in which mosquitoes survive.

In the US, however, where these new cases occurred are the same places where malaria would have infected people before it was locally eliminated; they already have Anopheles mosquitoes, and their weather is already warm enough to sustain them. So climate change may not have made these people more vulnerable than before.

That makes it even more important that municipalities in risky areas deploy robust mosquito control measures. It’s a big ask. Mosquito abatement is locally controlled in the US, and it’s very patchy: Some Florida cities can field the equivalent of a small Air Force of sprayer planes, but elsewhere in the South, funds are thin. “I hope this is a further wake-up call that there needs to be more investment in vector surveillance and vector control,” Boyce says. “So you spot it in the mosquitoes before you have a human case.”

In the end, keeping malaria from spreading in the US is simple but not easy. Simple, because it requires only that people not bring the infection into the country. But not easy, because any malaria prevention plan must take into account the enormous numbers of people entering the US from endemic zones, whether as tourists, economic migrants, or asylum seekers and refugees. Human movement spreads malaria and has done so since prehistory. That movement is unlikely to stop, but the risk of infection can be reduced.

Travelers can prevent malaria infection by taking a daily or weekly dose of drugs that kill the parasite as it circulates in the blood or reproduces in the liver. Almost all antimalarials have some side effects, however, from mild ones such as stomach upset and headaches to vivid dreams and flashes of psychosis, and so people often forgo them. With post-Covid “revenge travel” still booming, more Americans than ever are venturing to tropical endemic zones—and if they don’t protect themselves, they may bring malaria home as an unintended souvenir.

“We already have 2,000 cases a year, and a lot of those are because people did not take precautions,” says Johanna Daily, a longtime malaria researcher who is a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a physician at Montefiore Health System. “If people are traveling to endemic areas, please go to a travel clinic, please take antimalarials. It could prevent malaria here in the US.”

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The research, recently published in the journal Ecology Letters, demonstrates the potential severity of climate change impacts on coral health. It warns of the potential eradication of entire reef ecosystems and the subsequent detrimental effects on coastal populations.

For the meta-analysis, researchers from UNSW Sydney analyzed 108 studies of coral health where coral reefs were surveyed for disease symptoms. They then linked the disease surveys to ocean sea surface temperature records to understand how climate change – specifically ocean warming – has influenced coral disease prevalence worldwide and performed modeling to forecast disease under future warming scenarios.

They found coral disease increased with ocean temperatures over time, tripling over the past 25 years to 9.92 percent globally. Their modeling also predicts disease prevalence can increase to 76.8 percent in 2100 if temperatures continue to rise on the same trajectory – the most conservative worst-case scenario.

Samantha Burke, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, says the findings highlight the devastating impacts of rising temperatures on coral reefs and the dire need for swift action to mitigate climate change.

Coral disease is expected to become more widespread even if ocean temperatures rise conservatively.

 

“Coral disease is a serious cause of coral mortality globally and reef decline, and our modeling predicts it will only continue to worsen – even if ocean temperatures remain conservative,” Ms. Burke says.

The study also suggests coral disease is likely to worsen more in the Pacific Ocean than in the Atlantic Ocean or Indian Ocean based on current data.

“Particular oceans are more at risk, but it’s difficult for us to know whether that is solely from warming ocean temperatures or combined with the many other stressors coral face,” Ms. Burke says. “But what is clear is that coral disease prevalence is climbing across the globe, and without urgent action to address warming temperatures, more coral will become diseased.”

An ecosystem on the brink

Coral reefs play a critical role in the marine ecosystem, supporting around a quarter of the world’s fish. They’re also vital for coastal communities who rely on the reef for fisheries and tourism, as well as the protections they provide from storms and coastal erosion.

“They are the habitat builders. Without coral, there is no reef environment and no coastal industry,” Ms Burke says.

Coral disease occurs when the coral’s immune system is compromised, usually after becoming infected by a pathogen – like bacteria or fungi – that causes disease in the animal. It is different from coral bleaching, which is when corals turn white under stress by expelling the zooxanthellae algae that live inside their tissue responsible for coloration.

“Certain diseases act more quickly than others, but most corals that get diseased end up dying from it,” Ms. Burke says. “Because reefs take a long time to establish, the coral may not recover, and entire sections of the reef can be lost.”

Corals are sensitive organisms and require a precise range of environmental conditions to survive, including water temperature, salinity, and quality. Living outside this normal range can make corals ‘stressed’ – less able to grow, reproduce and ultimately survive.

Though infectious pathogens like bacteria and fungi ultimately cause coral disease, stressed corals are more vulnerable to infection. Rising water temperatures may also increase the virulence or growth rate of disease-causing organisms.

“As the ocean warms, it increases coral stress which can decrease its immune response,” Ms Burke says. “Increasing temperatures can also create more favorable conditions for the pathogen causing disease.”

Many diseases that affect corals are known by their appearance, such as black band disease or yellow band disease. But scientists have yet to identify many of the disease-causing pathogens.

“It’s still relatively unknown whether the microbes associated with diseased coral are the cause or a symptom of disease, just that the coral is sick, and the tissue is dying,” Ms. Burke says. “Whether the fungi or bacteria present caused disease or merely fed on the dying tissue is unclear, so researchers need to study it further.”

Ms. Burke says more research into coral disease will also help scientists develop effective disease interventions and demonstrate the complexity of threats that coral reef ecosystems are now facing.

“The solution to coral disease is likely complex and needs action on a large and small scale. We can’t just wait around and hope for a silver bullet like a universal antibiotic,” Ms. Burke says.

“Given what’s at stake, we need to take many steps forward to develop effective mitigation strategies, and addressing increasing temperatures would be a great place to start.”

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Sir Elton John set a record at this year’s Glastonbury, becoming the most-watched headliner in the festival’s history, with more than 7 million people tuning in live to the BBC to watch his last ever UK performance.

The 76-year-old singer certainly delivered all his characteristic showmanship. But many who have followed his music over the decades will have noticed how much his voice has changed during his career – and not only because of the surgery he had in the 1980s to remove polyps from his vocal cords.

Equally, it’s not all down to the process of ageing. While it’s no mystery that this affects every part of our body, it isn’t the only reason that a person’s voice – even a professional singer like Sir Elton – can sound quite different over the years.

The sound of your voice

The vocal cords are what produce the sound of your voice. They are located in the larynx, a part of the respiratory system that allows air to pass from your throat to your lungs. When air passes out of the lungs and through the larynx, it causes the vocal cords to vibrate – producing sound.

The vocal cords are composed of three main parts: the vocalis muscle, vocal ligament, and a mucous membrane (containing glands) to cover them. This keeps the surface moist and protects them from damage.

There are also approximately 17 other muscles in the larynx that can alter vocal cord position and tension – thus changing the sound produced.

Pre-puberty, there’s very little difference in the sound the vocal cords produce. But during puberty, hormones begin exerting their effects. This changes the structure of the larynx – making the “Adam’s apple” more prominent in men – and the length of the vocal cords. After puberty, they’re around 16mm in length in men, and 10mm in women.

Women’s vocal cords are also 20-30% thinner after puberty. These shorter, thinner vocal cords are the reason why women typically have higher voices than men.

Even after puberty, hormones can affect the voice. For instance, a woman’s voice may sound different depending on the stage of her menstrual cycle – with the best voice quality being in the ovulatory phase. This is because the glands produce most mucous during this phase, giving the vocal cords their best functional ability.

Research also shows that women taking the contraceptive pill show less variation in voice quality because the pill halts ovulation.

On the other hand, hormonal changes during the premenstrual phase impede the vocal cords, making them stiffer. This may explain why opera singers would be offered “grace days” in the 1960s to ensure they didn’t damage their vocal cords. And, because women’s vocal cords are thinner, they may also be more likely to suffer damage from overuse.

Everything ages

As with almost every other part of the body, vocal cords age. But these changes might not be as noticeable for everyone.

As we get older, the larynx begins increasing its mineral content, making it stiffer and more like bone than cartilage. This change can begin happening as early as your thirties – especially in men. This makes the vocal cords less flexible.

The muscles that allow the vocal cords to move also begin wasting (as do our other muscles) as we age. The ligaments and tissues that support the vocal cords also lose elasticity, becoming less flexible.

Changes in the larynx can begin happening as early as your thirties.

There’s also a decrease in pulmonary muscle function, reducing the power of the air expelled from the lungs to create the sound. The number of glands that produce the protective mucus also decrease, alongside a reduction in the ability to control the larynx.

Lifestyle is a factor

While vocal cords age at largely the same rate in most people, many lifestyle factors can increase the risk of damage to them – and so can change the way your voice sounds.

Smoking, for example, causes localised inflammation, increased mucous production, but can also dry out the mucosal surfaces. Alcohol has a similar effect. Over time, these factors can damage the vocal cords and alter the voice’s sound.

Some over-the-counter and prescription drugs can also alter the voice – such as steroid inhalers used for laryngitis. Blood thinners may also damage the vocal cords and can cause polyps to form, making the voice sound raspy or hoarse. Muscle relaxants, too, can lead to irritation and vocal cord damage due to the drug allowing stomach acid to wash back into the larynx. Thankfully, the irritation and changes caused by these medications typically disappears after stopping use.

One other lifestyle factor can be overuse, which is typically seen in singers and other people who use their voice a lot during work, such as teachers and fitness instructors. This can lead to an uncommon condition called Reinke’s oedema, which can also be caused by smoking. Reinke’s oedema causes fluid to swell in the vocal cords, changing the pitch of the voice – often making it deeper.

In extreme cases of Reinke’s oedema, surgery is needed to drain the fluid. But in most cases, rest and avoiding irritants (smoking and alcohol) is beneficial, while speech and language therapy can also address the change in sound.

Maintaining our vocal quality

While we can’t help some of the age-related changes that happen to our vocal cords, we can maintain some of our vocal quality and ability through continued use. This may explain why, in many cases, singers show significantly less vocal change with age than their non-singing counterparts.

Singing or reading out loud daily can give the vocal cords sufficient exercise to slow their decline.

Looking after your vocal cords is also important. Staying hydrated and limiting intake of alcohol and tobacco can help prevent high rates of decline and damage.

Adam Taylor, Professor and Director of the Clinical Anatomy Learning Centre, Lancaster University

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

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The fifth Indiana Jones revolves around the so-called "Dial of Destiny," a time-twisting device supposedly crafted by the ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes. While its time-traveling credentials are pure nonsense, the titular object is based on a genuine archaeological artifact: the Antikythera mechanism. 

This remarkable relic was found by sponge divers among a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera in 1901. With its chunky cogs and gears uncrushed in centuries of debris, it looks like something from a steampunk graphic novel.

It was originally recovered as a single lump but has since been divided into three separate components comprising at least 82 parts, including 37 meshing bronze gears. It's thought the device was originally placed inside a wooden box, although this has eroded away long ago. 

Significant parts of the device have been lost to the past, but it’s estimated it was about the size of a chunky toaster, around 34 × 18 × 9 centimeters (13.4 × 7.1 × 3.5 inches). 

At over 2,000 years old, the relic is the world’s oldest analog computer, capable of predicting the positions of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets as well as eclipses. For well over a century, the object mystified archaeologists as it appeared to rely on knowledge and technology that was well ahead of its time. 

To work the machine, a person would turn its crank with their hand to trigger the movement of a series of gears. As the cogs turn, this would move parts of the device to highlight different symbols and Greek texts denoting different astronomical features.

It was essentially a mechanical orrery that could be used to predict eclipses, track the movements of the Sun, Moon, and stars, and the positions of the five planets then known to the ancients Greeks: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. To view astronomical events of the past, users could simply turn the crank the other way.

James Mangold, director of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, has explained that this mysterious device was the direct inspiration for the movie. However, he suggests that many parts of the object's story have been exaggerated for fantastical effect.

"All the Indiana Jones movies are built on a fusion of fantasy and reality, an extrapolation of what might have been to what may be impossible," the director of the movie James Mangold reportedly told the media. "And I thought the Antikythera mechanism was a great relic."

Clearly, the Antikythera mechanism was not a time-traveling machine (at least that we know about). 

There is also no evidence that it was owned by Archimedes. However, some researchers argue that there is a clear connection between the famous thinker and Antikythera mechanism. 

In 2021, scientists at UCL reconstructed the Antikythera mechanism to understand how it calculated astronomical cycles. When digging into the history of the device, the researchers found had striking similarities to orrery devices purportedly made by Archimedes several centuries before. 

“This machine sounds just like the Antikythera mechanism. The passage suggests that Archimedes, although he lived before we believe the device was built, might have founded the tradition that led to the Antikythera mechanism. It may well be that the Antikythera mechanism was based on a design by Archimedes,” Professor Tony Freeth, lead author of the 2021 research from UCL Mechanical Engineering, wrote for Scientific American.

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Astronomers have found an extra-low hum rumbling through the universe.

The discovery, announced today, shows that extra-large ripples in space-time are constantly squashing and changing the shape of space. These gravitational waves are cousins to the echoes from black hole collisions first picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment in 2015. But whereas LIGO’s waves might vibrate a few hundred times a second, it might take years or decades for a single one of these gravitational waves to pass by at the speed of light.

The finding has opened a wholly new window on the universe, one that promises to reveal previously hidden phenomena such as the cosmic whirling of black holes that have the mass of billions of suns, or possibly even more exotic (and still hypothetical) celestial specters.

“It’s beautiful,” said Chiara Caprini, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva and CERN in Switzerland who was not directly involved in the work. “A new era in the observation of the universe has opened up.”

The results come from studies that stretch back more than a decade by four teams based in the U.S., Europe, Australia and China. Today, in a coordinated data release, the teams present evidence for a background “hum” of gravitational waves that were detected by tracking changes in the impossibly regular beats of objects called pulsars.

As long-wavelength gravitational waves pass through our cosmic neighborhood, they distort the space-time around us, which changes the arrival time of a pulsar’s pulses. Researchers had to map the correlations of these arrival times across dozens of different pulsars for decades in order to pick up the signal. “I had butterflies when I first saw this,” said Stephen Taylor, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University and chair of the team known as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav. “I’m so excited we can finally talk about it.”

The NANOGrav team primarily used three large radio observatories in North America (left to right): the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Green Bank Observatory; Susan E. Degginger/Science Source; David Parker/Science Source

Most likely, the gravitational waves come from pairs of supermassive black holes that are spiraling around each other inside merging galaxies. But we might be seeing something else entirely, perhaps something exotic such as ruptures in space-time itself resulting from loops of energy called cosmic strings.

“Finding for the first time the suggestion of background gravitational waves is fascinating,” said Juan García-Bellido, a theoretical cosmologist from the Autonomous University of Madrid who was not involved in the work. “It’s really Nobel Prize-winning research.”

A Galaxy-Size Hack

There’s two ways to start the story of this discovery. The first, as usual, is with Albert Einstein. His general theory of relativity in 1915 suggested that the universe is an ocean of space-time on which objects like black holes and stars sit. Movements of these objects would send ripples across this space-time ocean — gravitational waves.

The other place to start the story is in 1967, with a graduate student from Lurgan, Northern Ireland, named Jocelyn Bell. Using a radio telescope that she helped build near Cambridge, U.K., she spotted an unusual signal in space that repeated every second. She and other astronomers later classified these signals as a new class of celestial object known as pulsars — the rapidly spinning cores of dead stars. Today, some are known to spin exceedingly fast, emitting regular pulses of radio waves hundreds or even thousands of times per second.

The stopwatch-like regularity of pulsars makes them valuable cosmic timekeepers. In 1983, the U.S. astronomers Ron Hellings and George Downs suggested a novel way to put them to use: If gravitational waves were squeezing and stretching space-time, that motion would change the arrival time of the pulsars’ radio flashes.

The key is to look at many pairs of pulsars and compare their time delays. “If they’re close together on the sky, they’re both going to be early or late,” said Sarah Vigeland, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and chair of NANOGrav’s Gravitational Wave Detection Working Group. “As you pull them apart, they become out of sync, but in a way you can predict.”

Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine; source: nanograv.org

To catch these fluctuations, pulsar timing arrays such as NANOGrav use multiple radio telescopes to observe many pulsars over many years. These projects are cosmic cousins of LIGO and other earthbound observatories that detect gravitational waves by looking for tiny changes in the relative lengths of its two arms.

While LIGO’s arms are each four kilometers long, pulsar timing arrays effectively use the distance from Earth to each pulsar as a much larger arm — one hundreds or thousands of light-years in length. “What we’ve essentially done is hack the entire galaxy to make a giant gravitational wave antenna,” Taylor said.

This longer distance makes pulsar timing arrays sensitive to a different variety of gravitational wave. Whereas LIGO can detect high-frequency gravitational waves, which might occur when star-size black holes orbit each other tens or hundreds of times a second before merging, pulsar timing arrays are sensitive to processes occurring across years or even decades. That’s one reason why pulsar timing arrays need many years of data — if it takes a decade for a single wave to pass by, you can’t detect it in just a few months.

Of the four groups releasing data today, NANOGrav is the most confident in its result. The project was founded in 2007 and has largely used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (which collapsed in late 2020, near the end of NANOGrav’s 15 years of data collection). “We’re still mourning the loss of Arecibo,” Taylor said.

Separate pulsar timing array projects were also established in different parts of the globe. The four teams, which together form the International Pulsar Timing Array, coordinated today’s announcements, but they have not yet performed a combined data analysis. “It’s complex,” said Andrew Zic, an astronomer at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia and part of that country’s Parkes Pulsar Timing Array team. “We’re ready to move towards being a more unified thing.”

In 2020, NANOGrav released preliminary data from 12.5 years of observations. Those showed a tentative hint of gravitational waves affecting the pulses of some 45 pulsars.

Now they’ve added a few more years of data, along with data from nearly two dozen more sources, and a more consistent pattern has emerged. “It really jumps out to us,” Vigeland said.

“We’re looking at deviations in time that are a couple of hundred nanoseconds,” said Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and a founding member of NANOGrav. They’ve detected a particular pattern in the data, called the Hellings-Downs curve, that makes them confident that what they’re seeing is the gravitational-wave background. “That’s the smoking gun of gravitational waves.”

The European team, which observed 25 pulsars over 25 years with six telescopes, sees similar hints of timing delays but is less certain of their results. “The Americans are very confident,” said Michael Keith, an astrophysicist at the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics and part of the European team. The Australian team is reporting observations from 32 pulsars over 18 years, while the Chinese team has observed 57 pulsars for a little more than three years.

Supermassive Dances

So what’s causing these waves? The most likely sources are supermassive black holes — behemoths millions to billions of times the mass of our sun. These are found at the center of massive galaxies such as our own Milky Way. When two galaxies collide, as sometimes happens, the supermassive black holes at their centers may also begin to orbit each other, twirling around at a cosmically ponderous rate, and perturbing space-time as they do.

“If you have a rotating distribution of mass that’s not symmetric” — even something small, like a spinning pen — “gravitational waves are coming out,” Keith said. On big enough scales, with supermassive black holes, the low and steady rumble of these waves becomes detectable as they permeate space.

Sarah Vigeland, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and chair of NANOGrav’s Gravitational Wave Detection Working Group, is one of more than 190 researchers working on NANOGrav.

Tonia Klein

NANOGrav can’t yet make out individual gravitational wave sources. Instead, the team has found evidence for the background hum of all low-frequency gravitational waves. It’s like a buoy bouncing up and down in a busy harbor — it can’t distinguish the wake of a single boat, but its motion can reveal that there are some big objects slicing through the water.

Supermassive black holes, however, are not the only possible explanation for the background hum. Another possibility is cosmic strings. First predicted in the 1970s, these would essentially be cracks in space-time caused by the expansion of the universe. The cracks would emit gravitational waves as they spun around in loops.

“The idea of cosmic strings is you have some extension of the Standard Model [of particle physics] in which, in addition to pointlike particles, you can get strings of energy stretching out across the universe,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at King’s College London and CERN who is a proponent of cosmic strings. “Those strings of energy move around and can collide, spawning loops of string that eventually collapse by emitting gravitational waves.”

While the idea is somewhat extravagant, the observations so far from NANOGrav and the other teams are consistent with what we’d expect to see from cosmic strings. “They’d be constantly wriggling, and from time to time they crack like a whip and send out gravitational wave bursts,” said Patrick Brady, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. If the pulsar timing arrays don’t see individual sources start to emerge from their upcoming data, that could point toward this exotic physics beyond the Standard Model. “Cosmic strings will give you a much smoother signal,” Ellis said.

But while strings and other exotic phenomena can’t be ruled out, for now supermassive black holes are the favored explanation. “From an Occam’s razor point of view, we know galaxies merge and almost all galaxies have supermassive black holes,” Ransom said. “So we think it’s probably most likely that the signal we’re seeing is from supermassive black holes. But we could be wrong.”

Discovering a population of supermassive black hole pairs would help answer open questions in astrophysics. For example, what happens when two orbiting supermassive black holes get relatively close to each other? There were reasons to think that instead of merging, as smaller black holes do, supermassive black holes just rotate around each other forever. “This is called the last-parsec problem,” Caprini said; a parsec is a unit of distance measuring 3.26 light-years across. “It is an unsolved problem.” If pulsar timing arrays are seeing gravitational waves from these moments, however, it would be “a demonstration that two supermassive black holes do get close enough and merge,” rather than remaining in distant orbits, Caprini said.

Just the existence of such a population has broad implications for our understanding of galactic evolution in the universe. “It would mean that at the center of some galaxies, there are massive black holes that are not just alone,” Caprini said. “We can probe, through the history of the universe, how galaxies collide and the rate of collisions.”

Such work would require the discovery of individual supermassive black hole pairs, and so is not yet feasible. But as researchers combine the data sets from the different teams and take more observations over the next few years, individual sources may start to emerge, perhaps allowing astronomers to pinpoint binary supermassive black holes in space and time.

“Bright individual sources will start poking above this background hum,” said Maura McLaughlin, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University and one of the founding members of NANOGrav. “We’ll be able to say, in that direction, there is a supermassive black hole binary with [a certain] mass. We’ll learn a whole lot about galaxy mergers.”

What is clear is that these projects have given astronomers a completely new tool with which to study the cosmos. The rise of gravitational-wave astronomy “is like when Galileo first turned his telescope on the sky,” Brady said. We now know that a background of ripples in space-time pervades the universe. An ocean of gravitational waves awaits.

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In 1818 Johann Christian August Heinroth, considered to have been the first professor of psychiatry at a university, suggested that sleep deprivation might alleviate “melancholia,” or depression. But it wasn’t until 1959 that formal reports began to emerge, again from Germany, suggesting that a night of sleeplessness could boost mood in depression. Experimental trials in the 1970s went on to confirm a benefit. Since then study after study has shown that spending a night without sleep, especially with lights on, indeed produces mood benefits for about half of the people with depression.

The effects of this approach, dubbed “wake therapy,” offer the bonus of being immediate, unlike most antidepressants, which require a few weeks to work. Sleep deprivation has disadvantages that include, well, going without sleep. As anyone who has parented an infant can attest, that has unwanted “spillover” effects on other aspects of life. Identifying processes in the brain that underlie sleep-deprived boosting of mood could lead to therapies that are less burdensome than enduring a wakeful night.

A new study published June 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA has identified specific brain regions that kick up activity when sleep deprivation lifts one’s mood. Because the research included people with and without depression, the findings broaden understanding about the “bizarre phenomenon” of mood-boosting sleep deprivation, says study author Philip Gehrman, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Even without immediately leading to new therapies, the results confirm the benefit of wake therapy in depression, says Anna Wirz-Justice, a professor emerita at the Center for Chronobiology at the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel in Switzerland, who was not involved in the work. “Perhaps this study, which provides clues to mechanisms, will lead to reevaluation of the intervention as an inexpensive, rapid antidepressant modality.”

To take a peek inside the brain, Gehrman and his colleagues evaluated 30 people with major depressive disorder who all underwent sleep deprivation. They also assessed another 54 people without depression, 16 of whom served as controls who did not undergo sleep deprivation.

Over the course of five days, researchers performed three imaging scans on all of the participants. The sleep deprivation groups underwent one scan after a normal night’s sleep, another after a sleepless night and a third after two nights of recovery sleep. The 16 control participants without depression underwent three scans, too, but got regular sleep. The scanning tracked blood oxygen delivery in the brains of participants as they lay still, doing nothing. In between scans, every two waking hours from days two to five, all participants completed a questionnaire assessing their mood.

The questionnaire responses showed that 43 percent of those with diagnosed depression experienced mood improvement after sleep deprivation. Most, but not all, of those without depression reported a worsened mood after losing sleep.

Imaging in those reporting improved mood showed increased activity in two brain regions that were previously implicated in depression and the effects of sleep deprivation. One of these regions, the amygdala, is famously associated with emotion processing and memory. The other is the anterior cingulate cortex, which studies have connected to depression and to the benefits of sleep deprivation. Unexpectedly, activity in these two areas was increased in participants whose mood improved whether they had depression or not.

The involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex “fits the picture” that these previous studies have pieced together about depression and disrupted sleep, says Francesco Benedetti, a longtime sleep disruption researcher at the department of clinical neurosciences at San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, who was not involved in the work.

The implied link between the two regions suggests that they have a role in producing an elevated mood after a sleepless night. In participants with depression, the connection persisted even after two nights of recovery sleep. Benedetti says that sleep deprivation may heighten the effect of structures in the upper part of the brain, such as the anterior cingulate cortex, on quieting the amygdala and boosting mood. This signal in people reporting mood improvement regardless of depression diagnosis is “an important clue” to understanding how sleep deprivation works, Wirz-Justice says. Studies like this are a “fabulous” way to study what underlies changes in mood without interference from medications, she adds.

Back in 1976 Burkhard Pflug, a psychiatrist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, wrote that sleep deprivation might behave like a “zeitgeber,” or “time giver,” in people with depression and resynchronize aberrant brain rhythms. Benedetti’s work indicates that depression might flatten rhythmic cycles that support brain function and that sleep deprivation might jump-start these rhythms back into a healthy pattern.

The new findings may offer targets for reviving the zeitgeber in depression in accessible ways. A noninvasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which magnetic waves are applied from outside the skull, is used to treat depression, but its effectiveness relies on hitting the right regions. Gehrman says that brain circuits that are responsive to sleep deprivation could represent candidate targets for transcranial magnetic stimulation or other kinds of stimulation. Such approaches hold potential to produce the rapid effect of sleep deprivation without the downside of a sleepless night.

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Although not real water, coronal rain is a condensation process in which some of the Sun’s fiery material clumps together due to sudden, localised temperature drops. The corona, which is the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, is formed of gas at million-degree temperatures, and quick drops in temperature produce super-dense clumps of plasma that reach 250 kilometres wide. These fiery balls plummet back down towards the Sun as gravity pulls them in at over 100 kilometres per second.

SolO view in the EUV on 30 March 2022 showing a partial section of the Sun with gas at 1 million degrees. The red paths correspond to some of the rain tracks analysed in this work. The Earth image has been overlaid to scale.
Credit: Patrick Antolin. Background image: ESA/Solar Orbiter EUI/HRI

SolO view in the EUV on 1 April 2022 showing a partial section of the Sun with gas at 1 million degrees. The red paths correspond to some of the rain tracks analysed in this work. The Earth image has been overlaid to scale
Credit: Patrick Antolin. Background image: ESA/Solar Orbiter EUI/HRI

The research will be published in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics dedicated to SolO’s first close perihelion to the Sun. In spring 2022, SolO cruised super close to the sun at a distance of only 49 million kilometres – a third of the distance between the Earth and the Sun – allowing the best spatial resolution ever obtained of the solar corona.

Along with the first super-high-resolution images of the coronal rain clumps, SolO observed the heating and compression of gas immediately underneath them. The resulting spike in intensity below the clumps indicates that the gas is heated up to a million degrees, which lasts for a few minutes as they fall.

On Earth, ‘shooting stars’ happen when meteoroids, or objects in space that range in size from dust grains to small asteroids, enter our atmosphere at high speeds and burn up. Only some meteors make it to the ground without disintegrating and those that do can produce huge craters. But the Sun’s corona is thin and low in density and does not strip much material off the clumps, so scientists think most of the ‘shooting stars’ make it to the solar surface intact. Their impacts have never been observed until now and SolO’s observations have revealed that this process can produce a brief, strong brightening with an upward surge of material and shock waves that reheat the gas above.

‘Shooting stars’ and meteors in Earth’s atmosphere are characterised by a trace behind the meteor’s path, formed when heated material underneath strips off parts of the object – a process called ablation. The same happens to comets orbiting the Sun. However, ablation does not occur in the solar corona because of its magnetic field. Instead, falling gas is partially ionised and follows the magnetic field lines, which act as giant tubes that funnel the gas. The compression and heat underneath prevents the clumps from producing tails and makes the phenomenon much harder to capture on the Sun.

The project’s lead author, Patrick Antolin, says: “The inner solar corona is so hot we may never be able to probe it in situ with a spacecraft.

However, SolO orbits close enough to the Sun that it can detect small-scale phenomena occurring within the corona, such as the effect of the rain on the corona, allowing us a precious indirect probe of the coronal environment that is crucial to understanding its composition and thermodynamics. Just detecting coronal rain is a huge step forward for solar physics because it gives us important clues about the major solar mysteries, such as how it is heated to millions of degrees.”

“If humans were alien beings capable of living on the Sun’s surface, we would constantly be rewarded with amazing views of shooting stars,” jokes Antolin, “but we would need to watch out for our heads!”

These SolO observations have also confirmed earlier research which showed that coronal rain is far more pervasive than previously thought.

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The term "Big Bang" is thrown around casually, to the point of becoming the title of one of the most popular sitcoms ever. But while we all understand the basic idea — that the universe was once small, hot and dense — many people still hold big misconceptions about the theory. Here are five fascinating facts about the theory that defines our cosmos.

1. A Catholic priest first thought of it

Albert Einstein (left) and Georges Lemaître in January, 1900. (Image credit: Getty)

In 1915, Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which originally stated that the universe would naturally be either expanding or contracting. But Einstein, along with the vast majority of astronomers and physicists at the time, believed that the universe was static, so he added some extra terms to the equations to balance everything out.

Years later, Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are, on average, receding away from us. While astronomers continued to debate the implications of that observation, Belgian physicist and Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître was the first to take both Einstein's and Hubble's results at face value, arguing that we live in an expanding universe that was once much smaller, hotter and denser than it is today. He dubbed this origin point the "primeval atom."

2. It was verified accidentally

A researcher sitting at a high-power microwave receiver receiving messages from orbiting satellites. (Image credit: Getty/ Universal History Archive )

Most physicists viewed Lemaître's idea with skepticism, especially considering that his theory looked a little too close to the story of Genesis. But over the decades, all other attempts to explain Hubble's result failed observational scrutiny. Still, the "Big Bang" theory was regarded as an interesting — but not very plausible — idea.

In 1964, two radio engineers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were testing a new microwave receiver. No matter how hard they worked, they couldn't remove a stubborn background hiss that they were constantly hearing in the instrument — they even tried scrubbing all of the pigeon poop off the receivers. Searching around for an explanation, they happened upon a team of theoretical physicists who were gathering funding to build exactly what they had. It turned out that the background hiss was due to radiation left over from when the universe transitioned from a hot, dense plasma to a slightly less hot neutral gas. It's called the cosmic microwave background, and it remains a cornerstone of our understanding of the Big Bang.

3. It's not a theory of creation

Image of the Helix Nebula, also called the God's Eye Nebula. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.)

The Big Bang is a theory of the history of the universe, especially its earliest moments. We can say, with an extreme degree of confidence based on multiple independent lines of evidence, that our entire observable universe — every speck of dust, every star and every galaxy — was once crammed into a volume no bigger than a peach with a temperature of over 1 trillion degrees.

What the theory does not tell us, however, is where the universe came from — or even if that question makes sense. Our current understanding of physics can only take us so far into the past before all of our theories, including our knowledge of the workings of space and time, break down. In other words, we don't know how the universe "started." We only know what came after.

4. We can (almost) see it

A map of the cosmic microwave background taken by the ESA Planck mission. (Image credit: NASA)

The cosmic microwave background is a huge deal. It not only cemented the Big Bang as the sole theory capable of explaining all of the observational data but also serves as a window into our distant past. When our universe was about a million times smaller than its present-day size, it had a temperature of over 10,000 Kelvin (more than 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and was in a plasma state. As it expanded and cooled, that plasma converted into a neutral gas as the first atoms formed. That event released a tremendous amount of radiation, which remains today as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. The CMB is responsible for over 99.999% of all the radiation in the universe.

The CMB formed when the cosmos was about 380,000 years old. Compared with its present-day age of 13.77 billion years, that's the equivalent of a baby picture taken of you when you were a mere 10 hours old.

5. It happened everywhere

Image of the Rosette Nebula.

(Image credit: ESA and the PACS, SPIRE & HSC consortia, F. Motte AIM Saclay,CEA/IRFU - CNRS/INSU - U.ParisDidedrot for the HOBYS key programme)

One of the wildest things about discussing the universe is that our normal conceptions of objects simply don't apply. For example, the universe has no edge and no outside — because the concept of "the universe" expands to encapsulate literally everything in existence.

Similarly, the Big Bang wasn't an explosion in space — it was an explosion of space. The Big Bang happened to everything in the universe simultaneously. It did not happen in one particular location in space, but in a particular location in time. It's hard to think about, but that's why we have mathematics: to help us grapple with concepts we normally couldn't.

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The tooth regrowth medicine is intended for people who lack a full set of adult teeth due to congenital factors. The team is aiming to have it ready for general use in 2030.

In prior animal experiments, the medicine prompted the growth of "third-generation" teeth following baby teeth and then permanent adult teeth.

"The idea of growing new teeth is every dentist's dream. I've been working on this since I was a graduate student. I was confident I'd be able to make it happen," said Katsu Takahashi, lead researcher and head of the dentistry and oral surgery department at the Medical Research Institute Kitano Hospital in the city of Osaka.

Anodontia is a congenital condition that causes the growth of fewer than a full set of teeth, present in around 1% of the population. Genetic factors are thought to be the major cause for the one-tenth of anodontia patients who lack six or more teeth, a condition categorized as oligodontia. These conditions are also known as tooth agenesis. People who grow up with tooth agenesis struggle with basic abilities like chewing, swallowing and speaking from a young age, which can negatively impact their development.

After completing a dentistry degree, Takahashi went on to graduate studies in molecular biology at Kyoto University in 1991. Afterwards, he studied in the U.S.

Around that time, research around the world had begun to pinpoint genes that, when deleted, would cause genetically modified mice to grow fewer teeth. "The number of teeth varied through the mutation of just one gene. If we make that the target of our research, there should be a way to change the number of teeth (people have)," Takahashi said of his thoughts at the time.

Global attention

It was around 2005, when he delved further into the subject at Kyoto University after returning to Japan, that he began to see a bright path for his continued research. The researchers found that mice lacking a certain gene had an increased number of teeth. A protein called USAG-1, synthesized by the gene, was found to limit the growth of teeth. In other words, blocking the action of that protein could allow more teeth to grow.

Takahashi's research team narrowed their focus onto USAG-1, and developed a neutralizing antibody medicine able to block the protein's function. In experiments in 2018, mice with a congenitally low number of teeth were given medicine that resulted in new teeth coming through. The research results were published in a U.S. scientific paper in 2021, and gained much attention as the beginnings of the world's first tooth regeneration medicine.

Work is now underway to get the drug ready for human use. Once confirmed to have no ill effects on the human body, it will be aimed at treating children aged 2 to 6 who exhibit anodontia. "We hope to pave the way for the medicine's clinical use," Takahashi said.

Medicine could be game-changer

If successful, a drug to regenerate teeth may be a game-changer for the entire field of dentistry.

Animals including sharks and some reptile species can continuously regrow teeth. It's been assumed that humans only grow two sets of teeth in their lifetime, but in fact, there is evidence that we also have the "buds" for a third set.

Around 1% of the population exhibits the converse of anodontia: hyperdontia, a congenital condition causing a higher-than-normal number of teeth. According to research by Takahashi's team, one in three such cases manifests as the growth of a third set of teeth. Takahashi believes that in most cases, humans' ability to grow a third set was lost over time.

When the researchers applied the drug to ferrets, they grew an additional seventh front tooth. As the new teeth grew in between the existing front teeth and were of the same shape, the medicine is thought to have induced the generation of third-set teeth in the animals.

When treatment of teeth is no longer possible due to severe cavities or erosion of the dental sockets, known as pyorrhea, people lose them and need to rely on dental appliances such as dentures. The ability to grow third-generation teeth could change that. "In any case, we're hoping to see a time when tooth-regrowth medicine is a third choice alongside dentures and implants," Takahashi said.

For further information or inquiries about Takahashi's research, please visit https://www.kitano-hp.or.jp/toothreg/ (in Japanese).

(Japanese original by Mirai Nagira, Science & Environment News Department)

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It’s a perfectly sunny day, with a clear blue sky. The pilot just announced that your flight has reached cruising altitude, so the seat belt sign has been turned off. Passengers are moving about the cabin. Suddenly the plane starts shaking. You instinctively grab the arm of your chair. Passengers who have stood up brace themselves. A baby starts crying.

A minute later the alarm passes, your body relaxes, and you exhale deeply. Then the plane drops like a rock. Your stomach leaps into your throat. But there’s no storm outside, not even clouds. What’s going on?

This clear-air turbulence, as it’s called, is caused by patches of air swirling chaotically within the world’s jet streams—strong air currents that circle the globe from west to east and that we see on weather maps as wide, wavy lines that bend around low- and high-pressure centers.

Airlines like to fly within these bands of fast-moving air to boost speeds and reduce travel times if the bands are near enough to the flight’s desired direction. The swirls, invisible to the eye, batter a plane’s wings. And when the battering is strong enough, it jerks the plane up or down.

Passengers freeze, and flight attendants stumble. Over the past four decades clear-air turbulence has increased by up to 55 percent in various regions around the world. Models predict another 100 to 200 percent increase over the next 30 to 60 years. Each time the thumping arrives, it strikes with no warning.

Pilots can spot turbulence ahead of them relatively easily when it’s inside a storm or among clouds. Onboard radar can track the movements of rain drops in the distance to reveal the turbulent motion of air. Pilots can then forewarn passengers and crew, encouraging them to take their seat and buckle up before a jolt hits. Turbulence in clear air, however, is invisible to radar; pilots typically don’t know it’s there until the plane hits it.

Cloudy turbulence is created by a heating effect induced by the sun. When dawn breaks, the sun starts warming the ground, which in turn heats air near the surface. This warmer air is less dense than the colder air above it, so it rises. The displaced cold air falls, and the process repeats, setting up so-called convection currents. The up and down drafts of these currents push against the wings of planes, and if the shoves are strong and sudden, drinks start sloshing.

Clear-air turbulence occurs almost exclusively within jet streams. The fast band of air in a jet stream (envision a rectangular tube) shears the slower air that resides just above and below it, destabilizing the jet stream’s somewhat flat top and bottom boundaries and changing them from firm to fuzzy. Simultaneously, however, density differences between the jet stream’s air and the air above and below it restabilize the boundary.

Most of the time the stabilizing effect overcomes the destabilizing one, giving you a smooth ride. But if the wind shear becomes strong, the destabilization force can win the tug-of-war. The result is chaotically moving air that pushes abruptly up and down on the wings.

By pouring through historical flight and weather data, Paul Williams and his colleagues at the University of Reading in England found that turbulence in the North Atlantic jet stream increased in frequency by 17 to 55 percent from 1979 to 2020. The greatest increase was for the most severe class of turbulence, defined as having a g-force greater than 1 g. At this g-force, anything that isn’t bolted to the plane, including your stomach, will float momentarily because the turbulence causes the plane to accelerate downward faster than gravity does. If you’re not buckled up, you will lift out of your seat as the plane rapidly drops a few tens of meters.

What does this increase mean for your average flight? First, severe turbulence is relatively rare. In-flight measurements show that roughly 0.1 percent of the atmosphere at cruising altitudes contains severe turbulence. “That equates to around 30 seconds on an average eight-hour flight,” says Williams, an atmospheric science professor. A more likely scenario, he says, is that for every 10 flights a person takes, nine will have no severe turbulence and one will have several minutes of it.

Moderate to light turbulence is more common and what most of us will encounter. In moderate turbulence, the jumps and drops in altitude are typically a few meters. Williams says that today an eight-hour flight might contain 10 to 15 minutes of clear-air turbulence, but projections indicate that the extent of this turbulence will double or triple over the next few decades as warming from climate change increases wind shears in the jet stream.

Because more frequent jolts are likely to result in more wear and tear on planes, airlines may experience higher repair costs. Fliers might also encounter more harried parents, like me, weary from trying to keep their young child contained in their chair every time the seatbelt sign lights up. Those lift-latch buckles are just too easy for small hands to operate.

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