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Seven years ago an exceptionally strong El Niño took hold in the Pacific Ocean, triggering a cascade of damaging changes to the world’s weather. Indonesia was plunged into a deep drought that fueled exceptional wildfires, while heavy rains inundated villages and farmers’ fields in parts of the Horn of Africa. The event also helped make 2016 the planet’s hottest year on record.

Now El Niño is back. The odds are decent that this one will be another strong event, raising concerns of extreme weather in the coming months. And a strong El Niño is very likely to set another global heat record.

El Niño is part of a natural climate cycle called the El Niño/Southern Oscillation. Its hallmark is a tongue of warmer-than-normal waters that stretches across the eastern and central portions of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Its opposite state is called La Niña, which features colder-than-average waters in the same parts of the Pacific. The ocean seesaws between these states every two to seven years, though the past three years unusually saw three back-to-back La Niñas. The change in ocean surface temperatures during these events alters where heat is released into the atmosphere overhead. That in turn influences atmospheric circulation patterns and sets off a domino effect that can cause major changes to the weather all over the world.

When and whether various regions see these changes depends on location. The closer a place is to the tropical Pacific, the more immediate and likely the effects will be. Impacts also tend to be more pronounced when an El Niño reaches its peak strength, which happens in the Northern Hemisphere’s winter. “The stronger it is, the more confident we are in certain impacts occurring,” says Michelle L’Heureux, a forecaster at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center. NOAA forecasts a 56 percent chance the current El Niño will be strong. (One of the benchmarks for measuring an El Niño is that temperatures in a particular part of the tropical Pacific are at least 0.5 degree Celsius, or 0.9 degree Fahrenheit, above normal. A strong El Niño occurs when those temperatures are 1.5 degrees C, or 2.7 degrees F, above normal.)

Animated GIF shows weekly sea surface temperature patterns in the tropical Pacific Ocean from January 30 to June 4, 2023. Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, styled by Scientific American

But even if this El Niño does develop into a strong event—or an extremely strong one—that’s “not ever a guarantee” that any particular weather change will occur, L’Heureux says. Strong El Niños often bring rainy weather to southern California, but that rain did not materialize during the 2016 episode, for example. That is because El Niño isn’t the only game in town; other natural climate cycles and local influences also play a role.

The way El Niño changes the world’s weather is linked to what are called the Walker and Hadley circulations—essentially big vertical loops of air, with the former oriented along the equator and the latter oriented perpendicular to it. Tropical Pacific Ocean waters are typically warmer in the west than in the east. Those warm waters fuel convection, with hot, moisture-laden air rising and fueling rain until it hits the tropopause, where the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, meets the stratosphere. The air then flows from west to east, descends over the eastern Pacific and subsequently flows from east to west along Earth’s surface. But during an El Niño, everything shifts eastward: air rises over the eastern Pacific and subsides over Southeast Asia. This shift leads to drier weather in the latter region that can cause major droughts and food shortages and can fuel wildfires.

The shifting Walker circulation also brings descending air to northern South America and the Caribbean during an El Niño. That subsidence tends to keep a lid on hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean because it inhibits the convection that drives such storms. The changing circulation patterns also lead to more crosscutting wind shear, which can stymie storm development. But this year that influence will be competing against stunning, record-breaking hot temperatures in the Atlantic that will provide ample fuel for storms. With these competing influences, NOAA currently predicts a near-average season, with 12 to 17 named storms, five to nine of which could become hurricanes.

U.S. weather during an El Niño is also affected by the Hadley circulation, which runs in a north-south loop on either side of the equator. During an El Niño, shifts in that circulation push the subtropical jet stream—a current of fast-moving air that guides storm systems across the country—farther to the south in the winter months. That typically leads to cooler, wetter conditions across the southern U.S. and warmer-than-usual conditions across the northern tier of the country and parts of Canada.

Other weather changes that occur during an El Niño include warmer, drier conditions in eastern Australia, parts of India and southern Africa. Parts of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia tend to see increased rainfall, which could be a boon after years of climate-change-fueled drought. But if too much rain falls too quickly, it can bring flooding and mudslides and can help spread waterborne diseases.

One of the biggest certainties with an El Niño is that global temperature will ratchet up, as they always do during El Niño years, because the ocean releases exceptional amounts of heat into the atmosphere. That heat will be added on to the global warming driven by humans burning fossil fuels and could spur this year or next to be the hottest year on record, as happened in 2016. (The effects on global temperature lag the El Niño by a few months.) The 2016 El Niño was comparable in strength to the one in 1998, but the former was 0.5 degree C (0.9 degree F) hotter than the latter because of global warming. Adding to the likelihood of a record year with the current El Niño is the fact that the global average ocean temperature was already setting records before the event was declared, L’Heureux says. “That’s pretty bonkers,” she adds.

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The glaciers disappeared 65 per cent faster from 2011 to 2020 compared with the previous decade, according to a report by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (Icimod).

“As it gets warmer, ice will melt, that was expected, but what is unexpected and very worrying is the speed,” said lead author Philippus Wester. “This is going much faster than we thought.”

Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region are a crucial water source for around 240 million people in the mountainous regions, as well as for another 1.65 billion people in the river valleys below, the report said.

Based on current emissions trajectories, the glaciers could lose up to 80 per cent of their current volume by the end of the century, said the Nepal-based Icimod, an inter-governmental organisation that also includes member countries Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar and Pakistan.

The glaciers feed 10 of the world’s most important river systems, including the Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Mekong and Irrawaddy, and directly or indirectly supply billions of people with food, energy, clean air and income.

“With two billion people in Asia reliant on the water that glaciers and snow here hold, the consequences of losing this cryosphere (a frozen zone) are too vast to contemplate,” said Icimod’s deputy chief Izabella Koziell.

Even if global warming is limited to the 1.5 deg C to 2 deg C from pre-industrial levels agreed to in the Paris climate treaty, the glaciers are expected to lose a third to a half of their volume by 2100, the peer-reviewed report said.

“It underscores the need for urgent climate action,” Dr Wester said. “Every small increment will have huge impacts and we really, really need to work on climate mitigation… that is our plea.”

Dr Wester said improving technologies and previously classified high-resolution satellite imagery meant predictions could be made with a good degree of accuracy.

The world has warmed an average of nearly 1.2 deg C since the mid-1800s, unleashing a cascade of extreme weather, including more intense heatwaves, more severe droughts and storms made more ferocious by rising seas.

Hardest hit are the most vulnerable people and the world’s poorest countries, which have done little to contribute to the fossil fuel emissions that drive up temperatures.

Dr Amina Maharjan, a livelihoods and migration specialist at Icimod, said communities do not have the support they need.

“Most of the adaptation is communities and households reacting (to climate events). It is inadequate to meet the challenges posed by climate change,” Dr Maharjan said.

“What is going to be very critical moving forward is anticipating change,” she said.

AFP

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Every night, Alice Cerutti falls asleep to the sound of birds singing on her rice farm in the middle of the Italian countryside. In the morning, the voice of the black-tailed godwit, a bird whose numbers are declining globally, wakes her from sleep—a little harshly. Cerutti imitates the bird’s piercing call over the phone and laughs. “Her sound is a bit annoying,” she says, though she quickly adds, “I really love her.”

Cerutti has turned her 115-hectare rice farm, exactly halfway between Milan and Turin, into a conservation project. During the past decade or so, she and her family have planted thousands of trees, reestablished wetlands, and brought in experts to help study and manage the precious birds that nest in areas Cerutti has set aside for wildlife.

It seems to be working. “We have this amazing and big responsibility,” Cerutti says as she explains that her farm is the last recorded regular nesting site of the black-tailed godwit in Italy. Local researchers found the bird clinging on there even as it disappeared from other locations.

Half of the world’s 10,000-odd bird species are in decline. One in eight faces the threat of extinction. This problem has been worsening for decades, which means scientists have been able to estimate roughly how many fewer birds are around today than, say, half a century ago. The numbers are startling.

There are 73 million fewer birds in Great Britain alone than there were in 1970. Europe has been losing around 20 million every year, says Vasilis Dakos, an ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France—a loss of 800 million birds since 1980. And in the US, just shy of 3 billion individual birds have disappeared in only 50 years.

“We are seeing a meltdown of bird populations,” says Ariel Brunner, director of BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, a conservation NGO. Loss of habitats, the rising use of pesticides on farms, and, yes, climate change—these are among the factors to blame. Even if you are not a birdwatcher, the loss of birds impacts you. Birds regulate ecosystems by preying on insects, pollinating plants, and spreading seeds—by excreting them after eating fruit, for example. We all rely on healthy ecosystems for breathable air, the food we eat, and a regulated climate.

The disappearance of birds is staggering. But Cerutti and others are trying to make a difference. In total, she has earmarked around a quarter of her farmland as a nature reserve. Six and a half hectares, for instance, are now woodland. If you view the farm, called Cascina Oschiena, using the satellite imagery on Google Maps, she says, you’ll see a wedge of dark green trees—alone amid the huge sea of rice fields that belong to her and her neighbors.

Cerutti has dispensed with pesticides and allowed vegetation in wetland areas to regrow. Besides the black-tailed godwits, there are bitterns and lapwings—both also in decline. And no, she doesn’t make as much money as she might if she were driven to maximize profits on the same tract of land. It doesn’t matter. “Not every farmer can do what we’re doing, but I think that it’s important to do something,” she says. A neighbor was recently inspired by Cerutti’s efforts to stop spraying places that border her farm with glyphosate, an incredibly potent herbicide. “I think it’s a great step,” says Cerutti.

Speak to birdwatchers and researchers elsewhere in Europe and you’ll hear many examples of birds that were common just a generation or two ago that are now on the edge. Take the corncrake, whose song was once heard frequently across Ireland. There are now just a few hundred individuals left in a handful of locations.

“To be utterly frank, the situation is pretty awful,” says Rob Robinson, a senior scientist at the British Trust for Ornithology who is based in East Anglia. He mentions the willow warbler. Robinson has been putting rings on the legs of these little birds and releasing them, a common monitoring technique, for years.

“We catch one or two a year instead of 15 or 20,” he says, explaining how things have changed since he started the work. He also remembers seeing flocks of finches on farmland as a child. “Those I see very rarely these days.” Nightingales and turtle doves also used to be plentiful around the British countryside in spring. Now they are all but gone.

Brunner adds: “We are not losing just the birds, we are losing the insects, reptiles, amphibians, a lot of plants. We get very, very simplified and impoverished ecosystems.” That means it can be easier for invasive species to spread, he says. Crops become more dependent on chemistry and human intervention—and also more susceptible to diseases.

There’s also what Brunner calls the “moral issue.” Sights and sounds that have been part of the landscape, and of human culture, for millennia are suddenly fading away. Turtle doves are mentioned multiple times in the bible, he notes.

The single biggest cause of the decline in bird populations, he says, is the intensification of farming. High pesticide use, the loss of hedgerows and margins where insects and birds can live, and hyper-efficient harvesting are all problematic. Robinson says that around 70 years ago it was common for wheat farmers to leave 1 or 2 percent of their crop on the ground in fields.

“That doesn’t sound like very much, but if you add up large areas of farmland, it can sustain large bird populations,” he says. Technology and harvesting practices have become so good at catching every grain that this food source just isn’t there anymore.

In May, Dakos and colleagues published a large study in which they analyzed 37 years of bird-population data from 20,000 sites across 28 European nations. The team considered the growing size of towns and cities, the loss of forested areas, temperature rises, and the intensification of farming as key factors. In the researchers’ analysis of population trends for 170 bird species, all of these anthropogenic pressures had some impact, but it was intensive farming that appeared to have the strongest correlation with plummeting bird numbers. All over the dataset were struggling farmland bird species.

“We weren’t expecting to find such a strong result,” says Dakos. Farmland birds declined by 56.8 percent between 1980 and 2016, he and his colleagues estimate. The next most quickly declining group, urban species, fell by 27.8 percent.

Although this huge research project underlines some of the problems birds face, we’ve known about these issues for many years, says Amanda Rodewald at the Center for Avian Population Studies at Cornell University in the US.

“We’ve known enough for a long time to actually take active steps,” she says. “Our failure to do that has reflected that there hasn’t been a collective and strong will to act, in my opinion.”

There are ways to help, however. Countries can make tax or other financial incentives available to farmers willing to protect and encourage wildlife on their land, for instance. Consumer demand for more ecologically sustainable products can also have a positive impact, she says.

In California, some rice farmers are being paid to delay the draining of their fields in late winter to protect breeding areas used by wading birds. The project, called BirdReturns, has been running successfully for years. It targets areas deemed of greatest conservation benefit to bird species. Those areas were originally identified by citizen science bird-monitoring data from Cornell’s eBird app, Rodewald says.

“People are recognizing that we need to take some steps with the way we use resources and manage our planet,” she says. Despite the current bleak outlook, Robinson also maintains hope for the future because efforts to save birds appear to be growing.

Cerutti’s experience, though localized, speaks volumes. In just a few years, she has transformed multiple hectares of land and embraced wildlife—despite having known little about birds just 12 years ago. “The amazing thing is,” she says, “when you give back to nature, she really grabs it right away.”

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Within a few decades, quantum technology is expected to become a key technology in areas such as health, communication, defense and energy. The power and potential of the technology lie in the odd and very special properties of quantum particles.

Of particular interest to researchers in the field are the superconducting properties of quantum particles that give components perfect conductivity with unique magnetic properties. These superconducting properties are considered conventional today and have already paved the way for entirely new technologies used in applications such as magnetic resonance imaging equipment, maglev trains and quantum computer components. However, years of research and development remain before a quantum computer can be expected to solve real computing problems in practice, for example. The research community is convinced that there are many more revolutionary discoveries to be made in quantum technology than those we know today.

Open-source code to explore new superconducting properties

Basic research in quantum materials is the foundation of all quantum technology innovation, from the birth of the transistor in 1947, through the laser in the 1960s to the quantum computers of today. However, experiments on quantum materials are often very resource-intensive to develop and conduct, take many years to prepare and mostly produce results that are difficult to interpret. Now, however, a team of researchers at Chalmers have developed the open-source software SuperConga, which is free for everyone to use, and specifically designed to perform advanced simulations and analyses of quantum components.

The program operates at the mesoscopic level, which means that it can carry out simulations that are capable of "picking up" the strange properties of quantum particles, and also apply them in practice. The open-source code is the first of its kind in the world and is expected to be able to explore completely new superconducting properties and eventually pave the way for quantum computers that can use advanced computing to tackle societal challenges in several areas.

"We are specifically interested in unconventional superconductors, which are an enigma in terms of how they even work and what their properties are. We know that they have some desirable properties that allow quantum information to be protected from interference and fluctuations. Interference is what currently limits us from having a quantum computer that can be used in practice. And this is where basic research into quantum materials is crucial if we are to make any progress," says Mikael Fogelström, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Chalmers.

These new superconductors continue to be highly enigmatic materials—just as their conventional siblings once were when they were discovered in a laboratory more than a hundred years ago. After that discovery, it would be more than 40 years before researchers could describe them in theory. The Chalmers researchers now hope that their open-source code can contribute to completely new findings and areas of application.

"We want to find out about all the other exciting properties of unconventional superconductors. Our software is powerful, educational and user-friendly, and we hope that it will help generate new understanding and suggest entirely new applications for these unexplored superconductors," says Patric Holmvall, postdoctoral researcher in condensed matter physics at Uppsala University.

Desire to make life easier for quantum researchers and students

To be able to explore revolutionary new discoveries, tools are needed that can study and utilize the extraordinary quantum properties at the minimal particle level, and can also be scaled up large enough to be used in practice. Researchers need to work at mesoscopic scale. This lies at the interface between the microscopic scale, i.e. the atomic level at which the quantum properties of the particles can still be utilized, and the macroscopic scale which measures everyday objects in our world which, unlike quantum particles, are subject to the laws of classical physics.

On account of the software's ability to work at this mesoscopic level, the Chalmers researchers now hope to make life easier for researchers and students working with quantum physics.

"Extremely simplified models based on either the microscopic or macroscopic scale are often used at present. This means that they do not manage to identify all the important physics or that they cannot be used in practice. With this free software, we want to make it easier for others to accelerate and improve their quantum research without having to reinvent the wheel every time," says Tomas Löfwander, Professor of Applied Quantum Physics at Chalmers.

The article, "SuperConga: An open-source framework for mesoscopic superconductivity," has been published in Applied Physics Reviews and was written by Patric Holmvall, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University, and Niclas Wall Wennerdal, Mikael Håkansson, Pascal Stadler, Oleksii Shevtsov, Tomas Löfwander and Mikael Fogelström, the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

SuperConga is open-source software and is free to download.

More on the microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic scales

The mesoscopic regime is at the interface between the macroscopic and microscopic regimes. In the macroscopic regime (typically millimeters and larger), classical physics dominates, describing everyday objects such as footballs, cats or perhaps a coffee maker. This contrasts with the microscopic regime, where quantum physics prevails, and much smaller objects can be measured, such as electrons, atoms and other particles.

The odd properties of quantum particles can be explored on this tiny scale—properties that allow them to be in two places at once or to be perfectly conducting. Mesoscopic quantum components (typically micrometers down to nanometers) are so small that the strange properties of quantum particles can be accessed and used, but also large enough that they can be applied in practice. Open-source codes already exist for simulations at either the microscopic or more macroscopic level. SuperConga is the first freely available software in the world capable of simulating superconductors at the mesoscopic level.

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Approximately half of older persons in the United States have reported preventative aspirin use. One of the complications of aspirin use is an increased risk for major bleeding, particularly gastrointestinal bleeding. Although the risk for overt bleeding due to aspirin has been well characterized, very few studies have measured the effect of aspirin on anemia, particularly in older populations.

Researchers from Monash University, Melbourne conducted a post-hoc analysis of the ASPREE randomized controlled trial. The trial included 19,114 persons aged 70 years or older who were randomly assigned to take 100 mg of aspirin daily or placebo. Hemoglobin was measured annually, and ferritin was measured at baseline and 3 years after randomization.

The data showed that the risk for developing anemia was 23.5 percent among those assigned to receive low-dose aspirin. These results were accompanied by a small but greater decrease in mean hemoglobin and a greater decline in ferritin concentrations among those receiving aspirin.

Differences in clinically significant bleeding events did not account for the overall difference in incident anemia or the decline in ferritin observed in ASPREE but was most likely due to occult blood loss given the observed steeper decline in ferritin in participants allocated to aspirin.

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People are often advised to engage in social contact to cope with the experience of loneliness and improve well-being. But are the moments of loneliness actually more bearable when spent in other people's company? In this research, we proposed and tested two conflicting theoretical accounts regarding the role of social contact: social contact is associated with a stronger (the amplifying account) or with a weaker (the buffering account) negative effect of loneliness on psychological well-being. Analyses of three datasets collected using ecological momentary assessments (Nindividuals = 3,035) revealed that the negative association between loneliness and well-being was stronger when participants were with others than alone, consistent with the amplifying account. Further, when participants experienced high levels of loneliness, being with others was associated with the same or with even a lower level of well-being than being alone. These findings suggest that simply spending time with others (vs. alone) is not associated with a reduced burden of loneliness and may even backfire.

© The Author(s) 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

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The team showed nappers' brains were 15 cubic centimetres (0.9 cubic inches) larger - equivalent to delaying ageing by between three and six years.

However, the scientists recommend keeping naps to less than half an hour.

But they said a daytime sleep was hard in many careers, with work culture often frowning on the practice.

"We are suggesting that everybody could potentially experience some benefit from napping," Dr Victoria Garfield told me. She described the findings as "quite novel and quite exciting".

Napping has been shown to be critical for development when we are babies, becomes less common as we age and then goes through a resurgence in popularity after retirement, with 27% of people over 65 reporting having a daytime nap.

Dr Garfield says advice to nap is "something quite easy" to do in comparison to weight loss or exercise which are "difficult for a lot of people".

The brain naturally shrinks with age, but whether naps could help prevent diseases like Alzheimer's will still need extra research.

Overall brain health is important for protecting against dementia and the condition is linked to disturbed sleep.

The researchers suggest poor sleep is damaging the brain over time by causing inflammation and affecting the connections between brain cells.

"Thus, regular napping could protect against neurodegeneration by compensating for deficient sleep," researcher Valentina Paz said.

However, Dr Garfield is not about to find a comfy spot to snooze at work and prefers other ways of looking after her brain.

"Honestly, I would rather spend 30 minutes exercising than napping, I'll probably try and recommend that my mum does it."

How to find the answer?

Studying napping can be a challenge.

Napping might boost health, but the reverse is also true as your health can leave you so tired you need to nap more.

So the researchers used a clever technique to prove that napping is beneficial.

They used a gigantic natural experiment based on the DNA - the genetic code - with which we are born. Previous studies have identified 97 snippets of our DNA that either make us more likely to be nappers or to power through the day.

So the team took data from 35,000 people, aged 40 to 69, taking part in the UK Biobank project and simply compared those genetic "nappers" and "non-nappers".

The results, published in the journal Sleep Health, showed a 15 cubic centimetre difference - equivalent to 2.6 to 6.5 years of ageing. Total brain volumes were about 1,480 cubic centimetres in the study.

"I enjoy short naps on the weekends and this study has convinced me that I shouldn't feel lazy napping, it may even be protecting my brain," Prof Tara Spires-Jones, from the University of Edinburgh and the president of the British Neuroscience Association, told me.

She said the "interesting" findings study showed a "small but significant increase in brain volume" and "adds to the data indicating that sleep is important for brain health".

The researchers did not directly study having a big sleep in the middle of the day, but said the science pointed towards a cut off of half an hour.

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Q: What can we do to avoid getting arthritis as we age?

What was once an easy run may feel tougher to complete. Or perhaps a challenging game of tennis might leave your hip or ankle sore for days.

Painful, stiff or swollen joints are a common complaint among older adults — and for many, they’re the first sign of what may feel like an unavoidable diagnosis: arthritis.

In a recent survey of more than 2,200 people between ages 50 and 80 in the United States, 60 percent said they had been told by a health care provider that they had some form of arthritis. And about three-quarters considered joint pain and arthritis a normal part of aging.

But arthritis is not inevitable as we age, said Kelli Dominick Allen, an exercise physiologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

“Sometimes people will start to get aches and pains in their joints and not do anything about it because they think everyone gets arthritis as they get older,” Dr. Allen said. “We shouldn’t think about arthritis as something that we just have to deal with passively.”

Arthritis is a catchall term for the more than 100 kinds of inflammatory joint conditions, each of which can arise for different reasons. Many of those causes have little to do with age, Dr. Allen said.

One form of degenerative joint disease, though, known as osteoarthritis, is somewhat more likely to occur as a person gets older, said Dr. Wayne McCormick, a geriatrician at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “It’s basically just worn-out joints,” he said.

Osteoarthritis is most commonly seen among people over 50, particularly women, Dr. Allen said.

Scientists don’t know precisely why some people are more prone to joint inflammation and pain with age than others. But about 12 percent of osteoarthritis cases are a result of joint injuries, such as meniscus or ligament tears, from when they were young.

Arthritis is also more common among people who have a family history of the condition, or who have certain chronic conditions such as obesity, heart disease or diabetes.

Some people may find that their joint pain limits their activities as they age. But others, whose X-rays may show significantly worn-out joints, may experience no pain at all, Dr. McCormick said. As a result, he added, “each person has to develop their own plan of how to stay healthy and functional with the help of their physician.”

For most people, Dr. Allen said, preventing arthritis later in life should begin many years before it is a concern — by taking steps to prevent joint injuries during sports or exercise, and recovering properly when they occur.

For those who are not at risk of developing sports-related injuries, staying physically active and maintaining a healthy weight can help to prevent excessive wear and tear of your joints and to reduce pain if arthritis sets in later in life, Dr. Allen said.

In a 2015 review of 44 clinical trials, for instance, researchers found that participants who exercised regularly had reduced knee pain related to osteoarthritis and improved physical function and quality of life.

“It actually does help if you can do low-impact exercise, like a stationary bicycle where your knees, hips and joints aren’t receiving so much impact,” Dr. McCormick said. Strengthening muscles such as the quadriceps and hamstrings helps to support the joints, he added.

In addition to regular exercise, supportive knee or ankle braces, over-the-counter pain medications such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen, or steroid injections into a problematic joint can all help relieve joint pain to varying degrees, Dr. McCormick said.

Not every option works for everyone, he added, so it’s important to explore and find what helps you to stay active.

Similarly, dietary supplements such as glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate — or herbal remedies such as Boswellia (an herbal extract made from the bark of the Boswellia tree) — may help relieve symptoms for some people. But there isn’t much scientific evidence to support their use, Dr. Allen said.

“There have been a fair number of clinical trials, but really mixed evidence on their effects,” she said.

But Dr. McCormick said that, in his experience, it’s “very unusual for these supplements to be harmful,” so they could be worth trying — or stopping if they don’t seem to help.

Ultimately, finding ways to live a pain-free, active and healthy lifestyle is the best way to reduce your risk of developing arthritis later in life, Dr. Allen said.

Many of the actions that reduce the risk for other chronic conditions such as diabetes or heart disease “are really powerful tools” for lowering age-related joint disease risk too, Dr. Allen said.

“Somebody who’s trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle will already be doing the things that are most important for reducing arthritis risk,” she said.

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Nearly half of teens say they agree with phrases like “I can’t do anything right,” “I do not enjoy life” and “My life is not useful” — roughly twice as many as did just a decade ago.

“These are staggering numbers, just enormous increases,” psychologist and generational expert Dr. Jean Twenge told The Post. “And parents are rightfully very concerned about their children’s mental health.”

The poll, conducted by the University of Michigan and featured in Twenge’s book “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future,” is just the latest startling revelation about youth mental health, as rates of teen anxiety and depression have grown.

The No. 1 cause, according to Twenge, is social media and screen time. In fact, rates of teen depressive symptoms have increased massively since the mass popularization of the smartphone in the early 2010s.

A record number of teens say they feel their life is “not useful,” while depression and anxiety rates skyrocket.

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“There’s no question that is the primary cause of the increase in teen depression now,” Twenge said. “It’s by far the largest change in teens’ everyday lives over the past 10 to 12 years. Nothing else even comes close.”

The University of Michigan poll has been conducted annually since 1991, with 50,000 students in 8th, 10th and 12th grades nationwide asked if they agree with the statements “I can’t do anything right,” “I do not enjoy life” and “My life is not useful.”

While the numbers held steady until about 2012, they began a sharp ascent the next year. Until then, fewer than 20% of students said they agreed with the phrase “I do not enjoy my life”; now half do.

That coincides with the rise of platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and Musical.ly, which debuted in 2015 and became TikTok in the US two years later.

Today, teens can spend up to nine hours a day glued to screens — and half of them say they are online “almost constantly.”

Screen time is replacing critical rites of passage. Since smartphones came onto the scene, the share of teens dating, getting a driver’s license and working for pay has plummeted.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned this year that teen depression and suicide are on the rise.
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“It’s a fundamental change in how teens spend their leisure time,” Twenge said. “If you put this all together — more time with screens, less time with friends face to face, less time sleeping — that’s a very poor recipe for mental health.”

Earlier this year, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that teen depression and suicide are on the rise in the social media age. And, while both boys and girls are struggling, it’s a trend that seems to be hitting girls harder.

Twenge says this could be because platforms like Instagram exacerbate girls’ tendency to compare themselves and vie for social status — now in the form of followers and likes.

The pandemic exacerbated already frightening mental health trends in Zoomers.
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And, although the pandemic uprooted many lives, Twenge said it inflamed existing issues within Gen Z (approximately, those born between 1997 and 2012).

“The idea that the adolescent mental health crisis is due [only] to the pandemic is false, but you certainly can’t rule out some acceleration on the trend,” she said.

Meanwhile, Gen Z is coming of age in an era of political polarization, cancel culture and global social unrest — sapping them of hope for the future and faith in their country. Four in 10 say America’s founding fathers are better described as villains than as heroes.

Beaten down by the economic climate, older Gen Zers are setting records for moving back in with their parents.

Dr. Jean Twenge says that Zoomers are the most pessimistic generation.

Although their generation might not have it worse than, say, “Boomers getting drafted into Vietnam,” Twenge pointed out, they feel like they do.

“Depression isn’t just about emotions. It’s about cognition, it’s about thinking, it’s about how you see the world,” she said. “A generation that is more depressed is more likely to be pessimistic, and they’re going to view ambiguous things as negative.”

That mindset can have dire consequences. Nearly a third of teen girls have seriously considered suicide, and youth self-harm hospitalizations have soared by 163% in the last 10 years. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death in young Americans.

And while Twenge says parents should stave off smartphones and social media for as long as possible, she believes more radical solutions are needed — like raising the minimum social media age to 16. 

“We’re behind the curve in doing anything about this,” she said. “This is not just a problem of individual families or individual teens. This is a group level problem.”

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According to a report published by Wired, Apple has filed lawsuit which, if won, will force a 111-year old Swiss fruit company to give up on their logo. Fruit Union Suisse, a company established more than a century ago has represented itself with a red apple logo along with a white cross that denotes the Swiss national flag. However, if they lose the case filed against them, Fruit Union Suisse will be forced to change their logo.

Fruit Union Suisse director Jimmy Mariéthoz told Wired:

"We have a hard time understanding this, because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple. Their objective here is really to own the rights to an actual apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal … that should be free for everyone to use.

We’re concerned that any visual representation of an apple—so anything that’s audiovisual or linked to new technologies or to media—could be potentially impacted. That would be a very, very big restriction for us. Theoretically, we could be entering slippery territory everytime we advertise with an apple"

This is not the first time that Apple has attempted to pull such a stunt. According to the Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI), Apple filed an application for a black and white illustration of a Granny Smith apple. The request was partially approved by the Swiss authorities last year, who noted that generic images like that of an apple are public domain. Apple has, however, filed an appeal against the decision in April 2023.

Furthermore, as per the World Intellectual Property Organization’s records, Apple has filed similar trademark requests in other countries like Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia.

Apple has been aggressive in Switzerland in the past and the company has precedent to support its current quest. Back in 2010, Apple made a small Swiss grocers’ cooperative sign an out of court agreement declaring it would never add a bite mark to their apple logo. However, not every decision has gone in the company's favor. In 2012, Apple was forced to pay around $20 million to the Swiss Federal Railway after it proved that Apple had copied the design of the Swiss railway clock.

There has been an increase in tech companies trying to trademark common words and images that should ideally be public domain and free to use. However, Apple has been in an another league when it comes to filing trademarks. According to a report by the Tech Transparency Project, Apple has filed more trademarks than Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Google combined. However, that does not make Apple the sole guilty party as others have trademarked generic terms like Windows, Nest and Prime.

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At 6 and 8, my kids are still pretty small. I took all the usual precautions—lifted a rock and showed them a scorpion; told them to keep their shoes on because of goatheads, also called puncturevine, an invasive prickly plant that can stab itself into your foot and really ruin your day. I put on their hats and smeared sunscreen on their tiny faces. But as they stood by the car, a few slightly older kids—maybe around 8 or 10—whizzed by on what looked like folding Lectric XP bikes.

They looked like they were having a lot of fun. They were wearing big downhill mountain biking helmets and were zooming at impossible speeds around and around the campground, dodging cars and people with abandon. My kids stared at them wistfully but said nothing. Although we have several ebikes in our garage at any given time, they’re not allowed to ride them until they’re at least 16. If you’re a parent, I strongly suggest you give your kids the same rule.

A Heavy Load

The death of 12-year-old Molly Steinsapir rocked the (admittedly somewhat insular) electric bike world. In 2021, Steinsapir was riding on the back of a Rad Power Bike piloted by her friend, 11-year-old Eme Green. As the pair came down an incline, Green could not stop. The girls crashed at high speed. Steinsapir, who was wearing her helmet, hit her head hard, lost consciousness, and never woke up.

As a parent, those words are hard to write. Steinsapir’s parents sued Rad Power Bikes, claiming that the bike manufacturer was to blame. The electric bike industry has boomed incredibly fast, and reasonable safety regulations have not kept pace. For example, it took dozens of dangerous ebike fires for New York City to push for standard UL certification.

However, as with any new technology, it’s important that parents understand what the new technology is and make their own decisions about what their children are allowed to do. I want to emphasize here that I do not blame Steinsapir’s parents. I can’t imagine the pain of losing your child. Also, you can't know what you don’t know until it’s shoved in your face. Plenty of parents, including me, have made worse mistakes than letting their child ride an electric bike and have not had to face such terrible consequences. 

In their complaint, the Steinsapirs explicitly said they did not know that children riding an electric bike was dangerous. So I'm telling you now, as someone who has ridden dozens of electric bikes over the years, including the RadRunner, which is the bike that Green and Steinsapir were riding when they died: Do not put young children on an electric bike. 

In my review of the RadRunner, I noted that it was massive. An 80-pound child should not be riding a 60-pound motorized vehicle, no matter how fun it looks, no matter if you see other children doing it. They can't. I pack a full 115 pounds of pure coordinated power, and even I have had close calls. Please don't put your children at risk like this.  

Too Hot to Handle

It’s true that children need to learn confidence and independence. My kids roller skate, scoot, skateboard, snowboard, and ride analog pedal bikes. They have fallen down, gotten injured, and will continue to do so. I’m teaching them how to do so, how to pull tricks, and how to navigate safely around cars and in our neighborhood by themselves.

But the injuries sustained from electric bikes are more likely to be more severe, with a higher chance of internal organ damage (like those that you might get from riding a motorcycle). Not only that, but younger riders on electric bikes are also more likely to injure other people, like pedestrians. 

The link is pretty obvious. In Israel, electric bikes are limited to people 16 and older. In California and in many other states, you must be at least 16 to operate a class three electric bike—one that goes over 28 miles per hour. But as anyone who has ridden any kind of vehicle knows, 20 mph is pretty fast. 

I reached out to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the gold standard when it comes to childhood safety recommendations. The organization would not go on the record, citing a lack of data concerning electric bikes and children, specifically. However, you can find that the organization's record on motorized vehicles for children under age 16 has stayed pretty much the same since the 1970s. Motorized vehicles, especially adult-sized ones, just aren’t safe for children younger than 16 to operate. They simply do not have the physical, mental, or cognitive maturity to safely operate high-speed motor vehicles.

Slower Is Better

It's fair to say at this point that I am a huge electric bike advocate. Electric bikes make it easier for so many more people to get out of their cars, reduce air pollution, stop killing kids in car accidents, stop at small businesses, say hi to our neighbors, and generally turn where we live into safe, walkable, thriving communities. I ride an electric bike daily.

But I also take my children's safety seriously. And electric bikes are useful and powerful, but they’re not toys. If you’re going to ride an electric bike or put your loved ones on one, make sure that it’s properly maintained. Make sure that the brakes work and the chain is clean. And for the love of God, don’t put your small children in a large motorized vehicle they can’t properly control. Kids grow up so fast. It's OK to take things slow once in a while.

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India is no stranger to pollution, with many of its cities reporting some of the worst air quality in the world. Every winter, New Delhi gets shrouded in smog for days. But discussions about air pollution and policies to mitigate it mostly focus on particulate matter: PM2.5 and PM10—small particles or droplets that are only a few microns in diameter. However, scientists are increasingly raising the alarm about surface ozone. It’s a secondary pollutant that isn’t released from any source, forming naturally when oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds—such as benzene, which is found in gasoline, or methane—react under high heat and sunlight. This makes ozone a particularly ugly modern threat—a problem that arises where pollution and climate change coincide.

“Even an hour of exposure can give you very poor health outcomes,” says Avikal Somvanshi, a researcher at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. While ozone is beneficial in the high atmosphere, where it absorbs ultraviolet radiation, down on Earth’s surface, concentrations of it can be deadly. Data on its impacts is patchy, but a 2022 study estimates that ozone killed more than 400,000 people worldwide in 2019, up 46 percent since 2000. And according to the State of Global Air Report 2020, it is in India where the number of ozone deaths has increased the most over the past decade.

Ozone wreaks havoc in the respiratory tract. The gas can “inflame and damage airways” and “aggravate lung diseases like asthma,” warns the US Environmental Protection Agency. It does this by affecting the cilia, the microscopic hair-like structures that line the airways to help protect them, explains Karthik Balajee, a clinician and community medicine specialist based in Karaikal, India. After exposure “we are more prone to respiratory infections,” he says, adding that inhaling ozone also affects lung capacity. Studies show that long-term exposure is associated with an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung disease that makes it hard to breathe, and increases the risk of dying from other cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. Even short-term exposure can land you in the emergency room. “One or two days following a peak in ozone, there have been increases in hospital admissions due to respiratory problems,” says Balajee.

Delhi and other major Indian cities see spikes in ozone throughout the year, but particularly during summer heat waves, which have become increasingly common due to climate change. The World Health Organization says that exposure to ozone in the air, across an eight-hour period, shouldn’t exceed 50 parts per billion; India’s air quality standard says this WHO limit shouldn’t be broken on more than eight days a year, and not on two consecutive days. But analysis by Somvanshi and his colleagues has found that ozone has already exceeded limits in Delhi and its surrounding areas on 87 days between March and May this year. And they’ve seen similar results over the past three summers. And while the number of monitoring stations recording a breach of the ozone threshold was fewer this year than in previous years, the duration of the exceedance was higher. “We are not even close to compliance with the standard,” says Somvanshi.

Part of what’s driving this problem is ozone’s complicated relationship with other air pollutants. Ozone formation is a cyclic reaction, meaning that after it’s generated by reactions between air pollutants, ozone gets converted back to oxygen when it reacts again with pollutants in the air, such as oxides of nitrogen. But if those pollutants are not present after ozone has formed, it lingers. That’s why ozone levels shot up during India’s Covid-19 lockdown in the summer of 2020, when traffic screeched to a halt—the air pollutants needed to convert it back to oxygen weren’t being produced. It’s also why ozone is often found in green neighborhoods like Lutyens’ Delhi—because their air is cleaner, reactions that get rid of the ozone don’t take place.

Controlling particulate pollution is relatively simple—you just regulate its sources, such as vehicles and crop burning. Reducing ozone levels is harder. “Our prediction of how ozone might respond to pollutant changes or emission changes is complicated by environmental factors,” says Steve Arnold, professor of atmospheric composition at the University of Leeds. When trying to drive levels down, everything depends on the exact mixture of the different precursor pollutants in the air, he says.

Reducing precursor gasses is one way to reduce ozone formation. But bring them down too much and you won’t have any left to neutralize the ozone that’s already present. This is exactly what has happened in China, says Arnold, where stringent policies have reduced PM2.5 pollution in recent decades but the ozone problem has worsened. “There’s a delicate balance that needs to be made,” says Somvanshi.

At present, particulate matter is India’s focus, and rightly so—it’s a bigger problem. According to Arnold’s research, 900,000 deaths in India each year are linked to PM2.5, with 374,000 linked to ozone. But in the future, we should worry more about ozone, Arnold says. He has modeled how ozone pollution in India might look in the coming years. “If you go to 2050, then the health impacts from particulate matter and the health impacts from ozone pollution become much more similar in magnitude,” he says. One reason is that researchers believe pollution control policies in the future will be more successful in mitigating particulate matter than ozone.

Arnold’s study estimated that by 2050, India could see more than a million premature deaths a year linked to ozone exposure if there is no change in emissions. Even under a strict pollution control policy, premature deaths due to ozone were estimated to be 791,000—more than twice as many as in 2015.

While the gas is a problem in other countries, it is India’s poor air quality and increasingly common heat waves that makes ozone a particularly grave threat there. And for Arnold, how the country will evolve is concerning: India will have both a growing and aging population in the coming decades—meaning more people will be exposed to ozone, and in particular, more who are vulnerable.

And it’s not just human health that is damaged. Ozone also threatens food security by causing plant yields to “reduce drastically,” says Madhoolika Agrawal, a professor in the department of botany at Banaras Hindu University. Ozone enters plants through small pores on their leaves, explains Agrawal, and then kills cells by oxidizing them. Leaves then start yellowing and the plant is unable to photosynthesize. India’s wheat crop is particularly vulnerable. The country is a major producer and aspires to be a top exporter—yet studies show it loses millions of tons of wheat and rice annually to ozone. In fact, a 2021 paper shows that ozone affects the yield and seed quality of all major crops in India. Current policies are “insufficient in reducing crop loss to ozone,” its authors write.

At present, Somvanshi says India is “not doing anything” about ozone, and that the way the country’s Central Pollution Control Board monitors the toxic gas is flawed. The CPCB caps ozone pollution measurement at 200 micrograms per cubic meter—above that, the measurement software just records a blank cell in the data sheet. “We don’t really know exactly how severe the problem gets,” says Somvanshi, comparing the situation to checking someone’s fever using a thermometer that can only go up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The CPCB also reports ozone levels after averaging values at all the monitoring stations in a city, which Somvanshi calls a “disaster” because ozone is a hyperlocal pollutant. “Within the city, there is a massive variation and if you average it out, it will always be below the standard,” he says. WIRED reached out to the CPCB for comment but did not receive any response.

And while ozone monitoring infrastructure is robust in the capital region—Delhi and its five satellite cities have nearly 60 stations—more than 200 Indian cities don’t monitor ozone at all. The rest only have one or two ozone monitoring stations, which is basically “useless” says Somvanshi, because of the localized nature of the gas.

A quick way to mitigate the problem would be to issue targeted local ozone alerts, he says. In the US, for example, health advisories during periods of high ozone pollution warn residents to not go to refuel their cars when it is sunny outside, because petrol or diesel can evaporate to form volatile organic compounds that can further increase ozone formation. India could do something similar. Somvanshi suggests that factories could also be directed to operate during the evening or nighttime. That way, any nitrogen oxides they release wouldn’t be converted into ozone because there’s no sunlight. To reduce the precursor gasses, Arnold says the government should encourage “policies that can limit motor vehicle emissions in cities.”

As for addressing the threat to food security, Agrawal says farmers could choose crop varieties that are less susceptible to ozone. Some plants show resilience, she says, and by cross-breeding we could get crops that are less affected by it. Another solution could be to plant crops during seasons when ozone levels are low, like during the monsoon, but that’s not possible for all plants.

Above all, Arnold says, the Indian government should “take the time to understand the potential consequences of emission reductions” and learn from what happened in China. Use “modeling to try and predict the response you might get to emission control policies,” he advises. Ozone pollution, he says, cannot be ignored anymore.

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Luckily, it is possible to take steps to prevent stones from forming, primarily by increasing water intake and making small changes to your diet.

An expert from the Department of Urology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas offers some tips for avoiding kidney stones and the searing pain they can cause.

"Once you've had one stone, you have up to a 50% chance of having another within the next 10 years," physician assistant Megan Bollner said in a UT Southwestern news release. "But many risk factors for recurring kidney stones are within your control, and changing your eating habits can make a big difference."

Kidney stones are more likely to develop in urine that is highly concentrated, appearing dark yellow instead of clear or light-colored. These stones are formed by crystals and can block the flow of urine as it leaves the kidneys through the tubes that carry urine to the bladder.

Calcium oxalate and other minerals can form stones, which often start out the size of a grain of sand but can grow to fill the inside of a kidney.

They become more difficult to pass as they grow, sending more than a half million people to U.S. emergency rooms for treatment each year, according to the National Kidney Foundation.

About 1 in 10 people will develop a kidney stone during their lifetime, with men having a slightly higher risk.

Contributors to recurrence include family history, underlying kidney disease, obesity, diabetes, dietary choices, chronic dehydration and inflammatory bowel disease.

Symptoms include severe one-sided lower back pain, nausea, vomiting, fever, chills and bloody urine. Some, however, have no symptoms.

How do you steer clear of this? Bollner recommends:

• Drinking more fluids to stay hydrated to dilute your urine, at least 8 cups of water a day if you have had a previous kidney stone. Twelve cups is even better.

• Drinking extra water if it's hot outside and you're sweating.

• Adding lemon or lime juice to your water because citrates bind to calcium to help block stone formation.

• Limiting sodium intake. Eating a high-sodium diet increases the amount of calcium in urine. Federal guidelines recommend limiting sodium to 2,300 milligrams daily—equal to about 1 teaspoon.

Reducing salt in your diet also benefits the kidneys in other ways, including helping to lower blood pressure. Chronic high blood pressure can narrow and weaken blood vessels, affect blood flow and may lead to kidney disease or failure.

Another tip is to eat calcium-rich foods. A normal amount of calcium is critical to the body's calcium regulation, even though it seems counterintuitive because calcium is implicated in kidney stone development. Calcium from food combines with oxalates in the intestines, forcing the oxalates into the feces instead of the urine. That reduces the risk of developing calcium oxalate stones.

Consume 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day from dairy, soy, beans, fortified tofu and green vegetables (kale and broccoli are good sources).

Eat plenty of fruits and veggies, which can help increase urinary citrate and prevent kidney stones.

Cut back on animal protein, which can increase your risk of developing stones. This includes not only red meat, but also chicken, pork, fish and even eggs. Limit meat intake to 8 ounces a day, Bollner recommends.

Even oxalates found in healthy foods can contribute to kidney stone formation, so monitor how much you're eating of these foods: spinach, beets, nuts, wheat germ, rhubarb and soy. It is unlikely for oxalate consumption alone to cause stones, but excessive amounts can greatly increase the risk.

Keep your diet varied or eat a serving of dairy when you are consuming foods high in oxalate.

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It may be gastritis, an inflammation of the stomach lining that can come on suddenly or gradually. It can also lead to other problems, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Here, experts explore gastritis, its causes, risk factors, symptoms, types and treatments, including dietary changes that may be helpful.

Gastritis causes

Gastritis occurs when something causes a weakness or damage to the mucous-lined barrier that protects the stomach wall. According to the Mayo Clinic, this allows digestive juices to damage and inflame the stomach lining. There are several diseases and conditions that can increase your risk for gastritis, including inflammatory conditions such as Crohn's disease.

Gastritis risk factors

• Bacterial infections: An infection caused by Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is among the most common in the world, however not everyone with this infection will suffer from gastritis. Doctors think the vulnerability could be an inherited trait, or the result of smoking or dietary choices.

• Regular use of pain relievers: Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs) are often the culprit with gastritis. Taking these meds too often or for long periods of time can cause acute or chronic gastritis. Common names of NSAIDs are Advil, Motrin, Ibuprofen and Aleve.

• Age: As you age you develop an increased risk for gastritis since the stomach lining starts to thin over time. Older adults also tend to suffer from H. pylori infections or autoimmune diseases more often.

• Excessive alcohol use: Alcohol irritates and erodes the stomach lining. This allows the digestive juices to damage your stomach wall. Excessive alcohol use is more likely to cause acute gastritis. In a recent study in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, former president of the Spanish Gastroenterological Association Dr. Luis Bujanda states that, "Alcohol facilitates the development of superficial gastritis and chronic atrophic gastritis."

• Severe stress: Major illnesses, injuries, burns or infections can cause gastritis.

• Cancer treatment: Many chemotherapy drugs and radiation increase your risk of gastritis.

• Autoimmune gastritis: This occurs when your body attacks its own stomach cells. This is more common in patients who suffer other autoimmune diseases. It can also be related to a vitamin B-12 deficiency.

• Other diseases: These include HIV/AIDS, Crohn's disease and celiac disease.

Gastritis symptoms

• Burning, gnawing, or aching in your upper abdomen

• Indigestion

• Nausea

• Vomiting

• Feeling full in your upper abdomen after eating

• Belching and hiccups

• Bloody emesis (vomit) or black stools

• A loss of appetite

Gastritis types

There are two main types of gastritis, erosive and non-erosive, according to the Cleveland Clinic:

• Erosive gastritis (reactive): This occurs when gastritis causes inflammation and wearing away of the stomach lining. Alcoholic gastritis, corticosteroids, stress from illnesses or injuries, infections, and overuse of NSAIDs are most often related to this type.

• Non-erosive: This does not cause wearing away of the stomach lining. Autoimmune gastritis is generally non-erosive.

Gastritis diet

While doctors used to suggest bland diets for gastritis, this is no longer recommended. Below are some foods that may help with gastritis, as well as those to avoid.

Foods that may help, according to Mount Sinai:

• Apples, celery, cranberries (including cranberry juice), onions, garlic and tea may prevent the growth of H. pylori

• Foods high in antioxidants such as fruits and vegetables

• Foods high in B vitamins and calcium, like almonds, beans, whole grains, dark leafy greens and sea vegetables such as kelp

Foods to avoid, according to the Cleveland Clinic:

• Alcohol and caffeine

• Acidic foods and juices

• High fat and fried foods

• Any food or drink that irritates your stomach

Gastritis treatment

The treatment you receive for gastritis will depend on the type you have. Your treatment might include one or more gastritis medications, the Cleveland Clinic says.

• Antibiotics: These help get rid of bacterial infections that cause the gastritis.

• Antacids: This is the answer for how to relieve gastritis pain fast. However, these cause more side effects.

• Histamine blockers (Pepcid, Tagamet, Zantac): These decrease the production of stomach acid.

• Proton-pump inhibitors (Prilosec, Prevacid, Nexium, Protonix): These reduce the amount of acid your stomach produces.

Living with gastritis

Gastritis is very treatable condition, and most patients are able to resolve it with proper medical care and lifestyle changes. If you do not see improvement with the treatment prescribed, return to the office for further evaluation. If you see black stools or bright red vomit, seek medical attention immediately.

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All this media use can influence young people in a variety of ways. And with a reported rise in depression and anxiety among teens, you may wonder how social media may impact your child's mental health. Research suggests it depends on how they use it. Understanding potential connections between social media and mental health can help you guide your kids toward healthy social media habits.

One of the ways kids use social media is for social connection. Sharing photos and comments on social media platforms can help keep them in touch with peers and family who live far away, for example. Teens can also join groups that represent aspects of their identities or interests, such as groups around sports, theater, music or LGBTQ pride and support.

Another positive way adolescents use social media is to learn. They can explore and follow organizations such as art museums, local park systems or recipe bloggers. Some platforms also allow them to create and share their own content. Adolescents have described sharing their own crafts, hobbies and art to their social media audiences.

Using social media too much, though, can push out other important activities. Examples include being in person with friends and family or getting enough sleep.

Social media can also expose adolescents to content that is violent, dangerous or inaccurate. Further, social media can present idealized images of people that can lead to issues with body image for some teens.

There have been a lot of news stories lately about whether too much social media use contributes to depression. Some studies have found that young people who used more social media were more likely to report depression symptoms. It is important to consider that these studies could not tell if more social media use was impacting depression, or whether participants with depression already were using more social media. The cause-and-effect relationship for social media and depression remains unclear.

There are also research studies that found no relationship between the amount of social media use and depression symptoms. In a few other studies, researchers found that there was a small effect on depression, but only with very high levels of social media use.

All of these studies focus on the quantity of social media use; they do not address the different ways that each unique child may use social media.

Another important consideration about social media and mental health is how your child uses social media.

Some studies show that teens who use social media in a passive way, such as by scrolling and looking at content as it goes by on the screen, had a higher likelihood of feeling depression symptoms. These studies also found that adolescents who used social media in a more active way, such as by liking or commenting on people's posts, or making their own posts and sharing them, did not have a negative impact on mental health.

These studies suggest that it is not just quantity of time a child spends on social media, but the quality of time using social media.

Newer research studies are teaching us that not all adolescents use social media in the same way. We're also learning that some kids may be at risk for negative consequences while others may not. This approach in research is called "differential susceptibility." What this means is that adolescents have unique combinations of risks and strengths that they bring to, and that impact, their social media use.

A recent study looked at technology use and possible links to health and well-being behaviors, mental health and parenting. Two-thirds of adolescents in the study were doing well with their technology use and mental health. This group was called "Family-Engaged Teens," since they reported good communication with their parents about technology use. Their parents also had low levels of their own social media use.

The smaller one-third group of teen participants had higher rates of negative health outcomes such as depression and loneliness. This group was called "At Risk Teens." This group of teen participants reported higher rates of social media use by their parents, as well as less frequent communication with their parents about their social media use.

Another recent study found that adolescents who had higher depression symptoms reported that their parents spent up to 8 hours a day on social media. These studies highlight the important and positive role parents can play by communicating with their children about social media, and serving as role models in monitoring their own social media use.

Here are steps you can take to help promote positive social media use for your child:

• Establish a Family Media Plan for rules about social media use. Make sure that you are also following rules and role modeling healthy use for the family. AAP has also introduced an online Q&A portal where experts answer questions submitted by parents, teachers and others about teens and social media.

• Have conversations with your child about their media use, including how they are using these platforms. What do they like about them? Have they seen anything concerning? Make this an ongoing conversation.

• If you as a parent use social media, be sure to role model positive actions. For example, you can put away your phone at important family times such as during dinner, or during family time.

• Be cautious about children under 13 years old using social media. Most platforms set 13 as the minimum age to sign up.

• If you're concerned about your child's mental health, be sure to talk with your pediatrician.

2023 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Sunday, June 18

The first launch of the week involves the Satria comms satellite. At 10:04 p.m. UTC SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral carrying the satellite. It is being launched for the Indonesian Satelit Nusantara Tiga (SNT) consortium, the Indonesian government, and the Indonesian satellite operator PSN.

The Satria satellite will provide broadband internet and communications capacity for schools, hospitals, and other public use facilities in rural regions of Indonesia. You’ll be able to tune into the launch on SpaceX’s website.

Tuesday, June 20

There’s not a lot to say about China’s launch of its Long March 6 rocket due on Tuesday. It will be taking off at 3:19 a.m. UTC from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre but as for the payload, that is unknown. The event won’t be streamed either but there should be a video recording later on.

Wednesday, June 21

On Wednesday at 7:29 a.m. UTC, United Launch Alliance will launch a Delta IV Heavy from Cape Canaveral carrying a classified spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. The mission designated NROL 68 and dubbed Nusquam Celare or Nowhere to Hide, will be streamed live on ULA’s website.

Thursday, June 22

We have an interesting launch next. China will launch a Long March 2D rocket carrying the Liangxi space return capsule on a test flight. Apparently, the capsule can return to Earth carrying 300kg of cargo and has electronic components on board that can provide customized research data. The mission will launch from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre at an unspecified time.

Saturday, June 24

The final launch will be a common Starlink satellite launch atop a Falcon 9. As you probably know if you read TWIRL, the Starlink satellites beam internet back down to the planet for paying customers. This mission will take off at an undisclosed time from Cape Canaveral. You’ll be able to watch the launch via the SpaceX website.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites to space, the first stage of the Falcon 9 also landed after takeoff.

Next, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9, this time carrying the Transporter-8 rideshare satellites.

Finally, China launched a Long March 2D rocket carrying 41 satellites from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre.

That’s all for this week, check in next time.

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The world must rethink its approach to the climate crisis, by investing trillions of dollars instead of billions in the developing world, and moving beyond conventional ideas of overseas aid, one of the world’s most influential climate economists has urged.

“We need a complete rethink of the whole nexus of climate, debt and development,” Avinash Persaud told the Observer, before a key summit. “What we are seeing today is new – countries affected by climate disaster, this is happening now. Countries are drowning.”

He called for a tripling of the finance available from the World Bank and similar institutions, and a huge influx of cash from the private sector, driven by the careful use of public funds and regulation to remove the current barriers to investment. “This is the biggest financial opportunity in the world,” he said.

Persaud is economic adviser to Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, who is co-hosting a meeting of world leaders this week with French president Emmanuel Macron. More than 50 heads of state and government are expected to attend the summit in Paris this Thursday and Friday, including Lula da Silva of Brazil, Germany’s Olaf Scholtz and the Chinese premier Li Qiang.

Rishi Sunak is likely to snub the conference. Joe Biden is sending his climate envoy, John Kerry.

In Paris, Mottley and Persaud will set out the “Bridgetown agenda”, named after the Barbados capital where it was first mooted last year. They will call for debt relief for some of the poorest nations facing climate catastrophe, a tripling of funding from the world’s multilateral development banks, including the World Bank, and new taxes to fund climate action, including, potentially, a levy on shipping.

They will also call for reforms to the way the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other institutions operate, to make it easier for them to “de-risk” private sector investment in developing countries, such as by providing guarantees or long-term loans.

“The private sector has to be involved,” Persaud said. “The numbers needed would swamp developing countries’ balance sheets, but private companies can do it.”

Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, speaks at the COP27 UN climate summit on 8 November 2022 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. She will co-host a meeting of world leaders this week. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP

Persaud values pragmatism above ideals, and above traditional economic thinking. “If you ask economists for ideas, they will come up with an infinite number of ideas that are clever, elegant – and completely impractical,” he said.

Many approaches have been tried or discussed, he points out: insurance for countries at risk of climate disaster; raising money from carbon offsets; green and blue bonds. “None of these is the answer,” he said.

Some of the cherished ideals of many campaigners will also have to be sacrificed, he warns. NGOs rail against the use of loans for climate finance, saying non-repayable grants should be given instead, but Persaud finds this unlikely.

“Waiting for grants from rich countries is like waiting for Godot,” he said.

Conventional overseas aid will also never be enough, Persaud added. “These sums are far too big, we need to think beyond that.”

Work by the distinguished UK economist Nicholas Stern, and Vera Songwe, last year found that about $2tn a year would be needed to transform the economies of developing countries to cut emissions and enable them to deal with the effects of extreme weather. While this sum seems large, it is not much greater than the investment that is currently poured into fossil fuels and high-carbon infrastructure.

Persaud breaks this down further, estimating that about $1.4tn a year will be needed from mainly the private sector, for the green transformation of poor countries; about $300bn will be needed to help them adapt to the effects of the climate crisis; and about $100bn a year must go to “loss and damage”, which is the rescue of countries stricken by climate catastrophe.

Calls for reform of the World Bank, to enable it to deal with devastating effects of the climate crisis on poor countries, have intensified in the past year. The former president, Trump appointee David Malpass, resigned earlier this year after struggling to defend his apparent climate sceptic views, and his replacement Ajay Banga, a former banker, is thought to be amenable to change.

Persaud contrasted the treatment of developing countries today with the terms that were agreed by the World Bank in its early days for the reconstruction of Europe after the second world war. “Germany was told its debt repayments would never exceed 3.5% of its exports,” he said. “Those are terms the developing world would love to see today.”

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< Watch the video. >

During fleeting fits, the sun occasionally hurls a colossal amount of energy into space. Called solar flares, these eruptions last for mere minutes, and they can trigger catastrophic blackouts and dazzling auroras on Earth. But our leading mathematical theories of how these flares work fail to predict the strength and speed of what we observe.

At the heart of these outbursts is a mechanism that converts magnetic energy into powerful blasts of light and particles. This transformation is catalyzed by a process called magnetic reconnection, in which colliding magnetic fields break and instantly realign, slingshotting material into the cosmos. In addition to powering solar flares, reconnection may power the speedy, high-energy particles ejected by exploding stars, the glow of jets from feasting black holes, and the constant wind blown by the sun.

Despite the phenomenon’s ubiquity, scientists have struggled to understand how it works so efficiently. A recent theory proposes that when it comes to solving the mysteries of magnetic reconnection, tiny physics plays a big role. In particular, it explains why some reconnection events are so stupefyingly fast—and why the strongest seem to occur at a characteristic speed. Understanding the microphysical details of reconnection could help researchers build better models of these energetic eruptions and make sense of cosmic tantrums.

“So far, this is the best theory I can see,” said Hantao Ji, a plasma physicist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study. “It’s a big achievement.”

Fumbling With Fluids

Nearly all known matter in the universe exists in the form of plasma, a fiery soup of gas where infernal temperatures have stripped down atoms into charged particles. As they zip around, those particles generate magnetic fields, which then guide the particles’ movements. This chaotic interaction knits a scrambled mess of magnetic field lines that, like rubber bands, store more and more energy as they’re stretched and twisted.

In the 1950s, scientists proposed an explanation for how plasmas eject their pent-up energy, a process that came to be called magnetic reconnection. When magnetic field lines pointing in opposite directions collide, they can snap and cross-connect, launching particles like a double-sided slingshot.

But this idea was closer to an abstract painting than a complete mathematical model. Scientists wanted to understand the details of how the process works—the events that influence the snapping, the reason why so much energy is unleashed. But the messy interplay of hot gas, charged particles and magnetic fields is tricky to tame mathematically.

The first quantitative theory, described in 1957 by the astrophysicists Peter Sweet and Eugene Parker, treats plasmas as magnetized fluids. It suggests that collisions of oppositely charged particles draw in magnetic field lines and set off a runaway chain of reconnection events. Their theory also predicts that this process occurs at a particular rate. The reconnection rates observed in relatively weak, laboratory-forged plasmas match their prediction, as do the rates for smaller jets in the lower layers of the sun’s atmosphere.

But solar flares release energy much more quickly than Sweet and Parker’s theory can account for. By their calculations, those flares should unfurl over months rather than minutes.

More recently, observations from NASA’s magnetospheric satellites identified this speedier reconnection happening even closer to home, in Earth’s own magnetic field. Those observations, along with evidence from decades of computer simulations, confirm this “fast” reconnection rate:

In more energetic plasmas, reconnection occurs at roughly 10 percent of the speed at which magnetic fields propagate—orders of magnitude faster than Sweet and Parker’s theory predicts.

The 10 percent reconnection rate is observed so universally that many scientists consider it “God’s given number,” said Alisa Galishnikova, a researcher at Princeton. But invoking the divine does little to explain what’s making reconnection so fast.

God’s Number

In the 1990s, physicists turned away from treating plasmas as fluids, which had turned out to be too simplistic. Zoomed in, a magnetized soup is really made up of individual particles. And how those particles interact with one another makes a crucial difference.

“When you get to the microscales, the fluid description starts breaking down,” said Amitava Bhattacharjee, a plasma physicist at Princeton. “The [microphysical] picture has things in it that the fluid picture can never capture.”

For the past two decades, physicists have suspected that an electromagnetic phenomenon known as the Hall effect might hold the secret to speedy reconnection: Negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions have different masses, so they travel along magnetic field lines at different speeds. That speed differential generates a voltage between the separated charges.

In 2001, Bhattacharjee and his colleagues showed that only models that included the Hall effect yielded appropriately fast reconnection rates.

But precisely how that voltage produced the magical 10 percent remained a mystery. “It did not show us the ‘how’ and ‘why,’” said Yi-Hsin Liu, a plasma physicist at Dartmouth College.

< Watch the video. >

Electrons (red) and ions (white) travel at different speeds along magnetic field lines in astrophysical plasmas, generating a voltage that makes magnetic reconnection more efficient.Video: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Now, in two recently published theoretical papers, Liu and colleagues have attempted to fill in the details.

The first paper, published in Communications Physics, describes how the voltage induces a magnetic field that draws electrons away from the center of the two colliding magnetic regions. That diversion produces a vacuum that sucks in new field lines and pinches them in the center, allowing the magnetic slingshot to form more quickly.

“That picture was missed … [but] it was staring at us in the face,” said Jim Drake, a plasma physicist at the University of Maryland. “This is the first convincing argument I’ve ever seen.”

In the second paper, published in Physical Review Letters, Liu and his undergraduate research assistant Matthew Goodbred describe how the same vacuum effect emerges in extreme plasmas containing different ingredients. Around black holes, for example, plasmas are thought to consist of electrons and equally massive positrons, so the Hall effect no longer applies. Yet, “magically, reconnection is still working in a similar way,” Liu said. The researchers propose that within these stronger magnetic fields, most of the energy is spent accelerating particles rather than heating them—again creating a pressure depletion that yields the divine 10 percent rate.

“It’s a major milestone theoretically,” said Lorenzo Sironi, a theoretical astrophysicist at Columbia University who works on computer simulations of high-energy plasma jets. “This gives us confidence … that what we’re seeing in our simulations is not crazy.”

Picking Particles

Scientists can’t model each individual particle in large-scale plasma simulations. Doing so would produce billions of terabytes of data and take hundreds of years to complete, even using the most advanced supercomputers. But researchers recently figured out how to treat such an unwieldy system as a smaller, more manageable set of particles.

To investigate the importance of considering individual particles, Galishnikova and colleagues compared two simulations of an accreting black hole—one treating the plasma as a homogeneous fluid, and the other tossing roughly a billion particles into the mix. Their results, published in March in Physical Review Letters, show that incorporating the microphysics leads to distinctly different pictures of a black hole’s flares, particle accelerations and variations in brightness.

Now, scientists hope theoretical advances such as Liu’s will lead to models of magnetic reconnection that more accurately reflect nature. But while his theory aims to settle the reconnection-rate problem, it does not explain why some field lines collide and trigger reconnection but not others. It also doesn’t describe how the outflowing energy is divvied up into jets, heat, and cosmic rays—or how any of this works in three dimensions and on larger scales. Still, Liu’s work shows how, under the right circumstances, magnetic reconnection can be efficient enough to drive ephemeral but violent celestial outbursts.

“You have to answer the question ‘why’—that’s a crucial part of moving forward with science,” Drake said. “Having the confidence that we understand the mechanism gives us a much better ability to try to figure out what’s going on.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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It could be a new world record, although no one involved wants to talk about it. In the south of France, a collaboration among 35 countries has been birthing one of the largest and most ambitious scientific experiments ever conceived: the giant fusion power machine known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). But the only record ITER seems certain to set doesn’t involve “burning” plasma at temperatures 10 times higher than that of the sun’s core, keeping this “artificial star” ablaze and generating net energy for seconds at a time or any of fusion energy’s other spectacular and myriad prerequisites. Instead ITER is on the verge of a record-setting disaster as accumulated schedule slips and budget overruns threaten to make it the most delayed—and most cost-inflated—science project in history.

ITER is supposed to help humanity achieve the dream of a world powered not by fossil fuels but by fusion energy, the same process that makes the stars shine. Conceived in the mid-1980s, the machine, when completed, will essentially be a giant, high-tech, doughnut-shaped vessel—known as a tokamak—that will contain hydrogen raised to such high temperatures that it will become ionized, forming a plasma rather than a gas. Powerful magnetic and electric fields flowing from and through the tokamak will girdle and heat the plasma cloud so that the atoms inside will collide and fuse together, releasing immense amounts of energy. But this feat is easier said than done. Since the 1950s fusion machines have grown bigger and more powerful, but none has ever gotten anywhere near what would be needed to put this panacea energy source on the electric grid. ITER is the biggest, most powerful fusion device ever devised, and its designers have intended it to be the machine that will finally show that fusion power plants can really be built.

The ITER project formally began in 2006, when its international partners agreed to fund an estimated €5 billion (then $6.3 billion), 10-year plan that would have seen ITER come online in 2016. The most recent official cost estimate stands at more than €20 billion ($22 billion), with ITER nominally turning on scarcely two years from now. Documents recently obtained via a lawsuit, however, imply that these figures are woefully outdated: ITER is not just facing several years’ worth of additional delays but also a growing internal recognition that the project’s remaining technical challenges are poised to send budgets spiraling even further out of control and successful operation ever further into the future.

The documents, drafted a year ago for a private meeting of the ITER Council, ITER’s governing body, show that at the time, the project was bracing for a three-year delay—a doubling of internal estimates prepared just six months earlier. And in the year since those documents were written, the already grim news out of ITER has unfortunately only gotten worse. Yet no one within the ITER Organization has been able to provide estimates of the additional delays, much less the extra expenses expected to result from them. Nor has anyone at the U.S. Department of Energy, which is in charge of the nation’s contributions to ITER, been able to do so. When contacted for this story, DOE officials did not respond to any questions by the time of publication.

The problems leading to these latest projected delays were several years in the making. The ITER Organization was extremely slow to let on that anything was wrong, however. As late as early July 2022, ITER’s website announced that the machine was expected to turn on as scheduled in December 2025. Afterward that date bore an asterisk clarifying that it would be revised. Now the date has disappeared from the website altogether. ITER leaders seldom let slip that anything was awry either. In February 2017 ITER’s then director general, the late Bernard Bigot, discussed its progress with DOE representatives. “ITER is really moving forward,” he said. “We are working day and night.... The progress is on schedule.” The timeline he presented implied that everything was on track. Construction of the ITER complex’s foundation, which incorporates an earthquake protection system with hundreds of tremor-dampening rubber- and metal-laminated plates, should have been almost complete. From there, assembly of the reactor itself was planned to begin in 2018. At the time of Bigot’s remarks, two of its major pieces—a massive magnetic coil to wrap around the doughnutlike tokamak and a large section of the vacuum vessel that makes up the tokamak’s walls—were supposed to be ready to ship within the month and by the end of the year, respectively. Instead the coil would take almost three more years to complete, as would the vessel sector. The pieces were completed in January and April 2020, respectively. In fact, a large proportion of the big components of the machine were behind schedule by a year or two years or even more. Soon ITER’s official start of assembly was bumped from 2018 to 2020.

Then, in early 2020, the COVID pandemic struck, slowing manufacturing and shipping of machine components.

In late 2021 the ITER Council quietly asked for a revised schedule and estimate of costs, which was eventually presented at a closed meeting in June 2022—almost precisely a month after Bigot died from an unspecified illness. Some months later, when I asked Laban Coblentz, ITER’s head of communications, what exactly that revised schedule was, like everyone else on the project, he refused to disclose this information—or any other hint of how grave the delays or cost overruns were likely to be. According to Coblentz, Bigot’s death had pushed ITER into a “rather traumatic transition in leadership” that effectively rendered the revised schedule moot. There wasn’t, he said, “any relevance to providing you with an internal document, circulated to the ITER Council in June [2022], which is no longer current or in any sense accurate.”

In response to this stonewalling, earlier this year I initiated a lawsuit under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act seeking to reveal the extent of ITER’s expected schedule and cost troubles. So far, the lawsuit has been partially successful. It has extracted partially redacted documents revealing that in November 2021 ITER’s internal estimates showed the project already facing about 17 months of delays. By the time of the June 2022 ITER Council meeting, the number had doubled to roughly 35 months of delays—enough to easily add billions of dollars to ITER’s already bloated budget. But this timeline didn’t reflect other events bound to introduce even more delays.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: Charles Seife

In addition to some of ITER’s components arriving far behind schedule, some of that machinery also turned out to be defective. Several thermal shields meant to keep ITER’s liquid helium refrigerant cold and protect the walls of the machine corroded and cracked because of the way the welds interacted with an acid used to wash the metal. This needs to be repaired. “So all in all, it’s removing about 20 kilometers of very thin piping, replacing that—in most cases, repairing the thermal shields, in some cases, making new ones,” Coblentz says. “That is not a high-cost component in ITER terms.” In addition, some of the puzzle-piece-like parts of the vacuum vessel—intended to fit together with submillimeter precision—proved not to be manufactured as precisely as needed. “You can call that a manufacturing flaw, legitimately,” Coblentz adds. In November 2022 the ITER Organization decided not only to halt assembly of the vacuum vessel but also to remove the already installed segment for repairs. Even so, Kathryn McCarthy , director of the U.S. ITER Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, testified to Congress just this week that ITER’s “continued project progress shows us that it is possible to achieve engineering precision, at the millimeter-scale, on ship-sized fusion components.”

On top of that difficulty, in January 2022 the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) put a stop to ITER assembly entirely. ASN is unconvinced that, among other issues, the planned amount of radiation shielding around the machine will be adequate, and the authority won’t let the assembly go forward until ITER can prove that it can keep personnel safe. But adding much more shielding might pile on more weight than the rubber-and-metal earthquake-resistant foundation can bear. “ASN will reconsider lifting the tokamak assembly hold point on the basis of a self-supported dossier [ASN] requested from the ITER organization,” wrote ASN spokesperson Evangelia Petit in an e-mail to me. This dossier must address, among other things, biological protection against radiation hazards. Coblentz, however, says the impasse has been caused by “excessive conservatism” and suggests that the situation might be resolved by allowing ITER to run at low power so that the radiation hazard can be mapped and understood more fully before switching over to high-power operations.

In late 2022 Bigot’s replacement, Pietro Barabaschi, admitted that the problem with the vacuum vessel and thermal blankets would wreak havoc on the timing of ITER’s much vaunted initial run, its so-called first plasma date. “We are of course very much aware of the consequences as far as schedule and cost are concerned—and they will not be insignificant,” he said in a November 2022 ITER press release. The length and cost of those delays are still unclear, however, and Barabaschi’s statement didn’t address the supply chain issues—or the regulatory ones, which have not improved. In March 2023 ASN found that the qualifications of certain welders—who have to make nuclear-plant-grade welds between metal parts—had been falsified. ITER officials subsequently banned the vendor that supplied the welding services from any activity on the worksite, but ASN required ITER to go through all the relevant contractor contributions and prepare an impact statement about the falsifications. Coblentz believes that an approximately three-year delay caused by late components and supply chain issues discussed in 2022 and a roughly two-year delay caused by the defective vacuum vessel segments and thermal blankets won’t be additive—that many of the problems can be worked out in parallel. In fact, he says, the ITER organization will possibly start installing equipment not needed until after the first plasma date—a date, he suggests, that might not even be a relevant goalpost anymore.

Whether the wait slips four or five or even more years, ITER is far from the only big scientific project to face enormous delays, cost growth and moving goalposts. Such obstacles, its advocates say, are unavoidable when attempting ambitious tasks that require large amounts of technological development. Proponents of megaproject largesse may cite the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as an apt example: intended to be completed in a decade at a cost of a bit more than $1 billion, it took 20 years and more than $10 billion to get the telescope off the ground. Those overruns were especially painful for astronomers but in hindsight seem justified, given that they ensured JWST’s successful launch, deployment and ongoing revolutionary observations in deep space.

But ITER and JWST are not remotely the same. ITER’s gestation has been even longer—stretching back to a handshake agreement between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s—and its cost is higher than any scientific endeavor in history. Adjusted for inflation, its price is about the same as that of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs—and is almost certain to get larger. As early as 2018 the DOE’s undersecretary for science told Congress that the machine was going to cost much more than the then official price tag of $22 billion. ITER officials vigorously disputed this claim, but the as-yet-undisclosed effects of the project’s latest setbacks makes it clear, at least, that the final bill will be billions more still.

And unlike JWST, which began full operation mere months after launch, ITER won’t be fit for purpose for years after its construction ends. The real purpose of ITER—to run high-power fusion experiments using a mixture of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium—won’t happen until more than a decade after the machine hits its first plasma milestone. (Originally those experiments were supposed to take place just five years or so after ITER’s debut. Over time, that turned into 10 years: the scheduled 2025 turn-on date would have meant a 2035 start to deuterium-tritium operations.) A further slip to ITER’s start date is likely to cause a corresponding delay in the deuterium-tritium experiments.

When assailed by costly, acrimony-inducing delays, the architects of ITER, JWST and other scientific megaprojects typically respond by reminding the public and policymakers that great monuments take time to build. The plans for Notre Dame and other Gothic cathedrals, for example, were of such grand scale and intricacy that, from their outset, everyone knew their creation would span generations; no one present at Notre Dame’s beginnings assumed they’d live to see it finished. ITER’s designers, however, did not initially hold such lofty expectations for the project. Instead they fully believed they’d see it completed within a couple of decades. Yet the project is now entering its third generation of planning and construction, and its important experiments are at least another generation away. ITER has become the Gothic cathedral of our time: a beautiful but immensely complex structure that we pray will help us find salvation from our energy and climate woes.

Then again, perhaps a cathedral is the wrong metaphor: while Notre Dame took a century to complete, it became an active structure much more quickly, one that was used for its intended purpose less than a generation after construction began. Nobody can say when that will be true for ITER. With each passing decade, this record-breaking monument to big international science looks less and less like a cathedral—and more like a mausoleum.

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A giant rift is slowly tearing Africa, the second-largest continent, apart. This depression — known as the East African Rift —  is a network of valleys that stretches about 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) long, from the Red Sea to Mozambique, according to the Geological Society of London. 

So will Africa rip apart completely, and if so, when will it split? To answer this question, let's look at the region's tectonic plates, the outer parts of the planet's surface that can collide with each other, making mountains, or pull apart, creating vast basins.

Along this colossal tear in eastern Africa, the Somalian tectonic plate is pulling eastward from the larger, older part of the continent, the Nubian tectonic plate, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. (The Somalian plate is also known as the Somali plate, and the Nubian plate is also sometimes called the African plate.)

The Somalian and Nubian plates are also separating from the Arabian plate in the north. These plates intersect in the Afar region of Ethiopia, creating a Y-shaped rift system, the Geological Society of London noted.

A slow break

The East African Rift started forming about 35 million years ago between Arabia and the Horn of Africa in the eastern part of the continent, Cynthia Ebinger, chair of geology at Tulane University in New Orleans and a science adviser to the U.S. State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, told Live Science. This rifting extended southward over time, reaching northern Kenya by 25 million years ago.

The rift consists of two broadly parallel sets of fractures in Earth's crust. The eastern rift passes through Ethiopia and Kenya, while the western rift runs in an arc from Uganda to Malawi, the Geological Society of London noted. The eastern branch is arid, while the western branch lies on the border of the Congolese rainforest, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The existence of the eastern and western rifts and the discovery of offshore zones of earthquakes and volcanoes indicate that Africa is slowly opening along several lines, which together amount to more than 0.25 inch (6.35 millimeters) per year, Ebinger said.

"The rifting right now is very slow, about the rate that one's toenails grow," Ken Macdonald, a distinguished professor emeritus of Earth science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Live Science.

A map showing tectonic plate boundaries (gray) as well as the East African Rift zone (dotted lines). (Image credit: U.S. Geological survey)

The East African Rift most likely formed because of heat flowing up from the asthenosphere — the hotter, weaker, upper part of Earth's mantle — between Kenya and Ethiopia, according to the Geological Society of London. This heat caused the overlying crust to expand and rise, leading to stretching and fracturing of the brittle continental rock. This led to substantial volcanic activity, including the formation of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, NASA's Earth Observatory noted.

If Africa does rip apart, there are different ideas for how that might happen. One scenario has most of the Somalian plate separating from the rest of the African continent, with a sea forming between them. This new landmass would include Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and the eastern parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, Ebinger said. "Another scenario has only eastern Tanzania and Mozambique separating," Ebinger noted.

If the African continent does rupture, "the rift in Ethiopia and Kenya may split to create a Somali plate in the next 1 million to 5 million years," Ebinger said.

However, Africa may not split in two. The geological forces driving the rifting might prove too slow to separate the Somalian and Nubian plates, Ebinger said. One notable example of a failed rift elsewhere on the globe is the Midcontinent Rift, which curves for about 1,900 miles (3,000 km) across the Upper Midwest of North America, according to a 2022 review in the journal GSA Today.

"Failed rifts mark continental landmasses worldwide," Ebinger said.

The eastern branch of the East African Rift is a failed rift, according to the Geological Society of London. However, the western branch is still active.

"What we do not know is if this rifting will continue on its present pace to eventually open up an ocean basin, like the Red Sea, and then later to something much larger, like a small version of the Atlantic Ocean," Macdonald said. "Or might it speed up and get there more quickly? Or it might stall out?"

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Doctors are warning parents against buying the baby sleep sack, a weighted swaddle blanket designed for infants. In a major public service announcement, pediatricians say the blanket, which is meant to mimic the sensation of “being held or hugged” could turn deadly.

For years, pediatricians have advised parents not to place any objects in an infant’s crib or sleeping area, citing the dangers of sudden infant death syndrome, otherwise known as SIDS. Infants are not born with the reaction to move their faces away from obstructions when they aren’t getting enough oxygen, which ultimately leads to their death.

The weighted sleeping sacks, doctors say, are no different. “Why would anyone put a weight on top of a child’s chest — particularly a newborn?” said Dr. Michael Goodstein, a neonatologist and member of the AAP’s task force on SIDS in an interview with NBC News. He said that adding weighted blankets to a newborn’s chest, could potentially compress their chest and since their rib cages are much more elastic and flexible at that age, it could affect their breathing.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in a letter to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and ASTM International that they had long advised against weighted blankets, and urged them to implement “vigorous oversight” of the sleep sack. There is evidence that products such as weighted blankets pose “concerning reductions in oxygen saturation levels in infants,” the AAP said in its letter, adding that the commission and ASTM should address these concerns before any babies are harmed.

The AAP warned that if their concerns are not addressed, we could be facing a repeat of the SIDS-related deaths that have been linked to inclined sleepers, in-bed sleepers, and others. One such product was the Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play Sleeper which was recalled by the CPSC in 2019 after it was connected to about 100 infant deaths over 13 years.

The company was forced to recall all of its 4.7 million sleepers after 32 deaths were linked to the product. The commission said in January that investigations showed the lack of restraints in the sleeper caused the infants to die when they rolled from their backs onto their stomachs or sides.

It is unacceptable to wait until these deaths occur, the AAP said in its letter, adding that all infant deaths caused by sleep products could have been avoided if the product was taken off the market while awaiting confirmation that it was actually safe.

The AAP concluded: “Waiting for the emergence of confirmatory data about these concerns while these products proliferate is an unacceptable outcome when each of those data points will be a family whose lives are forever marked by unfathomable tragedy of their infant dying from a sleep-related death.”

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This week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US vehicle safety regulator, warned automakers not to comply with nearly three-year-old state law that requires them to share vehicle data with owners and independent auto repair shops. In a letter, a lawyer for the government argued that giving customers and repairers access to the vehicle systems demanded by Massachusetts could also make them available to hackers, who could then access steering, acceleration, braking, or electronics systems.

The conflict dates to 2020, when Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure granting them the right to repair their cars. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade association representing global auto manufacturers, filed a suit to prevent the law from going into effect. It argued that the law was preempted by federal vehicle safety rules—in other words, not the sort of thing Massachusetts voters could decide—and created safety risks by opening up its vehicles to manipulation. The federal judge overseeing the lawsuit has yet to decide on the case, and the federal government had stayed mum on it until this month.

So now the right-to-repair movement faces another setback. Massachusetts says its law is good for car consumers. The federal government says it’s bad for car safety.

What does the new twist in this right-to-repair case mean for the state’s car owners, repairers, and dealers? At this point, confusion.

“Massachusetts consumers don’t know their rights because of how long this is taking,” says Tommy Hickey, who leads the Massachusetts Right to Repair Coalition (and now a Maine group trying to pass a similar law there.) Meanwhile, new car owners in Massachusetts who have lost access to some safety and comfort features as a result of the legal fight have been left in the lurch.

On June 1, the Massachusetts attorney general defied the legal logjam and began distributing paperwork to new car buyers informing them of their rights to access all the mechanical data created by their cars to help them diagnose, maintain, and repair their vehicles. In a statement, Massachusetts first assistant attorney general, Pat Moore, questioned why the federal government chose to weigh in on the issue now. (NHTSA did not respond to questions about the timing of the letter.)

The federal government’s stance in Massachusetts appears to conflict with its general views on the right to repair. In 2021, President Joe Biden ordered the Federal Trade Commission to create new rules making it harder for manufacturers to limit who can fix the devices they create.

Amid competing letters, statements, and legal paperwork there’s a fundamental question, one that Massachusetts tried to find the answer to: Who owns the reams of data created by today’s increasingly software- and computer-chip-enabled vehicles?

For decades, those advocating for the right to repair—that is, the idea that once you buy a product, you get to decide how to fix it—held up the auto industry as one that was doing it right. Car repair has long been the domain of the at-home tinkerer. As a result, independent auto repair shops and aftermarket parts manufacturers have made billions of dollars tuning and fixing vehicles.

In 2012, Massachusetts voters became the first to bring the concept into the modern age by requiring automakers to add an onboard port that allowed anyone with a cheap tool to access a car’s data. The law led to a nationwide agreement, where automakers guaranteed independent repairers and owners would have access to the tools and software given to their own franchised dealerships.

But since then, the auto business has shifted online, and almost every new car these days comes with a telematics system that collects data on its operation—including how fast it’s moving, where it’s going, how hard its driver is braking, and whether everything in the car is working correctly. This data can be transmitted wirelessly, and some automakers no longer build the onboard port into their vehicles, arguing they don’t need it anymore.

Owners and repair shops worry that the auto industry will use such advances to cut off access to the information needed to diagnose and fix vehicles, instead directing repair business to their own franchise dealerships. In Massachusetts, 75 percent of voters decided that the new technology, and the potential loopholes it created, called for a new law and passed the ballot measure approving the updated right to repair.

“Everything that your car does—all of the data it generates and all of the functions it has after you buy it—that belongs to you,” says Nathan Proctor, who heads up the Right to Repair campaign at the US Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy organization. “Automakers should not get to tether you to their services.” He called the ongoing fight in Massachusetts “very frustrating.”

But the auto industry—and now, the US Department of Transportation—has said it believes giving wider access to car data is actually dangerous. In the lawsuit filed by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation in 2020, the industry argued that the Massachusetts law required them to create an open data platform too quickly, creating security risks.

Josh Siegel, an assistant professor of engineering at Michigan State University who studies connected-car security, says the automakers might be right—to a point. The Massachusetts law gave the industry about a year to build an open data platform, likely not enough time to create a safe system. “Open telemetry systems that are slapped together can allow unauthorized access and control,” he says.

But the federal government’s current stance argues that open systems aren’t just dangerous if they’re badly built. It argues they’re inherently dangerous—and Siegel doesn’t think that’s true. He says it is possible for everyone—right-to-repair advocates, vehicle safety and cybersecurity experts, manufacturers—to get together to build a data-sharing system. One standard, created for the entire US and not just one state, should be “designed with the public and manufacturers’ needs in mind and with care and attention paid to security from the start,” he says.

Beyond the legal and policy wranglings, the conflict between the state, the auto industry, and the federal government has had strange practical fallout in Massachusetts. In 2021, Kia and Subaru decided to cut off access to their telematics systems for new car buyers living in the state. The carmakers said they made the move to avoid breaking the law: They argued that because the open data platform the law required didn’t yet exist, the only way to comply was to limit access to their telematics systems altogether.

As a result, Massachusetts car buyers investing in the latest and greatest aren’t able to access Subaru’s Starlink service, including emergency roadside assistance and remote start, or Kia Connect, which includes stolen vehicle recovery and remote climate control.

The situation has frustrated state Subaru and Kia owners—and doesn’t look set to change soon. This week’s NHTSA letter cautioned automakers not to go the Subaru and Kia route and disable their telematics systems in Massachusetts, citing safety features that “could facilitate better emergency response in the event of a vehicle crash.” But in a statement, Subaru spokesperson Dominick Infante says the automaker wasn’t changing its stance. “Compliance with the Massachusetts Data Law is impossible for any automaker,” he says. “Subaru stands by its commitment to consumer choice when it comes to repairing vehicles.”

A Kia spokesperson declined to comment and referred WIRED to its trade group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which in turn declined to comment on ongoing litigation. Now everyone will wait for the Massachusetts judge to have the last say on the law approved by state voters—and the future of automotive repair in Massachusetts, the US, and beyond.

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When an aircraft is flying below the speed of sound, sound waves ripple and spread out in front of and behind the plane. This contributes to the rumble and roar you hear when a plane is flying overhead. Of course, these waves are invisible, but we see something similar with slow-moving boats on calm water, when you can see gentle undulations of the bow and stern waves created by the boat’s hull.

For the plane, the sound waves are spreading out from the aircraft at the speed of sound, which is about 1,200km/h (750mph). If the plane accelerates to the speed of sound or faster, then the sound waves can no longer move fast enough to get out of the way of the aircraft. The waves bunch up and combine to form a shock wave.

This then trails behind the aircraft in a V-shape. Something similar is seen for the boat on water. When that craft speeds up and gets faster than the speed of the water waves, then V-shaped white water is seen trailing behind the boat.

For the aircraft, the shock wave is what causes the loud, thundering sonic boom. It’s happening all the time, but for people on the ground, they only hear it once when the wake passes over them. Occasionally a double bang is heard, because two wakes are created, one by the aircraft nose and the other by the tail.

NASA is currently researching how to make a quieter sonic boom. They are doing this by shaping the supersonic aircraft so the wake created by the plane is less pronounced, meaning the boom is more muffled, making a ‘whoomph’ rather than a ‘bang’.

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