Crucially, the treatment isn't applied straight away but is initiated seven days after the stroke. That means those who are unable to be assisted immediately after a stroke could still be protected against the worst effects of the condition.

The key molecule in the drops is the complement peptide (a chain of amino acids) C3a, which we already know plays an important role in the body's immune system, as well as in the development and plasticity of the brain.

"With this method, there's no need to race against the clock," says neuroimmunologist Marcela Pekna from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

"If the treatment is used in clinical practice, all stroke patients could receive it, even those who arrive at the hospital too late for thrombolysis or thrombectomy. Those who have remaining disability after the clot is removed could improve with this treatment too."

The delay is actually deliberate. Applied too early, the C3a peptide can increase the number of inflammatory cells in the brain, where they would start doing more harm than good.

Scientists induced an artificial ischemic stroke, the most common type of stroke there is, in mice. After a week, however, the nasal drops proved to help mice recover motor function faster and more completely, compared to a placebo group.

C3a was shown to help mice recover their motor function after a stroke. (Stokowska et al., Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2023)

The new study also gives us a better idea of the effect of C3a on the brain. MRI scans revealed that the peptide helped to increase the number of connections between nerve cells in the brains of the mice.

"Our results show that the C3a peptide affects the function of astrocytes – that is, cells that control many of the nerve cells' functions in both the healthy and the diseased brain – and which signals astrocytes send to nerve cells," says neuroscientist Milos Pekny from the University of Gothenburg.

The study builds on previous work by some of the same researchers into how the C3a peptide can protect against and reverse stroke damage. That they were able to repeat their results demonstrates the potential of this particular approach.

Some 7.6 million people a year experience an ischemic stroke, with more than half then going on to develop some kind of physical or mental impairment as a result: a loss of voluntary movement in an arm or a leg, speech disturbances, or issues with depression and anxiety.

Nosal drops with the C3a peptide could make a massive difference in those figures – though we're going to have to make sure that the treatment is viable in humans as well as mice first. We can add it to the list of several possible options researchers are exploring.

"Our ambition is to develop the method to make it usable in clinical practice, but to get there, and especially to be able to carry out the necessary clinical trials, we need to team up with a partner in the pharmaceutical industry," says Pekna.

The research has been published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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Beaming electricity down to Earth from solar panels in space has been a clean energy dream for decades. Even though the technology still has a long way to go before it can keep the lights on at home, there’s more hype than ever that space-based solar power stations could actually work.

 

A major milestone was announced this month when researchers at Caltech said that a prototype launched into space was able to beam a small amount of power to Earth. It was an important first for the nascent technology, and other researchers around the world are racing to make similar progress with funding from governments trying to reach their climate goals.

 

In space, solar panels can soak up unfiltered sunlight around the clock with no setting sun. They might be able to generate up to eight times as much electricity as land-based solar panels, according to Caltech. The hope is that we might be able to one day harness that abundant clean energy here on Earth or potentially even outposts on the Moon.

 

“I have a hard time not letting my imagination run wild when I start looking at this. It has a strange seductiveness like that,” Nikolai Joseph, a senior technology analyst at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, tells The Verge.

 

How feasible it is to turn those dreams into reality anytime soon is the subject of a study Joseph is working on with colleagues for NASA. Caltech’s demonstration was a game-changer, he says. “If you’d asked me if that was going to happen a year ago, I would have said, ‘Oh no, probably not.’ And then they just did it, which is wild,” he says. Joseph compares the milestone to a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion that made headlines last year.

 

Caltech researchers on the roof of the Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering in Pasadena,

California detecting power from their prototype in space.

Image: Ali Hajimiri via Caltech

 

Caltech showed that it could overcome one of the trickiest engineering challenges with space-based solar power: how to safely send electricity zooming from space down to Earth. A SpaceX rocket launched a spacecraft carrying Caltech’s prototype into space in January. The prototype includes solar cells and an array of transmitters that can beam energy to different locations. The photovoltaic cells convert sunlight into electricity, which then needs to be converted into microwaves so it can be transmitted wirelessly. (Caltech has a neat video explainer.)

 

A few months after launch, Caltech’s prototype was able to beam some power through space and ultimately back to the university. It started small, sending microwaves to receiver arrays about a foot away from the transmitter. The receiver arrays were able to convert the microwaves back to direct current (DC) electricity and use that to light up a couple of LEDs. The prototype also beamed a “detectable” amount of power down to a receiver on the rooftop of a Caltech lab in Pasadena, California.

 

“We had, of course, tested it on Earth, but now we know that it can survive the trip to space and operate there,” Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical and medical engineering who led the Caltech team, said in a press announcement. “To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated wireless energy transfer in space even with expensive rigid structures. We are doing it with flexible lightweight structures and with our own integrated circuits. This is a first.”

 

And it’s looking like it might not be the last. Earlier this week, the UK announced £4.3 million in government funding for several research initiatives. That includes a group at Queen Mary University of London developing its own wireless system for beaming microwave energy from place to place. And the US Naval Research Laboratory launched an experiment to the International Space Station earlier this year with the goal of beaming power across space using laser transmitters.

 

Even though research is ramping up now, the first patent for space-based solar power was filed in 1968 by aerospace engineer Peter Glaser. NASA and the Department of Energy took an interest in the concept in the 1970s as the world faced an energy crisis. But it was ultimately deemed too expensive to pursue the idea.

 

Even today, “The cost is the big issue,” says Xiaodong Chen, a professor of microwave engineering at Queen Mary University of London. “You’re building such big infrastructure in space.”

 

The economics are starting to change, though, with the commercial space industry driving down launch costs. The most ambitious timeline so far is for this technology to be ready to power homes and businesses on Earth by 2050, Chen says.

 

By 2050, in order to meet climate goals set in the Paris agreement, greenhouse gas emissions need to reach net zero. There’s no chance of hitting that goal overnight. So space-based solar shouldn’t be seen as a competitor to Earth-bound solar farms, says a 2022 report on the technology by the European Space Agency. The world needs as much renewable energy as it can get, as soon as it can get it.

 

 

Space-based solar power is having its moment in the sun

Rocket Report: China addresses falling rocket debris, Vulcan launch slipping

In the past few weeks, sea-surface temperatures in some parts of the North Atlantic Ocean have soared to record heights.

The anomalous warming is occurring in a large swath stretching almost one-third of the way across the Atlantic westward from the northwestern coast of Africa. Satellite data reveal that some surface waters in the area are almost 4 degrees Celsius (about 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal for this time of the year, says Brian McNoldy, a meteorologist at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.

“There’s been record-breaking warmth since March, but even more so now,” he says.

On June 10, for instance, the average sea-surface temperature for the portion of the Atlantic that stretches from the equator to 60 degrees north — up to southern Norway, southern Greenland and the central portions of Canada’s Hudson Bay — was 22.7° C (nearly 73° F). That’s about 1 degree C higher than the average recorded from 1991 through 2020, McNoldy notes. The previous record for the same date, 22.1° C, occurred in 2010.

Hot Atlantic

Sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic in 2023 (red) have been breaking daily records since March. In this plot, the 1982–2022 daily mean temperatures have been subtracted from this year’s temperatures as well of those from 1982 to 2022 (gray).

Daily North Atlantic temperatures for 2023 and the previous 41 years

Compared to 1982-2022 daily averages

< View the graphic at the source page. >

This year’s warmer-than-normal waters might help strengthen storms that form in the eastern Atlantic and eventually spawn hurricanes, scientists say.

What’s causing the unusual warm-up isn’t clear. But here’s a rundown of several factors that might be at play.

A dearth of Sahara dust

Occasionally, vast swathes of desert dust from the Sahara waft across the ocean. They are carried by winds stirred up by a semipermanent high-pressure system dubbed the “Azores high” due to its proximity to those islands.

But lately, the Azores high has weakened and shifted southwest away from Africa. So those winds that typically pick up and transport Saharan dust westward over the North Atlantic are calmer and largely dust free, says Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

As a result, solar radiation that normally would be scattered back into space by the dust reaches the ocean surface, warming the dark waters (SN: 9/25/01).

If and when the trade winds strengthen, increased dust from Africa could help cool the area somewhat.

In a typical year, vast plumes of dust from the Sahara Desert (left in this satellite image of northwest Africa from 2020) block sunlight, shading and cooling the underlying ocean. This spring, a lack of dusty air has contributed to warming of the North Atlantic.NOAA

Decreased air pollution

In 2020, new emissions rules kicked in for long-haul container ships that spew sulfate-rich exhaust plumes. There’s been some speculation that less pollution could lead to more heating. With fewer plumes scattering sunlight back into space, more radiation reaches the sea surface.

But some studies suggest that the cooling effect of ship plumes may have been minor to begin with: Not only do the exhaust plumes have a short life span, the pollutants can cause natural clouds to evaporate more quickly and thus lead to warming, not cooling (SN: 2/1/21).

Global warming trends

This year marks the return of El Niño, a climate phenomenon whose hallmark is warmer-than-normal sea-surface temperatures along the equator west of South America. By winter, there’s a more than 4 in 5 chance that the El Niño will be either strong or moderate, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

Each El Niño has its own personality (SN: 5/2/16). But in general, El Niño boosts average surface temperatures both on land and at sea worldwide, Mann says. Human-caused climate change has done the same, he notes.

But there’s still a lot of uncertainty about how current conditions may affect the coming forecast.

The unusually warm waters of the North Atlantic may tend to strengthen storm systems that later develop into tropical depressions and then hurricanes. But the El Niño that’s now developing in the equatorial Pacific may hamper their formation by strengthening winds in the upper atmosphere that can shear the tops off nascent hurricanes. How active this year’s hurricane season will be depends on which of these forces will prevail, scientists say (SN: 5/26/23).

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A recent DNA analysis of the two geographically separated octopus populations, published earlier this year ahead of peer review, indicates they were once part of one big family.

This "direct historical connection" suggests that around 125,000 years ago, the massive 2.2 million cubic kilometer (530,000 cubic mile) West Antarctic ice sheet that separates the two bays had fully collapsed into the sea.

The two populations of Turquet's octopus in the Weddell and Ross Sea. (Sally Lau/Twitter)

Scientists who sequenced the genomes of octopus populations in both the Weddell and Ross Seas found evidence of ancestral gene flow between the two populations roughly 70,000 years ago, suggesting that "an ancient seaway was likely once opened across the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which directly linked the present day Weddell Sea and Ross Sea".

"This could only be facilitated by a complete West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse during an interglacial period, which we infer to have occurred approximately between 68 and 265 [thousand years go]," they write.

If it happened then, it could very well happen again, especially since global temperatures are reaching a similar threshold today.

At the moment, scientists don't really know whether West Antarctica is at risk of fully collapsing due to the climate crisis. It's one of the major uncertainties left to solve in climate models.

While some experts warned of disaster in the region as far back as 50 years ago, other climate models made just 10 years ago predicted no significant ice loss in Antarctica within the century.

How wrong that turned out to be.

Today, West Antarctica is discharging melting icebergs the size of major metropolises much faster than the rest of the continent.

One of its glaciers is known as the 'Doomsday Glacier' because if it collapses, it could cause 65 centimeters of sea level rise all on its own. Climate scientists recently warned the glacier was holding on "by its fingernails".

So how long will the region continue to dangle on a cliff's edge?

Of course, the past collapse was due to a natural cycle in Earth's climate. It was not caused by rapid global warming, triggered by human fossil fuel emissions during what should be a planetary cold spell, as it is today.

If the entire West Antarctic ice sheet collapses from human-induced global warming, forming an archipelago in the southern ocean, the resulting environmental catastrophe is hard to fathom.

Scientists predict sea levels could rise by 3.3 to 5 meters (11 to 17 feet) around the world, overturning water circulation in oceans globally and drastically reshaping the coastlines of continents.

"Currently, future West Antarctic ice sheet collapse on centennial timescales is considered as a low likelihood process," researchers of the octopus paper write.

Yet even the most optimistic future models predict air temperatures will reach 1.2 to 1.7 °C by 2100, and as the authors point out, that is "potentially within the tipping point of future West Antarctic ice sheet collapse".

Currently, over half the ice shelves holding up the Antarctic ice sheet are on the brink of caving in, and if they crumble, it could possibly lead to irreversible losses.

If Turquet's octopuses in the southern ocean are ever reunited with their long-lost family members, it will mean our planet has entered truly troubled waters.

The study was published in bioRxiv.

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Similarly, those who endorsed increased alcohol use also reported increased depression, whether or not the amount they drank was at a level considered unhealthy. The findings may motivate individuals to reduce their drinking to improve their mood and suggest that monitoring changes in alcohol consumption may be helpful as part of clinical interventions for depression.

For the study, researchers reviewed responses from 200,000 individuals about drinking behaviors and depression symptoms to people at primary care visits between 2016 and 2020. Participants were adults who completed questionnaires about alcohol use and depression as part of routine health care on two occasions eleven to twenty-four months apart.

About one-quarter reported unhealthy alcohol use, and about thirteen percent screened positive for depression. Three-quarters had no changes in alcohol use from the time of the first questionnaire to the second.

For all but two subgroups with an increase in drinking risk level, there was a significant increase in the prevalence of positive depression screens ranging from 11 percent to 100 percent higher at the time of the second questionnaire compared to the first. The exceptions were those whose drinking increased from none to a level of drinking not considered unhealthy and those whose drinking increased from high risk to very high risk.

For subgroups reporting decreased drinking, the prevalence of positive depression screens dropped from 17 percent to 49 percent from the time of the first questionnaire to the second. The only subgroup where a drop in depression prevalence did not accompany a reduction in drinking were those whose drinking dropped from levels not considered unhealthy when completing the first questionnaire to no drinking at the second assessment.

The study did not examine what caused the changes in alcohol use and depression symptoms. The simultaneous increases or decreases in both depression symptoms and alcohol use could be attributed to increased or decreased drinking causing changes in depression, improved or worsening depression leading to increases or decreases in drinking, or other factors leading to changes in both depression and drinking.

The screening tools used in the study were the AUDIT-C, a validated instrument to identify high-risk alcohol behavior, and PHQ-2, a validated depression screening tool. The questionnaires on which the study was based may be subject to biases related to self-report and interactions in the health care setting. Questionnaires were administered in Washington state; the study population was predominantly white, non-Hispanic, older, and insured by commercial insurance or Medicare.

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The drum major and French horn player helped lead the Anna High School marching band to the state finals in November 2021, the farthest the team had ever advanced. The next morning, after years of climbing the band ranks and months of preparing their set, McGowan realized the pinnacle of her high school music career was over.

What now?

Weekly Starbucks runs with friends and hours spent in the band room after school suddenly brought McGowan no joy. She wasn't sad, per se; she felt nothing at all.

Physicians and counselors across the country have raised alarms about the worsening mental health among children and adolescents for years. Even before the crisis was amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, there were shortages of psychiatrists, therapists and beds at in-patient treatment facilities.

Texans have less access to mental health care than residents in any other state, according to a 2023 Mental Health America ranking. Less than 30% of Texas youth with major depression received mental health treatment.

Investments in youth mental health care are in the works. The Texas Legislature created the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium in 2019 to leverage 13 state universities and science centers. But the process is slow.

In the meantime, doctors and nurses say they're overwhelmed by the flood of young people suffering from anxiety and depression.

"I think the impulse is, 'Well, we need more hospitals. We need to crack down on social media. We need to do whatever.' And that's all important," said Andy Keller, president and CEO of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. "But really, to me, the most important thing to do is we need to get upstream."

Pediatricians are often the first—and sometimes, only—health care contact for children but have minimal training in psychiatric care. Hospitals and clinics are experimenting with training frontline physicians and nurses to act as a safety net to catch mental illness before it becomes an emergency.

Asking the right questions

Children's Health put veteran nurse practitioner Piper Merrill through a six-month training to bolster her confidence in recognizing and treating her patients' mental health concerns.

It helped Merrill when McGowan told her that she didn't want to get out of bed in the morning, a symptom Merrill immediately identified as a sign of depression.

"Kids come in with stomach aches, and a lot of times it's anxiety, it's fear, it's emotional stuff," Merrill said. "So now I have the tools to know how to ask the right questions, because a lot of times they're not comfortable talking about their emotions or talking about their thoughts."

Children's launched the proactive pediatric behavioral health program in 2022 in partnership with the Texas-based Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute in response to the mental health epidemic primary care providers are seeing on a daily basis. About 75 providers went through the training in its inaugural year, Children's said.

The number of pediatric mental health hospitalizations rose nearly 26% between 2009 and 2019, according to one recent study. Patients often sit in emergency departments for days waiting for psychiatric beds to become available.

"The only way we're going to get ahead of all these hospitalizations is to intervene sooner," said Meadows' Keller.

"What we're doing is we're filling this huge upstream gap which is to help pediatricians identify these needs when they're small, when we can deal with them, when we can keep the child on a healthy trajectory, and we never get to a point of crisis unless we don't win with the biology," Keller said.

Traditional training for pediatricians largely focuses on how to recognize and treat different physical illnesses rather than caring for a patient's mental and emotional well-being, said Children's pediatrician Dr. Mia Best, who specializes in mental and behavioral health.

Providers going through the Children's and Meadows behavioral health training complete online courses for around six months that cover different mental health conditions and scoring systems for evaluating patients.

The program also convenes participants for group discussions so practitioners can ask questions about specific cases and bounce ideas off one another.

Additional education while juggling heavy patient loads can seem daunting, but Merrill said the investment was worth it. The objective measurements used in screening tools made Merrill more confident in her diagnosis of and treatment plans for conditions like depression, anxiety and ADHD.

"I found that once I had the language, and I also had the resources, I was less intimidated by the behavioral health issues coming my way," Merrill said.

Surveys taken after completion of the program found that trained providers increased their use of mental health screening tools, use of related insurance billing codes and calls to the Child Psychiatry Access Network, which provides behavioral health consultations to pediatricians.

The program's impact also expanded beyond just children and adolescents. Some parents were exposed to open conversations about mental health for the first time when accompanying their children to their pediatrician's office.

"Some of the things that we've seen in our kids are generational from their parents because they have not been taught to talk about their feelings," Best said. "Not only are we providing education and we're treating our kids, but it's rippling to their parents as well."

Fighting a national emergency

Mental health professionals say it will take a variety of approaches to improve the youth mental health crisis. Several of the country's leading pediatric care organizations declared a national state of emergency in children's mental health in 2021, laying out a list of changes needed to reverse the trend.

Solutions include increased funding for screening, increasing access to telehealth and using schools as mental health care sites. Integrating mental health care into places like schools and pediatricians' offices increases the likelihood that a professional can preemptively spot worrying mental well-being signs.

The first person to notice McGowan withdrawing from her friends and activities was her band teacher, who quickly brought her to her school's crisis counselor. That counselor met with McGowan a few times before recommending her parents make an appointment with their pediatrician's office.

"We are seeing an increase in the mental health crisis in schools. And that manifests as behavior problems, it manifests in learning loss, it manifests in our school safety crisis," said Jill Adams, director of counseling and social work services at Lewisville ISD.

The number of in-patient psychiatric beds is also a concern that is years in the making and one that will take years to improve. Texas identified the need for another psychiatric hospital in North Texas in 2014. Health officials broke ground on the Texas Behavioral Health Center at UT Southwestern in December 2022.

The new, $482 million hospital is set to open with nearly 300 beds in 2025. About 100 of those beds are designated for kids and teens.

Even if there wasn't a bed shortage, doctors want to avoid in-patient treatments if possible. Hospital stays, though sometimes necessary, take children out of school and extracurriculars.

Kids are coming to the hospital sicker than before, due in large part to the shortage of mental health care options, said Dr. Kia Carter, a pediatric psychiatrist at Cook Children's in Fort Worth. Because they're getting help later, treatment options are more drastic and take longer to work, she said.

Cook Children's started a mental health training program for pediatricians last year with similarities to the Children's Health initiative. The training takes place in-person over a few days and is followed by discussion groups for the next six months.

"The goal is not for our pediatricians to become child psychiatrists or therapists. The goal is to prevent the kiddos' symptoms from worsening and that early intervention is truly what helps us," said Carter, co-medical director of Cook's inpatient and consultation liaison psychiatric services.

'There is a way through it'

Behavioral health training for primary care providers won't undo the need for additional mental health specialists. Some patients, including McGowan, need care beyond what's offered by pediatricians. The training has, however, helped primary care providers feel more comfortable referring their patients to other professionals for additional treatments.

McGowan was experiencing suicidal thoughts when she started seeing Merrill, so she was referred to a partial hospitalization program where she saw a therapist daily and worked with a psychiatrist. After she finished the program, she continued to see Merrill for anxiety and depression.

"I had kind of developed an understanding of everything and actually started to believe things are going to be OK," McGowan said. "It's going to take work, but this isn't going to be my life. I think that [Merrill] put that in my head that we're going to get through this."

More than a year after seeking help, McGowan has her passion for life back. She completed her freshman year at Texas A&M University-Commerce and is studying to become an elementary school teacher. She found solace in her Christian faith, which helped her through her treatment.

McGowan also rediscovered joy in music. She took French horn lessons last semester and, though she'll be too busy with student-teaching to take them again next fall, she still plays on her own time.

"The way I experience or go through trials now is not the same as I did a year ago, and there's progress through that," McGowan said. "I want people to know that there is a way through it and that life has meaning and that you have purpose."

2023 The Dallas Morning News.

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The enormity of human and economic loss incurred due to earthquakes is overwhelming. The ability to foresee these events, both in terms of time and location, could greatly mitigate the aftermath.

In an intriguing endeavor to substantiate this predictive possibility, the CREDO project, launched in 2016 by the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, seeks to decipher a potential link between cosmic radiation fluctuations and earthquakes.

Initial cosmic radiation research generated a surprising outcome

Statistical analysis yielded a surprising outcome: the two phenomena are indeed correlated, but in ways no one had anticipated.

The Cosmic Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) is an international, virtual cosmic ray observatory that is accessible to all. It aggregates and processes data from numerous detectors, large and small, including smartphone CMOS sensors, transformed into cosmic ray detectors via a simple app.

A fundamental responsibility of CREDO is to track worldwide alterations in the flux of secondary cosmic radiation that reaches our planet’s surface.

This radiation primarily originates in the Earth’s stratosphere, particularly within the Regener-Pfotzer maximum.

Here, primary cosmic radiation particles collide with atmospheric gas molecules, giving rise to secondary particle cascades.

Dr. Piotr Homola (IFJ PAN and AstroCeNT CAMK PAN), the coordinator of CREDO and first author of the research article in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, explains:

“At first glance, the idea that there is a link between earthquakes and cosmic radiation, in its primary form reaching us mainly from the Sun and deep space, may seem strange. However, its physical foundations are fully rational.”

He emphasizes that the Earth’s magnetic field, a result of eddy currents in our planet’s liquid core, alters the trajectory of primary cosmic radiation’s charged particles.

Therefore, any substantial earthquakes linked to disturbances in the Earth’s dynamo flows would alter the magnetic field, thus impacting the path of primary cosmic radiation. The fallout of these alterations would be apparent in the changes in the counts of secondary cosmic ray particles recorded by ground-based detectors.

How the earthquake/cosmic radiation study was conducted

To ascertain this hypothesis, CREDO physicists scrutinized cosmic ray intensity data from two different stations – the Neutron Monitor Database project (half-century data) and the Pierre Auger Observatory (data since 2005). The chosen observatories offer a balanced representation since they’re located on both sides of the equator and employ distinct detection techniques.

Scientists incorporated changes in solar activity, data acquired from the Solar Influences Data Analysis Centre, into their analysis. Crucial seismic activity data was obtained from the U.S. Geological Survey program.

Various statistical techniques applied to the collected data revealed a distinct correlation between alterations in the intensity of secondary cosmic radiation and the collective magnitude of all earthquakes of 4 or more on the Richter scale.

Significantly, this correlation becomes evident only when the cosmic ray data is advanced by 15 days in relation to the seismic data. This revelation brings optimism for the potential to predict imminent earthquakes.

Very strong and undeniable results

However, the feasibility of predicting specific locations of these seismic events remains unclear. The cosmic ray intensity and earthquakes correlation is not discernible in location-specific analyses but emerges when global seismic activity is considered. This could imply that cosmic ray intensity changes reveal a phenomenon affecting our planet on a broader scale.

Dr. Homola states, “In the scientific world, it is accepted that a discovery can be said to have been made when the statistical confidence level of the corroborating data reaches five sigma, or standard deviations.”

Homola continues, “For the observed correlation, we obtained more than six sigma, which means a chance of less than one in a billion that the correlation is due to chance. We therefore have a very good statistical basis for claiming that we have discovered a truly existing phenomenon. The only question is, is it really the one we were expecting?”

More mysteries found in cosmic radiation and earthquake data

But the mystery doesn’t end here. Along with the observed global nature and the 15-day lead in seismic activity as revealed in cosmic radiation, another unexpected aspect emerges: a large-scale cycles of the correlation.

This periodic fluctuation, peaking every 10-11 years similar to the solar activity cycle, didn’t coincide with the maximum activity of our Sun, confounding the scientists.

Adding to the enigma are other common cycles observed in both cosmic ray and seismic data. For instance, alterations in seismic activity and the intensity of secondary cosmic radiation correspond to the Earth’s stellar day, which is approximately 24 hours minus 236 seconds.

Could this imply that the cosmic-seismic correlations are influenced by some factor beyond our Solar System, something capable of triggering both radiation and seismic effects? But what known physical phenomenon could explicate these apparent correlations?

Could dark matter be involved?

Given the dearth of conventional explanations, scientists are considering the potential involvement of less orthodox phenomena. One such possibility is Earth’s passage through a stream of dark matter, modulated by the Sun and other massive bodies in our Solar System.

Our Earth, with its vast magnetic field, acts as a highly sensitive particle detector, much larger than any human-made detector. Hence, it’s plausible that it might react to phenomena that currently remain undetectable by existing devices.

“Regardless of the source of the observed cycles, the most important thing at this stage of the research is that we have demonstrated a link between the cosmic radiation recorded at the surface of our planet and its seismic activity – and if there is anything we can be sure of, it is that our observation points to entirely new and exciting research opportunities,” concludes Dr. Homola.

In essence, the discovery opens up a new realm of scientific investigation. As scientists grapple with these intriguing puzzles, the quest for understanding our universe continues, and with it, the potential to predict and prepare for catastrophic events like earthquakes.

More about cosmic radiation

Cosmic radiation, also known as cosmic rays, refers to high-energy particles and radiation that come from outer space. This radiation is primarily composed of atomic nuclei stripped of their electron shells, along with a small amount of solitary electrons (beta particles) and gamma photons. Here’s more about cosmic radiation:

Origin of Cosmic Radiation

Most cosmic rays originate from outside our solar system, from sources scattered across the Milky Way galaxy, and a small fraction are even thought to come from outside our galaxy. These sources could include supernova explosions, pulsars, and active galactic nuclei. An even smaller fraction of cosmic rays, often those of lower energy, originate from the Sun.

Composition

Cosmic rays include protons (hydrogen nuclei) in the greatest abundance, followed by alpha particles (helium nuclei), and a small percentage of heavier atomic nuclei, electrons, and gamma photons. The mix of atomic nuclei is broadly reflective of the relative abundance of elements in the cosmos, but with an over-representation of heavy, high-energy nuclei known as “HZE ions”.

Energy Levels

The energy of cosmic rays is extremely high, often many times higher than that which can be achieved by human-made particle accelerators. The exact energy spectrum of cosmic rays follows a power-law distribution, meaning there are fewer high-energy cosmic rays than there are lower-energy ones, but the maximum energy can reach levels observed in the “Oh-My-God” particle, one of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever detected.

Effects of Cosmic Radiation on Earth

When cosmic rays strike the Earth’s atmosphere, they produce showers of secondary particles, many of which reach the Earth’s surface. These particles include pions, muons, electrons, and photons, and the process of their creation is of interest to researchers studying particle physics.

Role in Cloud Formation

Some theories propose that cosmic rays may influence cloud formation on Earth, and thus affect the Earth’s climate, although this remains a subject of ongoing research and debate.

Health Impact

Cosmic rays pose a significant health risk to astronauts in space, far from the protective shield of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. They can damage living cells and cause mutations, potentially leading to cancer and other health issues. This is a key concern in planning long-duration space missions, especially missions to Mars.

Cosmic Radiation Detection Methods

Cosmic rays are detected and studied through various methods, including ground-based observatories that detect air showers, balloon-borne detectors that measure the secondary particles in the atmosphere, and space-based detectors that can directly measure the primary cosmic rays. The study of cosmic rays is a branch of astroparticle physics.

Cosmic Radiation History

Cosmic rays were discovered in 1912 by Victor Hess, who conducted balloon flights and observed that radiation increased with altitude, indicating a non-terrestrial origin.

In summary, cosmic rays are an intriguing subject of study for physicists, providing insights into the nature of the universe, the fundamental properties of particles, and the forces and events that can accelerate particles to such extreme energies. They also pose practical concerns for space travel and possibly for climate.

More about earthquakes

Earthquakes are natural phenomena that occur when stress within the Earth’s lithosphere, or crust, is released, causing seismic waves that shake the ground. Here’s an overview:

Origin of Earthquakes

Most earthquakes occur along the boundaries of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust. These plates are constantly moving, but they can become locked at their boundaries due to friction. When the stress on the boundary overcomes this friction, it’s released in the form of an earthquake.

Faults

The location where an earthquake originates is called the hypocenter, or focus. The point directly above it on the Earth’s surface is the epicenter. Earthquakes typically occur along faults, which are fractures in the Earth’s crust where sections of rock have moved.

Magnitude and Intensity of Earthquakes

The size or energy release of an earthquake is measured by its magnitude, typically using the Richter scale or the moment magnitude scale (Mw). The effects of an earthquake are measured by its intensity, typically using the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale.

Seismic Waves

Earthquakes generate several types of seismic waves, including P-waves (primary), S-waves (secondary), and surface waves. P-waves are fastest and move in compressional motion, S-waves move in an up-and-down motion, and surface waves travel along the surface, causing the most destruction.

Earthquakes and Aftershocks

Major earthquakes are usually followed by smaller tremors known as aftershocks. These occur as the crust around the displaced fault plane adjusts to the effects of the main shock.

Induced Seismicity

Human activities, such as reservoir-induced seismicity (due to the filling of large reservoirs behind dams), mining, extraction of petroleum, and injection of fluids into the Earth, can also induce seismic events.

Tsunamis

Underwater earthquakes can displace large volumes of water, leading to powerful sea waves known as tsunamis. These waves can cause significant destruction when they reach land.

Predicting Earthquakes

Despite advances in scientific understanding, predicting exactly when and where an earthquake will occur remains challenging. Current research is focused on probability estimates based on seismic risk mapping and understanding precursory phenomena.

Protection Measures

In earthquake-prone areas, structures are often designed to withstand seismic activity as part of “earthquake engineering”. This can include designing buildings that can flex and sway without collapsing or using base isolation to reduce the amount of energy that reaches the building during an earthquake.

Seismology

The study of earthquakes and seismic waves is called seismology. Seismologists use seismographs to record the seismic waves produced by earthquakes and use this information to learn more about the Earth’s interior and to locate and measure earthquakes.

Earthquakes can be one of nature’s most destructive forces, leading to significant loss of life and property, particularly in regions that are not well-prepared for seismic activity. However, they also provide key insights into the structure and behavior of the Earth’s crust and interior.

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Our fall COVID boosters will likely be a monovalent XBB formula

Based on climate models, scientists previously estimated humans pumped 2,150 gigatons of groundwater, equivalent to more than 6 millimeters (0.24 inches) of sea level rise, from 1993 to 2010. But validating that estimate is difficult.

One approach lies with the Earth's rotational pole, which is the point around which the planet rotates. It moves during a process called polar motion, which is when the position of the Earth's rotational pole varies relative to the crust. The distribution of water on the planet affects how mass is distributed. Like adding a tiny bit of weight to a spinning top, the Earth spins a little differently as water is moved around.

"Earth's rotational pole actually changes a lot," said Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University who led the study. "Our study shows that among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater actually has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole."

Water's ability to change the Earth's rotation was discovered in 2016, and until now, the specific contribution of groundwater to these rotational changes was unexplored. In the new study, researchers modeled the observed changes in the drift of Earth's rotational pole and the movement of water—first, with only ice sheets and glaciers considered, and then adding in different scenarios of groundwater redistribution.

The model only matched the observed polar drift once the researchers included 2150 gigatons of groundwater redistribution. Without it, the model was off by 78.5 centimeters (31 inches), or 4.3 centimeters (1.7 inches) of drift per year.

"I'm very glad to find the unexplained cause of the rotation pole drift," Seo said. "On the other hand, as a resident of Earth and a father, I'm concerned and surprised to see that pumping groundwater is another source of sea-level rise."

"This is a nice contribution and an important documentation for sure," said Surendra Adhikari, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in this study. Adhikari published the 2016 paper on water redistribution impacting rotational drift. "They've quantified the role of groundwater pumping on polar motion, and it's pretty significant."

The location of the groundwater matters for how much it could change polar drift; redistributing water from the midlatitudes has a larger impact on the rotational pole. During the study period, the most water was redistributed in western North America and northwestern India, both at midlatitudes.

Countries' attempts to slow groundwater depletion rates, especially in those sensitive regions, could theoretically alter the change in drift, but only if such conservation approaches are sustained for decades, Seo said.

The rotational pole normally changes by several meters within about a year, so changes due to groundwater pumping don't run the risk of shifting seasons. But on geologic time scales, polar drift can have an impact on climate, Adhikari said.

The next step for this research could be looking to the past.

"Observing changes in Earth's rotational pole is useful for understanding continent-scale water storage variations," Seo said. "Polar motion data are available from as early as the late 19th century. So, we can potentially use those data to understand continental water storage variations during the last 100 years. Were there any hydrological regime changes resulting from the warming climate? Polar motion could hold the answer."

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Amazon delivery drivers and dispatchers walked out of their delivery facility on Thursday to demand that Amazon bargain with them. The 84 drivers currently on strike have held picket lines before, but this is the first time Amazon drivers have walked out in the U.S., according to a Teamsters press release.

The drivers, who work for the Amazon delivery service partner (DSP) Battle-Tested Strategies in Palmdale, California, unionized with the Teamsters in late April, and are demanding that Amazon come to the bargaining table to negotiate a contract. Drivers have already negotiated and ratified a contract with the DSP, which voluntarily recognized their union.

Amazon has previously stated that, because the drivers don’t work directly for Amazon—they work for the DSP, which is then contracted by Amazon—that the company is not obligated to bargain with them. For the past month, the union has been trying to prove that wrong, saying that, despite Amazon placing all responsibility onto the DSP, it is in fact in “complete control” of the DSP’s operations.

“We are on the picket line today to demand the pay and safety standards that we deserve,” said Raj Singh, one unionized driver on strike, in a statement. “We work hard for a multibillion-dollar corporation. We should be able to provide food and clothes for our kids.”

The drivers’ contract with the DSP guarantees a higher wage, protections against the extreme heat of California summers, and the right to refuse unsafe deliveries. Heat is an industry-wide hazard for delivery drivers. Motherboard has previously reported on how UPS drivers must deal with temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. Earlier this week, the Teamsters won a tentative agreement with UPS guaranteeing improved heat protections and air conditioning in trucks.

“The back of an Amazon van feels like an oven in the summer,” said Cecilia Porter, another driver on strike, in a statement. “I’ve felt dizzy and dehydrated, but if I take a break, I’ll get a call asking why I’m behind on deliveries. We are protecting ourselves and saying our safety comes first.”

Singh previously told Motherboard about his experiences with driving in heat. “The vans we have—it's a big metal container. In the extreme heat it can get upwards of 130, 135 degrees inside the van,” he said at the time. “You walk in, and it’s sweltering, the wave of heat that hits you—the only comparison I can give you is like walking into an oven, because it’s that nasty dry heat. You feel like you’re just getting cooked back there. I go through 10-12 bottles of water a day, and I urinate once.”

The Teamsters say that, instead of honoring the contract’s guarantees, Amazon has violated labor law by refusing to bargain, surveilling union members, and even terminating the DSP’s contract because of the organizing, according to an unfair labor practice charge filed to the National Labor Relations Board in May. Amazon previously told Motherboard in a statement that the DSP had actually been terminated for “poor performance"—the DSP owner contests this statement.

Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards told Motherboard in a statement that, “While we respect everyone’s right to express their opinions, the facts here are being intentionally misrepresented by the Teamsters and BTLT. This company has a history of underperformance and not providing a safe environment, and was notified that Amazon was ending their contract before the Teamsters got involved to try and re-write the facts.”

“Amazon has no respect for the rule of law, the health of its workers, or the livelihood of their families,” said Randy Korgan, the director of the Teamsters Amazon Division, which has been working to organize Amazon facilities to protect workers and maintain wage standards in the delivery and logistics industry. “Workers are on strike today because the only thing this corporate criminal cares about is profits. We are sending a message to Amazon that violating worker rights will no longer be business as usual.”

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Vanessa Chapoy had just turned 24 when she felt the lump in her breast. It was “huge,” she remembers, “like the size of a walnut, or a big marble.” She went to the first in a series of doctors that night to have it checked out. Two-and-a-half weeks later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Stage two, she would learn.

“And my whole world flipped upside down,” Chapoy says.

She entered a gauntlet of treatments: a lumpectomy to cut out the tumor and a portion of surrounding breast tissue, fertility treatments so she could freeze her eggs, five months of chemotherapy and then a double mastectomy to remove both of her breasts.

Three years on, she’s still undergoing hormone therapy — an experience she likens to “early menopause” — and occasionally suffering from “chemo brain,” a form of brain fog resulting from chemotherapy that she says makes it more difficult for her to complete tasks or remember certain things.

“I don’t understand how this could happen,” she recalls telling a nurse at the beginning of it all. “I’m so young.”

Cancer, after all, most often strikes late in life. In the United States, nearly 60 percent of patients are 65 or older when they’re diagnosed.

But stories like Chapoy’s are becoming more common. In recent decades, cancer rates have been climbing among people under 50, the typical cutoff for when cancer is considered “early-onset.”

This “early-onset cancer epidemic,” as one recent study published in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology dubbed it, comprises a surge in the incidence of over a dozen different cancers in younger people since the 1990s in countries around the world.

In the U.S., the rate of early-onset cases rose by almost 18 percent between 2000 and 2019, even as cancer declined slightly in older adults, according to data from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Among Americans between 15 and 39 years old, an age group cancer researchers refer to as adolescents and young adults (AYAs), the surge was more pronounced still, topping 20 percent.

That increase has spanned genders, races and organs. It has stormed through young people’s blood and bone marrow, launched assaults on their gastrointestinal tracts, quartered itself in their reproductive organs. The incidence of breast cancer in Americans aged 15-39 rose more than 17 percent over the 19-year period. Myeloma rates spiked by over 30 percent. Colorectal cancer by nearly 45 percent.

Why? Cancer researchers aren’t entirely sure.

The rising rates are “probably partially attributable to increasing uptake of screening and early detection” in certain cancer types, especially thyroid cancer and prostate cancer, the authors of the Nature study noted.

Archie Bleyer, a clinical research professor at the Knight Cancer Institute of the Oregon Health & Science University, says the surge in cases of thyroid cancer, as well as kidney cancer, is at least partly a result of “overdiagnosis” due to increased screenings, both for cancer and for other health concerns. The screenings have detected tumors and masses in those organs that “look like cancer, so they’ve got to call it carcinoma,” he explains. But they “would never have been a problem if they were never picked up,” because they typically wouldn’t spread or progress.

So “in some ways, it’s a false increase,” Bleyer says.

The surge in rates goes beyond what can be accounted for by increased screenings, however. Researchers hypothesize a slew of environmental and lifestyle changes since the mid-20th century have also driven a real rise in cases by increasing exposure to risk factors early in life.

The main suspect researchers point to is obesity, which has climbed steadily since the 1960s and become more common in childhood and adolescence. Many of the cancers rising among younger people have been tied to obesity, including breast cancer and uterine cancer, as well as colorectal cancer and several others impacting the gastrointestinal tract.

The increases in obesity-related cancers have been more “dramatic” than those among other types, suggesting obesity is a “big contributor” to the spike in early-onset cases, says Tomotaka Ugai, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the lead author of the Nature study.

Beyond obesity itself, researchers believe a number of related factors could be involved: Westernized diets, sugar-sweetened beverages, red and processed meat, sedentary lifestyles, a decline in physical activity, metabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes.

And the list of suspects goes on. Bleyer says the increased use of diagnostic imaging such as CT scans and X rays, which expose patients to low levels of carcinogenic radiation, could be contributing, especially for cancers impacting the blood and bone marrow. When it comes to the uptick in testicular cancer, meanwhile, he says rising cannabis use is likely the leading culprit.

People growing taller could also be a risk factor for several cancer types, he says. Ugai tells me there’s speculation changes in our sleep patterns could be involved, though evidence is “quite limited.” Marios Giannakis, a medical oncologist and researcher at the Dana-Farber Gastrointestinal Cancer Center, says changes in the microbiome — the community of microorganisms that populate the body — have been “implicated” in the increase in early-onset colorectal cancer. These changes can result from diet, lifestyle factors or even surgical procedures such as C-sections.

Giannakis stresses that more research is needed to understand what’s behind the rising rates, including long-term prospective cohort studies that follow participants over extended periods of time.

“Finding out the why could be very relevant for prevention,” Giannakis says.

But as research continues, more than 85,000 American adolescents and young adults are now being diagnosed with cancer each year. In 2020, Chapoy was one of the unlucky thousands. Two years later, I was.

I went to the dermatologist for the first time in my life in August. Within twenty minutes of stepping into the exam room, I’d had a suspicious mole cut out of my forearm. I learned days later that I’d had melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. I was 27.

My cancer was caught early and easily removed; a month after I first went to the dermatologist, all that remained of it was an inch-and-a-half-long scar and some haunting what-ifs. But that’s not the case for many adolescent and young adult patients. They’re often diagnosed at a more advanced stage, when cancer has already had time to grow and spread in the body. There are several reasons for that: They’re less likely to regularly visit the doctor than other patients. They’re more likely to be uninsured. And because cancer is relatively rare in the age group, it’s usually not top of mind for either doctors or patients as a possible explanation for symptoms.

When Chapoy went to urgent care the night she found the lump in her breast, she said she was told, “It’s nothing to worry about. You’re probably ovulating.”

“It was a struggle getting the doctors to take me seriously at first,” she says. “If I had just listened to that first doctor, I wouldn’t be here.”
Despite the often late diagnoses, adolescents and young adults are more likely to survive their initial cancer diagnosis than older adults: More than 85 percent live to see the five-year mark, compared to 74 percent of 40- to 64-year-olds and fewer than 62 percent of those aged 65 and older.

But Chun Chao, a cancer epidemiologist with the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation, emphasizes that “the challenge for cancer survivors doesn’t stop when they complete their treatment.”

Cancer can recur or progress. And young survivors also face a heightened threat of developing a second cancer or an array of other medical conditions, Chao says, including “cardiovascular diseases, metabolic disorders, endocrine conditions, pulmonary diseases, liver disease, renal failure and musculoskeletal conditions.” In addition to those physical ailments, she notes survivors have an increased risk of severe depression or anxiety.

And the timing presents a unique set of challenges and disruptions to adolescent and young adult patients that extend beyond their health.

“They are at a transitional stage in life,” Chao says. “If you think about it, this is the age when people are trying to establish their independence.

Some people are finishing up their education. People are trying to get their first job, just start to establish their career. And people are starting new families and starting to have kids. So at this particular age, having a cancer diagnosis can be a huge disruption to these goals.”

After Tatyana Ridgeway was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer when she was 26, she stepped away from work as she went through treatment: four cycles of chemotherapy and then proton radiation. Like Chapoy, she also underwent fertility treatments, as chemotherapy can negatively impact fertility and even cause early menopause.

The experience “shattered my idea of what parenthood was like. It shattered my idea of what your 20s are supposed to look like,” she says. “My ideas, my beliefs of, ‘By this age, we’re going to start trying for a kid, and then by this age, we want to be done,’ all of those plans fell off the shelf and just broke.”

She was able to preserve some embryos. But it was costly, she says. Her in vitro fertilization treatments were covered by insurance, but she had to take out a loan to cover the cost of cryopreservation.

Her other treatments weren’t cheap either. Each of her four cycles of chemotherapy cost $15,000, and her proton radiation altogether cost over $100,000. “That’s without insurance,” she says.

Chao notes that a “high proportion” of young adult survivors report financial hardships related to cancer, including “having to borrow money, going into debt or even filing for bankruptcy.”

Ridgeway, who is Black, says she also looked into cold cap therapy, which can help reduce hair loss brought on by chemotherapy. But she learned no one with her hair texture — “textured, curly, kinky hair” — had been included in trials for the therapy, and no one her age had been studied, either.

“There’s a lack of research specific to this age group,” says Alison Silberman, the CEO of Stupid Cancer, a nonprofit that advocates for adolescents and young adults impacted by the disease. She describes the demographic as an “underserved and underrepresented population” when it comes to cancer.

“There has been a growing awareness” over the last couple of decades amid the increase in cases, she says. But it “depends on where you are. A lot of the larger academic institutions are well versed in AYA needs and challenges and differences. That doesn’t happen as much in the smaller community settings.” And she notes that while there’s “slightly more academic research,” there may still not be “as much clinical research.”

“I think there’s still a lot of work to be done,” she says.

Researchers stress the importance of further raising awareness about cancer in the age group — among both young people themselves and their doctors — and studying their cases so treatment can be better tailored.

Danielle Carnival, the White House cancer moonshot coordinator, says the administration is “really focused on how to bridge the gap” in cancer care for adolescents and young adults, “both in understanding the science and helping serve those patients better.”

The administration is closely following research into potential causes for the increase in cases and prioritizing “decreasing the impact of preventable cancers,” she says, including by working to further lower smoking rates and by “looking at nutrition and lifestyle.”

Bleyer, of the Knight Cancer Institute, points to lung cancer and melanoma as “examples of how we can do better” at preventing early-onset cancer. Both have beaten against the current in recent years, growing scarcer in the young even as other cancers have become more common. Researchers have linked lung cancer’s drop-off to the decline in smoking, and melanoma’s to the embrace of sun protection.

For now, though, the overall rise in rates shows no sign of stopping. And it may be a canary in a coal mine.

“One of the reasons that we look at trends in younger adults is because it’s the best way to evaluate progress, because that’s where you first see changing patterns in cancer,” says Rebecca Siegel, a cancer epidemiologist and Senior Scientific Director of Surveillance Research at the American Cancer Society.

Several cancer researchers I spoke to agree: The age group now passing through adolescence and young adulthood, who were buffeted by a not yet fully understood cocktail of risk factors in the early years of their lives, will likely continue to suffer higher rates of cancer as they get older.
It’s already happening, at least for colorectal cancer, Siegel says: Since 2010, advanced cancers of that type have become more common among Americans aged 50-64.

“The younger people have elevated risk their whole life,” Siegel says. “As they age, they will carry that elevated risk with them.”

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 (CNN) - The proportion of US adults who have ever been diagnosed with depression ranges greatly depending on where they live.

A new report published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that in 2020, 18.4% of US adults reported having ever been diagnosed with depression in their lifetimes – but, state by state, that percentage of adults ranged from an estimated 12.7% in Hawaii to 27.5% in West Virginia.

 “There was considerable geographic variation in the prevalence of depression, with the highest state and county estimates of depression observed along the Appalachian and southern Mississippi Valley regions,” researchers from the CDC and Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education in Tennessee wrote in the new report.

“This report provides current estimates of national, state-level, and county-level prevalence of adults reporting a lifetime diagnosis of depression,” the researchers wrote. “These estimates can help decision-makers guide resource allocation to areas where the need is greatest.”

The researchers analyzed data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, taking a close look at how adults answered survey questions in 2020 about whether they have ever been told by a doctor, nurse, or other health professional that they had a depressive disorder. Nearly 400,000 adults in all 50 states and Washington, DC, responded to the depression question.

 The survey data showed that the 10 states with the highest prevalence of adults saying they’ve been diagnosed with depression before were, in descending order: West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Vermont, Alabama, Louisiana, Washington, Missouri, and Montana. When the researchers analyzed the data by county, they found that the prevalence of depression ranged from 10.7% in Alaska’s Aleutians East Borough County to 31.9% in Logan County, West Virginia.

The researchers also found that the prevalence of depression overall was 24% among women compared with 13.3% among men, and 21.5% in younger adults ages 18 to 24 versus 14.2% in adults 65 and older. Prevalence also was higher among White adults and adults who had attained less than a high school education.

Previously, a separate report released in May from Gallup found a similar national prevalence of depression in the United States, also finding that about 18% of adults say they are depressed or receiving treatment for depression, a jump of more than 7 percentage points since 2015.

The Covid-19 pandemic took an undeniable toll on mental health. Rates of clinical depression had been rising steadily in the US but “jumped notably” in recent years, the Gallup data shows.

“The fact that Americans are more depressed and struggling after this time of incredible stress and isolation is perhaps not surprising,” Dr. Rebecca Brendel, president of the American Psychiatric Association, which was not involved in the new research, said in May. “There are lingering effects on our health, especially our mental health, from the past three years that disrupted everything we knew.”

But experts emphasize that awareness around mental health has grown, which could lead to higher rates of diagnoses – and that’s not a bad thing.

“We’re making it easier to talk about mental health and looking at it as part of our overall wellness just like physical health,” Brendel said. “People are aware of depression, and people are seeking help for it.”

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Inside the battle to build a $1.2 billion fish barricade

Hypertension remains the major pre-existing pathophysiology for the development of cardiovascular diseases including myocardial infarction and stroke.

Although significant accomplishments have been made to normalize blood pressure in hypertension patients, patients still have significantly greater risk for cardiovascular disease mortality even when their blood pressure is controlled by medications.

Ang II, the major peptide hormone of the renin angiotensin system plays a central role in development of hypertension.

Inhibitors against the system are an effective and first line choice as hypertension medications. However, meta-analysis suggests that general adherence to angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers was only 50-60%.

“It is recognized that drugs alone are not enough to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in hypertension patients,” said Temple University’s Professor Satoru Eguchi.

“To help solve this problem, we became interested in a supplement that could potentially decrease cardiovascular disease risk and began investigating the effects of bainiku-ekisu, an infused juice concentrate of the Japanese plum.”

To better understand the potential anti-hypertensive effects of bainiku-ekisu, Professor Eguchi and colleagues utilized a mouse model in which animals received infusions of Ang II to induce hypertension.

Mice were then given either plain water, in the control group, or water containing bainiku-ekisu.

Evaluation of cardiovascular function and vascular tissues from both groups of mice revealed stark differences.

Most notably, mice given bainiku-ekisu did not develop hypertension, and in these animals tissue analysis indicated that the juice concentrate protected the vasculature from the effects of Ang II.

In particular, hypertrophy (growth and enlargement) of the aorta was minimal in mice given bainiku-ekisu, whereas control animals had marked aortic hypertrophy.

Bainiku-ekisu also attenuated the infiltration of immune cells, which trigger inflammatory processes associated with hypertension.

The study authors then explored possible mechanisms by which bainiku-ekisu prevented hypertension in mice.

They looked specifically at molecular pathways involved in glycolysis, the process by which cells breakdown glucose and which is a central feature of hypertension-induced hypertrophy.

“In hypertension, cells shift from aerobic metabolism to glycolysis because there is less oxygen available in the cellular environment,” Professor Eguchi said.

“This switch results in high levels of oxidative stress, which leads to more inflammation, more vascular stiffness, and, eventually, the development of more severe cardiovascular disease.”

The experiments in cells showed that bainiku-ekisu prevents the switch to glycolysis, suggesting that it protects against Ang II-induced hypertension by mitigating harmful metabolic changes that underlie hypertrophy and inflammation.

The team now plans to identify the specific compounds in bainiku-ekisu that are responsible for its protective effects.

“There may be two or three compounds working together, which could explain why the infused juice concentrate of Ume is so popular as a health supplement,” Professor Eguchi said.

“Multiple compounds working together would produce additive or synergistic effects that might be lost in a pharmaceutical preparation.”

The findings appear in the journal Hypertension Research.

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The stone removed from ex-sergeant Canistus Coonge weighed 801 grams (28.25 ounces), more than five times the weight of an average male kidney, the army said.

Coonge's kidney stone measured 13.37 centimeters (5.26 inches) long, compared to an average kidney which is about 10 to 12 centimeters long.

"The removal of the world's largest and heaviest kidney stone through a major surgery occurred on June 1 at the Colombo Army Hospital," the military said in a statement.

Coonge told the local Swarnavahini TV that he had abdominal pain since 2020 and oral medication had not helped.

"I was told to undergo surgery after a recent scan," he said. "I feel normal now."

The Sri Lankan case surpassed the largest kidney deposit previously recorded of 620 grams from a patient in Pakistan in 2008, according to Guinness World Records.

Officials announced the finding on Wednesday after Guinness World Records recognized it.

"The most important thing for us is that the kidney is functioning normally despite this stone," army surgeon K. Sutharshan said.

Stones are deposits made when minerals and salts crystallize in the kidney as it filters the blood.

Passing the stones can cause excruciating pain, requiring surgery if they are too big and get stuck.

© 2023 AFP

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3D reconstruction of lower limb muscles of Australopithecus afarensis fossil AL 288-1, aka "Lucy." Credit: Ashleigh Wiseman

3D muscle reconstruction shows 3.2 million-year-old “Lucy” walked upright

Megaplume of water vapor erupting on Enceladus caught by Webb Telescope

I have always been fussy about noise. I don’t mind overhearing people talking, but I recoil from other instruments in the disgusting opera of everyday life: open-mouthed chewing, rhythmic sniffing or coughing, phone alerts, pen-clicking, nail-clipping.

For a long time, I was able to tune these sounds out, or politely remove myself from situations where they were bothering me. But during lockdown, my ambient fussiness grew to a fixation. The problem was that there was nowhere to politely remove myself to. The woman who lived above me in our quadplex also rented the garages below to run a business making minimalist metal wall hangings, a task that involved a fair amount of what sounded like welding. The unpredictability and pitch of the noises made them impossible to ignore. The floor that separated me from my neighbor’s workshop was completely uninsulated, and the wail of her equipment felt like a personal test. She, perhaps more so than the virus itself, became the locus of my pandemic stress.

Fortunately, there were plenty of noise-canceling solutions to pick from. Whenever I sat down to work, I would put on my Jabra headphones and fire up an app called Noisli, which allows users to create layered soundscapes. (I paid $10 a month to use the app during all my waking hours, and because I coveted the paywalled desert cicada option.) Over that I played music on Spotify, swaddling myself in a curated cacophony. I kept my headphones on all day, thrilled by the control I had over my environment. I had always envied people who seemed unbothered by noises—they probably don’t drunk-text their exes either, or eat beyond capacity—and now I was one of them.

That was just the beginning. The craftswoman moved out; my devices stayed. I bought a loud air purifier and put it on the left side of my bed. I then put a LectroFan white noise machine on the right side. With the ceiling fan on, I slept surrounded by sound on all sides. The sensation was akin to sleeping in a dryer, encircled by womb-like whirring. Noise-canceling devices had proliferated and taken over my home. They had even entered my person, in the form of the special narrow earplugs I bought for my dainty ear canals. I obtained a small portable white noise machine meant for babies and toted it around my apartment like a daemon. I would place it next to my tea while I ate my breakfast and fire it up when garbage collectors came, when my new upstairs neighbor—this one a penitent law student, mercifully—was clip-clopping around, and when the leaf blower at the church across the street started a-blowing. I was safe. I was smug.

Then human error abruptly forced me from my sound cocoon. Packing in a hurry for a work trip to Albuquerque this past spring, I forgot my baby white noise machine, my little ear plugs, the ear buds I exercise with, and the charger for my noise-canceling headphones, which crapped out midway through the flight. I bought new earplugs at the airport upon arrival, but they were incompatible with my tight canals. I didn’t sleep well that night or the next, nor on the plane home.

It wasn’t so much actual noises that kept me up as the expectation of noises. I had leaned into noise-canceling tools under the banner of reducing distraction, which I understood to be the enemy of productivity and well-being. But though my devices had been effectively masking noise, they hadn’t made me any better equipped to stay calm and focused when noises intruded. Because these tools are so effective, it’s easy to treat them as panaceas rather than spot treatments. Once I realized I had overdone it, I had to correct not just a habit but a lifestyle.

After my trip I scuttled back into my sound hidey-hole like a crab and remained there for several weeks, content in my habits. But one morning, as the man with the leaf blower across the street began his work at dawn, I realized that I’d been so absorbed in what I was reading and eating that I hadn’t heard it start up. I hadn’t needed my baby white noise machine. I saw a glimpse of life without noise cancellation, or at least one with a balance.

Intrigued, I reached out to Jane Gregory, a doctoral research fellow at Oxford University who specializes in and suffers from misophonia (a phenomenon whereby certain sounds inspire a very strong negative reaction in the afflicted). Gregory told me she has her own armory of noise management tools. These include three different sets of headphones, foam earplugs, and a Siri-connected speaker that allows her to eat with her family without policing their chewing. But she is careful to employ these tools only once a noise starts bothering her, rather than using them all the time to prevent noise from becoming a problem. That way, she isn’t unnecessarily risking over-sensitizing herself to her surroundings.

I had noticed that when I took off my headphones or removed my ear plugs, I was more aware of the sounds around me for a short time. But I hadn’t realized that trying to block out noise might actually exacerbate the problem. As Prashanth Prabhu, an assistant professor of audiology at All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, describes it, the brain tries harder to hear sounds when it’s receiving less auditory input. Noise-canceling headphones, ear plugs, and other tools may provide relief in the moment, but they can have long-term effects on your sensitivity.

There are certainly occasions when it’s useful to block out noise. I think my lockdown headphone regimen, for instance, was necessary for keeping the peace in my building at a time when further tension would have made an already-stressful situation intolerable. My mistake was that I failed to let go of my noise-canceling tools once my neighbor had gone.

I had started a new job shortly before lockdown, and I was terrified of losing it amid widespread layoffs. My life felt precarious, so I controlled what I could: I organized and re-organized my entire apartment, I made a Google spreadsheet ranking my loved ones. I approached my work with the same mania. In Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, authors Flora Lichtman and Joe Palca point out that a core feature of annoyances is that they keep us from doing something (or, at least, we think they do). Traffic is not inherently annoying; it’s annoying because it stymies us from getting wherever we’re going. My neighbor’s workshop wouldn’t have bothered me so much if I weren’t so preoccupied with my own delicate circumstances.

Humans have long sought to shield themselves from their environments rather than strengthen themselves to absorb potential threats. Excessive and improper use of antibiotics, for example, may protect us from harmful bacteria in the short term, but this has also strengthened the germs’ resistance mechanisms. Once we start to feel like it’s possible to live without something bad, we feel that we must. But both germs and annoyances are ubiquitous. Learning to live with them bolsters us for times when our defenses fail.

I asked Zachary Rosenthal, director of Duke University’s Center for Misophonia and Emotional Regulation, for some advice on weaning myself off of noise-canceling devices. He recommended evaluating the situations in which one experiences sound sensitivity to determine which ones are likely to result in a particularly negative reaction, such as a tantrum. If, for instance, you know that sitting next to a crying baby on a plane is likely to cause you to have a public meltdown, you might put on your headphones when you hear an infant preparing for liftoff. But if the situation is not dire, you can try distracting yourself by starting a conversation with the person next to you, or changing seats, or finding another activity that holds your attention.

Gregory, from Oxford, who is also a clinical psychologist, often encourages patients grappling with misophonia or noise sensitivity to practice “opposite action”: making yourself do the opposite of what your emotions are telling you to do. One way to do this with a noise is by imagining a sound is being made by something else which doesn’t offend you. Another opposite action might be to smile warmly at the perpetrator.

I tried this with the leaf blower. I imagined a possible backstory for the blower’s handler in which he was very ill and had to leaf-blow at dawn–even though whenever I watch him from my windows, gargoyle-like, there never seem to be any leaves to blow–so his employer wouldn’t find reason to let him go. As a chronically redundant employee myself, this made me feel close to the man. When the potency of the first scenario wore off, I imagined another possibility, and another. I understand this is called “empathizing.” I have not grown to enjoy the sound of the leaf blower, but it has become less offensive to me.

Opposite action has a separate utility that resonated with me: It can make one feel more in control in the face of noise. As a terminal asshole, I have long felt an inflated ability and responsibility to keep the world around me from slipping into anarchy. I do this by glaring. When you take a call in the quiet car of a train, I’m the one boring a-hole in your back with my eyes. I often feel that if I don’t glare at an offender, something will happen: The noisemaker will become emboldened by my passivity and the sound will grow more intolerable.

But there’s also shame in being a warrior of the quiet car. Trying to suppress the urge to glare—knowing that I’ll just feel like a noise cop once I succumb—only makes it worse. So I sit there, eye twitching, torn between an irrational but powerful fear of escalating annoyance and the horror of being a glarin’ Karen. Opposite action doesn’t require me to try to ignore a sound, which is impossible. Instead, I give the sound my tacit permission to exist. I still get to be the boss.

My urge to conduct the world around me is the most persistent behavioral symptom of lockdown. But even if my neighbor hadn’t been banging away beneath me for most of 2020, I think the pandemic still would have escalated my desire to cancel noise. The sounds of other people going about their lives should have been soothing during a time of forced solitude. Instead, they became a reminder that other people, perhaps infectious ones, were always nearby. Anything outside our immediate communities and environments became a threat, and everyone had their own ways of sealing themselves off. Some of us disinfected incoming groceries and packages; some of us sterilized incoming sounds. A 2021 evaluation of social media in London found that tweets complaining about noise more than doubled during lockdown (an additional survey supported the results). And in the United States, curmudgeons took to Twitter to complain about the Blue Angels, whose ficus-shaking roar has always been one of the most exciting sounds of summer to me. Any sound violated our fragile sense of control.

Training myself to tolerate noise, and annoyances in general, is part of a long process of exiting the bunker I built around myself during the worst months of the pandemic. I’ve been experimenting with letting more sounds in. I try to jog without my headphones once or twice a week; I run along a creek sometimes, and its babbling is pleasant and summery, less repetitive than the creek sound offered by Noisli. In May, I purposely left the baby white noise machine at home on a trip to West Texas (where, truth be told, there was no noise anyway) and I have stopped having breakfast with it. I try to focus on the morning birds, the wind in the trees, and other woodland niceties.

I would love to live without needing the illusion of control over my surroundings—to dance in the breeze like an inflatable tube man. Unfortunately, you can’t force yourself into an entirely new personality. But you can take off your headphones.

It’s Time to Let the Noisy World Back In

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If you're experiencing persistent mental health symptoms, in the first instance you should consider speaking to your GP. You will be able to discuss your specific symptoms with them and possible treatments, including therapy.

If you decide psychological therapy is right for you, there are many different types available. It can be confusing to decide which one would work best for you, especially if it's your first time seeking therapy.

So here's a bit about some of the different options to help you work out what might suit you.

The options covered in this article are some of those used to treat mild depression, as recommended by health authorities in the UK and generally available for free via the NHS or mental health charities. But if you have a preference or want to specify your therapist, you may need to go private.

1. Cognitive behavioral therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is based on the theory that psychological problems stem from unproductive ways of thinking and learned patterns of unhelpful behavior. One example is "all or nothing" thinking, where people believe that if one thing goes wrong in the day then the whole day is ruined, or if they answer one question badly during a job interview then the whole interview was a waste of time.

During CBT, the therapist guides the client to learn ways to cope and change their thinking patterns. This form of therapy focuses on the person's current problems and doesn't address wider problems such as family or underlying past issues.

CBT is highly structured and the skills learned, such as problem solving and re-framing unhelpful thoughts, are practical and can be incorporated into daily life. It also involves homework assignments, such as goal-setting worksheets, which people must be willing to complete to get the most out of treatment.

CBT is most commonly used to treat anxiety and depression, but can also help with other mental health problems, and can even help people cope with certain physical health conditions.

This approach may be suited to people who would like a structured, guided method with a specific focus on unhelpful thoughts and behavior.

2. Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy

Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy seeks to target troubling thoughts and feelings that may be interfering with relationships, communication and daily life. A key goal is to change problematic relationship patterns.

It's based largely on the belief that psychological problems are rooted in the unconscious part of the mind. So short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to help the client identify the root causes of any problematic thoughts and feelings, such as unresolved or repressed trauma, and work through them.

The therapist does this by forming a trusting relationship with the client and exploring past and current events.

Similar to CBT, this approach teaches the client coping skills to help with future situations. But it's less structured than CBT, and the client can direct what is discussed.

This type of therapy may therefore be suited to someone who wants a little more autonomy, and is keen to focus on interpersonal difficulties, such as loss or changing relationship dynamics, that may be associated with their depression or anxiety.

3. Behavioral activation

Behavioral activation focuses on the association between a person's activities and their mood, and involves helping the client to use activities to influence their emotional state. For example, behavioral activation may be used for people with depression, who often lose interest in activities they used to enjoy.

Similar to CBT, this form of therapy looks at behavioral patterns and the therapist explores behavioral changes the client could make in their everyday life. It encourages clients to engage with activities that they enjoy but are avoiding, and explores the thoughts and feelings that have led to this avoidance.

For example, the client maybe avoiding exercise classes they used to enjoy as they feel low on energy and are worried the other class members won't talk to them.

Behavioral activation focuses on the client's current situation and environment and doesn't explore past events. It doesn't target unhelpful thoughts and beliefs so it may not suit people who want to address these aspects. It also requires motivation and discipline to be able to commit to the relevant activities (such as exercise on a Monday evening).

This approach may be most suitable for someone whose symptoms have led to social withdrawal and is engaging in fewer activities that bring them happiness. It will also be better suited to someone who is action-oriented (who wants to take practical action to deal with their problems).

4. Person-centered therapy

Person-centered therapy is based on the theory that people are inherently driven to achieve their potential. The client is the expert in their life and therefore they lead the direction of the therapy. This approach creates a supportive, flexible, and empowering environment for self-exploration.

The therapist uses reflections and questions to aid the client's understanding of their own thoughts, feelings and actions. Person-centered therapy aims to improve self-esteem, self-efficacy (the belief in your ability to succeed) and ability to cope with everyday situations.

Because of the lack of direction from the therapist, person-centered therapy requires the client to be motivated and have the ability to self-reflect. It's less problem-focused and the therapist doesn't suggest coping strategies.

This approach may suit someone who wants the freedom to talk about the problems and issues they want to address in a supportive environment. It's better for someone who wants less structure without specific techniques and homework to undertake.

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Chaos theory is a branch of physics that describes the evolution of processes that are dependent on initial conditions. Some processes, which at first glance appear to be random, can in fact be based on underlying patterns and interdependencies.

The classic example of a chaotic system is termed the ‘butterfly effect’, first highlighted by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Lorenz envisaged the apparent chaos of a tornado being dependent on a butterfly flapping its wings several weeks prior to the storm. Almost negligible changes in initial conditions can have dramatic and unpredictable effects on the evolution of a chaotic system.

There are several areas of astronomy that benefit from an understanding of chaos theory. The obvious one is the gravitational interaction of celestial bodies. Such a system is chaotic, and a tiny error in the positions or velocities of the celestial bodies, or the introduction of small perturbations, means the system is unpredictable in the long term.

Weather and climate here on Earth are good examples of chaotic systems. Similarly, features such as the Great Red Spot on Jupiter are also chaotic. Although scientists have a good grasp of fluid dynamics and the forces that result in this massive storm system, its formation and evolution cannot be predicted from these principles.

Most of the processes going on in the Universe are essentially chaotic. The acceleration of charged particles, the creation of cosmic rays, the structure of magnetic fields, nuclear reactions within stars, chemical reactions in interstellar space, and many more phenomena, are all critically dependent on initial conditions. Ultimately, it would be fair to say the Universe itself is chaotic and therefore unpredictable.

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“Clearly predatory”: Western Digital sparks panic, anger for age-shaming HDDs

A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the simplest nuclear systems.

To test the strong nuclear force, physicists turned to the helium-4 nucleus, which has two protons and two neutrons. When helium nuclei are excited, they grow like an inflating balloon until one of the protons pops off. Surprisingly, in a recent experiment, helium nuclei didn’t swell according to plan: They ballooned more than expected before they burst. A measurement describing that expansion, called the form factor, is twice as large as theoretical predictions.

“The theory should work,” said Sonia Bacca, a theoretical physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and an author of the paper describing the discrepancy, which was published in Physical Review Letters. “We’re puzzled.”

The swelling helium nucleus, researchers say, is a sort of mini-laboratory for testing nuclear theory because it’s like a microscope — it can magnify deficiencies in theoretical calculations. Physicists think certain peculiarities in that swelling make it supremely sensitive to even the faintest components of the nuclear force — factors so small that they’re usually ignored. How much the nucleus swells also corresponds to the squishiness of nuclear matter, a property that offers insights into the mysterious hearts of neutron stars. But before explaining the crush of matter in neutron stars, physicists must first figure out why their predictions are so far off.

Bira van Kolck, a nuclear theorist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said Bacca and her colleagues have exposed a significant problem in nuclear physics. They’ve found, he said, an instance where our best understanding of nuclear interactions — a framework known as chiral effective field theory — has fallen short.

“This transition amplifies the problems [with the theory] that in other situations are not so relevant,” van Kolck said.

The Strong Nuclear Force

Atomic nucleons — protons and neutrons — are held together by the strong force. But the theory of the strong force was not developed to explain how nucleons stick together. Instead, it was first used to explain how protons and neutrons are made of elementary particles called quarks and gluons.

For many years, physicists didn’t understand how to use the strong force to understand the stickiness of protons and neutrons. One problem was the bizarre nature of the strong force — it grows stronger with increasing distance, rather than slowly dying off. This feature prevented them from using their usual calculation tricks. When particle physicists want to understand a particular system, they typically parcel out a force into more manageable approximate contributions, order those contributions from most important to least important, then simply ignore the less important contributions. With the strong force, they couldn’t do that.

Then in 1990, Steven Weinberg found a way to connect the world of quarks and gluons to sticky nuclei. The trick was to use an effective field theory — a theory that is only as detailed as it needs to be to describe nature at a particular size (or energy) scale. To describe the behavior of a nucleus, you don’t need to know about quarks and gluons. Instead, at these scales, a new effective force emerges — the strong nuclear force, transmitted between nucleons by the exchange of pions.

Weinberg’s work helped physicists understand how the strong nuclear force emerges from the strong force. It also made it possible for them to perform theoretical calculations based on the usual method of approximate contributions. The theory — chiral effective theory — is now widely considered the “best theory we have,” Bacca said, for calculating the forces that govern the behavior of nuclei.

Sonia Bacca, a physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, found that our best theoretical understanding of the strong nuclear force is at odds with experimental results.

Angelika Stehle

In 2013, Bacca used this effective field theory to predict how much an excited helium nucleus would swell. But when she compared her calculation to experiments performed in the 1970s and 1980s, she found a substantial discrepancy. She’d predicted less swelling than the amounts measured, but the experimental error bars were too big for her to be sure.

Ballooning Nuclei

After that first hint of a problem, Bacca encouraged her colleagues at Mainz to repeat the decades-old experiments — they had sharper tools at their disposal and could make more precise measurements. Those discussions led to a new collaboration: Simon Kegel and his colleagues would update the experimental work, and Bacca and her colleagues would try to understand the same intriguing mismatch, if it emerged.

In their experiment, Kegel and his colleagues excited the nuclei by shooting a beam of electrons at a tank of cold helium gas. If an electron zipped within range of one of the helium nuclei, it donated some of its excess energy to the protons and neutrons, causing the nucleus to inflate. This inflated state was fleeting — the nucleus quickly lost grasp of one of its protons, decaying into a hydrogen nucleus with two neutrons, plus a free proton.

As with other nuclear transitions, only a specific amount of donated energy will allow the nucleus to swell. By varying the electrons’ momentum and observing how the helium responded, scientists could measure the expansion. The team then compared this change in a nucleus’s spread — the form factor — with a variety of theoretical calculations. None of the theories matched the data. But, strangely, the calculation that came closest used an oversimplified model of the nuclear force — not the chiral effective field theory.

“This was totally unexpected,” said Bacca.

Other researchers are equally mystified. “It’s a clean, well-done experiment. So I trust the data,” said Laura Elisa Marcucci, a physicist at the University of Pisa in Italy. But, she said, the experiment and theory contradict one another, so one of them must be wrong.

Bringing Balance to the Force

In hindsight, physicists had several reasons to suspect that this simple measurement would probe the limits of our understanding of nuclear forces.

First, this system is particularly persnickety. The energy needed to produce the transiently inflated helium nucleus — the state researchers want to study — lies just above the energy needed to expel a proton and just below that same threshold for a neutron. That makes everything hard to calculate.

The second reason has to do with Weinberg’s effective field theory. It worked because it allowed physicists to ignore the less important parts of the equations. Van Kolck contends that some of the parts deemed less important and routinely ignored are in fact very important. The microscope provided by this particular helium measurement, he said, is illuminating that basic error.

“I cannot be too critical because these calculations are very difficult,” he added. “They’re doing the best they can.”

Several groups, including van Kolck’s, plan to repeat Bacca’s calculations and find out what went wrong. It’s possible that simply including more terms in the approximation of the nuclear force might be the answer. On the other hand, it’s also possible that these ballooning helium nuclei have exposed a fatal flaw in our understanding of the nuclear force.

“We exposed the puzzle, but unfortunately we have not solved the puzzle,” Bacca said. “Not yet.”

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Switching to a diet full of fresh veggies and low in processed foods could do wonders for your brain's biological age, new research shows.

According to the international team of researchers who ran the study, eating a Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, seafood, and whole grains appears to slow the signs of accelerated brain aging typically seen in obesity with as little as 1 percent loss in body weight.

Brain scans taken after 18 months showed the participants' brain age appearing almost 9 months younger than expected, compared to estimates of their brain's chronological age.

Like the participants in the clinical trial, you might not feel as old as the years you've lived, or perhaps your body feels like it's aging faster than you are – this is the difference between biological and chronological age.

Either way, research shows your body's biological age is much more than a feeling: Signs of biological aging can be found dotted along your DNA, etched onto the ends of your chromosomes, or as this study suggests, in the loosening connections of your brain.

While a growing body of research suggests that biological aging brought on by stressful events could be reversible, this new study shows that improving your diet may be one of the simplest options to improving body condition, irrespective of the years.

In the study, the researchers imaged the brains of 102 participants who were taking part in a larger clinical trial conducted at one workplace in Israel. Brain scans were taken once before the trial began and again after 18 months, along with a battery of tests of liver function, cholesterol levels, and body weight.

Groups ate one of three diets: a Mediterranean diet with lots of nuts, fish, and chicken instead of red meat; a Mediterranean diet with a few added extras such as green tea for the polyphenols; or a diet based on healthy dietary guidelines.

Estimates of brain age were based on an algorithm that had been trained on brain scans from a separate cohort of nearly 300 people, with the model accurately predicting age from measures of brain connectivity.

On average, people in the trial lost around 2.3 kilograms. For every 1 percent of body weight lost, the participants' brains appeared almost 9 months younger than their chronological age, the researchers found.

Whether changes in brain connectivity actually translate to improvements in brain function is still a big unknown. The brain is a complex web of flexible connections we're only just beginning to map out, though a recent review hints at the Mediterranean diet having a positive effect on memory in older people.

Signs of slowed brain aging were also associated with lower levels of liver fat and improved lipid profile but again, these changes could be superficial or short-lived.

"Our study highlights the importance of a healthy lifestyle, including lower consumption of processed food, sweets, and beverages, in maintaining brain health," says lead author and neuroscientist Gidon Levakov of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

That might be sound advice and although these findings are from a clinical trial where participants were randomly 'prescribed' a diet to follow, there are a few other limitations worth digesting.

Most of the participants were men, and they filled out online surveys about their diet and lifestyle habits, meaning the data may be skewed by what they could recall or chose to report.

And it's not all about food: participants' activity levels at work were taken into account; they also received a free gym membership as part of the trial, so exercise was a factor too.

What's more, past research has uncovered how the good fats of a Mediterranean diet work on a cellular level. But it has also exposed clear discrepancies in who reaps the health benefits of a diet rich in Mediterranean staples.

People with well-paying jobs and higher education who could afford to buy lots of fish and whole grains saw greater improvements in cardiovascular health than those on low incomes – even if their adherence to the diet was the same.

The study has been published in eLife.

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The biggest peril of Artificial Intelligence, experts say, is its ability to demolish the boundaries between reality and fiction, handing cybercriminals a cheap and effective technology to propagate disinformation.

In a new breed of scams that has rattled US authorities, fraudsters are using strikingly convincing AI voice cloning tools -- widely available online -- to steal from people by impersonating family members.

"Help me, mom, please help me," Jennifer DeStefano, an Arizona-based mother, heard a voice saying on the other end of the line.

DeStefano was "100 percent" convinced it was her 15-year-old daughter in deep distress while away on a skiing trip.

"It was never a question of who is this? It was completely her voice... it was the way she would have cried," DeStefano told a local television station in April.

"I never doubted for one second it was her."

The scammer who took over the call, which came from a number unfamiliar to DeStefano, demanded up to $1 million.

The AI-powered ruse was over within minutes when DeStefano established contact with her daughter. But the terrifying case, now under police investigation, underscored the potential for cybercriminals to misuse AI clones.

- Grandparent scam -

"AI voice cloning, now almost indistinguishable from human speech, allows threat actors like scammers to extract information and funds from victims more effectively," Wasim Khaled, chief executive of Blackbird.AI, told AFP.

A simple internet search yields a wide array of apps, many available for free, to create AI voices with a small sample -- sometimes only a few seconds -- of a person's real voice that can be easily stolen from content posted online.

"With a small audio sample, an AI voice clone can be used to leave voicemails and voice texts. It can even be used as a live voice changer on phone calls," Khaled said.

"Scammers can employ different accents, genders, or even mimic the speech patterns of loved ones. [The technology] allows for the creation of convincing deep fakes."

In a global survey of 7,000 people from nine countries, including the United States, one in four people said they had experienced an AI voice cloning scam or knew someone who had.

Seventy percent of the respondents said they were not confident they could "tell the difference between a cloned voice and the real thing," said the survey, published last month by the US-based McAfee Labs.

American officials have warned of a rise in what is popularly known as the "grandparent scam" -– where an imposter poses as a grandchild in urgent need of money in a distressful situation.

"You get a call. There's a panicked voice on the line. It's your grandson. He says he's in deep trouble —- he wrecked the car and landed in jail. But you can help by sending money," the US Federal Trade Commission said in a warning in March.

"It sounds just like him. How could it be a scam? Voice cloning, that's how."

In the comments beneath the FTC's warning were multiple testimonies of elderly people who had been duped that way.

- 'Malicious' -

That also mirrors the experience of Eddie, a 19-year-old in Chicago whose grandfather received a call from someone who sounded just like him, claiming he needed money after a car accident.

The ruse, reported by McAfee Labs, was so convincing that his grandfather urgently started scrounging together money and even considered re-mortgaging his house, before the lie was discovered.

"Because it is now easy to generate highly realistic voice clones... nearly anyone with any online presence is vulnerable to an attack," Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, told AFP.

"These scams are gaining traction and spreading."

Earlier this year, AI startup ElevenLabs admitted that its voice cloning tool could be misused for "malicious purposes" after users posted a deepfake audio purporting to be actor Emma Watson reading Adolf Hitler's biography "Mein Kampf."

"We're fast approaching the point where you can't trust the things that you see on the internet," Gal Tal-Hochberg, group chief technology officer at the venture capital firm Team8, told AFP.

"We are going to need new technology to know if the person you think you're talking to is actually the person you're talking to," he said.

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