“My daughter has told me that their mother was alive for four days,” the children’s father, Manuel Ranoque, said to reporters, according to the Guardian on Sunday.

But the mom, Magdalena Mucutuy, knew her days were numbered and that the kids’ chances of survival were better if they left the wreckage to look for food, water and help.

“Before she died, she said to them, ‘Maybe you should go. You guys are going to see the kind of man your dad is, and he’s going to show you the same kind of great love that I have shown you,’ ” Ranoque said.

The youngsters — ages 13, 9, 4 and 11 months — eventually left, sparking what ended up being an epic, 40-day, miraculous journey of survival that included them living off a bag of cassava flour from the wreckage and seeds and fruit they found in the area after the May 1 crash in Colombia that killed their mother and two other adults.

The children were found Friday by a military rescue dog and members of the military and local indigenous groups.

News about their mom’s heartbreaking plea surfaced along with other stunning details about the saga.

Choppers dropped boxes of food as they scoured the region by air and rescuers with dogs searched for the children — which authorities said actually frightened the young survivors and prompted them to hide.

“They were afraid out there, with the dogs barking,” said their great-uncle, Fidenxio Valencia. “They hid among the trees. … They ran.”

Rescue crews also blared recordings through loudspeakers of the children’s grandmother urging them to stay in one place so people could find and help them.

But the kids were spooked by that, too.

“They heard the message, and they were afraid. They hid in the bush so as not to be found,” said Alicia Mendez, a journalist with El Tiempo, to the Guardian.

“Every time [the search team] was close, they hid,” Mendez said. “We don’t know what was going through their little heads.”

Valencia said the children four are “shattered but in good hands, and it’s great they’re alive.

About 150 Colombian soldiers searched the jungle for weeks before finding the four missing children. AP

“We were in the darkness, but now dawn has broken, and I have seen the light,” he told the outlet.

He said Lesly, the oldest of the children, is credited with leading her siblings to safety and keeping them alive by using her knowledge of Amazon fauna, which includes many poisonous varieties of fruit.

Gen. Pedro Sanchez, who took charge of the rescue effort, said the four emaciated children were found in a clearing about 3 miles from the site of the Cessna crash nearly six weeks later, the outlet said.

“The minor children were already very weak,” Sanchez said. “They were only strong enough to breathe or reach a small fruit to feed themselves or drink a drop of water in the jungle.”

Officials said they were able to sustain themselves because the jungle was in harvest and lush with fruit.

On Saturday, Colombian pop icon Shakira joined the chorus of those celebrating the children’s survival.

“The suffering of Lesly, Soleimy, Tien and Cristin and the miracle of their lives have shaken us all and have given us the greatest example of unity and resilience,” she wrote on Twitter.

The children and their mother, who are members of the Huitoto Indigenous community, were flying from the village of Ararcuara to San Jose del Guaviare when the small plane suffered engine failure and plunged into the dark jungle.

Rescuers discovered the wreckage and adults’ bodies May 16 — but there was no sign of the youngsters.

Colombia’s military sent 150 soldiers into the jungle to find the missing kids and soon found traces that they may have survived, including footprints, a baby bottle and baby “nappies,” in the dense foliage.

On Friday, a trained rescue dog named Wilson sniffed out the exhausted children.

“The jungle saved them,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro has told reporters. “They are children of the jungle and now they are also children of Colombia.”

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Picture of children in their hospital beds:

“Shit” is a crucial and ubiquitous word that serves as a noun, a verb and an adjective, propping up the entire English language. This wondrous word is both a profanity and a term used to denote an item of high quality, and it is liberally sprinkled into the daily chatter of our lives.

The sense of revulsion we feel when we’re faced with human excrement (or even just the thought of it) is, in part, a response to the way it looks and smells. But that revulsion is also a psychological reflex, ingrained by potty training and social stigma. This aversion is an important safety mechanism: handwashing and sewer systems prevent the spread of diseases that have killed millions.

But what if I told you that faeces was not toxic waste and that it contained the secret to human health? Would you eat it, if your life depended on it? What if it was rebranded as a faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) or, more accurately, a faecal milkshake given through a tube that passes through the nose into the stomach? You could even take it in the form of a capsule – or “crapsule” – if you wanted.

To help persuade you that this might not be such a terrible idea, I’ll tell you the tale of a patient. Raymond had driven the No 7 bus between Oxford Circus and East Acton from the age of 20 until taking early retirement in his mid-40s after learning he had genetic heart problems. He gave up his job on his doctor’s orders. Like you and me, and everyone else on the planet, Ray was a host to several trillion microbes that lived in and on his body. From our first breath to our last, and even beyond, microbes are our ever-present companions. While they take up residence in any number of places in our bodies, they’re especially keen on – and abundant in – the various cavities and niches found in our gut.

The “gut microbiome” is the name we have used to describe not only the wildly diverse collection of microbes that live there, but also what happens when they interact with each other and with our bodies. In other words, it’s an ecosystem made up of trillions of microbial life forms going about their business inside us, as we go about ours.

In the last two decades, scientists have started to leverage the new science of the microbiome to transform how we conceive of human health. Throughout his life Ray’s gut microbiome had changed with him. But as time passed, his genes and his gut microbiome began to do battle, causing multiple chronic diseases. Eventually, Ray developed a type of leukaemia that left him profoundly frail.

‘The scale of the task is huge: there is 1.5kg of bacteria in our guts.’ Illustration: Lisa Sheehan/The Observer

Ray and his wife, Heather, navigated his various health issues together until the day pneumonia struck. He was admitted to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London, where he was treated with intravenous antibiotics. Without the drugs he would have died. He was discharged within the week. However, it was at this point that a terrible antibiotic firestorm started in his gut. Imagine the worst-possible diarrhoea, incapacitating nausea, plus severe cramping pain in your abdomen, depriving you of sleep. Now imagine that you are frail. Your heart is working at 40% of its normal function and your lungs are full of fluid. You can’t breathe. Arthritis means you can’t get to the loo in time. You are cold, clammy and profoundly dehydrated, but can’t drink enough to satisfy your thirst. You are soiled, but too close to death to care.

Ray was readmitted to St Mary’s critically unwell and was soon diagnosed with Clostridium difficile (C diff) infection (officially, this bacteria has now been renamed Clostridiodes). A “hospital-acquired infection”, this disease is a complication of 20th-century medicine and an unintended consequence of Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, the first effective mass-produced antibiotic, in 1928. It is a global problem that afflicts 500,000 people in the United States each year and it kills 29,000 of them.

C diff debilitates its host organism – the human being – by generating toxins that destroy the lining of the gut. The particular strain of C diff in Raymond’s gut had engaged in an aggressive campaign of molecular warfare. His personal gut-microbe collection was gone. His intestine was failing and he was dying. He was treated with yet more antibiotics. This seems counterintuitive, but it is in accordance with best practice. But C diff has a trick up its sleeve, which is to produce antibiotic-resistant spores that wait to germinate, biding their time. Raymond was given an antibiotic drug called vancomycin. Many patients will respond to vancomycin, but about a quarter will relapse. And in those who do, 45% will have a second relapse. These are the patients who typically benefit from FMT, or the “good shit”.

Dr Ben Mullish, a clinical scientist at Imperial College London, was running a trial of FMT in patients with C diff infections. Ray was so unwell that Dr Mullish offered him the treatment. Heather understood that there are good and bad bugs and advised her husband to go ahead with it, but Ray was not having it. The idea of taking another human’s faeces was just too much for him, and he refused. Three days later, however, he had deteriorated so much that there was no other choice. Ray consented to the trial.

The logistics of preparing an FMT should not be underestimated. Faecal donors have to be found – harder than you might think. Most of us are squeamish about pooing in pots, and we struggle to do it on demand. Some studies use friends and families, others use members of staff, volunteers or “pooled” samples taken from lots of donors mixed together.

The complexity and demand for faecal transplants have spawned an entire industry, and FMT can now be purchased frozen from biobanks. As with an organ donation, donors have to be carefully screened to make sure they don’t harbour transmittable diseases or parasites. Potential stool donors undergo a rigorous screening questionnaire, medical interview and examination, followed by blood- and stool-testing.

Then there are the practicalities. Fresh samples must ideally be acquired within a short time from delivery, diluted with sterile saline, stirred, strained and then poured into a sterile bottle. Dr Mullish’s job can at times be less than glamorous. Once the faecal cocktail was mixed (shaken, not stirred), the transplant was administered to Ray during a colonoscopy. This procedure involves a flexible telescope that is passed into the colon through the bottom, and the bowel is gently coated in the soothing balm of microbes, which are passed through the colonoscope using a syringe.

It may be like turning a computer on and off again – it’s a complete reset of the gut’s immunology software

While an FMT might be a new idea to many of us today, the medical practice of faecal transplant is ancient, and it has been drunk as “yellow soup” since the 4th century AD for the treatment of infective diarrhoea. In 1958 an innovative surgeon, Dr Ben Eiseman, administered faecal enemas to his patients in Denver, Colorado, with severe and recurrent C diff infections. It was remarkably effective, but like all important medical discoveries, this intervention was largely ignored at the time of its first report.

More than half a century later, the Dutch gastro- enterologist Josbert Keller and his team at the Amsterdam Medical Centre randomised patients with recurrent C diff into three groups. The first group received vancomycin, a wash-out of the colon using a strong laxative, and a faecal transplant. The second had vancomycin and the colonic wash-out, and the third just received vancomycin. The FMT group did so much better than the other two groups that the study had to be stopped early, as it was deemed unethical to continue.

The race to discover how FMT works is now on. We do know it restores the metabolism of bile (a digestive fluid made in the liver and stored in the gall bladder), which is co-metabolised by bacteria, and this in turn blocks the germination of C diff and controls the infectious disease. It is also probable that a process of “bioremediation” occurs, in which the donor micro organisms consume and break down toxins that exist in the recipient’s gut. However, there are trillions of organisms producing an infinite number of bioactive molecules, and each disease has a discrete microbiome. Therefore, it may really be a bit like turning a computer on and off again; it’s a complete reset of the gut’s immunology software.

It’s also becoming clear that samples from some donors are much more effective than those from others. These are known as “super donors” and their faeces seems to contain a magical ingredient that makes it particularly effective. But we don’t understand why this happens, or whose poo will be most effective.

Regardless, FMT is now being investigated with varying degrees of success in hundreds of trials across the globe. These include trials for inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, acute malnutrition, diabetes, arthritis, hepatic encephalopathy (decline in brain function with severe liver disease), liver transplants, skin cancer, autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer’s, neurodevelopmental conditions, bipolar disorder, hair loss, depression, neurodegenerative diseases and recurrent urinary tract infections, to name but a few.

Some of these studies are extremely encouraging and offer treatments where few effective medical therapies exist. For example, FMT appears to be a promising treatment for irritable bowel syndrome and a recent study suggests that its benefit can last for many years: 125 patients were randomly assigned to receive either 30g or 60g of faeces from the same donor or a placebo transplant containing their own faeces. Researchers not only found that the FMT improved the symptoms, but there was a lasting benefit three years after it was given.

Unlike C diff, where there is a dramatic and acute clinical change caused by a defined pathogen, the impact of FMT is less clear in chronic disease states, where it hasn’t yet been proven that bacteria are the cause, or where we haven’t defined exactly how the disease develops. As a result, at the time of writing in the UK and the US, recurrent C diff is the only clinical condition for which regulatory bodies have approved the use of FMT. The bottom line (pun firmly intended) is that we don’t understand how FMT works or its long-term risks well enough to start using it more widely in clinical practice. Nevertheless, because word of its incredible potential is spreading, there’s a worrying growth in online enthusiasts offering back-street FMT “cures”. I hope it goes without saying: please don’t try this at home.

Ray’s response to his FMT treatment was just like that in the reported literature. Within three days of receiving the microbiota transplant he was out of bed. Heather described it as a miracle. If I’ve spent longer than is entirely comfortable talking about faeces, that’s because FMT is a starting point for understanding the importance of the gut microbiome to human health. The extraordinary benefit of FMT in some patients has opened the clinical world to the idea that our microbes may have an important role in the causation and treatment of diseases where their involvement runs contrary to medical science.

The scale of the task is immense. The bacteria in the gut alone weigh close to 1.5 kg, they’re made up of about 100,000,000,000,000 bacterial cells (that’s 100 trillion) – equivalent in number to the total number of cells that make up the human body – and they speak millions of different molecular languages. Another major challenge in studying the microbiome is its physical distribution. The micro- biome is dispersed across our bodies in different niches, each with varying total abundances of microbes. Being clear about our anatomical definitions is important.

We are only just beginning to map all of the microbial life in the vast ecosystem inside our bodies – and to understand how it connects us to the world around us. In this backward world, shit has become a therapy, used to replenish our delicate internal ecosystems, which are being lost as quickly as they are being discovered. Even with the impressive advances in biology, metagenomics and bio-informatics (computational biology), we might not be able to count and name all of the beneficial microorganisms that live inside us before they die out, mutate or evolve into something very different.

We are deciphering the molecular language of the human microbiome, one of the great challenges of modern medicine, and faecal transplantation is a critical and fascinating tool that is being used to unlock these secrets.

The human microbiome represents the most important new therapeutic target that we have for treating the greatest threats to human life in the 21st century and for preventing future pandemics of pathogens. This was not only important for Ray – it is critical for all of us: without a stable and diverse microbiome, we may well lose our minds. Behind all this is a simple message: microbes are not the enemy.

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Billion-year-old grease hints at long history of complex cells

When Smith shared his shape with the world in March, excited fans printed it onto T-shirts, sewed it into quilts, crafted cookie cutters or used it to replace the hexagons on a soccer ball—some even made plans for tattoos.

The 13-sided polygon, which 64-year-old Smith called "the hat", is the first single shape ever found that can completely cover an infinitely large flat surface without ever repeating the same pattern.

That makes it the first "einstein"—named after the German for "one stone" (ein stein), not the famed physicist—and solves a problem posed 60 years ago that some mathematicians had thought impossible.

After stunning the mathematics world, Smith—a hobbyist with no training who told AFP that he wasn't great at math at school—then did it again.

While all agreed "the hat" was the first einstein, its mirror image was required one in seven times to ensure that a pattern never repeated.

But in a preprint study published online late last month, Smith and the three mathematicians who helped him confirm the discovery revealed a new shape—"the specter."

It requires no mirror image, making it an even purer einstein.

'It can be that easy'

Craig Kaplan, a computer scientist at Canada's Waterloo University, told AFP that it was "an amusing and almost ridiculous story—but wonderful".

He said that Smith, a retired print technician who lives in Yorkshire's East Riding, emailed him "out of the blue" in November.

Smith had found something "which did not play by his normal expectations for how shapes behave", Kaplan said.

If you slotted a bunch of these cardboard shapes together on a table, you could keep building outwards without them ever settling into a regular pattern.

Using computer programs, Kaplan and two other mathematicians showed that the shape continued to do this across an infinite plane, making it the first einstein, or "aperiodic monotile".

When they published their first preprint in March, among those inspired was Yoshiaki Araki. The Japanese tiling enthusiast made art using the hat and another aperiodic shape created by the team called "the turtle", sometimes using flipped versions.

Graphic showing the shapes that solved the "einstein problem", which had been impossible to solve for around 60 years.

Smith was inspired back, and started playing around with ways to avoid needing to flip his hat.

Less than a week after their first paper came out, Smith emailed Kaplan a new shape.

Kaplan refused to believe it at first. "There's no way it can be that easy," he said.

But analysis confirmed that Tile (1,1) was a "non-reflective einstein", Kaplan said.

Something still bugged them—while this tile could go on forever without repeating a pattern, this required an "artificial prohibition" against using a flipped shape, he said.

So they added little notches or curves to the edges, ensuring that only the non-flipped version could be used, creating "the specter".

'Hatfest'

Kaplan said both their papers had been submitted to peer-reviewed journals. But the world of mathematics did not wait to express its astonishment.

Marjorie Senechal, a mathematician at Smith College in the United States, told AFP the discoveries were "exciting, surprising and amazing".

She said she expects the specter and its relatives "will lead to a deeper understanding of order in nature and the nature of order."

Doris Schattschneider, a mathematician at Moravian College in the US, said both shapes were "stunning".

Even Nobel-winning mathematician Roger Penrose, whose previous best effort had narrowed the number of aperiodic tiles down to two in the 1970s, had not been sure such a thing was possible, Schattschneider said.

Penrose, 91, will be among those celebrating the new shapes during the two-day "Hatfest" event at Oxford University next month.

All involved expressed amazement that the breakthrough was achieved by someone without training in math.

"The answer fell out of the sky and into the hands of an amateur—and I mean that in the best possible way, a lover of the subject who explores it outside of professional practice," Kaplan said.

"This is the kind of thing that ought not to happen, but very happily for the history of science does happen occasionally, where a flash brings us the answer all at once."

© 2023 AFP

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When the sky over New York City turned a thick, silty orange on Wednesday, 8 million residents woke up in a new era. Until this week, the East Coast had remained cocooned, thousands of miles away from the walls of choking smoke that have become commonplace in Washington state, California, Oregon and British Columbia. Not anymore.

The East Coast, along with the rest of the planet, has entered a new fire era, or — as Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, calls it — the “Pyrocene.”

Fires have burned on Earth throughout its history, reshaping its landscape. But rising temperatures from fossil fuel burning and other human activities have tilted the balance, making wildfires more frequent and intense.

As a result, humans are feeling the impact of wildfires far from where they ignite. The blazes are also moving into areas that are normally waterlogged or frozen, pushing species closer to extinction and erasing some of the gains people have made in curbing pollution.

“We are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age,” Pyne said.

For the past few years, it has felt like fire is everywhere. In 2020, a wave of smoke and fire washed over the West Coast, burning over 10.2 million acres, and creating the second and third worst smoke days in U.S. history. (New York City’s orange Wednesday claimed the top spot this week.) Just six months earlier, Australia suffered through what is now known as the Black Summer, a months-long series of bush fires that sent native wildlife fleeing and swallowed lush coastal cities with wildfire smoke. Last year, the worst wildfires in two decades torched large swaths of Spain, Portugal and Romania; in Northwest Spain, fires destroyed ecosystems and devastated local communities.

A man pours water onto the flames during a forest fire in Canecas on the outskirts of Lisbon in July 2022. (Mario Cruz/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

A fire on Jan. 10, 2020, in Mount Adrah, Australia. (Sam Mooy/Getty Images)

Scientists say climate change plays a role. The connection is not direct — rising carbon emissions in the atmosphere don’t drop the cigarette, or down the power line, or create the lightning strike that sets things ablaze. But, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, rising temperatures can turn already fire-prone forests into tinderboxes. Warm air sucks water from soils and trees, leaving behind crackling, dry trees and brush that can easily turn into an inferno.

“Climate change just creates these favorable conditions for fires,” said James MacCarthy, a research associate with Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute.

There has not been a specific study identifying the extent to which climate change drove the ongoing Canadian fires. But several scientists said the record heat in Alberta, Nova Scotia and Quebec, along with drought in Canada’s Atlantic region, likely helped create the underlying conditions for the blazes.

More broadly the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said greenhouse gas emissions have “led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes” such as wildfires. And a 2021 study published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences identified climate change as the main driver of fire weather in the U.S. West.

According to one study from 2016, human-caused climate change has doubled the area of forest burned in the American West since the 1980s. As long as there is still fuel to burn, the researchers concluded, climate change will continue to “chronically enhance” the fire potential of the West. Another study found that wildfires in British Columbia in 2017 burned seven to 11 times more than they would without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Then there are the emissions released by those blazes, as carbon locked in trunks and stems spills out into the atmosphere. Emissions from wildfires in Canada in May alone reached almost 55 million tons of carbon dioxide, or almost a tenth of the country’s total annual carbon output.

Most of those emissions will later be locked away again as the forests regrow — but some of that CO2 will linger in the atmosphere, creating one of climate change’s devastating feedback loops.

And it’s not just climate change. Fire is a natural part of many landscapes, including the boreal forests of Canada, Alaska and Russia. But in the United States, and in many countries around the world, decades-long policies of suppressing fires — rather than encouraging healthy burns — have created massive fuel loads just waiting for a spark.

“Fire was removed from the land in the same way that it was removed from modern houses and cities,” said Pyne, who is the author of “The Pyrocene: How we created an age of fire and what happens next.” Eliminating the natural burning cycle of the landscape, he argues, is one of the hallmarks of humanity’s new fire age. And it has consequences.

Bill Nichols, 84, works to save his home as fires tear through Vacaville, Calif., in August 2020. (Noah Berger/AP)

In the years to come, scientists say, climate-charged megafires will continue to be a part of life — and death. The emissions from fires are serious, but the air pollution impacts are even more so. Invisible, fine pieces of particulate matter can seep into the throat, the lungs and even the brain. Around 10 million people every year are killed by air pollution.

And the number of people exposed to such pollution through smoke is rising. In the United States alone, between 2006 and 2010, fewer than 500,000 people every year were exposed to a single day of extreme levels of fine particle pollution, also known as PM2.5. Between 2016 and 2020, that number climbed to more than 8 million.

Fay Johnston, a public health physician and head of environmental health at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, says the smoke from Australia’s Black Summer ultimately killed more than 12 times the number of people taken by the blaze itself. Studies have linked bush fire smoke to a rise in premature births, lower birth weights, and heart and lung problems that can follow children for years.

“The thing about fire smoke is that it happens at scale,” she said. “It’s not one or two otherwise robust people affected. It’s entire communities, young people, elderly people, pregnant people, kids. That’s why it’s such a big public health problem.”

The hundreds of Canadian wildfires burning will surely also leave their fingerprints on human health.

The economic impact lingers for years as well. Last June, an electrical thunderstorm started a fire in Zamora’s Sierra de la Culebra, in northwest Spain, ultimately scorching a third of the forested area along with farms, fields and bee colonies.

Almost half of the burned area was a forest of pine and centennial chestnut trees, a tourist attraction and a sanctuary for the Iberian wolf, wild board and dozens of species of birds. The University of Salamanca put the economic damage at nearly $82 million.

The citizens affected by the wildfire set up a group to demand compensation and action by the authorities to prevent future wildfires, “La Culebra no de Calla” (La Culebra won’t remain quiet). Lucas Herrero, an architect who serves as the president, said a year later that some of the farming activities have resumed and that a few businesses received compensation. But many small tourism companies had to reinvent themselves, Herrero said. No one would go spend their holidays in a burned forest.

Such fires might seem like anomalous, once-in-a-lifetime occurrences. But for many people, they are already beginning to feel commonplace.

On the West Coast, residents have accustomed themselves to shutting windows and doors, donning N95 masks and cranking up their air purifiers for weeks throughout the summer. As fires blaze around the world, others are learning to follow suit. There will be dark, “purple air” days when playgrounds sit empty and students learn online. There will be homemade air purifiers and eyes stinging with smoke.

For some people, the rising smoke has spurred environmental activism. In Australia, the Black Summer may have helped trigger a new push for federal climate policy. This week in Canada, however, lawmakers focused on budgets and inflation, even as the smell of smoke filtered into the halls of Parliament. And in United States, wildfire smoke has not convinced some Republicans of the severity of climate change.

Sooner, rather than later, it may all start to feel normal. There will be a smoke season, just like there is now an allergy season, Pyne said. Fires will become a part of the rhythm of our everyday lives.

Prescribed burns, dramatically cutting carbon emissions — all of that will help soften the changes to come. But there is no getting around the fact that most of humanity is now plunged into an extra fiery age. “We have created a Pyrocene,” Pyne wrote. “Now we have to live in it.”

Miller reported from Sydney. Rios reported from Brussels. Amanda Coletta in Toronto contributed to this report.

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Much of the eastern U.S. has seen unsettlingly hazy skies this week as smoke from the more than 400 wildfires currently blazing across Canada has blown south.

Wednesday was by far the worst day for wildfire smoke in the contiguous U.S. since 2006, according to researchers at Stanford University’s Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab, and Tuesday claimed the number four slot. Scientists are still waiting to see how Thursday compares.

Although wildfire smoke is a common hazard in the western U.S., it’s rare on the East Coast. Millions of people in newly affected region scrambled to understand the official Air Quality Index, which quantifies just how dangerous the air is, and to protect themselves from the acrid smoke particles.

To visualize the spread of smoke, consider this map, which shows data from Wednesday. One particularly concentrated plume of smoke arcs southward from fires burning in and around Quebec, covers the Great Lakes and then sweeps over New York City and out above the Atlantic Ocean.

Credit: Ripley Cleghorn; Sources: Hazard Mapping System Fire and Smoke Analysis, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

But while the worst conditions are in the eastern U.S., lower concentrations of smoke coat much of the nation, as well as nearly all of Canada and a portion of Central America. Even states as far from the fires as Tennessee saw serious amounts of smoke in the atmosphere.

The map is based on smoke detected in photographs taken by the satellites GOES-East and GOES-West, which are both operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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President Eisenhower had a simple dream. While the US military was busy expanding its young arsenal of nuclear weapons and launching, in 1954, the world’s first nuclear submarine, Eisenhower dreamed up a ship that would symbolize peace. Propelled by the superlative power of the atom, this vessel would travel the world under the stars and stripes, carrying nothing but a few US officials and goodwill.

But his aides weren’t buying it. Why couldn’t this floating ego trip at least try to make a buck or two? In the end, Eisenhower agreed to authorize a nuclear-powered merchant ship that would carry both cargo and passengers. As well as goodwill, naturally.

The nuclear ship Savannah, capable of hauling 14,000 tons of cargo, entered service in 1962. Its reactor was encased behind 4 feet of concrete, as well as thick layers of steel and lead. In the glitzy passenger lounge stood an 8-foot-long table topped with white marble—and an early CCTV system so passengers could keep an eye on the reactor while sipping martinis.

A zero-emissions cargo ship is a dream that might seem even more potent today, in an age when decarbonization is crucial to addressing the climate crisis. Shipping currently accounts for 3 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions and is viewed as a particularly difficult industry to decarbonize. Nuclear energy, at the point of use, produces zero emissions.

But heed this cautionary tale of nuclear hubris. The NS Savannah was a failure. During its first year at sea, the ship dumped 115,000 gallons of radioactive waste into the ocean. It had inadequate cranes and poorly designed cargo hatches. Egregiously expensive to run, the vessel carried passengers for a mere three years, and cargo alone for another five, before retiring.

Other countries also tried—and struggled—to make nuclear merchant ships work during the 20th century. West Germany’s demonstration nuclear cargo ship, the Otto Hahn, was refused entry to some ports and the Suez Canal on safety grounds. The Mutsu, a Japanese vessel, suffered a minor failure in its reactor’s radiation shielding in 1974, causing outcry. Indignant fishers blocked the ship’s return to port for several weeks.

As of 2023, there is only one active nuclear-powered merchant ship in the world, the Russian-built container-carrying NS Sevmorput. It is tiny compared to most fossil-fuel-powered container ships and has been plagued by breakdowns.

These four boondoggles handily illustrate why giant merchant ships still generally run on oil. And yet, for well over half a century, nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as icebreakers, have been sailing the oceans with relatively little fuss. Hundreds of nuclear reactors have operated at sea and, given the urgency of reducing emissions now, one could argue that it is time to finally embrace nuclear cargo ships.

In February, a gaggle of organizations based in South Korea, including those behind multiple shipping lines, signed a memorandum of understanding with this in mind. The group aims to develop nuclear-powered merchant ships equipped with small modular reactors. But they won’t say much else about the project.

“We believe it is too early to mention details on the tangible results of this partnership,” Hojoon Lee, a spokesperson for HMM, one of the shipping lines involved, tells WIRED. “We still have a long way to go to achieve the commercial viability of nuclear energy sources.”

There is another project afoot, in Norway, called NuProShip (Nuclear Propulsion of Merchant Ships). The team behind it has come up with a short list of six possible reactor designs that could work in a demonstrator vessel, says project manager Jan Emblemsvåg of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “The progress is quite OK,” he adds, via email. He and colleagues plan to convert a liquefied natural gas tanker called the Cadiz Knutsen to run on nuclear power.

Both the South Korean and Norwegian efforts are considering molten salt reactors. Instead of solid fuel rods, the nuclear fuel in these devices is dissolved into, for example, molten fluoride salts. Such reactors first operated in the 1960s and are nothing new, but technical issues, including corrosion occurring inside the reactors, have hampered their widespread rollout. Despite concerns from some over the viability of this technology, multiple countries are pursuing it. Proponents say that, in principle, such reactors could have serious safety and efficiency advantages over other types, such as pressurized water reactors, which are used in the majority of nuclear power stations worldwide. Meltdowns—where reactions in the solid nuclear fuel get out of control, causing it to overheat, melt, and risk breaching the containment of the reactor—are made effectively impossible in a molten salt design because the fuel is already in a molten state and can be drained to prevent a runaway reaction.

Nuclear fuel is incredibly energy dense, stresses Luciano Ondir Freire of the Nuclear and Energy Research Institute in Brazil. Despite the significant upfront cost of building a new reactor, for the largest container ships, he estimates that switching from dirty fossil fuels to nuclear would be cost-effective in the long run.

Nuclear reactors can operate for many decades—take the one at Nine Mile Point in New York, which has been running since 1969. That sounds good, but for ship owners it could actually be a problem. A large container ship might only have a service life of around 20 years, which means you wouldn’t get much use out of the expensive new reactor specially made for it. Plus, you would be left with the headache of removing the nuclear power plant components and making the vessel safe so that it could be scrapped—the NS Savannah, now essentially a museum piece, has yet to be fully decontaminated, more than half a century after it ended commercial operations.

Ondir Freire and Delvonei Alves de Andrade, who also works at Brazil’s Nuclear and Energy Research Institute, have published multiple papers on the history and possible future of nuclear-powered merchant shipping—and they have a solution in mind: small reactors that can be detached from one ship and installed in another, or in some other kind of facility.

But figuring out what to do with a ship’s reactor is far from the only hurdle. People need to be convinced of the safety of nuclear energy and technology, says Alves de Andrade. Despite excellent safety records at many nuclear sites around the world, public perceptions remain understandably dominated by the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, as well as by concerns around what to do with radioactive waste.

And while there are lots of nuclear reactors operating at sea right now, they tend to be on vessels with some of the highest security in the world. Commercial ships are occasionally subject to piracy and accidents, including large fires and explosions—the thought of adding nuclear fuel to such scenarios is unlikely to be met with enthusiasm.

The task of switching to a world in which nuclear-powered vessels are commonly welcomed at commercial ports is “not trivial,” says Stephen Turnock, professor of maritime fluid dynamics at the University of Southampton. “You have to have protocols in place to say what would happen in the event of an emergency associated with a nuclear-powered vessel,” he explains.

Simon Bullock, a shipping researcher at the University of Manchester, says that there is not enough of a regulatory framework to define how nuclear ships would operate globally in the commercial sector, including detail on who would bear responsibility for any mishaps. Would it be the ship owner, the ship operator, the manufacturer of the nuclear reactor, or the country where the ship is registered, known as the flag state? There are six “decade-long problems” of this kind regarding nuclear vessels that the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and other agencies would have to sort out if nuclear-powered commercial ships were ever to become widespread, he says.

Liz Shaw, an IMO spokesperson, says that “there is a long history of IMO cooperating and coordinating with other entities where necessary.” There are guidelines for how member states may submit proposals to update existing regulations, she adds.

The crews on nuclear ships would also require special training and expertise, which raises the cost of running such vessels. Is it worth dealing with all these challenges, given the need to decarbonize right now? Probably not, says Bullock. “The critical thing here is the next 10 years,” he says, referring to the urgency of tackling emissions and climate change right now. “Nuclear can do nothing about that.”

Even the Norwegian NuProShip project won’t convert its first demonstrator ship until at least 2035. Meanwhile, there are other low- or zero-emissions fuels already being deployed in vessels—from methanol to ammonia, electric batteries, and hydrogen. None of these is perfect, and all will jostle for supremacy in the coming years. Nuclear, with its many complications, is “possibly a dangerous distraction” from the main horse race, says Bullock.

For what it’s worth, Turnock’s money is on hydrogen. Last month, sportswear brand Nike launched a hydrogen-powered barge in Europe, and there are various other hydrogen-powered vessels of a similar size already sailing.

Looking further ahead, however, perhaps ship owners will eventually adopt nuclear technology in earnest. Here’s a fun fact. The original Savannah, a steamship, was also a technological pioneer. Built in 1818 in the US, it was the first steam-propelled vessel to cross the Atlantic. But its huge engines meant it could carry hardly any cargo and so was deemed unprofitable. Yet within decades, steam ruled the waves.

So while the NS Savannah may appear a tantalizingly short-lived experiment, swathed in the long-faded atomic idealism of the 1950s, perhaps nuclear-powered merchant ships will somehow come to dominate after all. As President Eisenhower found out, dreams are one thing. Then there’s the future.

Nuclear-Powered Cargo Ships Are Trying to Stage a Comeback

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Greenhouse gas emissions have reached an all-time high, threatening to push the world into “unprecedented” levels of global heating, scientists have warned.

The world is rapidly running out of “carbon budget”, the amount of carbon dioxide that can be poured into the atmosphere if we are to stay within the vital threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to a study published in the journal Earth System Science Data on Thursday.

Only about 250bn tonnes of carbon dioxide can now be emitted, to avoid the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere that would raise temperatures by 1.5C. That is down from 500bn tonnes just a few years ago, and at current annual rates of greenhouse gas emissions, of about 54bn tonnes a year over the past decade, it would run out well before the end of this decade.

Prof Piers Forster, the director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds, and lead author of the paper, said: “This is the critical decade for climate change. Decisions made now will have an impact on how much temperatures will rise and the degree and severity of impacts we will see as a result.”

He said the rate of annual increase in emissions had slowed down, but far stronger action was needed. “We need to change policy and approaches in light of the latest evidence about the state of the climate system. Time is no longer on our side,” he said.

Governments are meeting in Bonn to prepare for a major UN summit on the climate, Cop28, this November in the United Arab Emirates. Cop28 is seen as one of the last opportunities for the world to get on track to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and stay within 1.5C.

Sultan Al Jaber, the president-designate of Cop28, will arrive at Bonn on Thursday, under pressure to produce a plan for the talks that will achieve the “course correction” he has called for. While heading the talks, Al Jaber has retained his role as head of UAE’s national oil company, Adnoc, which is planning to increase its oil and gas production capacity.

Al Jaber has previously told the Guardian that his dual role is a benefit to the talks, as he will bring a “business mindset” and galvanise the private sector. Major figures in the talks, including John Kerry of the US and Frans Timmermans of the EU, have praised him. Campaigners remain unconvinced, however, and are planning a protest in Bonn on Thursday against the perceived conflict of interest in Al Jaber’s role.

At Cop28, nations will undertake a “global stocktake” for the first time since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015, to assess whether they are on track to meet their commitments to cut emissions.

That stocktake is likely to show the world is far off track, as the paper published on Thursday also shows. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, despite a sharp fall in 2020 when Covid lockdowns were in place in many countries.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculated in 2018 that the world must nearly halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared with 2010 levels, in order to stay within the 1.5C threshold, and reach net zero emissions by 2050. But that calculation rested on an assumption that the world would reduce emissions by about 7% a year during the 2020s.

As emissions have continued to rise, the annual rate of decline for emissions will now have to be much steeper to stay within the 1.5C limit.

Joeri Rogelj, co-author of the new paper and a professor of climate science at Imperial College London, told the Guardian: “The years of continued high emissions as the updates the remaining carbon budget mean that by now we should be doing more. That means either moving forward the global goal net zero date for CO2 from around 2050 to about 2035, or cutting much deeper by 2030.”

Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency found that emissions from energy – the biggest source of emissions – were showing signs of reaching a plateau. But only 18 countries have shown sustained decreases in their emissions.

Majid Al Suwaidi, the director general of Cop28 and one of the top aides to Al Jaber, told the Guardian that UAE would not be using the global stocktake to name and shame the nations that were missing their pledges under the Paris agreement, or failing to cut emissions fast enough.

“Climate change is one of those things where we’re all interconnected,” he said. “We can’t solve the problem individually. We have to solve as a collective. That’s what makes it difficult. And so there’s no simple bad guy, good guy in this discussion. Everybody has their solutions. Everybody has their ideas. And if we can bring people together behind those sort of common solutions, and drive the agenda behind that, that becomes a real powerful moment. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve at Cop28.”

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MONTREAL—The black bear was an uncommon sighting in increasingly common circumstances.

Quebec television reporter Marie-Michelle Lauzon was near the front lines of a forest fire that was bearing down Wednesday on the Quebec town of Normétal.

She and her colleagues had pulled over on the side of the road when, she recounted on Twitter, a black bear emerged into the road several metres behind them.

It didn’t attack — likely because it was too busy defending itself.

Who has time to chase pesky journalists, when wild Canadian animals are fleeing the flames of potentially life-changing disasters?

“They’re being forced into areas they wouldn’t normally go, being forced into areas more inhabited by humans,” said Sheryl Fink, the director of wildlife campaigns for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

“They’re displaced from their habitat. They’re looking for food. They’re looking for shelter and I think we’ll see a lot more of them.”

Wildfire is a naturally occurring, seasonal phenomenon. It has, historically, acted as a sort of cleansing ritual for forests and their ecosystems.

“A lot of species were adapted to it. For many plant species, fire is a part of their life cycle,” said Gráinne Michelle McCabe, chief conservation officer with Calgary’s Wilder Institute.

The problem now, scientists say, is that forest fires are occurring more regularly and growing more intense.

“So, a fire that you would have seen every hundred years you’re now seeing much, much more frequently,” McCabe said.

Many of the studies looking into the effects of forest fires on wildlife conclude that what’s needed more than anything is more study. Even the experts admit there are large gaps in the research waiting to be filled in.

The rough cause-and-effect contours of wildfires on wildlife, however, are known.

Whether caused by humans or nature, fire poses the biggest threat to those animals that are slowest and least able to react.

Larger, faster animals, like deer, wolves, rabbits, birds and Lauzon’s black bear can usually find their way to immediate safety.

Smaller, sneakier animals, like mice and squirrels can burrow their way to safety under the ground.

The very young and very old are most at risk. Fish, meanwhile, can often ride out the heat and contamination in the deepest parts of lakes, although drastic changes to water temperature and composition can be deadly.

After that, though, the impacts of a forest fire get hazy.

Researchers gauging the effects of Australia’s so-called megafires, which burned 12.6-million hectares of land (an area the size of England) between August 2019 and March 2020, said animals who are able to survive the flames nevertheless emerged to new and lethal risks. They compared the fire-ravaged habitat to a bare and burnt “moonscape environment.”

Starvation and sudden loss of protective shelter is one of the more pronounced causes of wildlife deaths following forest fires.

But environmental scientists in the U.S. have also hypothesized that animals, like humans, are at risk of smoke inhalation, lung damage and respiratory diseases from the hazardous air quality levels caused by wildfires.

If you’re worried about the asthmatics and the elderly in Toronto, Ottawa or Manhattan, in other words, think of the choking tortoise, owl or moose in Sioux Lookout or Mistissini or Slave Lake.

And like their two-legged counterparts, animals that are forced to contend with tree-fueled, out-of-control blazes experience that most natural of feelings: stress.

“Generalized ‘stress’ is often theorized to decrease immune resistance and although this effect is not always observed, it is possible that stressed animals in the wake of fire will be in worse condition and have weaker immunity,” wrote the American authors of a 2021 study published in the journal Fire Ecology.

Lower immunity means an elevated risk of infection both from fire-related injuries and burns as well as from harmful parasites able to survive the flames, to grow and spread unchecked.

Historically, the reaction when wildlife are at risk from forest fires has been to let nature run its amoral course — to spare or kill based on the whims of the wind.

But McCabe said that wildlife conservation groups like the Wilder Institute are increasingly thinking about how to help some fire-threatened species as they stare down extinction.

It’s the kind of intervention that captured the world’s imagination when officials stepped in to save Australia’s koala bears, 60,000 of which were killed, injured or otherwise impacted by the 2019-20 fires.

In 2018, there were estimated to be between 46,000 and 82,000 koalas in the country. In 2021, the population had declined 30 per cent to between 32,000 and 56,000, according to the Australian Koala Foundation.

The Wilder Institute has taken similar efforts with animals and vegetation.

Among them are the burrowing owl, an endangered bird found in the Prairies with an estimated population of about 300 pairs, McCabe said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that a burrowing owl had survived the destruction of a 2017 wildfire in California’s San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Reserve by digging an underground refuge, true to the rare bird’s name.

The majestic white whooping crane is another endangered bird whose Canadian nesting areas, in Alberta’s Wood Buffalo National Park, are also prone to forest fires.

The whooping crane population was down to “the tens of birds,” said McCabe, but has grown to about 200 with the help of the federally protected status and the assistance of conservationists.

“With each one of these species, in particular because their numbers are so low, any catastrophic event could devastate the whole species,” she said.

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As he looked out his window at the thick smog of wildfire smoke blanketing Toronto this week, Ze’ev Gedalof thought to himself, “This is our new normal.”

Global temperatures are climbing as a result of climate change, leading to longer and more intense wildfire seasons across Canada. As the world heats up, experts warn to brace for a fiery future.

“We’re going to see lots more wildfires in the coming years and decades as the climate warms,” said Gedalof, an associate professor researching forestry and climatology at the University of Guelph. “Climate scientists have been saying this for decades, and people are just not paying attention.”

Here’s what you need to know.

Is climate change making wildfires worse?

Although wildfires are a natural process that can be beneficial for the ecosystem, the events have been happening at an “unprecedented level” in recent years, Gedalof said.

“It’s not rocket science,” he continued. “When it gets warmer and drier, we’re going to see longer fire seasons and we’re going to see hotter fires.”

There are three main ingredients for a wildfire, according to John Innes, a professor of forestry at the University of British Columbia — its intensity hinges on the source of ignition (and how frequently they occur), the state of the fuel and the presence of conditions that spread the fire, like strong wind.

“Climate change affects all of those,” he said. Specifically, scientists expect more thunderstorms and windy conditions as the weather changes, which can spark and spread fires. Meanwhile, woods are drier as temperatures warm, providing for excellent fuel, Innes said.

“We are anticipating that it’s going to get hotter and warmer, particularly the springs and the autumns — and so the fire season becomes longer,” Innes continued, adding that there are no longer fire seasons in parts of the southern U.S. because the risk of fire has become present year-round. In “50 to 80 years,” Innes sees the same thing happening to Canada.

If a wildfire gets intense enough, it can even generate its own weather, including thunder and lightning — potentially spawning more fires, according to Jeff Brook, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Brook added that climate change has impacted the seasons in which certain species are active — like mountain pine beetles, which usually get killed off by the cold but are now able to survive year-round due to warming winters. As a result, they’ve become an epidemic in the B.C. interior, devastating forests — “and dead forests are even more susceptible to burning,” he said.

Wildfires to increase both in intensity and duration

While we can’t predict exact weather conditions in the future, climatologists say wildfires on average will increase in intensity and duration in coming years.

Kent Moore is a professor of physics at U of T Mississauga researching the dynamics of our climate system and its long-term impacts. “Typically by this time of year, about 200,000 hectares (of forest) would have burned in Canada,” he said. “We’re about ten times that this year.”

That’s not to say every year will be as intense going forward, but it will mean major fires will become more common: “There is a concept called return period, which is how often would one expect to see a fire season of this intensity.

“As the climate changes, we expect to see that return period go down — so rather than having a fire season like this once every 20 or 30 years, we may see a fire season like this every ten years or every five years,” Moore said.

And while occasional fires can be good for the ecosystem, the unprecedented burns in recent years are too much, said Gedalof: “Most of these ecosystems are going to take decades to adapt (to Canada’s new fire conditions) … These changes are happening much, much faster than ecosystems can respond to.”

Source

With bows, arrows and spears, young men of the Sao Luis village patrol the Javari River by motorboat in the valley of the same name.

They call themselves the "Warriors of the Forest," the self-styled heirs of Indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira, who was murdered in the Javari Valley one year ago along with British journalist Dom Phillips.

"We must always be prepared for the worst. But we do not want violence," said Lucinho Kanamari, his face painted red, insisting the traditional weapons are merely a "precaution."

"When we spot intruders, one of us will talk to them. The others stay back, ready to react if things go wrong," he told AFP.

"We are there to teach, to act as a peaceful deterrent. We talk, we explain."

Lucinho is a member of the Kanamari Indigenous group, one of six in the Javari Valley which holds Brazil's second largest protected Indigenous reservation.

Like many others who live here, he takes his surname from his tribe which lives in a part of the rainforest the size of Portugal that contains many of the world's last uncontacted Indigenous groups.

- 'Invasions exploded'  -

The patrolling warriors particularly fear the illegal fishermen in search of pirarucu -- one of the world's largest freshwater fish, its flesh considered a delicacy worth a small fortune.

Such poachers are believed to have killed Pereira and Phillips on June 5, 2022, hacking up their bodies and hiding the remains in the jungle.

For a while, the crime brought international attention to this threatened corner of the planet long-abandoned under former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his pro-industrial agenda.

"With Bolsonaro, and then Covid, the invasions exploded," said Varney Todah da Silva Kanamari, vice president of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja).

"As the state abandoned us, we had to assume our responsibilities... We defend what belongs to us: our lakes and forests," he said.

It is not only fishermen the watchmen fear.

There are also narco groups growing coca crops on the Peruvian side of the river, and in April, loggers threatened to kill a Kanamari chief, forcing him into exile.

The warriors have built two floating wooden observation posts on the river near their village of Sao Luis. One of the structures has come under fire.

Their task is immense and dangerous, their means lacking. The team has only two motorboats and little fuel.

The "warriors" avoid violent conflict, and in tense situations, withdraw back into the forest.

- 'Under threat of death' –

With government forces absent from the area, the Sao Luis warriors work with another Indigenous group known by its acronym EVU -- a sort of commando unit attached to Univaja.

Pereira helped set up the EVU before his death.

EVU members -- about 30 in total -- are equipped with motorized barges, GPS, drones, phones and satellite internet, much of it made possible by private donors. They carry no weapons.

EVU volunteers from different Javari Valley communities undergo training by NGOs and security specialists in "how to intervene, make surveys, confiscate equipment or boats," explained EVU co-founder Cristobal Negredo Espisango, known as Tatako.

According to Univaja coordinator Bushe Matis, the EVU does not "replace the state."

"We monitor, we collect information and evidence, and we pass it on to the relevant authorities. Then let the state do its job."

EVU leader Orlando de Moraes Possuelo said a key goal is "to occupy terrain" in areas with an abundance of sought-after fish and animals.

"We arrive as soon as possible to catch the intruders in the act, before they disappear or return to Peru." Legally, they cannot detain anyone.

Many of the group's members have received threats.

"I am under threat of death. I am afraid of course, but there is no other option," said Tatako.

"The EVU is the only organization that really fights organized crime in the Javari Valley," he added.

With the return of leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to the presidency, many in the Amazon hope help will soon be coming.

This week, as Brazil marked the anniversary of the murders of Pereira and Phillips, Lula vowed that "we will not abandon this struggle for the planet."

"We are fighting to revive policies to protect Indigenous peoples and the Amazon," he said in a statement to The Guardian newspaper, to which Phillips was a contributor.

But just last week, Brazil's Congress passed bills cutting the powers of Lula's environment and Indigenous affairs ministries and dramatically curbing the protection of Indigenous lands.

Univaja's Matis fears for the future.

"There can be a tragedy at any moment. The invaders will never back down: they will always want to lay claim to the Javari," he said.

Source

A telescope happened to be pointing at the brightest supernova yet observed

Writing in Nature Genetics, researchers describe that the newly-discovered gene variant causes several problems, which makes it hard for doctors to diagnose some patients with hypertension. Firstly, the variant affects a protein called CADM1 and stops cells in the body from "talking" to each other and saying that it is time to stop making aldosterone.

Also an issue for doctors is the fluctuating release of aldosterone throughout the day, which at its peak causes salt overload and hypertension. This fluctuation explains why patients with the gene variant can elude diagnosis unless they happen to have blood tests at different times of day.

The researchers also discovered that this form of hypertension could be cured by unilateral adrenalectomy—removing one of the two adrenal glands. Following removal, previously severe hypertension despite treatment with multiple drugs disappeared, with no treatment required through many subsequent years of observation.

Fewer than 1% of people with hypertension caused by aldosterone are identified because aldosterone is not routinely measured as a possible cause. The researchers are recommending that aldosterone be measured through a 24-hour urine test rather than one-time blood measurements, which will reveal more people living with hypertension but going undiagnosed.

The initial patient in this study was detected when doctors noticed fluctuation in his hormone levels during his participation in a clinical trial of treatments for difficult hypertension.

In most people with hypertension, the cause is unknown, and the condition requires lifelong treatment by drugs. Previous research by the group at Queen Mary had discovered that in 5-10% of people with hypertension the cause is a gene mutation in the adrenal glands, which results in excessive amounts of aldosterone being produced.

Aldosterone causes salt to be retained in the body, driving up the blood pressure. Patients with excessive aldosterone levels in the blood are resistant to treatment with commonly used drugs for hypertension, and at increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Professor Morris Brown, co-senior author of the study and Professor of Endocrine Hypertension at Queen Mary University of London, said, "In the 900th anniversary of Barts Hospital, this story illustrates benefits from the virtuous circle of science and medicine. Most patients consent to our undertaking non-routine molecular analyses of their surgical samples, from which we discover how their hypertension was caused, and how to cure it in future patients.

"Because the aldosterone nodules in this study were so small, we are now investigating whether momentary cauterization of the nodule is an alternative to surgical removal of the whole adrenal gland."

More information: Wu, X. et al, Somatic mutations of CADM1 in aldosterone-producing adenomas and gap junction-dependent regulation of aldosterone production, Nature Genetics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41588-023-01403-0 www.nature.com/articles/s41588-023-01403-0

Journal information: Nature Genetics

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• Google’s HR chief told employees Wednesday that it will be cracking down on employees who aren’t adhering to the hybrid work schedule, CNBC has found.

• The company said it will include office attendance in performance reviews and track badge data.

• Chief people officer Fiona Cicconi asked already-approved employees to consider switching from full-remote to hybrid.

Google plans to crack down on employees who haven’t been coming into its offices consistently, CNBC has found.

The company updated its hybrid work policy Wednesday and it includes tracking office badge attendance, confronting workers who aren’t coming in when they’re supposed to and including the attendance in employees’ performance reviews, according to internal memos viewed by CNBC. Most employees are expected in physical offices at least three days a week.

Google’s chief people officer, Fiona Cicconi, wrote an email to employees at the end of the day on Wednesday, which included doubling down on office attendance, reasoning that “there’s just no substitute for coming together in person.”

“Of course, not everyone believes in ‘magical hallway conversations,’ but there’s no question that working together in the same room makes a positive difference,” Cicconi’s email read. “Many of the products we unveiled at I/O and Google Marketing Live last month were conceived, developed and built by teams working side by side.”

Her note said the company will start including their three days per week as a part of their performance reviews and teams will start sending reminders to workers “who are consistently absent from the office.”

Cicconi even asked already-approved remote workers to reconsider. “For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community.”

A separate internal document showed that already-approved remote workers may be subject to reevaluation if the company determines “material changes in business need, role, team, structure or location.”

In the U.S., the company will periodically track whether employees are adhering to the office attendance policy using badge data, and executives are currently reviewing local requirements to implement in other countries, one of the documents states. If workers don’t follow the policy after an extended period of time, human resources will reach out about “next steps.”

Going forward, Cicconi said, new fully remote work will only be granted “by exception only.”

In a statement to CNBC, Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont said, “our hybrid approach is designed to incorporate the best of being together in person with the benefits of working from home for part of the week. Now that we’re more than a year into this way of working, we’re formally integrating this approach into all of our workplace policies.”

Lamont added that the badge data viewed by company leaders is aggregate data and not individualized.

These policy updates represent the company’s most stringent attempt to bring employees back into physical offices.

In 2021, after facing backlash for returning to offices, the company relaxed remote work plans and said it expected to let 20% of employees telecommute. However, most employees have been expected in physical offices at least three days a week as of April 2022 and at the time, the company tried to woo workers by throwing a private Lizzo concert, hiring marching bands and bringing in city mayors to celebrate the returns.

In April, CNBC reported Google dropped its Covid vaccine requirement to enter buildings.

The crackdown comes as the company is in the middle of an artificial intelligence arms race by which it has at times called all hands on deck to rapidly position itself against rivals like Microsoft and OpenAI, whose success has grown in recent months. Google has also made more attempts in recent weeks to crack down on leaks coming from within the company.

However, the crackdown also comes as the company downsizes its real estate footprint amid broader cost-cutting. In February, CNBC first reported Google’s cloud unit told employees that it will transition to a desk-sharing workspace in its five largest locations. CNBC also reported Google indefinitely paused construction on its massive San Jose, California, campus.

Correction: In February, CNBC first reported Google’s cloud unit told employees that it will transition to a desk-sharing workspace in its five largest locations. An earlier version misstated the month.

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Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Meta and Google are stalling the country’s Online News Act by using “bullying tactics.” The companies argue that the bill, which would require the big tech companies to pay news publishers for content posted to their websites, is unsustainable for their bottom line.

The Online News Act would require digital platforms to share revenue with news outlets, and sets up an arbitration framework in the event that those platforms and outlets cannot reach a revenue sharing agreement. Meta and Google have thrown tantrums in regards to the Online News Act in Canada before—Google threatened to block news in Canada in February, while Meta threatened to do the same in March. The bill was first introduced in April 2022, and now, Prime Minister Trudeau are calling Google and Meta for trying to strong arm the Canadian government, according to Reuters.

“The fact that these internet giants would rather cut off Canadians’ access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem, and now they’re resorting to bullying tactics to try and get their way—it’s not going to work,” Trudeau said to reporters, as quoted in Reuters.

Last month, both Google and Meta released official statements on the Online News Act. Meta’s president of Global Affairs Nick Clegg claimed in a statement Meta only fairly benefits from users sharing news on the platform. Clegg further said that users don’t come to Facebook and Instagram for news, but to share the “ups and downs of life.” Google Canada’s vice president and Country Managing Director Sabrina Geremia wrote that the Online News Act could create a lower standard of journalism.

This is not the first time Google and Meta have pitifully attempted to flex their digital biceps against a government trying to hold them accountable for being a glorified newspaper. An Australian law similar to Canada’s Online News Act caused Facebook to ban news sharing amongst users in the country, with the platform claiming that news accounts for less than 4% of content shared. California lawmakers introduced similar legislation this past March that would also require tech companies to share revenue with news publishers through a “journalism usage fee.” Unsurprisingly, Meta and Google did not respond well, but the California Assembly is holding firm against Meta’s threats.

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We know that time in space affects our bodies, from our brains to our bones, but scientists are still not clear on the details. In a new study, researchers looked at how the length of space missions and the time between them might affect fluid in the human brain.

This cerebrospinal fluid, stored in the brain in four pockets called ventricles, helps to cushion the brain and keep it protected. It's also associated with washing away cellular waste and delivering nutrient supplies from the bloodstream.

Researchers from the University of Florida, NASA Johnson Space Centre and other institutions in the US have discovered the way in which spaceflight increases ventricle size and brain fluid volume depends on certain factors, including the length of time astronauts spend in space, and the intervals between their space adventures.

"These findings demonstrate that ventricle expansion continues with spaceflight with increasing mission duration," write University of Florida neuroscientist Heather McGregor and colleagues in their published paper.

Additionally, "intermission intervals less than three years may not allow sufficient time for the ventricles to fully recover their compensatory capacity."

This increase in ventricle size and additional brain fluid is something that has also been seen in previous studies, and it's accompanied by an upward shift of the brain within the skull in microgravity, which in turn contributes to fluid redistribution.

Using MRI scans of 30 astronauts, the researchers built on those earlier studies to discover that the longer the spaceflight, the greater the increase in ventricle size – up to six months or so, where the rate of change seems to plateau.

It's thought the swelling of the brain's ventricles represents a compensatory mechanism during spaceflight, allowing the brain to accommodate shifts in cerebrospinal fluid. Once back on Earth, brain fluid slowly settles back to its normal distribution.

"Although it seems counterintuitive that there would be a greater change in this structure for shorter missions, this may reflect an early, adaptive structural change in-flight that gradually returns to baseline over time," the researchers explain.

For the seven astronauts who had a break of less than three years between missions, this ventricle expansion wasn't as prominent. The team suggests that this means there's not enough time for the brain ventricles to shrink and reset themselves, in order to be able to deal with the increases in cerebrospinal fluid.

The scans also showed that the more previous missions that an astronaut had done, the less noticeable the increase in ventricle size was after a mission. It's almost as if the brains of these astronauts were "less compliant" due to earlier expansions, or had maxed out their capacity for coping with the stressors of spaceflight, the researchers posit.

"This finding suggests that the brain is impacted by the cumulative effects across multiple flights and perhaps separate bouts of adaptation to microgravity and the spaceflight environment," write the researchers.

Part of the challenge for scientists is that there aren't really that many people going up to space on a regular basis – 636 individuals in total at the time of writing. Analyzing the effects of spaceflight on larger groups of people is going to be important to get more of an idea about how different bodies and brains are impacted.

This study didn't go into the subsequent health impacts of changes in ventricle size and brain fluid levels, but it's clear that brain shifts are happening, and are affected by mission length and frequency. Previously, this additional cerebrospinal fluid has been linked to vision problems for astronauts.

With longer missions planned to the Moon and Mars in the coming years, we need to understand as much as we possibly can about what the astronauts will be putting themselves through – and nowhere is that more important than in the brain.

"These findings illustrate some potential plateaus in and boundaries of human brain changes with spaceflight," write the researchers.

The research has been published in Scientific Reports.

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Most people can manage the discomfort of heartburn on their own with lifestyle changes, including maintaining a healthy weight and avoiding smoking, alcohol and foods that trigger your symptoms; and nonprescription medications, such as antacids.

When heartburn occurs repeatedly over time and interferes with your routine, it's considered gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD.

Approximately 20% of the people in the U.S. have GERD, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

The constant backwash of acid with GERD can irritate the lining of your esophagus, often causing it to become inflamed. Over time, chronic inflammation in your esophagus can cause serious damage, including narrowing of the esophagus, called esophageal stricture, or the precancerous changes of Barrett's esophagus.

In addition to heartburn, symptoms of GERD can include:

•     Upper abdominal or chest pain

•     Trouble swallowing

•     Sensation of a lump in your throat

•     A chronic cough

•     Inflammation of the vocal cords

•     New or worsening asthma

With GERD, your health care professional is likely to recommend that you first try lifestyle changes and nonprescription medications—similar to the treatment recommendations for heartburn. And with both conditions, if these measures aren't effective, there are prescription medications that may be recommended.

Surgery and other procedures for GERD

If medications don't help with GERD, or you wish to avoid long-term medication use, your health care team may recommend:

• Fundoplication. With this procedure, the surgeon wraps the top of your stomach around the lower esophageal sphincter, to tighten the muscle and prevent reflux. Fundoplication is usually done with a minimally invasive laparoscopic procedure.

• LINX device. With this procedure, a ring of tiny magnetic beads is wrapped around the junction of the stomach and esophagus. The magnetic attraction between the beads is strong enough to keep the junction closed to refluxing acid but weak enough to allow food to pass through. The LINX device can be implanted using minimally invasive surgery. The magnetic beads do not have an effect on airport security or MRI.

• Transoral incisionless fundoplication. This new procedure involves tightening the lower esophageal sphincter by creating a partial wrap around the lower esophagus using polypropylene fasteners. Transoral incisionless fundoplication is performed through the mouth by using an endoscope and requires no surgical incision. Its advantages include quick recovery time and high tolerance.

2023 Mayo Clinic News Network.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Off the coast of south-east China, one particular fish species is booming: the oddly named Bombay duck, a long, slim fish with a distinctive, gaping jaw and a texture like jelly. When research ships trawl the seafloor off that coast, they now catch upwards of 440lb (200kg) of the gelatinous fish per hour — a more than tenfold increase over a decade ago. "It's monstrous," says University of British Columbia fisheries researcher Daniel Pauly of the explosion in numbers.

The reason for this mass invasion, says Pauly, is extremely low oxygen levels in these polluted waters. Fish species that can't cope with less oxygen have fled, while the Bombay duck, part of a small subset of species that is physiologically better able to deal with less oxygen, has moved in.

The boom is making some people happy, since Bombay duck is perfectly edible. But the influx provides a peek at a bleak future for China and for the planet as a whole. As the atmosphere warms, oceans around the world are becoming ever more deprived of oxygen, forcing many species to migrate from their usual homes. Researchers expect many places to experience a decline in species diversity, ending up with just those few species that can cope with the harsher conditions. Lack of ecosystem diversity means lack of resilience. "Deoxygenation is a big problem," Pauly summarises.

Our future ocean – warmer and oxygen-deprived – will not only hold fewer kinds of fish, but also smaller, stunted fish and, to add insult to injury, more greenhouse-gas producing bacteria, scientists say. The tropics will empty as fish move to more oxygenated waters, says Pauly, and those specialist fish already living at the poles will face extinction.

Fish in warmer waters have a higher metabolism and need more oxygen (Credit: Getty Images)

Researchers complain that the oxygen problem doesn't get the attention it deserves, with ocean acidification and warming grabbing the bulk of both news headlines and academic research. Just this April, for example, headlines screamed that global surface waters were hotter than they have ever been — a shockingly balmy average of 21C (70F). That's obviously not good for marine life. But when researchers take the time to compare the three effects — warming, acidification, and deoxygenation — the impacts of low oxygen are the worst.

"That's not so surprising," says Wilco Verberk, an eco-physiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. "If you run out of oxygen, the other problems are inconsequential." Fish, like other animals, need to breathe.

Oxygen levels in the world's oceans have already dropped more than 2% between 1960 and 2010, and they are expected to decline up to 7% below the 1960 level over the next century. Some patches are worse than others – the top of the north-east Pacific has lost more than 15% of its oxygen. According to the Interngovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2019 special report on the oceans, from 1970 to 2010, the volume of "oxygen minimum zones" in the global oceans – where big fish can't thrive but jellyfish can – increased by between 3% and 8%.

The oxygen drop is driven by a few factors. First, the laws of physics dictate that warmer water can hold less dissolved gas than cooler water (this is why a warm soda is less fizzy than a cold one). As our world warms, the surface waters of our oceans lose oxygen, in addition to other dissolved gases. This simple solubility effect accounts for about half of the observed oxygen loss seen so far in the upper 1,000m (3,3300ft) of the ocean.

Researchers have even suggested that the rise of microplastics pollution has the potential to exacerbate the low-oxygen problem

Deeper down, oxygen levels are largely governed by currents that mix surface waters downward, and this too is being affected by climate change. Melting ice adds fresh, less-dense water that resists downward mixing in key regions, and the high rate of atmospheric warming at the poles, as compared to the equator, also dampens winds that drive ocean currents.

Finally, bacteria living in the water, which feed off phytoplankton and other organic gunk as it falls to the seafloor, consume oxygen. This effect can be massive along coastlines, where fertiliser run-off feeds algae blooms, which in turn feed oxygen-gobbling bacteria. This creates ever more "dead zones," including the infamous one in the Gulf of Mexico.

Researchers have even suggested that the rise of microplastics pollution has the potential to exacerbate the low-oxygen problem. This theory predicts that if zooplankton fill up on microplastics instead of phytoplankton — their usual prey — the latter will proliferate, again feeding all those oxygen-gobbling bacteria on their way to the seafloor.

As oxygen levels fall, jellyfish are expected to increase in number, scientists say (Credit: Getty Images)

The Global Ocean Oxygen Network — a scientific group set up as part of the United Nation's Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030 – reports that since the 1960s, the area of low-oxygen water in the open ocean has increased by 1.7 million sq miles (4.14 million sq km). That's an area a little more than half the size of Canada. By 2080, a 2021 study reported, more than 70% of the global oceans will experience noticeable deoxygenation.

In 2018, hundreds of researchers concerned with oxygen loss signed the Kiel Declaration to urgently call for more awareness of the problem, alongside work to limit pollution and warming. Researchers are now in the midst of establishing a Global Ocean Oxygen Database and ATlas (GO2DAT) to consolidate and map all the data.

Andrew Babbin, a biogeochemist at MIT who is on the steering committee for GO2DAT, in 2021 mapped out huge areas of extremely low oxygen in the Pacific. "It's concerning for sure," says Babbin, who hopes to repeat the mapping exercise in a decade or so to see how things change. One issue, he notes, is that low-oxygen conditions tend to host a class of anoxic bacteria that produce methane or nitrous oxide — potent greenhouse gases.

Modelling the net impacts of the three factors – solubility, mixing, and microbiology – has proven tricky. "Any one of those is hard," says Babbin. "And then you put them all together, and it's dramatically difficult to make any predictions." In the tropics, for example, one model suggests that a shifting balance of biological factors that deplete oxygen, versus ocean mixing that delivers oxygen, will drive oxygen levels down until about 2150 but then raise them — a spot of potentially good news for tropical fish. On the whole, though, climate models seem to have underestimated changes in oxygen levels, which have been dropping faster than expected.

The impacts on marine life are going to be complicated – and not good.

Fish already expend tens of times more energy to breathe than people do

In general, a hot fish has a higher metabolism and needs more oxygen. Trout, for example, need five to six times more dissolved oxygen when waters are a balmy 24C (75F) than when they are a chilly 5C (41F). So as waters warm and the oxygen seeps out, many marine creatures take a double hit. "Fish require a lot of oxygen, particularly the large ones we like to eat," says Babbin.

Right now, there are about 6 milligrams of oxygen per litre of seawater in the tropics, and 11 milligrams per litre at the colder poles. If levels drop below 2 milligrams per litre (a 60% to 80% reduction), as they often do in some patches, the water is officially hypoxic – too low in oxygen to sustain many species. But subtler drops can also have a big impact. Fish already expend tens of times more energy to breathe than people do, notes Pauly, since they must pump the paltry oxygen out of viscous water.

The effects of low oxygen are well known to mountaineers, who experience headaches and potentially fatal confusion at high altitudes. Fish often try to swim away from low oxygen waters, but if they can't escape, they become sluggish. Low oxygen levels affect almost everything across the board, including fish growth, reproduction, activity levels, and outright survival. A host of genetic and metabolic changes can help fish conserve energy, but only within limits. In general, larger fish are more affected simply because their body-volume-to-gill ratio is larger, making it harder to feed their cells with oxygen. Overfishing has already had the effect of decreasing the number of large fish in the ocean; deoxygenation looks set to exacerbate that effect, says Verberk.

The long-term chronic effects of slightly decreased oxygen levels are harder to evaluate than the short-term effects of hypoxia, says Verberk, and researchers have urgently called for more research on the subject. "For mild hypoxia over longer terms, there's not that many studies, but it's likely to have quite a strong impact," he says. "If you continually have 7% less energy [from 7% less oxygen], that's going to accumulate to quite a large deficit."

Larger fish such as tuna may be more adversely affected by falling oxygen levels (Credit: Getty Images)

Fish are already moving to find more oxygen. Those living in deeper waters may move down to colder, and therefore more oxygenated waters, while fish living in the top few hundred metres of the water column, like coastal rockfish, may move toward the surface to catch a breath. In a study of California reef fish from 1995 to 2009, 23 species moved up an average of 8.7m (28.7ft) per decade toward the surface as oxygen levels declined. In the tropical north-east Atlantic, tuna have been driven into a narrower layer of water by oxygen declines; overall, they lost 15% of their available habitat from 1960 to 2010.

While warming and deoxygenation often go hand in hand, the two effects are not completely matched everywhere, all the time, says Verberk. The result is a patchwork of areas too hot or too low in oxygen for various fish to thrive, leading to a mishmash of different escape routes. Researchers are currently trying to trying to map the anticipated effects for different species, studying how temperature and oxygen might restrict their future habitats and how those ranges will overlap with each other.

Once in waters where they can breathe, fish will then have to see what food they can find – and what predators they need to avoid. "Low oxygen is going to be a trigger to move to other places, but those other places are not empty," says Verberk. "They will encounter other animals living there. It's going to change competitive interactions between species." Crabs, says Pauly, are currently marching on the Antarctic as those waters warm and will feast on unprotected molluscs. "There will be a mass destruction," he says.

Over the past century, says Pauly, the greatest pressure on marine life has been overfishing, which has caused huge declines in fish numbers. That could change. If we get overfishing under control, he continues, climate-related pressures will pose the biggest problem for marine life in the coming decades. A 2021 paper showed that the oceans are already committed to a four-fold greater oxygen loss, even if CO2 emissions stop immediately.

If you chart out the trends in warming and oxygen loss, the cataclysmic endpoint for the ocean thousands of years from now would be "a soup that you that you cannot live in", says Pauly. The ocean already has sporadic hypoxic zones, he says, "but you could imagine all the dead zones of the world coalescing into one, and that is the end of the thing." If we don't get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, he says, "we have to expect this to happen."

Source

At every point over the last 70 years, people across the world have continuously believed that morality is declining, US psychologists found by looking at historical surveys.

But rather than morals steadily falling throughout history, the researchers suggested this perception is an illusion caused by rose-tinted memories of the past and a focus on the grim news of the present.

In a study in the journal Nature, the researchers quoted an observer as saying that "the process of our moral decline" has led to "the dark dawning of our modern day".

They then revealed that this is a quote from the Roman historian Livy written more than 2,000 years ago.

"This feeling is always there, you can find quotes from any era of history where people are decrying the decline of people's interpersonal goodness," Adam Mastroianni, a researcher at New York's Columbia University and the study's lead author, told AFP.

The researchers first looked at 177 opinion polls that included more than 220,000 people in the United States from 1949 to 2019.

In 84 percent of the polls, a majority reported that morality had declined—and the rate remained steady regardless of the year.

Similar surveys from 59 other countries found a remarkably similar rate—86 percent—agreed that morals had tumbled.

"People all over the world believe that morality has declined, and they have believed this for as long as researchers have been asking them about it," the study said.

Age, politics not major factors

While one might think that older people were more likely to believe the world has gone to hell, it turned out that young people do as well.

"The effect of age is pretty small," Mastroianni said.

But young and old alike agreed when everything started getting worse.

"Participants believed that moral decline began at about roughly the same time they appeared on Earth," the study said.

And while people with conservative political leanings were more likely to think morals had crumbled, liberals also felt this way, Mastroianni said.

So has the fabric of our society been consistently unraveling over the years?

For the researchers, the evidence suggests that "on average, modern humans treat each other far better than their forebears ever did."

And when it comes to "everyday morality", such as taking care of a neighbor's dog or giving up a train seat to an elderly person, "we found pretty strong evidence of no change," Mastroianni said.

'Troubling consequences'

This illusion of moral decline could be the result of two well-established biases, the study said.

The first is what is known as the Pollyanna principle, in which people tend to forget the negative parts of the past.

The second is that people are likely to seek out negative information about others—and "mass media indulge this tendency," the study said.

Combined, these factors paint a rosy past that has decayed into a cruel present.

But these biases can evaporate when people judge the morals of their friends and family, not society at large.

In 2020, US participants of a survey said that in general people were not as kind, honest or nice as they were in 2005.

But they also said that the people they knew personally had improved morally over the same period.

This illusion of moral decline may have "troubling consequences," the researchers warned.

Three quarters of US respondents in a 2015 poll said that "addressing the moral breakdown of the country" should be a high priority for the government, even amid serious crises such as climate change.

The perception that morals have gone to the dogs could increase the appeal of "leaders who promise to halt that illusory slide—'make America great again'," the study said, in a reference to the campaign slogan of former US President Donald Trump.

More information: Adam Mastroianni, The illusion of moral decline, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06137-x. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x

Journal information: Nature

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“Click the button below to contact your representatives before it is too late,” Deville pleads.

The call-to-action video, launching Wednesday in multiple states, comes from Pornhub, which last month withdrew from Utah over a new law that requires adult sites to verify their users’ ages and holds them liable for serving their content to minors. Now, as similar legislation is set to take effect next month in Arkansas, Mississippi and Virginia, Pornhub is making a last-ditch effort to galvanize users there in opposition.

It’s unclear how much Pornhub expects to achieve, as the laws have already been passed and signed. A company spokesperson told CNN it’s “certainly not our goal” to shut down the site in the three states as it did in Utah but hinted at the possibility, saying that “if necessary, we will share next steps in the coming weeks.”

But the video campaign is only part of a broader unfolding strategy by one of the internet’s highest-profile distributors of adult material.

The video’s release coincides with a previously unreported effort by Pornhub — and its private equity owners, Ethical Capital Partners (ECP) — to convince the world’s largest tech companies to intervene in the wider debate over age restrictions for digital porn and social media.

In recent weeks, ECP has lobbied Apple, Google and Microsoft to jointly develop a technological standard that might turn a user’s electronic device into the proof of age necessary to access restricted online content, according to Solomon Friedman, a partner at ECP.

One possible version of the idea, Friedman told CNN, would be for the tech companies to securely store a person’s age information on a device and for the operating system to provide websites requesting age verification with a yes-or-no answer on the owner’s behalf — allowing sites to block underage users without ever handling anyone’s personal information.

“We are willing to commit whatever resources are required to work proactively with those companies, with other technical service providers and as well with government,” Friedman said.

Pornhub’s simultaneous appeals to users and to Big Tech highlight the challenging position the company now finds itself in amid a wave of state legislation. Under many of these laws, adult sites are required to implement “reasonable age verification methods” that could include users submitting pictures of their photo ID, facial scans or other information, either to third-party companies or to the sites themselves.

Minimum age requirements have emerged as a favored policy tool in statehouses across the country as lawmakers have increasingly become attuned to the potential mental health harms of unregulated social media use. But Pornhub, along with civil liberties and digital rights groups, have broadly warned of the potential pitfalls of age-verification rules.

Those risks can include the infringement of Americans’ rights to access legal speech under the First Amendment; the leakage of personal information belonging to underage as well as overage internet users; or the loss of online anonymity that safety experts say is crucial for shielding vulnerable individuals.

Pornhub’s outreach to Big Tech is intended to convince the companies whose operating systems power the world’s smartphones, tablets and computers that their technology is central to the future of online identity management and to draw their political might into a global policy battle that could reshape the internet for millions.

But it is far from clear the effort is succeeding. Friedman declined to say how, or even if, the companies have responded to Pornhub’s communications. Microsoft declined to comment for this story; Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Friedman characterized the discussions as being in “early stages,” though his other remarks implied the talks may be largely one-sided.

“We are willing and ready to work with them proactively to determine best solutions and to lend any technical expertise that we possibly can, whether it be implementation or pilot projects or assistance in any way,” Friedman told CNN. “We are hoping that this dialogue bears fruit and age verification will be addressed once and for all.”

An ‘intriguing idea,’ with complications

The adult industry has famously led the charge on technological innovation before. Porn played a decisive role in the battle between the VHS and Betamax videotape platforms, facilitated the rise of online credit card transactions and helped promote streaming video technology writ large.

Now, Pornhub’s fight could prove to be a bellwether for the growing push to enforce age verification for social media. As with the battle over adult material, debates over how to keep children and teens away from social media have raised substantial questions about user privacy and how effective age restrictions may be when determined kids inevitably try to circumvent the rules.

The tech industry, for its part, has been making its own strides in digital identity services. In 2021, for example, Apple announced support for adding driver’s licenses from eight states to Apple Wallet. In December, Google announced it was beta testing a similar feature for Android.

Those services, however, are designed for in-person ID checks such as at travel checkpoints or liquor stores, technology experts said, and are not set up to perform age or identity verification remotely or virtually.

Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a consumer advocacy group focused on children’s technology use, described calls for device-based age verification as an “intriguing idea” that might ease burdens on websites and internet users. But, he argued, there are less invasive ways of determining a website visitor’s age.

“It is our position that rather than requiring new, stringent forms of age verification, that we should start by having the platforms use the data they’re already collecting to do age estimation,” Golin said, pointing to how TikTok, for example, reportedly uses behavioral cues and activity algorithms to guess whether a user may be underage.

Any device-based approach to age verification would immediately run into issues in most households with children, where no device is ever solely used by one person or exclusively by adults, said India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization.

“You would have to assume that children and teens weren’t borrowing their parents’ phones,” McKinney said. “And that’s sharing on purpose. You don’t have to be too sophisticated to think about teens stealing their parent’s device to get around the age-gating.”

Meanwhile, entrusting large tech companies to be the custodians of even more personal information, and enabling them to be the effective arbiters of what internet users can see online, brings its own challenges, said Udbhav Tiwari, head of global product policy at Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox web browser.

Device-based age verification, Tiwari said, could have “very serious privacy connotations, because you now have the largest tech companies in the world having your government ID and all the information present in them linked to individual devices. We’ve seen Twitter use phone numbers they collected for account security for targeting ads in the past, which led to them being subjected to FTC fines.”

Last year, Twitter agreed to pay $150 million to resolve those Federal Trade Commission allegations.

But Pornhub argues that the alternative is a world that’s even less safe, where users seeking age-restricted content may simply go to sites without age-gates or other checks.

“Giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution,” Deville says in Wednesday’s video. “In fact, it will put children and your privacy at risk.”

Source

She produced a foetus that was 99.9% genetically identical to herself.

The phenomenon of so-called "virgin birth" has been found in species of birds, fish and other reptiles, but never before in crocodiles.

The scientists say the trait might be inherited from an evolutionary ancestor, so dinosaurs might also have been capable of self-reproduction.

The egg was laid by an 18-year-old female American crocodile in Parque Reptilania in January 2018. The foetus inside was fully formed but stillborn and so did not hatch.

The crocodile who laid the egg was obtained when she was two years old and was kept apart from other crocodiles for its entire life. Because of this, the park's scientific team contacted a US team from Virginia Polytechnic, which specialised in virgin births, known scientifically as parthenogenesis.

They analysed the foetus and found that it was more than 99.9 % genetically identical to its mother - confirming that it had no father.

Writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the researchers say that virgin births may be more common in crocodiles, and have gone unnoticed until now because people have not been looking for instances of them.

"It is not uncommon for captive reptiles to lay clutches of eggs, given the period of isolation from mates, these would normally be considered non-viable and discarded. These findings therefore suggest that eggs should be assessed for potential viability when males are absent," the scientists say in their research paper.

"Furthermore, given that (virgin births) can occur in the presence of potential mates, instances of this may be missed when reproduction occurs in females co-habited with males".

It is unclear why parthenogenesis occurs in different species, but occurrences are cropping up in the scientific literature more often, probably because researchers are now looking for it. One theory is that it happens in species capable of parthenogenesis when numbers dwindle, and they are on the verge of extinction.

"This new evidence offers tantalizing insights into the possible reproductive capabilities of extinct relatives of crocodiles," write the scientists, "notably the dinosaurs".

Source

Also:  A documented case of a crocodile virgin birth

For the second time in 24 hours, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has sued a major cryptocurrency exchange. Yesterday, the regulator filed charges against Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, with accusations of manipulative trading practices, mishandling customer assets, and failures of corporate control. Today, the SEC followed up with a suit against the Nasdaq-listed exchange Coinbase, alleging that it has violated securities laws.

The double salvo sends a clear message that the SEC is gunning for crypto. The upshot of this could be that US investors lose access to popular crypto assets. 

“We are reaching an end state where if the current regulatory crackdown in the US proceeds unchecked, then you’re basically banning most crypto activity in the US,” says Omid Malekan, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and author of Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets and Platforms. 

The SEC’s latest complaint doubles down on its long-standing assertion that many crypto tokens are simply securities, as defined under existing laws in the US. That means they fall under its purview, the regulator says. Based on that interpretation, the suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, accuses Coinbase of knowingly operating an unregistered securities exchange by selling tokens, including Sol, Ada, and Matic, to US investors. The SEC also accuses Coinbase of violating securities law in connection with its staking service, which lets customers earn profits on certain crypto holdings by pooling them and locking them up.

“You simply can’t ignore the rules because you don’t like them or because you’d prefer different ones: The consequences for the investing public are far too great,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, in a public statement. “Coinbase was fully aware of the applicability of the federal securities laws to its business activities, but deliberately refused to follow them.”

Like Binance yesterday, Coinbase turned the finger of blame back on the regulator, claiming the SEC has failed to mark out a road to compliance for crypto businesses. “The SEC’s reliance on an enforcement-only approach in the absence of clear rules for the digital asset industry is hurting America’s economic competitiveness,” says Paul Grewal, the company’s chief legal officer. Coinbase has “demonstrated commitment to compliance,” he claims, and will continue to operate as usual while it defends against the complaint.

This tension—over the interpretation of existing securities laws and whether they apply to crypto—will form the center of the case to come, says Noelle Acheson, an independent crypto analyst. “It’s very much game on,” Acheson says.

With the filings against Coinbase and Binance, the SEC has now formally alleged that seven of the top 15 largest cryptocurrencies are securities. Bitcoin is considered an exception, and the SEC has not rendered a clear verdict on Ether, but the agency “seems to be using a broad rubric by which to classify these tokens as securities,” says Molly White, author of crypto-skeptic blog Web3 Is Going Just Great. 

Any exchange that supports the trading of securities must first register with the SEC—a process that comes with various reporting and diligence requirements. SEC chair Gary Gensler has long called on crypto exchanges to register or face enforcement action.

But the demand creates a catch-22 of sorts that threatens viability in the US of crypto assets that are deemed securities: Gensler demands that crypto exchanges register with the SEC, but the exchanges claim there is no means of doing so. In March, Paul Grewal told WIRED that “Coinbase is not asking for special treatment” but that there is no clear path to registering because the process makes no accommodation for the unique attributes of crypto tokens. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reiterated the same message in a tweet responding to today’s SEC complaint.

Coinbase’s share price fell nearly 14 percent after the case was announced. Dan Dolev, senior fintech equity research analyst at Mizuho, estimates that about 30 percent of Coinbase’s revenue could be at risk as the crypto industry comes under tighter scrutiny. Some of that loss could fall off with alt coin trading, if those now have to be registered as securities, and the exchange could lose another chunk from a loss in staking revenue. More risk-averse institutional investors might start to steer clear of the exchange, while banks may be reluctant to work with an organization that is attracting regulatory attention. After a chaotic year in the crypto industry, this is just another blow for Coinbase. “This downward spiral is only getting worse,” Dolev says.

The complaints against Coinbase and Binance are likely to take years to pass through the courts—as demonstrated by the SEC’s case against Ripple, which deals in many of the same issues. Short of legislative intervention from Congress, questions around the classification of crypto assets and jurisdiction of the SEC will remain unresolved too. All the while, the US crypto industry will hang in limbo.

Some in the industry think that’s part of the motivation.  “It’s an effort to chill the market,” says Justin Browder, partner at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. The complaints will serve to put crypto on ice in the US, he explains. For now, exchanges will continue to operate and customers are still able to trade, but a question mark will hang over the legality of the crypto assets named in the complaints for the duration of the legal proceedings. Equally, new crypto businesses are less likely to want to set up shop in a country that has demonstrated itself unsympathetic to the sector.

Browder says the charges brought by the SEC this week indicate that the agency is perfectly comfortable with a future in which US residents have limited access to crypto assets. “The undercurrent is that the SEC views crypto assets, in the way they’re currently offered, as inappropriate for retail investors,” says Browder. “If the SEC thinks this asset class needs to be curtailed, these two actions are the most effective way to send the signal.”

Coinbase and Binance Lawsuits Put Crypto on Ice

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With 7,000+ satellites and growing, is space sustainable? An Ars Frontiers recap

The artificial sweetener sucralose (marketed as Splenda) is widely used and found in products like diet soda and chewing gum. According to a new study, it's also capable of damaging the DNA material inside our cells.

As DNA holds the genetic code controlling how our bodies grow and are maintained, that's a serious problem that could lead to multiple health issues.

So significant are the researchers' concerns, they are now calling for food standard agencies to review the safety and regulatory status of the sugar substitute.

The technical term for something that breaks DNA like this is genotoxic, and the study looked specifically at sucralose-6-acetate: this chemical compound is produced when sucralose is ingested and metabolized in the body, as reported in a 2018 study in rats.

"To put this in context, the European Food Safety Authority has a threshold of toxicological concern for all genotoxic substances of 0.15 micrograms per person per day," says biomedical engineer Susan Schiffman from North Carolina State University.

"Our work suggests that the trace amounts of sucralose-6-acetate in a single, daily sucralose-sweetened drink exceed that threshold. And that's not even accounting for the amount of sucralose-6-acetate produced as metabolites after people consume sucralose."

In other words, sucralose-6-acetate is already present in these drinks before they are ingested, but even more of it is produced in our stomachs. Sucralose is actually made from a tweaked version of sucralose-6-acetate, which is synthesized from sucrose sugar.

In the study, the researchers ran a series of lab tests on human blood cells and gut wall tissue to see the reaction to both sucralose and the sucralose-6-acetate compound. Tests were also done on the genetic activity of the gut cells, all using standardized analysis procedures for detecting DNA damage.

The tests confirmed mechanisms that were genotoxic and clastogenic (breaking strands of DNA), as well as showing increases in the expression of genes that are linked to inflammation, oxidative stress, and cancer. What's more, the gut lining was also damaged.

"[W]e found that both chemicals [sucrose and sucralose-6-acetate] cause 'leaky gut'," says Schiffman.

"Basically, they make the wall of the gut more permeable. The chemicals damage the 'tight junctions', or interfaces, where cells in the gut wall connect to each other."

A leaky gut means that the partially digested food and toxins can seep into the bloodstream. The condition can be brought on in numerous ways, and can have subsequent impacts in many different parts of the body.

The researchers behind the new study warn that people should now stop taking sucralose and consuming anything that contains it. Previously, regulatory approval was given to the sweetener based on research showing that it passed through the body unchanged – findings that are now being contradicted by more recent studies.

That regulatory approval may now have to be reviewed. Further research could look more closely at the potentially dangerous health impacts of sucralose-6-acetate exposure, the researchers suggest.

"This work raises a host of concerns about the potential health effects associated with sucralose and its metabolites," says Schiffman.

"It's time to revisit the safety and regulatory status of sucralose, because the evidence is mounting that it carries significant risks."

The research has been published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B.

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