A new randomized trial from researchers in the United States has shown that injections of ketamine are at least as effective as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) when treating non-psychotic forms of major depression.

After starting ECT or ketamine therapy, patients in the trial reported an almost immediate improvement in the quality of their lives. Side effects like nausea and poor memory were common for both treatments, albeit short-lived.

"Statistically, it was a robust finding showing that ketamine was non-inferior to ECT," says psychopharmacologist Sanjay Mathew from Baylor College of Medicine.

"This study can give clinicians and patients confidence that ketamine is a reasonable and safe alternative to ECT, at least for the short-term management of treatment-resistant, non-psychotic depression."

For nearly 80 years, ECT has remained the standard gold treatment for severe depression that doesn't respond to other drug treatments or therapies, making ketamine the first real contender ECT has faced.

Historically, ketamine has been used in clinical settings for sedation and pain relief because it lulls patients into a trance-like state of euphoria.

However, the psychoactive substance has also shown some remarkable mental health benefits in recent years.

Clinical studies have shown a low-dose infusion of ketamine administered over an hour or so can relieve symptoms of depression for weeks at a time. That's remarkable, given that many antidepressants take a month or so to kick in with less potent effects.

Initial trials on ketamine have been so promising that in 2019 the United States Food and Drug Administration approved a ketamine-based nasal spray for those with intractable depression and chronic suicidal thoughts.

Previous studies comparing ECT and ketamine have found each therapy safe and efficacious in treating resistant depression. But while some trials suggest ECT is "significantly superior" to ketamine when it comes to remission, other studies indicate ketamine retains 90 percent of the effect seen from ECT treatments.

The latest trial from the US comparing the two treatments used a larger sample size and only focused on non-psychotic forms of depression.

Interestingly, when researchers randomly split patients into two treatment groups, ECT or ketamine injections, those assigned to the ECT group dropped out at a higher rate.

That might have to do with the fact that ECT requires general anesthesia, whereas ketamine injections take about 40 minutes and can be administered while the patient is awake.

In the end, the trial saw 158 patients with resistant depression receive three weeks of ECT three times a week, and 180 patients receive three weeks of ketamine injections twice per week.

These patients were enrolled for the trial at multiple institutes along the east coast, including Yale University, Johns Hopkins, and Baylor College of Medicine.

Several days after the three-week treatment, patients filled out questionnaires on their mental health.

Treatment was considered a success when a patient's depression severity scores decreased by at least 50 percent from the start of the trial.

In the end, 55 percent of patients responded to ketamine treatments, while 41 percent responded to ECT treatments.

Moderate-to-severe side effects were slightly more common among the ECT group at a rate of just over 30 percent.

"ECT is often used for suicidal patients in the inpatient setting, so now we need to do a large-scale comparison of ketamine versus ECT for our most critically ill and suicidal patients," says Mathew.

Previous studies have shown ketamine can rapidly reduce suicidal thoughts in over two-thirds of patients, suggesting this new form of treatment could possibly save lives.

With so few options available to treat resistant forms of depression, we can't afford to ignore these leads.

The study was published in NEJM.

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Given their ubiquity—and the enjoyment many people get from seeing and cataloging them—birds offer something that sets them apart from other creatures: an abundance of data. Birds are active year-round, they come in many shapes and colors, and they are relatively simple to identify and appealing to observe. Every year around the world, amateur birdwatchers record millions of sightings in databases that are available for analysis.

All that monitoring has revealed some sobering trends. Over the last 50 years, North America has lost a third of its birds, studies suggest, and most bird species are in decline. Because birds are indicators of environmental integrity and of how other, less scrutinized species are doing, data like these should be a call to action, says Peter Marra, a conservation biologist and dean of Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute. “If our birds are disappearing, then we’re cutting the legs off beneath us,” he says. “We’re destroying the environment that we depend on.”

It’s not all bad news for birds: Some species are increasing in number, data show, and dozens have been saved from extinction. Understanding both the steep declines and the success stories, experts say, could help to inform efforts to protect birds as well as other species.

The bad news

On his daily walks at dawn along a trail that snakes by several reservoirs near his home in central England, Alexander Lees typically sees a variety of common waterfowl: Canada geese, mallards, an occasional goosander, a type of diving duck. Every once in a while, he spots something rare: a northern gannet, a kittiwake, or a black tern. Lees, a conservation biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, records each sighting in eBird, an online checklist and growing, global bird database.

Emperor penguins line up at water's edge at Flutter Colony, Antarctica. Numbers of this charismatic species are decreasing; it is listed as near threatened on the IUCN’s Red List.

Lees studies birds for a living, but the vast majority of those who track the world’s 11,000 or so bird species, either on their own or as part of organized events, do not. Hundreds of thousands of them participate each year in the Great Backyard Bird Count, launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society in 1998: For four days each February, people tally their sightings and the data are entered into eBird or a related identification app for beginners called Merlin.

The North American Breeding Bird Survey, organized by the US Geological Survey and Environment Canada, has enlisted thousands of participants to observe birds along roadsides each June since 1966. Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, which began in 1900, encourages people to join a one-day bird tally scheduled in a three-week window during the holiday season. There are shorebird censuses and waterfowl surveys, all powered by citizen scientists.

This wealth of longitudinal recordings started to turn up signs of distress as far back as 1989, Marra says, when researchers analyzed data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey and concluded that declines were occurring among most of the species that breed in forests of the eastern United States and Canada, then migrate to the tropics.

Thirty years later, Marra and colleagues reassessed the situation using multiple bird-monitoring datasets from North America along with data on nocturnal bird migrations from weather radars. They found stunning losses. Since 1970, the team reported in Science in 2019, the number of birds in North America has declined by nearly 3 billion: a 29 percent loss of abundance. The paper used several methods for estimating changes in population sizes, Marra says, and “they all told us the same thing, which was that we’re watching the process of extinction happen.”

More than half of the 529 bird species assessed by the study have declined, the team reported, with the steepest drops in grassland birds, which have suffered from habitat loss and our use of pesticides. Declines are widespread among many common and abundant species that play important roles in food webs, Marra adds.

And it’s not just North America. In the European Union, a 2021 study of 378 species estimated that bird numbers fell by as much as 19 percent from 1980 to 2017. Data are scarcer on other continents, but reports are starting to chronicle concerns elsewhere, too. At least half of the birds that depend on South Africa’s forests have experienced shrinking ranges (with population trends yet to be assessed).

Bird numbers are falling across a broad range of habitats, as these graphs from Europe and North America show. Birds that live in grassland, farmland, and aridland are especially affected.

In Costa Rica’s agricultural areas, an assessment of 112 bird populations found more are declining than are increasing or remaining stable, according to a 12-year study of coffee plantations and forest fragments that was published in 2019. Meanwhile, at 55 sites in the Amazon, 11 percent of surveyed insect-eating birds have experienced shrinking ranks, some of them dramatically, over more than 35 years of tracking. Of 79 species on which there were enough data to compare historical and recent numbers in primary forests, eight have dwindled by at least 50 percent.

And in India, using citizen science data from eBird, a 2020 report estimated shrinking numbers in 80 percent of the 146 species examined—nearly half with declines of more than 50 percent. Overall, 13 percent of birds worldwide are threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, a comprehensive source of information on the extinction risk of the world’s plant, animal, and fungus species.

Recently, Lees and colleagues pulled together all the data they could find on the state of the world’s birds, publishing in the 2022 Annual Review of Environment and Resources. It was an attempt to, for the first time, synthesize research from across the world to create a comprehensive picture of global changes in bird abundance. “Looking across all taxa, there are big signals for declines everywhere,” Lees says. “There are some species which are increasing, but more species are declining than are increasing. In our attempts to halt the loss of global bird biodiversity, we’re currently not succeeding.”

This California condor was hatched in 2004 as part of a breeding program and released in Arizona in 2006. In the 1980s, just 27 of the birds remained in existence. A recovery program has boosted the species’ numbers to more than 500, with several hundred living once more in the wild.

Silver linings

Even as they reveal a downward slide, bird surveys offer some hopeful signs. Wetland species in North America have grown by 13 percent since 1970, according to the 2019 Science study, led by a 56 percent rise in waterfowl numbers. The paper credits billions of dollars allocated to the protection and restoration of wetlands, often for the sake of hunting. In India, 14 percent of assessed bird species have been growing in abundance. Those successes, scientists say, show that it is possible to reverse population declines.

There are plenty of examples of birds that have been saved from extinction by people, adds Philip McGowan, a conservation scientist at Newcastle University in the UK. To assess the impacts of conservation actions, he and colleagues made a list of bird and mammal species that were listed as endangered or extinct in the wild on the IUCN Red List at any point since 1993.

For each species, they collected as much information as they could about population trends, pressures driving the species to extinction, and key decisions or actions taken to protect them. Over daylong Zoom calls, small groups of researchers hashed out the details before everyone assigned each species a score indicating how confident they were that conservation actions had influenced the species’ status.

For some birds, the researchers were able to definitively link conservation efforts with species survival. The Spix’s macaw, for example, has continued to exist only because it has been kept in captivity. And the California condor clearly benefited from the ban of lead ammunition, as well as captive breeding programs and reintroductions, among other measures.

But for other species, there was less certainty. The red-billed curassow of eastern Brazil, for one, faces threats of habitat fragmentation and hunting. Protected areas intended to safeguard it aren’t always well enforced, making it probable but less clear that conservation has helped the species.

Overall, the researchers reported in 2020, as many as 48 species of birds and mammals were saved from extinction between 1993 and 2020 (McGowan says that is likely to be an underestimate). The number of extinctions, the calculations showed, would have been three or four times higher or more without human intervention.

Those findings should offer hope and motivation to help more species, McGowan says. “If we look at what has worked, we know that we can avoid extinctions,” he says. “We just need to scale that up.”

AMID THE BAD NEWS, SOME BIRD SUCCESS STORIES

Despite widespread signs of trouble, some birds are doing great.

Take, for example, the black-browed albatross, a seabird with a range throughout the southern oceans that encompasses Chile, Antarctica, and Australia. Albatrosses like to hang around fishing boats, and they often die after getting tangled up in baited hooks. But simple measures—like shielding hooks or putting colorful strings on fishing lines to scare the birds away—have dramatically reduced the accidental snagging of these birds in some places, including by more than 90 percent in South Africa. Today, some half a million pairs of black-browed albatrosses breed on the Falkland Islands alone, according to BirdLife International. Worldwide, there are 1.4 million mature adults, and the numbers are growing.

The Cook’s petrel, a resident of New Zealand, is another seabird that has benefited from conservation measures—in this case, the eradication of rats, cats, and other invasive predators from the bird’s small breeding islands. It is still classified as vulnerable because its range is small, but success of the birds’ fledglings has increased from 5 percent to 70 percent, and the population is rebounding.

In India, community outreach ended the unsustainable hunting of more than 100,000 Amur falcons each year, stabilizing what is thought to have been a rapidly declining population. And Kirtland’s warbler numbers rose from 200 to 2,300 breeding pairs after protections were enacted both in their breeding grounds in Michigan and their wintering grounds in the Bahamas. In 2019, the birds were removed from the US Fish and Wildlife Services endangered species list.

These and other stories of rebound and growth show that the actions we take can make the difference between a struggling species and a thriving one, says Alexander Lees, a conservation biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. “There are lots and lots of exciting examples of success.”

Forging ahead

In 2020, the year after Marra and colleagues reported a loss of nearly a third of North American birds, they partnered with several conservation groups to launch the Road to Recovery Initiative. The project has identified 104 species of birds in the United States and Canada that need immediate help and, of those, 30 that are highly vulnerable to extinction because of extremely small population sizes or precipitous declines.

For each species, Marra says, it will be important to learn what’s behind their shrinking populations. Currently, he says, “We’re not approaching conservation from a species perspective. And people are nervous about doing that … they view it as being just too difficult. But I maintain that we can figure it out, just like we’ve done with … all the species that almost disappeared because of DDT. We have the power and the understanding with new science and with new quantitative skills to identify the causes of decline and to figure out how we can eliminate those.”

It will take political will to set aside resources and enact widescale changes, such as reducing chemical use on farms, Lees says. Saving more birds, he adds, would ideally entail focusing as much energy on woodlands and agricultural areas as governments have allocated to wetlands, as well as implementing conservation measures well before the point where a species is about to disappear. “What we’re not succeeding at doing,” he says, “is stopping lots of species from getting rarer.”

Policies need to acknowledge the interests of local communities, adds McGowan. That’s a key focus of a new international agreement that was forged at the end of 2022, when representatives from 188 governments met in Montreal for the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) and adopted a set of measures to stop biodiversity loss, restore ecosystems and protect Indigenous rights.

Involving local people can benefit biodiversity while respecting communities, McGowan says. In South America, for example, the yellow-eared parrot nearly went extinct, in part because people decimated palm groves, which are prime nesting habitats for the birds, to use the fronds in Palm Sunday processions. Successful conservation actions have included a community outreach campaign that encouraged people to stop cutting down wax palms and cease hunting the parrots. In 2003, the head of Colombia’s Catholic church halted a 200-year-old Palm Sunday tradition involving wax palms, and parrot numbers have since increased. “Working with local people meant that threat could be reduced,” McGowan says.  Conservation, he says, should target the species that need action most urgently while ensuring that local people are not disenfranchised.

Better population estimates would help to inform conservation efforts, says Corey Callaghan, a global ecologist at the University of Florida in Davie. 

As it stands, wide margins of error are a problem, in part because estimating abundance is challenging and the sampling data are full of biases.  Large birds are overrepresented in some types of citizen science data, Callaghan found in a 2021 study. And since contributors to the North American Breeding Bird Survey stand on the sides of roads in the daytime, Marra says, they miss nocturnal birds, marshland birds and birds that live in untouched landscapes.

Understanding and accounting for these biases could lead to better estimates, says Callaghan. In one example of how far off counts can be, total estimates of shorebirds called Asian dowitchers ranged from 14,000 to 23,000—until a survey in 2019 tallied more than 22,000 of the birds on a single wetland in eastern China. Researchers can’t assess changes if they don’t have accurate baseline estimates, says Callaghan. To that end, he argues for more open sharing of databases and more integration of observations collected by researchers and citizen scientists. “If we want to preserve what we have around us,” he says, “we need to understand how much there is and how much we’re losing.”

As more data emerge, researchers urge optimism. “It’s really important not to have a doomsayer sort of position,” Lees says. Conservation has saved very rare species from extinction, he notes, and reversed declines in once-common species.

“Conservation,” he says, “does work.”

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If you’ve ventured outside after sunset recently and happened to glance to the west, you may have noticed an astonishingly bright “star” glaring down on you, seemingly hovering in the sky. Is it a helicopter, a supernova, a—gasp—UFO?

Nope. That’s Venus, the second rock from the sun, Earth’s evil twin and frequent UFO impersonator.

If you haven’t seen the planet before, right now is the best time to take a gander. It’s not hard to spot: go out when the sky is getting dark and look west and then up. Venus is incredibly bright, shockingly so, which is why it’s commonly mistaken for a UFO. I get e-mails pretty often from slightly panicked people about it. They can’t believe it’s real.

It’s not only real, it’s a whole planet, and it orbits the sun closer than Earth does. Venus is 110 million kilometers from the sun, compared with our 150 million km. It moves faster around our home star, too, so its year is shorter than ours, lasting only about 225 Earth days.

How we see Venus in our sky depends on where it is in its orbit. Imagine standing a short distance away from a race car going around a track. For reference, let’s say there’s a flag marking the center of the track. The car starts between you and the flag and passes in front of it, moving left to right. When it reaches the right side of the track, you see it round the bend and then start moving right to left. It moves along the far side of the track, behind the flag, until it reaches the left side. It rounds that part, moving toward you, and then you see it moving left to right again. It passes in front of the flag, and the cycle starts again.

The situation is the same with Venus, except its orbit is the track, and the sun is the flag in the center. Sometimes we see it passing very near the sun in the sky, when it’s closest to us in space. We call this point inferior conjunction. Venus moves “to the right”—technically westward—until it reaches the point where it’s farthest from the sun, called greatest western elongation. Then it reverses direction as it rounds that part of its orbit, moving eastward, or “to the left.” It passes behind the sun on the far side of its orbit—reaching superior conjunction—and then continues on until it’s as far east as it gets: the point of greatest eastern elongation. It rounds the bend again, starting to head west until it passes Earth on the near side of the sun once more. Then the dance begins anew. (Incidentally, this back-and-forth motion helped inspire the term “planets” itself, which derives from “planētēs”—Greek for “wanderers.”)

The easiest time to see Venus is when it’s at maximum elongation from the sun. At greatest western elongation, it appears to be a morning star, rising well before the sun does, and at greatest eastern elongation, it’s an evening star, setting late. That’s where we are now: Venus reaches greatest eastern elongation on June 4, when it will be 45 degrees away from the sun. As our star dips below the horizon, darkening the sky, Venus becomes an unmissably bright planetary beacon.

It’s not just celestial mechanics that makes Venus “pop,” though—planetary science is a factor, too. Venus is about the same size as Earth, but unlike our world, it is covered with a tremendously dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. This thick blanket of gas absorbs infrared light, trapping it as globe-warming heat. But Venus’s clouds also efficiently reflect visible light—a situation that sets the planet gleaming in our skies, with the downside of pressure-cooking it at a temperature of circa 475 degrees Celsius. That’s hot enough to melt lead, leading to Venus’s eminently deserved status as “Earth’s evil twin.”

But there’s more. Carefully looking at the interplay of light and geometry on Venus can reveal something simple yet profound about our solar system. Like our moon, Venus undergoes phases (although you need a telescope or binoculars to see them). When it’s on the far side of the sun, we see it fully lit like a full moon. As it moves to eastern elongation—as it is now—we see it half lit, and then it becomes an ever thinning crescent as it moves between us and the sun. When it’s closest to the sun in the sky, we see the back side of it, the unilluminated half, so it’s in the “new” phase. At western elongation, it’s half lit again. Then it approaches the far side of the sun, where the cycle repeats.

Those phases are more than just a lovely sight at the eyepiece. Galileo noted the phases of Venus as he observed it early in the 17th century, and he used it as an argument against the then popular geocentric models of the solar system. In such models, Venus and the sun both orbited Earth, with Venus closer to us. But if that were the case, Venus would never look full because it could never be on the far side of the sun, as seen from Earth. A full Venus, Galileo showed, was clinching evidence for the competing sun-focused “heliocentric” solar system model developed by Copernicus.

Galileo paid for this later in life when the Catholic Church accused him of heresy, but happily, there’s no such penalty for you now. Watch Venus while you can, and enjoy the view!

SPECIAL EVENTS TO WATCH FOR

June 2: Mars will pass directly through the Beehive star cluster, an easy “binoculars object” that contains dozens or even hundreds of visible stars.

June 11–13: Venus will pass about a degree away from the Beehive cluster.

June 21: Venus, the thin crescent moon and Mars will make a tight triangle in the west after sunset. Mars and Venus wil lbe close together for several weeks around this time.

July 9: Mars and the bright star Regulus will be less than a degree apart to the upper left of Venus.

July 26: Venus and Mercury will be about 5 degrees apart, low to the horizon, after sunset. Regulus will be close to the pair as well.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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A universal basic income of £1,600 a month is to be trialled in England for the first time in a pilot programme.

Under the pilot programme, 30 people in two areas will be paid an unconditional lump sum each month for two years, with the participants observed to better understand the effects on their lives.

Two places in England have been selected for the micro pilot scheme, central Jarrow in north-east England and Grange, East Finchley in north London.

In the pilots, 15-30 people would receive £1,600 a month for two years.

Will Stronge, the director of research at the thinktank Autonomy, which is backing the plan, said: “This is a substantial amount. Universal basic income usually covers people’s basic needs but we want to see what effect this unconditional lump sum has on people’s mental and physical health, whether they choose to work or not.

“Our society is going to require some form of basic income in the coming years – given the tumult of climate change, tech disruption and industrial transition that lies ahead. This is why building the evidence base and public engagement now is so important, so the ground is well-prepared for national implementation.”

Advocates argue that universal basic income (UBI) provides a level of economic security to everyone. It is also seen as a potential solution to insecurity in the labour market while others say it is expensive and support should be targeted.

Last year, Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said UBI was an idea “whose time has come” as he spoke on the cost of living crisis.

Burnham said: “A universal basic income will put a solid foundation beneath everybody so that they can have a life with security and stop worrying about everything.”

Similar pilots are already under way in other countries. In Wales, the devolved government is running a scheme paying an unconditional £1,600 to young people leaving care for two years. It says it will report on the outcome after the trial finishes.

In 2020, more than 170 MPs and peers urged the government to introduce a universal basic income to “give everyone the financial support they need to provide for themselves and their families” during the coronavirus pandemic.

Cleo Goodman, the co-founder of the initiative Basic Income Conversation, said: “We’re hopeful that this plan will result in the first ever basic income pilots in England. No one should ever be facing poverty, having to choose between heating and eating, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

“Basic income has the potential to simplify the welfare system and tackle poverty in Britain.”

A control group will also be recruited and not paid the basic income to monitor their experiences during the same period. Participants will be randomly selected from a pool of volunteers, with 20% of places allocated to people with disabilities.

Stronge said: “All the evidence shows that it would directly alleviate poverty and boost millions of people’s wellbeing: the potential benefits are just too large to ignore. With the decades ahead set to be full of economic shocks due to climate change and new forms of automation, basic income is going to be a crucial part of securing livelihoods in the future.”

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A pill taken once a day cuts the risk of dying from lung cancer by half, according to “thrilling” and “unprecedented” results from a decade-long global study.

Taking the drug osimertinib after surgery dramatically reduced the risk of patients dying by 51%, results presented at the world’s largest cancer conference showed.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8 million deaths a year. The results of the late-stage study, led by Yale University, were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (Asco) annual meeting in Chicago.

“Thirty years ago, there was nothing we could do for these patients,” said Dr Roy Herbst, the deputy director of Yale Cancer Center and lead author of the study. “Now we have this potent drug.

“Fifty per cent is a big deal in any disease, but certainly in a disease like lung cancer, which has typically been very resistant to therapies.”

The Adaura trial involved patients aged between 30 and 86 in 26 countries and looked at whether the pill could help non-small cell lung cancer patients, the most common form of the disease.

Everyone in the trial had a mutation of the EGFR gene, which is found in about a quarter of global lung cancer cases, and accounts for as many as 40% of cases in Asia. An EGFR mutation is more common in women than men, and in people who have never smoked or have been light smokers.

Speaking in Chicago, Herbst said the “thrilling” results added huge weight to earlier findings from the same trial that showed the pill also halves the risk of a recurrence of the disease.

Herbst, the assistant dean for translational research at Yale School of Medicine, said the pill was proven to be “practice-changing” and should become the “standard of care” for the quarter of lung cancer patients worldwide with the EGFR mutation.

Some patients in the UK, US and other countries are already able to access the drug, he said, but more should benefit.

Not everyone diagnosed with lung cancer is tested for the EGFR mutation, which needs to change, Herbst said, given the study’s findings. “This further reinforces the need to identify these patients with available biomarkers at the time of diagnosis and before treatment begins.”

Treatment after surgery with osimertinib, also known as Tagrisso and made by AstraZeneca, “significantly lowered” the risk of death in lung cancer patients, the trial results reported. “Adjuvant osimertinib demonstrated an unprecedented, highly statistically significant and clinically meaningful overall survival benefit in patients,” the report said.

After five years, 88% of patients who took the daily pill after the removal of their tumour were still alive, compared with 78% of patients treated with a placebo. Overall, there was a 51% lower risk of death for those who received osimertinib compared with those who received placebo.

The survival benefit “was observed consistently” in an analysis across all study subgroups, including those with stage one, stage two and stage three lung cancer. Chemotherapy had been given to 60% of those in the study, and the survival benefit of osimertinib was seen regardless of whether prior chemotherapy was received.

“It is hard to convey how important this finding is and how long it’s taken to get here,” said Dr Nathan Pennell, an Asco expert who was not involved with the study. “This shows an unequivocal, highly significant improvement in survival.”

About two-thirds of the 682 patients in the trial were women. About two-thirds of patients also had no history of smoking, which suggested the pill works for smokers and non-smokers diagnosed with lung cancer.

Angela Terry, the chair of EGFR Positive UK, a lung cancer charity, said the findings were “very exciting” and “hugely significant”.

“A five-year overall survival rate of 88% is incredibly positive news,” she said. “Having access to a drug whose efficacy is proven and whose side-effects are tolerable means patients can be confident of and able to enjoy a good quality of life for longer.”

Source

Sunday, June 4

On Sunday there are going to be two launches, both by SpaceX and both in Florida. The first launch sees a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 22 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. It is scheduled to take off at 9:56 a.m. and the event will be streamed on SpaceX’s website.

Several hours later, another Falcon 9 will take off carrying a Dragon 2 spacecraft. The Dragon 2 will be performing a cargo delivery mission to the ISS. You’ll be able to tune in to this launch on the SpaceX website too. The launch is due at 4:12 p.m.

Wednesday, June 7

Next up is CAS Space’s Kinetica 1 rocket. This is its second launch and it will orbit 26 satellites including the Fucheng 1. This mission will take off at 4:11 a.m. from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre. Given that the launch is coming from China, it’s unlikely there will be a live stream of the event.

Thursday, June 8

On Thursday, there will be yet another Falcon 9 launch but this time it will be carrying the Transporter-8 rideshare mission. In terms of payloads, this mission will carry dozens of small microsatellites and nanosatellites for commercial and government customers. There is no scheduled time given for this launch but it will be taking off from Florida and should be streamable on the SpaceX website.

Friday, June 9

The fourth and final mission is another Falcon 9 rocket carrying two O3b mPOWER broadband internet satellites into a medium Earth orbit for SES. Just like the other Falcon 9 launches, this one will take off from Cape Canaveral at 7:15 p.m. and will be watchable on the SpaceX website.

Recap

The first launch last week was an Indian GLSV Mk II rocket carrying the NVS-01 navigation satellite to orbit. The satellite will make up part of India’s NavIC satnav system that works over the subcontinent.

Later on in the week, China launched a Long March rocket carrying three astronauts to the Chinese Space Station aboard Shenzhou-16. These astronauts were temporarily in space with the Shenzhou-15 crew before the latter departed back for Earth. For a short while last week, there were a whopping 17 people in space - that’s quite a lot more than usual.

The final launch was a Falcon 9 carrying 52 satellites to orbit where they will help power the Starlink internet constellation.

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

TWIRL 117: SpaceX plans four Falcon 9 launches this week

Foucault pendulum, the 19th-century experiment that exemplified the earth’s rotation without complex calculations, has found a new home in the recently inaugurated Parliament building of India. The pendulum features in Parliament’s Constitutional Gallery area. It was designed and installed by the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM), Kolkata.

Invented by the 19th century French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, the pendulum provided simple physical proof that the earth rotated on its axis.

However, as E. Islam, a member of the NCSM team that has built Foucault pendulum models in India and abroad, pointed out in a research paper, the invention was actually an accident. According to Mr. Islam, Foucault was setting up a long and thin metal rod in a lathe when he accidentally plucked it, causing the end of the metal rod to vibrate in the same plane. Its other end rotated while being fixed on the headstock of the lathe.

The incident paved the way for the current version of Foucault pendulum. To test the theory, Foucault suspended a short pendulum from the chuck of a vertical drill press and set it to oscillation. He then started the drill press, and noticed that the pendulum swung in its original plane, irrespective of the fact that its mounted end was rotating. Foucault knew he was onto something. He set up an 11-metre-long wire in the Paris Observatory for analysis and found that it too rotated clockwise.

The physicist first set up the public display of the pendulum at the Pantheon in Paris in 1851. It consisted of a hollow brass sphere filled with lead to reach 28 kg in mass. It measured 17cm in diameter and was suspended from a 67-metre-long pendulum.

According to his findings, it is much easier to understand the phenomenon of the earth’s rotation using the pendulum at the Poles than it is at lower latitudes. At the Poles, the pendulum’s plane rotates once every 24 hours (which is the approximate period for one rotation of the earth), while at the Equator, it does not rotate at all. This is because the earth rotates faster at the Equator than it does at the Poles because it is wider in the centre and hence needs to cover more area in the same time period as compared to the North or South Pole.

The pendulum swings across a plane, which is the surface swiped by the motion of the sphere, also called the pendulum’s bob. As the earth rotates, the plane of the pendulum’s swing appears to rotate slowly. However, it’s not the pendulum, but the earth itself, that is rotating.

Coriolis effect

This relative motion explains the Coriolis effect. Coriolis force is a phenomenon that appears to act on objects in motion in a rotating reference frame, like the earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, Coriolis force causes moving objects to be deflected to the right, while its effect is the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere. This deflection is called the Coriolis effect. The direction in which Foucault pendulum swings is in line with the Coriolis effect. With each swing, the bob of Foucault pendulum moves a little to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and vice versa in the South. This is why the plane of the swing is observed to have rotated in the clockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere over a period of time.

The Royal Astronomical Society, London, states that certain conditions must be satisfied for accuracy of Foucault pendulum. The pendulum must be allowed to swing freely, independent of any torque, in any plane. The bob must be heavy, and the string must be long to reduce air resistance effect. The pendulum must be released from rest smoothly to avoid any knee-jerk motions and to ensure that it swings in a plane.

For people standing on the surface of the earth, rotation is not a noticeable part of the daily life. This is why if the pendulum is installed at the North Pole, it will swing as the earth rotates underneath it, and the plane of the swing will appear to rotate one full circle in 24 hours, like the earth’s rotation. However, a pendulum at the Equator appears to remain in the same plane because it rotates along with the earth.

India’s first Foucault pendulum display was commissioned in 1991 by the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune. It was installed by the NCSM in 1993.

Source

TOKYO – Bans on Huawei telecommunications equipment may cost the US and its allies more than US$100 billion according to industry estimates, but those who want to exclude it from their 5G networks say no price is too high for national security.

Issues of industrial policy, oligopoly, price competition and the rise of protectionism have made the problem more complex amid an escalating tech war where the US seeks to block China’s access to advanced technology including high-end semiconductors.

Calculations by telecom network operators, industry consultants, economists and governments indicate that replacing Huawei equipment that has already been installed could eventually cost the US and its allies more than $10 billion; that the negative economic impact of a slower roll-out of 5G services could be two or three times greater; and that paying the higher prices charged by Huawei’s competitors could raise the total cost of implementing 5G to a level several times higher over the course of the decade.

The potential losses are staggering in financial amount and economic import:

• In 2019, when the US first blacklisted Huawei, global mobile telecom association GSMA estimated that banning Chinese telecom equipment would delay the rollout of 5G networks in Europe by about 18 months and increase its cost by about 55 billion euros.

• That same year, a report based on government data and input from mobile telecom operators concluded that banning Huawei from the UK’s supply chain could delay 5G by 18 to 24 months and cost the UK economy as much as 6.8 billion pounds.

• An Oxford Institute of Economics study covering Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, India, the UK and the US concluded that excluding Huawei could increase 5G investment costs by 16-19% and result in a reduction in GDP of $105.5 billion in the 15 years to 2035 in a median cost scenario.

• In 2022, the US Federal Communications Commission told Congress that removing all Huawei and ZTE equipment in the US alone would cost about $5 billion. The Oxford Institute’s median estimate of the long-term impact on US GDP was estimated at $35.8 billion.

• In March 2023, a report in telecom industry magazine Light Reading indicated that it might cost Deutsche Telekom more than $6 billion to remove all Huawei equipment and that it could take as long as five years. Of 134,000 5G antennas in Germany, about 80,000 were reportedly supplied by Huawei.

These estimates do not include lost sales of semiconductors and other products restricted to Huawei, which amount to tens of billions of dollars more.

Huawei’s telecom equipment prices are reportedly often 20-30% lower than its competitors. They are not always lower, but they have been low enough to enable Huawei to take high market shares in Europe, the home of competitors Nokia and Ericsson.

Price, of course, is not the only factor relevant to telecom carriers: Huawei’s success is also based on good and sometimes superior quality.

According to Strand Consult, a telecom consultancy based in Denmark, the percentage of Chinese equipment (most of it from Huawei but some from ZTE) in European national 5G rollouts ranged from 100% in Cyprus to zero in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and eight other countries at the end of 2022.

Among other countries, it ranged from 72% in Norway to 17% in France, with Germany at 59%, Italy at 51% and the UK at 41%.

Data: Strand Consult; Graphic: Asia Times

John Strand, founder of the eponymous consultancy, for one, finds this alarming. “It is more dangerous to be dependent on Chinese telecoms networks than to be dependent on Russian gas. Digital infrastructure is the fundament of society,” he said.

In February 2020, Robert O’Brien, then-president Trump’s national security advisor said, “We have evidence that Huawei has the capability secretly to access sensitive and personal

information in systems it maintains and sells around the world.”

This evidence has reportedly been provided to the UK, Germany and other US allies.

Before that, in May 2019, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that agents of the Australian Signals Directorate, the nation’s top-secret eavesdropping agency, had been given a challenge: With all the offensive cyber tools at their disposal, what harm could they inflict with access to equipment installed in 5G networks of a target nation?

The ASD found that “the offensive potential of 5G was so great that if Australia were on the receiving end of such attacks, the country could be seriously exposed.”

The key issue was not tapping phone calls or emails, but instead disabling water, power and other infrastructure. Six months later, the Australian government excluded Huawei from its 5G rollout.

Asked if he has seen any hard evidence of Huawei using its 5G equipment for purposes of espionage, Evan Anderson, CEO of information service INVNT/IP (Inventing Nations vs. Nation-Sponsored Theft of IP), told Asia Times by email:

“While I am not aware of a case wherein Huawei was caught directly surveilling foreign citizens outright, they retain the motivation, capability, and government support to do so. As with any company in China, they cannot say no to the government or Communist Party, by law.

“They are a de facto arm of the Chinese state. Conversations about backdoors and evidence of direct surveillance therefore miss the point: surveillance could be achieved in myriad ways by using third parties and leaving the front door open.”

There may not be any publicly-available hard evidence, yet, but national security concerns center on the preemption of potential threats, not about being innocent until proven guilty. Huawei’s rebuttal of the allegations against it can be seen here.

5G network vulnerability is a two-way street. The Sydney Morning Herald article said, “To be sure, China would also be vulnerable to attacks from the US and its allies.”

In 2014, as reported by The New York Times, documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency had already hacked Huawei servers to conduct espionage of its own.

Who’s spying on whom over 5G? Image: RS Kingdom / Twitter / Screengrab

The Five Eyes (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) intelligence-sharing network are losing, or have already lost, their previous monopoly on telecom espionage – and clearly they don’t like it.

The economic argument for continuing to use Huawei equipment and the national security argument against it are irreconcilable. But telecom equipment is both critical infrastructure and key to the development of an advanced economy.

That, of course, is why Japan, South Korea and China have devoted decades of effort and heaps of capital to developing their own first-class telecoms technology.

All three countries have eliminated excessive dependence on foreign suppliers and created domestic intellectual property and supply chains that generate returns far outweighing the initial costs of development.

The US, Canada, Australia and Europe now intend to do the same. How long it might take and whether they can avoid the temptations of oligopoly and protectionist destruction of price incentives remains to be seen.

Source

THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There is a paradox at the heart of our changing climate. While the blanket of air close to the Earth’s surface is warming, most of the atmosphere above is becoming dramatically colder. The same gases that are warming the bottom few miles of air are cooling the much greater expanses above that stretch to the edge of space.

This paradox has long been predicted by climate modelers, but it has only recently been quantified in detail by satellite sensors. The new findings are providing a definitive confirmation on one important issue, but at the same time they are raising other questions.

The good news for climate scientists is that the data on cooling aloft confirm the accuracy of models that identify surface warming as human-made. A new study published in May in the journal PNAS by veteran climate modeler Ben Santer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that it increased the strength of the “signal” of the human fingerprint of climate change fivefold, by reducing the interference “noise” from background natural variability. Santer says the finding is “incontrovertible.”

But the new discoveries about the scale of cooling aloft are leaving atmospheric physicists with new worries—about the safety of orbiting satellites, about the fate of the ozone layer, and about the potential of these rapid changes to visit sudden and unanticipated turmoil on our weather below.

Until recently, scientists called the remote zones of the upper atmosphere the “ignorosphere,” because they knew so little about them. So now that they know more, what are we learning, and should it reassure or alarm us?

THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE has a number of layers. The region we know best, because it is where our weather happens, is the troposphere. This dense blanket of air 5 to 9 miles thick contains 80 percent of the mass of the atmosphere but only a small fraction of its volume. Above it are wide open spaces of progressively less dense air. The stratosphere, which ends around 30 miles up, is followed by the mesosphere, which extends to 50 miles, and then the thermosphere, which reaches more than 400 miles up.

From below, these distant zones appear as placid and pristine blue sky. But in fact, they are buffeted by high winds and huge tides of rising and descending air that occasionally invade our troposphere. And the concern is that this already dynamic environment could change again as it is infiltrated by CO2 and other human-made chemicals that mess with the temperature, density, and chemistry of the air aloft.

Climate change is almost always thought about in terms of the lowest regions of the atmosphere. But physicists now warn that we need to rethink this assumption. Increases in the amount of CO2 are now “manifest throughout the entire perceptible atmosphere,” says Martin Mlynczak, an atmospheric physicist at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. They are “driving dramatic changes that scientists are just now beginning to grasp.” Those changes in the wild blue yonder far above our heads could feed back to change our world below.

The story of changing temperatures in the atmosphere at all levels is largely the story of CO2. We know all too well that our emissions of more than 40 billion tons of the gas annually are warming the troposphere. This happens because the gas absorbs and re-emits solar radiation, heating other molecules in the dense air and raising temperatures overall.

But the gas does not all stay in the troposphere. It also spreads upward through the entire atmosphere. We now know that the rate of increase in its concentration at the top of the atmosphere is as great as at the bottom. But its effect on temperature aloft is very different. In the thinner air aloft, most of the heat re-emitted by the CO2 does not bump into other molecules. It escapes to space. Combined with the greater trapping of heat at lower levels, the result is a rapid cooling of the surrounding atmosphere.

Satellite data have recently revealed that between 2002 and 2019, the mesosphere and lower thermosphere cooled by 3.1 degrees F (1.7 degrees C ). Mlynczak estimates that the doubling of CO2 levels thought likely by later this century will cause a cooling in these zones of around 13.5 degrees F (7.5 degrees C), which is between two and three times faster than the average warming expected at ground level.

Early climate modelers predicted back in the 1960s that this combination of tropospheric warming and strong cooling higher up was the likely effect of increasing CO2 in the air. But its recent detailed confirmation by satellite measurements greatly enhances our confidence in the influence of CO2 on atmospheric temperatures, says Santer, who has been modeling climate change for 30 years.

In May, he used new data on cooling in the middle and upper stratosphere to recalculate the strength of the statistical “signal” of the human fingerprint in climate change. He found that it was greatly strengthened, in particular because of the additional benefit provided by the lower level of background “noise” in the upper atmosphere from natural temperature variability. Santer found that the signal-to noise ratio for human influence grew fivefold, providing “incontrovertible evidence of human effects on the thermal structure of the Earth’s atmosphere.” We are “fundamentally changing” that thermal structure, he says. “These results make me very worried.”

Much of the research analyzing changes aloft has been done by scientists employed by NASA. The space agency has the satellites to measure what is happening, but it also has a particular interest in the implications for the safety of the satellites themselves.

This interest arises because the cooling of the upper air also causes it to contract. The sky is falling—literally.

The depth of the stratosphere has diminished by about 1 percent, or 1,300 feet, since 1980, according to an analysis of NASA data by Petr Pisoft, an atmospheric physicist at Charles University in Prague. Above the stratosphere, Mlynczak found that the mesosphere and lower thermosphere contracted by almost 4,400 feet between 2002 and 2019. Part of this shrinking was due to a short-term decline in solar activity that has since ended, but 1,120 feet of it was due to cooling caused by the extra CO2, he calculates.

This contraction means the upper atmosphere is becoming less dense, which in turn reduces drag on satellites and other objects in low orbit—by around a third by 2070, calculates Ingrid Cnossen, a research fellow at the British Antarctic Survey.

On the face of it, this is good news for satellite operators. Their payloads should stay operational for longer before falling back to Earth. But the problem is the other objects that share these altitudes. The growing amount of space junk—bits of equipment of various sorts left behind in orbit—are also sticking around longer, increasing the risk of collisions with currently operational satellites.

More than 5,000 active and defunct satellites, including the International Space Station, are in orbit at these altitudes, accompanied by more than 30,000 known items of debris more than 4 inches in diameter. The risks of collision, says Cnossen, will grow ever greater as the cooling and contraction gathers pace.

This may be bad for business at space agencies, but how will the changes aloft affect our world below?

One big concern is the already fragile state of the ozone layer in the lower stratosphere, which protects us from harmful solar radiation that causes skin cancers. For much of the 20th century, the ozone layer thinned under assault from industrial emissions of ozone-eating chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Outright ozone holes formed each spring over Antarctica.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol aimed to heal the annual holes by eliminating those emissions. But it is now clear that another factor is undermining this effort: stratospheric cooling.

Ozone destruction operates in overdrive in polar stratospheric clouds, which only form at very low temperatures, particularly over polar regions in winter. But the cooler stratosphere has meant more occasions when such clouds can form. While the ozone layer over the Antarctic is slowly reforming as CFCs disappear, the Arctic is proving different, says Peter von der Gathen of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany. In the Arctic, the cooling is worsening ozone loss. Von der Gathen says the reason for this difference is not clear.

In the spring of 2020, the Arctic had its first full-blown ozone hole with more than half the ozone layer lost in places, which von der Gathen blames on rising CO2 concentrations. It could be the first of many. In a recent paper in Nature Communications, he warned that the continued cooling means current expectations that the ozone layer should be fully healed by mid-century are almost certainly overly optimistic. On current trends, he said, “conditions favorable for large seasonal loss of Arctic column ozone could persist or even worsen until the end of this century … much longer than is commonly appreciated.”

This is made more concerning because, while the regions beneath previous Antarctic holes have been largely devoid of people, the regions beneath future Arctic ozone holes are potentially some of the more densely populated on the planet, including Central and Western Europe. If we thought the thinning ozone layer was a 20th-century worry, we may have to think again.

CHEMISTRY IS NOT the only issue. Atmospheric physicists are also growing concerned that cooling could change air movements aloft in ways that impinge on weather and climate at ground level. One of the most turbulent of these phenomena is known as sudden stratospheric warming.

Westerly winds in the stratosphere periodically reverse, resulting in big temperatures swings, during which parts of the stratosphere can warm by as much as 90 degrees F (50 degrees C) in a couple of days.

This is typically accompanied by a rapid sinking of air that pushes onto the Atlantic jet stream at the top of the troposphere. The jet stream, which drives weather systems widely across the Northern Hemisphere, begins to snake. This disturbance can cause a variety of extreme weather, from persistent intense rains to summer droughts and “blocking highs” that can cause weeks of intense cold winter weather from eastern North America to Europe and parts of Asia.

This much is already known. In the past 20 years, weather forecasters have included such stratospheric influences in their models. This has significantly improved the accuracy of their long-range forecasts, according to the Met Office, a UK government forecasting agency.

The question now being asked is how the extra CO2 and overall stratospheric cooling will influence the frequency and intensity of these sudden warming events. Mark Baldwin, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in England who has studied the phenomenon, says most models agree that sudden stratospheric warming is indeed sensitive to more CO2. But while some models predict many more sudden warming events, others suggest fewer. If we knew more, Baldwin says, it would “lead to improved confidence in both long-term weather forecasts and climate change projections.”

It is becoming ever clearer that, as Gary Thomas, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, puts it, “if we don’t get our models right about what is happening up there, we could get things wrong down below.” But improving models of how the upper atmosphere works—and verifying their accuracy—requires good up-to-date data on real conditions aloft. And the supply of that data is set to dry up, Mlynczak warns.

Most of the satellites that have supplied information from the upper atmosphere over the past three decades—delivering his and others’ forecasts of cooling and contraction—are reaching the ends of their lives. Of six NASA satellites on the case, one failed in December, another was decommissioned in March, and three more are set to shut down soon. “There is as yet no new mission planned or in development,” he says.

Mlynczak is hoping to reboot interest in monitoring with a special session that he is organizing at the American Geophysical Union this fall to discuss the upper atmosphere as “the next frontier in climate change.” Without continued monitoring, the fear is we could soon be returning to the days of the ignorosphere.

Source

Through 2027, the iPhone maker is discussing opening 15 new stores across the Asia-Pacific region, five locations in Europe and the Middle East, and four additional outlets in the U.S. and Canada, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations. The company is also aiming for six revamped or relocated stores in Asia, nine in Europe and 13 in North America, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. In total, the company is proposing 53 new, relocated or remodeled stores over the next four years.

Apple looks to bring fresh luster to its 22-year-old retail operation, which is one of the world's most venerated chains but also has contended with pandemic woes, customer service problems and labor unrest in recent years. The idea is to build Apple's brand in growth markets, such as India, while also giving consumers in the U.S. and Europe a better experience.

The most notable new stores under discussion or in development include three sites in India, the company's first outpost in Malaysia and an upgrade to Apple's historic location in the Opera shopping area of Paris, according to the people. It's also soon opening a store at the Battersea Power Station in London by its new local headquarters and is planning an additional location in Miami. And there's a flagship store slated for the Jing'an Temple Plaza in Shanghai.

Some of the future locations and their timing remain either internal projections or proposals, meaning they could either be delayed or canceled altogether. Still, many of the stores are already in development, with Apple having agreed to leases with landowners. A spokesman for the Cupertino, California-based company declined to comment.

Apple currently has more than 520 stores in 26 countries, with roughly half of them located in the U.S. The chain is famously lucrative on a square-footage basis, but the stores are often more about building Apple's brand than selling goods. The company gets most of its revenue from other channels, including its e-commerce site. Still, the brick-and-mortar locations serve as a key place for customers to buy products on release days, get technical support and take classes.

The company's retail operations are overseen by Deirdre O'Brien, one of Apple's longest-serving executives, who took over the duties when Burberry Group Plc veteran Angela Ahrendts left the role in 2019. Construction and upkeep of the stores themselves is managed by Kristina Raspe, Apple's executive in charge of global real estate and facilities. That group reports to the company's chief financial officer rather than O'Brien.

Apple operates four types of retail outlets, according to internal specifications: a standard store within indoor malls, "Apple Store+" locations that can be in outdoor malls or on city streets, "flagships" in key areas with unique designs, and "flagship+" stores, which are the largest and most expensive to operate. Regular stores typically generate more than $40 million annually, while Apple Store+ locations bring in over $45 million, according to internal data. The flagships generate more than $75 million, while the flagship+ sites make over $100 million annually.

The main focus of the expansion is the Asia-Pacific region, with 21 new or revamped sites planned through 2027. The market generated about $130 billion of Apple's revenue last year—roughly a third of its total—and countries like India have emerged as a critical growth engine. Apple opened its first two stores in India in April.

Later this year, the company is opening a new mall store in Wen Zhou Shi, China, upgrading its Nanjing East flagship in Shanghai and adding a pair of new outlets in South Korea. That expansion in South Korea, the home turf of chief rival Samsung Electronics Co., will bring the total number of outposts in the country to seven. Apple opened its Gangnam store in Seoul in March and its Myeongdong location a year ago.

For next year, the company is planning its first store in Malaysia, located in Kuala Lumpur; the new Jing An Temple Plaza location; a remodel of its Pudong site in Shanghai; and potentially its first outpost in Foshan, China. It's also planning a new store at the Grand Front Plaza mall in Osaka and a remodel of its Shinsaibashi location in the region.

Even with U.S.-China relations China souring, Apple remains highly dependent on the Asian nation—both as a manufacturing partner and a market for its goods. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook celebrated that relationship during a trip to China earlier this year, calling it "symbiotic," and the retail growth underscores Apple's commitment to the country.

For 2025, Apple is discussing opening its third store in India—in the Borivali suburb of Mumbai—and may relocate its site in Perth, Australia. Four new China stores are proposed for that year as well, in addition to a remodel of Apple's Ginza shop in Japan, which was the company's first in the country when it opened in 2003. The store was relocated to a temporary space last year after its original building was demolished.

Apple is proposing opening its fourth India location in 2026. It would be the second one in New Delhi, situated at the DLF Promenade mall. That store could become the second-largest for Apple in India, after the Bandra Kurla Complex site that debuted in Mumbai in April. The company is also laying the groundwork for a new store in Yokohama, Japan, and a relocated outlet in Shibuya Marui, Japan. In 2027, Apple aims to add a fifth Indian outpost, a location in the seaside Worli area in Mumbai.

In Europe, Apple looks to open the London store in the Battersea location as soon as this month. The company is also planning a new store in Madrid at the La Vaguada shopping center, as well as a relocation for its Milton Keynes store in the UK. Europe generated more than $95 billion for Apple last year, or about a fourth of sales. The UK is Apple's third-biggest retail market, home to about 40 stores.

The locations that Apple is rebuilding or moving are mostly aging or outdated stores. In some cases, they're smaller than most modern locations or they lack features like a product pickup area or seating for classes. Apple's aesthetic also has changed over the years. The company has transitioned away from metal walls and accents to wooden shelves.

More broadly, O'Brien is seeking to improve the experience in Apple stores. Complaints from both customers and employees have stacked up in recent years, and the chain has lost some of the cachet it enjoyed when Apple's gleaming logo first began popping up in shopping centers two decades ago. The company also been dealing with a unionization push both in the U.S. and abroad.

For next year, Apple is discussing relocating four UK stores, as well as a location in Le Chesnay, France, and will open its fourth site in Sweden. A year later, it's planning to relocate one more UK site, potentially remodel the Opera location in France and open a new location in Abu Dhabi's Al Ain. That will mark its fifth store in the United Arab Emirates.

Apple is also proposing a new store in Dortmund, Germany. That country is Apple's eighth-largest retail region, featuring over a dozen sites. For 2027, it's discussing a relocation in Munich.

Apple's retail plans in North America also are focused more on overhauling existing operations than spreading to new cities. First up is a revamp of the Tice's Corner store in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, slated for next month. That location was Apple's last with an original black front, dating from the chain's debut in 2001. The company is planning three other U.S. relocations and one Canada store move during the remainder of 2023.

For next year, Apple is considering a few new U.S. sites, including a mall store in the Southern California city of Torrance and a large new location at the $4 billion Worldcenter development in Miami. It is also discussing eventually opening a major new store in Detroit and a relocated store in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Apple is planning a store at the Birkdale Village mall in North Carolina as well, replacing a Charlotte location that abruptly shuttered in March following a rash of shootings in the area. An additional five other relocations are being eyed for the U.S. in 2024.

In 2025, Apple is proposing opening its second outlet in Kansas, a large store in Wichita, and is planning three other U.S. relocations. It's also considering moving its Sainte-Catherine Street store in Montreal.

2023 Bloomberg L.P.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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"We were inspired by the natural system and wanted to mimic it," said Weichen Wang, whose team published its success in the journal Science. "Maybe we can someday help patients to not only restore motor function, but also restore their sensations."

Much faster, larger and more sophisticated circuitry is needed before so-called "e-skin" holds promise for people.

But, in a milestone, the device showed remarkable success in a lab rat. When researchers pressed the rat's e-skin and sent electronic pulses to its brain, the animal responded by twitching its leg.

Scientists have long dreamed of building prosthetic limbs that not only restore movement but also provide perception—sensing pressure, temperature and vibration, for instance—to help restore a more normal quality of life. Skin damage and amputation cause a massive disruption in the loop of perception and movement, so even simple tasks like feeling or grasping an object are challenging.

"If you pick up a glass of beer and you can't sense that it's not cold, then you won't get the right taste," said Ravinder Dahiya, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, who is also studying the use of flexible electronics to develop artificial skin.

Electronic skin also could be used to clad robots so they feel sensations in the same way that humans do. This is critical to the safety of industries where robots and humans have physical interactions, such as passing tools on a manufacturing floor.

But the sensation of touch is complicated. Human skin has millions of receptors that sense when they are poked or pressed, squeezed or scalded. They react by sending electrical pulses to the brain, through nerves. The brain responds by sending information back, telling muscles to move.

And biological skin is soft and can stretch, repeatedly, for many decades.

The Stanford team, led by chemical engineering professor Zhenan Bao, has been working on e-skin designs for several years. But an earlier effort used rigid electronics and 30 volts of power, which requires 10 batteries and isn't safe. And it wasn't able to endure continuous stretching without losing its electrical properties.

"The hurdle was not so much finding mechanisms to mimic the remarkable sensory abilities of human touch, but bringing them together using only skin-like materials," said Bao, in a statement.

The new e-skin is innovative because it uses networked layers of stretchable organic transistors that perceive and transmit electrical signals. When sandwiched, the layers are only about 25 to 50 microns thick—as thin as a sheet of paper, similar to skin.

Its networks act as sensors, engineered to sense pressure, temperature, strain, and chemicals. They turn this sensory information into an electrical pulse.

And the e-skin runs on only 5 volts of electricity.

To test the system, the Stanford team implanted it into a live rat. When the rat's e-skin was touched, a pulse was transmitted by a wire to the rat's brain—specifically, an area called the somatosensory cortex, which is responsible for processing physical sensations.

The rat's brain responded by sending an electrical signal down to its leg. This was done using a device that amplifies and transmits signals from the brain to muscles, mimicking connections in the nervous system called synapses.

The rat's leg twitched. Significantly, its movement corresponded to varying levels of pressure, said Wang, an engineering Ph.D. and first author on the new paper. For example, the team could increase the leg's movement by pushing the e-skin harder, which boosted the signal's frequency and the transistor's output.

If tested in humans, the device would not require implantation of a wire to send sensory information to the brain. Rather, the team envisions using wireless communication between e-skin and an electrical stimulator located next to a nerve.

Joe McTernan of the American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association said such research encourages technological advancements that could someday provide real-time biofeedback for people who have lost limbs.

"Although this skin technology is fairly new, there has been significant research and development in recent years that have focused on creating a positive tactile experience for the patient," he said.

The Stanford team's closed-loop system—from sensation to muscle movement—is "very exciting…very much a proof of concept," bioelectronics expert Alejandro Carnicer-Lombarte of University of Cambridge told the journal Nature.

In the field of artificial prosthetics, most researchers tend to work on individual components, he said. "Combining those things, in sequence, is not trivial."

Dahiya applauded the team's success in building flexible electronics and then making them work. "That's where they've done a nice job," he said.

But he said there's still a missing piece of the puzzle: creating memory. Unlike Stanford's e-skin, human skin learns how an object feels, then can anticipate it.

There's another challenge: The transmission of signals is currently too slow to be useful. The flow of information through the team's flexible carbon-based transistors is sluggish compared to more traditional silicon-based transistors, he said.

Such a delay "will not allow us to get a real feeling," Dahiya said. "And without real feeling, then you have a practical bottleneck."

At Stanford, the next step is to pack more and different sensors into the e-skin, to more closely replicate the many sensations felt by the human hand, said Wang.

"We're scaling up," he said. "It will be more advanced.

"The whole field is under development," he said. "It will take many more generations of developments to realize our target."

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That's according to a new study that found U.S. kids who spend time in community service are often thriving, physically and mentally.

Overall, kids who'd volunteered in the past year were in better physical health, had a more positive outlook on life, and were less likely to have anxiety, depression or behavioral problems than their peers who did not do volunteer work.

The findings, published May 30 in the journal JAMA Network Open, do not answer the chicken-and-egg question, researchers noted: Kids who were already high on the well-being scale may have been more apt to volunteer.

"We can't say this is cause-and-effect," said lead researcher Kevin Lanza, an assistant professor at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health.

That said, Lanza thinks the findings set the stage for a study that follows kids over time, to see whether volunteerism promotes better physical and mental well-being down the road.

There are, of course, already plenty of reasons to encourage volunteerism, Lanza pointed out. But if it also benefits young volunteers' well-being, then it would be a "win-win," he said.

"There could be a great opportunity to promote volunteering as a public health measure," Lanza said.

Many studies over the years have linked volunteerism to better physical and mental health, but nearly all have focused on adults—often older adults. A couple of studies have found that teenage volunteers may be in better health, and more engaged at school, than their peers. But the studies involved only small groups of teens.

So Lanza's team decided to dig into data from a long-running national survey tracking the health and well-being of U.S. children and teenagers. They focused on nearly 52,000 kids ages 6 to 17 who were part of the 2019-2020 survey period.

Overall, one-third of children and just over half of teens had done volunteer work in the past year, according to parents' responses.

In general, those parents gave higher ratings to their kids' well-being than parents whose kids did not do volunteer work. They were one-third more likely to say their child was in "very good" to "excellent" health, and anywhere from 18% to 35% less likely to say their child had dealt with depression or anxiety, or had behavioral problems, in the past year.

Kids who volunteered were also 66% more likely to be "flourishing"—which, Lanza said, could be summed up as an "overall drive for life." In this survey, kids' flourishing was based on how parents answered questions about their kids' curiosity, willingness to see tasks through, and ability to stay calm in the face of challenges.

Ying Chen is a research scientist at Harvard University's Center for Health and Happiness. She praised the study's focus on kids, and the way it looked at multiple facets of well-being.

But like Lanza, she cautioned on the cause-effect question. For one, Chen said, parents who encourage their kids to volunteer are likely "pro-social" and may themselves be quite healthy and happy.

She also noted that the study results are based on parents' reports, which can be biased.

Those caveats made, there are also reasons to believe volunteerism can boost kids' well-being, both researchers said.

If volunteering gets kids off their devices and into the world, Lanza said, there's the social engagement. And it's a particular type of engagement—with other people who want to work for a common, positive purpose.

"Volunteering is community-building," Lanza said.

And with younger children, he pointed out, any volunteer work is probably going to involve their parents or other adults in their lives—whether that's planting trees, helping to clean up the neighborhood park or packing boxes of donated food.

An opportunity to spend more time with that pro-social parent, in action, could boost kids' well-being, Lanza said.

No kid should be forced into volunteering, both researchers stressed. What's important, Lanza said, is that all kids—regardless of family income and resources—have the opportunity.

Historically, he noted, volunteerism has been a "luxury item"—done by people with the time and means for it.

"The onus should be on society to make volunteer opportunities more accessible," Lanza said.

That's especially true, he noted, if those opportunities stand to benefit volunteers' well-being, too.

Source

Rocket Report: SpaceX pushing ahead on Starbase, North Korea launch failure

A blood test for more than 50 forms of cancer could help speed up diagnosis and fast-track patients for treatment, a study suggests.

NHS trial results of the liquid biopsy, published at the world’s largest cancer conference in the US, suggest the Galleri blood test has the potential to spot and rule out cancer in people with symptoms.

The test detects tiny fragments of tumour DNA in the bloodstream. It alerts doctors as to whether a cancer signal has been detected, and predicts where in the body that signal may have originated.

Experts welcomed the findings from the trial but said more research would be needed before the test, made by the California company Grail, could be rolled out in healthcare systems.

The Symplify study, led by the University of Oxford, involved 5,461 people in England and Wales who were referred to hospital by their GP with suspected cancer. Its results are being presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago.

The test correctly revealed two-thirds of cancers among those in the study. In 85% of those positive cases, it was also able to pinpoint the original site of cancer. It was more accurate in older patients and those with more advanced cancers, according to the trial results.

Mark Middleton, a professor of experimental cancer medicine at Oxford, who led the trial, said the test had “potential for identifying people going to see their GP who are currently not referred urgently to investigate cancer … who do need testing”.

It was also likely the test could speed up diagnosis “where it is not certain which rapid diagnostic pathway is the right one”, Middleton said.

“The first use case above has the potential to diagnose cancers earlier; the second and third have the potential to help achieve cancer targets (and therefore reduce waiting for patients) by reducing the overall number of tests needed to diagnose cancers.”

Lawrence Young, a professor of molecular oncology at the University of Warwick, urged caution but added: “This is an important study that shows we are edging towards an era when blood testing for cancer, alongside other tests of symptomatic patients, could really impact early diagnosis and significantly improve clinical outcome.”

Dr Richard Lee, of the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said testing in patients with symptoms potentially indicating cancer could help to enable quicker diagnostic testing in those deemed to be at high risk. “This could result in earlier diagnosis of cancer or faster reassurance for those without cancer,” he added.

Prof Nicholas Turner, also of the Institute of Cancer Research, said the study provided valuable data that enhances the evidence liquid biopsies could be used to more rapidly diagnose cancer in patients presenting with symptoms.

“It could well be useful in the future to fast-track patients into rapid-access clinics, and especially in people where imaging findings are uncertain,” said Turner.

Dr David Crosby, the head of prevention and early detection research at Cancer Research UK, said: “The findings from the study suggest this test could be used to support GPs to make clinical assessments, but much more research is needed in a larger trial to see if it could improve GP assessment, and ultimately patient outcomes.”

The NHS has also been using the Galleri test in thousands of people without symptoms, to see if it can detect hidden cancers. Results are expected later this year. If successful, it plans to roll the test out to about 1 million people.

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THE COMMOTION STARTED sometime after they lost track of which month the pandemic was in. Leo Guzman and his 24-year-old daughter, Anita, could hear trucks beeping and people working at all hours of the evening in the unmarked warehouses next door to their mobile home in Carson, a suburb 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Thousands of boxes wrapped in plastic were haphazardly pushed to the edges of the lot and stacked in piles as high as 20 feet, one of them leaning like a cardboard interpretation of the Tower of Pisa. Caution tape was strewn around some of the boxes, a blue tarp partly covered others. From where they live, Leo and Anita watched the boxes ascend for many months as the piles became part of their Covid surreality. 

At around 2 pm on September 30, 2021, Anita heard a large boom and felt their home shake, like in an earthquake. After a second boom—the sound of an explosion—Leo checked outside. The boxes were on fire. 

“Luckily, the wind was blowing that way,” Anita told me last spring from inside her residence, pointing away from the park and its 81 homes. Leo has lived here since before Anita was born and keeps an enviable plant collection around his porch. He remembers ashes falling onto his palm tree. 

The fire was the size of a city block. It took 17 hours and 200 firefighters to put out; five were injured. The boxes turned out to contain thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer, distributed by a beauty business called ArtNaturals. When firefighters finally cleared the scene, massive amounts of the liquid remained. It slowly washed down a nearby storm drain.

Five days after the fire was extinguished, people across southern LA County began reporting on social media and to their local officials a foul, overpowering odor. Some compared it to sewage, a bad perm, paint fumes, or death itself. Overwhelmingly most common descriptor: rotten eggs. The smell was especially pungent along the Dominguez Channel, which snakes through 15 miles of residences and retail and two oil refineries before emptying into the Pacific. 

The channel is no stranger to unpleasant aromas. More than 100 businesses are permitted by the LA Regional Water Quality Control Board to dump treated waste into the Dominguez. White clouds often drift from refinery smokestacks over local houses, and fire plumes from flares—a measure to get rid of excess gas—regularly glow on the horizon. 

This new smell, however, was much worse than anything the people in Carson and nearby towns were normally expected to tolerate. Some started waking up with headaches. Others feared they were being poisoned. For Leo, it seemed most unbearable when he got home from work as a night-shift baker; his throat hurt and being outside made him dizzy. 

Given the timing, it appeared likely that the explosion at ArtNaturals was to blame. But how exactly could the fire have resulted in the awful smell? And why was it spreading? Residents and local officials were mystified.

BEFORE VACCINES, BEFORE masks, before much at all was known about how the novel coronavirus spread and whether it lived on surfaces (remember wiping down grocery bags with Lysol?), hand sanitizer took on a mythos as the essential protective elixir. In the first week of March 2020, year-over-year sales of the product jumped 470 percent. Panicked shoppers soon emptied shelves. California governor Gavin Newsom tweeted a photo of a 24-pack of 2-ounce bottles of Purell selling for $400.

On March 20, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it was relaxing its regulations on hand sanitizer to “provide flexibility to help meet demand during this outbreak.” Those regulations, known as the Current Good Manufacturing Practices, had been in place since 1994 and included regularly updated rules on everything from record-keeping to product testing to packaging. The agency also paused the requirement under the Federal Food Drug & Cosmetics Act that sanitizer be sourced from pharmaceutical-grade ethanol, which is free of industrial toxins that are commonly found in fuel-grade ethanol. Businesses were still expected to test their sanitizers for benzene and other toxic compounds, but essentially on an honor system. The FDA noted that it did “not intend to take action against firms” for violations during the public health emergency.

What happened next is a lesson about leaving disaster response to the whims of capitalism. Without the threat of an FDA inspection, thousands of companies that had never made or sold hand sanitizer before, let alone any other over-the-counter drug, immediately began distribution. From whiskey and vodka distillers to manufacturers of CBD oils, beauty products, and drilling fluids, anyone with access to ethanol seemed to rebrand, overnight, as a sanitizer maker. (This was in addition to a DIY frenzy. WIRED’s second-most-popular story of 2020 was “How to Make Your Own Hand Sanitizer.”)

ArtNaturals was among these newcomers. The company, a brand of skin and hair care products, was founded in 2015 “out of a desire”—according to its website—“to free beauty from high prices, toxic chemicals, and all-around bad vibes.” Its formulations, tagged with wellness buzzwords like “plant-based” and “globally sourced,” are found at Target, Walmart, and especially Amazon. “We were born online, born on Amazon,” Joseph Nourollah, the CEO of ArtNaturals, once said at a beauty conference.

According to Emily Castellanos, a former copywriter at the company, opportunism was in ArtNaturals’ DNA. She says the company hired third-party agencies to offer select shoppers products like shampoo for as little as a dollar in exchange for Amazon reviews. “Usually they were great reviews,” she says. ArtNaturals often got new product ideas, Castellanos says, by copying what was already trending on Amazon, then making “the quantity bigger and the price point lower.” As new products went on sale, “huge jugs of jojoba oil, tea tree oil,” and the like would arrive by the truckload, to be bottled and labeled manually by primarily immigrant workers in the ArtNaturals warehouse, next to the mobile home park. 

The company shared the facilities with at least three other businesses, all run, according to court records, by Nourollah and members of his family.

Their companies Day-to-Day Imports and OxGord have sold everything from car parts to knives to ladders to pregnancy pillows. Several of these products have been the subject of lawsuits by competitors alleging that Nourollah’s companies stole their designs. Numerous customers have claimed that Day-to-Day Imports and OxGord ladders suddenly collapsed and left them severely injured. The company settled with one roofer in 2019 and with two more individuals in 2021 and 2022; one other ladder injury lawsuit is pending. (ArtNaturals and its attorneys did not respond to repeated interview requests or questions submitted by email.)

ArtNaturals submitted paperwork to the FDA to sell hand sanitizer starting on April 8, 2020. By the summer, 8-ounce bottles of its “scent-free” sanitizer were sold at Walmart and other retailers. Osher Netkin, the company’s chief operating officer, posted on LinkedIn that ArtNaturals was giving hand sanitizer away to “hospitals, nursing homes, law enforcement and fire departments.” In another post, he wrote that he had access to truckloads of ethanol alcohol “that are able to ship today.” In Carson, members of the city council included bottles of ArtNaturals sanitizer in Covid care packages donated to families.

From whiskey and vodka distillers to manufacturers of CBD oils, beauty products, and drilling fluids, anyone with access to ethanol seemed to rebrand, overnight, as a sanitizer maker

Within weeks of the FDA’s move to deregulate hand sanitizer, complaints started pouring in to the agency. Poison Control Centers across the country received thousands of reports of people seeking treatment for exposure to hand sanitizer that contained methanol, a highly toxic form of alcohol used in antifreeze that can cause skin and lung irritation, nausea, vomiting, headache, or worse. That summer, 17 people died after drinking sanitizer with methanol; a telltale sign was that people who ingested it showed up to hospitals with seizures and sudden loss of vision. (Although sanitizer made with pharmaceutical-grade ethanol isn’t safe to drink, it is not usually deadly.)

By mid-June the FDA had received so many complaints that it started compiling an online list of “hand sanitizers consumers should not use.”

Because the agency does not have recall authority for over-the-counter drugs, the offending companies themselves were expected to pull products marked as unsafe. Consumers had to go out of their way to find the list and stay up to date as it got longer and longer. By the end of that first pandemic summer, nearly 200 types of sanitizer appeared on the list.

ArtNaturals was, at that point, not on the list. Its sanitizer, labeled with a tasteful, millennial-friendly design that said it was vegan and infused with jojoba oil, was marketed as “safe for kids” and “a great bulk hand sanitizer pack for parents and teachers.” At least two school districts on the West Coast had purchased the sanitizer to distribute to students, in addition to two Ivy League universities. Then, in March 2021, a year into sales, an independent lab in Connecticut called Valisure announced that it had found benzene in the company’s sanitizer. Benzene, a widely used industrial chemical derived from petroleum, can be absorbed through the skin and is known to be a risk factor for leukemia.

ArtNaturals wasn’t alone: 44 of 260 hand sanitizer batches that Valisure tested were contaminated. But it had fared the worst, with benzene at eight times the legal limit—a limit that was only allowed under the FDA’s relaxed rules. Valisure petitioned the FDA to immediately request a recall of all the contaminated batches in its study, arguing that the agency had some recall authority under the unique circumstances. At the time, the FDA acknowledged receiving the petition. As the petition circulated, some customers requested refunds. Not long after, a horrified nurse in Arizona captured a photograph of ArtNaturals bottles on sale at her local Walmart for 50 cents, with a sign nearby saying that they used to be $2.97. (Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.)

By May 2021, a little over a month after the Valisure report came out, the LA County Fire Department showed up at ArtNaturals warehouses over concerns about boxes piling up. In south Los Angeles, where ArtNaturals was storing boxes at a second location, the fire department said that hand sanitizer gel appeared to be leaking out. On September 9, firefighters cited the company for the cardboard boxes on the Carson lot, warning that they blocked a fire access road. Three weeks later, the Guzmans heard the double explosion.

The arson division of the LA Sheriff’s Department said the cause was “undetermined” because they could not find an ignition source in security footage that the company provided. The day after the fire, ArtNaturals filed a property loss claim with its insurer, which says in a lawsuit that it paid out $266,000; ArtNaturals filed a counterclaim boldly asking for $92 million to cover destroyed merchandise, debris removal, and damages it says its insurer caused by not covering the other costs. 

A few days after the explosion, Yarely Molina was hired by the property’s landlord as a security guard to do fire watch because of concerns that the remaining debris might reignite. She says they told her the products that exploded “had some chemical that gave you cancer.” 

On October 4, the FDA issued an online alert “urging consumers not to use any ArtNaturals hand sanitizers”—not because of the fire, which is not mentioned in the alert, but because its own tests had also found “unacceptable levels” of benzene and other toxins in samples. (The FDA didn’t say whether it conducted the tests in response to the Valisure study.) The alert says the agency had been repeatedly trying to reach the company but received no response. 

This would soon be the least of the company’s problems. The smell was starting to spread.

THE ODOR OF rotten eggs soon pervaded Carson. It hit Alejandro Rojas, a retired teacher who’d lived in the city for 23 years, at 3 am one morning when he was awoken by his dogs whining. The smell gave him a headache that reminded him of when he used to strip antiques. Tania Torres, who lived in a condo complex a few blocks from the Dominguez Channel, says the smell made her dogs lethargic and exacerbated her daughter’s asthma. David Ashman, a disaster management coordinator for LA County, says “the odor would force a coughing type of reaction. You couldn’t take deep breaths.”

By October 6, LA County and the regional air quality regulator identified the smell as hydrogen sulfide, according to emails obtained by WIRED in a public records act request. But they didn’t initially connect it with the ArtNaturals fire. The gas can be produced by any number of sources, including algae bloom decay and effluent from refineries. If a waterway has low oxygen levels for whatever reason, organic matter can die off, releasing harmful amounts of hydrogen sulfide into the air.

In California, hydrogen sulfide is considered a nuisance at 30 parts per billion because of its characteristic smell. While the gas is known to be deadly at the much higher levels that workers are sometimes exposed to on hog farms, oil refineries, waste treatment plants, and other dangerous work sites, low levels can irritate the sinuses, according to the federal government’s toxic-substances registry. Moderate exposure causes headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, coughing, and difficulty breathing. (The document does not define the distinction between “low level” and “moderate.”) 

Without the threat of an FDA inspection, thousands of companies that had never made or sold hand sanitizer before, let alone any other over-the-counter drug, immediately began distribution. 

The organic matter theory was quickly determined to be the most likely explanation. In a press conference on October 10, county representatives claimed that hydrogen sulfide levels in the air were “elevated” but not unsafe. They did not share what those levels were. 

The county declared the smell a “nuisance.” It said that people would soon be compensated for air purifiers, but that it was not prepared to pay for hotel rooms. The following day, in a virtual city council meeting that hundreds of angry residents signed in to, the county relented on the hotels.

Vouchers were provided through a “relocation” program. It was not an evacuation, so people had to be proactive about applying for vouchers, and only those with physical addresses were eligible. 

Ana Meni, the daughter of Samoan immigrants who has lived in Carson for all her 43 years and worked for the city for 25 of them, was deeply frustrated with the local government’s response. At the very least, she says, the city could have sent a mass alert to all residents, as they would do in an emergency. 

Meni and a neighbor soon started a Facebook group, City of Carson Public Health Concerns, where residents began to share their stories. The page became a jumping-off point for on-the-ground protests and organizing. Meni helped people fill out their reimbursement applications and went door-to-door trying to persuade her neighbors to leave. “A lot of our seniors told me, ‘No one's going to take us away,’” she recalls. “But the main message from a lot of them was, ‘If it’s as bad as you say it is, the government would make us go.’ That was just very mentally heartbreaking.” 

By the second week of the odor, a resident noticed that the mailboxes in her condo had turned black overnight, a sign of a chemical reaction between aluminum and hydrogen sulfide. Others spotted workers spraying something from hoses into the channel. LA County Public Works began applying a deodorizer called Epoleon and said the smell would clear within five days.

On October 14, the Department of Public Health sent a notice to local doctors that people were reporting dizziness, vomiting, and shortness of breath. It still described the hydrogen sulfide levels as “elevated, but not toxic” and maintained that “the source appears to be naturally decaying organic material.”

(LA County and its Departments of Public Health and Public Works have not answered questions sent by WIRED over the course of several months. Southern California’s air quality department referred questions about health back to the Department of Public Health. A spokesperson for the Public Health Department said, “We cannot comment on this matter due to pending litigation” provided a link to a November 2021 update on the "odor event.")

The principal of a middle school within a couple blocks of the channel called regional air quality officials on the morning of October 15, before students arrived, to report that the smell was inside classrooms. When agency inspectors monitored the campus, they detected indoor levels as high as 200 parts per billion, according to internal emails. (The toxic-substances registry says that “whether children are more sensitive to hydrogen sulfide exposure than adults is not known.”) Hazmat crews advised the principal to air out the building and keep the HVAC system running for two hours before students arrived.

Regional air quality officials installed a new hydrogen sulfide monitor along the banks of the channel in Carson. On the nights of October 15 and 17, it recorded levels hundreds of times higher than the state nuisance level, as high as 13,000 parts per billion at one point. “They kept saying there was no evidence it would cause any long-term harm, when the real answer was, we didn’t know if it would or not,” says one local official, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity about the county health department’s response. 

On October 18, Carson canceled an annual citywide earthquake drill after city employees reported experiencing “extreme discomfort (even indoors) due to the odor,” according to an email from a city risk manager obtained by WIRED.

The smell was still omnipresent by the third week. An emergency manager with the City of Carson said in one email that “the County’s plan for solving the problem seems to have failed.” At a press conference on October 25, Lula Davis-Holmes, the mayor of Carson, announced a new city order stating that the gas did in fact pose an emergency. City councilmember Jawane Hilton said his two young children had just been diagnosed with ear infections. He also asserted that a wealthier community wouldn’t have had to wait 22 days for a resolution.

By November 19, seven weeks after the smell began, 3,400 families were temporarily living in hotels and 40,000 air purifiers had been delivered to residents’ homes. That week, some learned from hotel receptionists that their stays would not be extended another week. The county said the issue was resolved. Hydrogen sulfide levels had dropped below 30 parts per billion at most monitors. A local company that markets “proprietary nanobubble treatment” later put out a press release taking credit for getting rid of the smell.

On December 3, the regional air quality department and the LA water board announced that they had concluded their investigation into the source of the smell. Investigators found pollutants that included benzene, methanol, and ethanol in the channel. They said that the pollutants depleted oxygen in the water and after breaking down in the anaerobic conditions had unleashed the hydrogen sulfide. The investigators had by now traced the runoff to the ArtNaturals warehouse fire.

The report, confirming what some residents had long suspected, was little solace. After their hotel stays were terminated, Tania Torres says, “We had nowhere else to go, and it still smelled.” Her asthmatic daughter had fallen into depression working as a therapist from the hotel, but back at home Torres says she had trouble breathing and experienced headaches and burning eyes for weeks. Meni’s sister, who teaches at an elementary school near the channel, went to the emergency room to stop a 10-hour nosebleed. On December 4, an internal regional air quality department memo said the agency had received 75 new odor complaints in the previous two weeks. 

A FEW WEEKS after the investigators in Carson published their report, the FDA reinstated its pre-pandemic regulations on hand sanitizer. Now that supply had caught up to demand, the agency said, the relaxed rules were no longer appropriate. Manufacturers were not allowed to sell or donate any sanitizer produced under the rules starting in March 2022, and they would need to find some way to destroy it. 

While the agency’s move surely resulted in fewer bottles of tainted sanitizer reaching the market, it created a new problem. Discarded sanitizer is supposed to be separated from its plastic bottles and treated as hazardous waste. One trade group, the National Association of Chemical Distributors, complained to the FDA that the process would be “inefficient,” “expensive,” and “time-consuming.” The group also asserted that “it is more costly to dispose of the product than to give it away.” The assertion does not acknowledge the numerous safety problems found in pandemic sanitizer. 

Regardless, several school districts last year received donations of pandemic-regulation hand sanitizer worth tens of thousands of dollars. In June 2022, the FDA added a pandemic hand sanitizer from the Arizona-based brand Healing Solutions to its list of sanitizers that consumers should not use because of unspecified manufacturing issues. Copa Health, a behavior treatment center in Mesa, Arizona, donated $68,000 worth of Healing Solutions hand sanitizer to Mesa Public Schools, the largest district in the state, according to donation records obtained by WIRED. In October, after being contacted for comment, the school district sent a letter to its schools telling them to dispose of the bottles. “Mesa Public Schools was not made aware by the FDA or provider that the hand sanitizer was on the FDA’s Do Not Use List,” a district spokesperson wrote via email. Reached for comment, Copa Health’s marketing director, Linda Torkelson, wrote, “Thanks for reaching out but we would not be interested.” (Neither she nor other Copy Health executives responded to follow-up messages.) 

People who work in the waste management industry say that they have been regularly fielding calls from people trying to get rid of hand sanitizer.

“It’s been prohibitively expensive for the big jobs that we’ve talked to, so they haven’t followed through with us,” says Tony Orlando, the president of a California company that disposes of hazardous waste.

Several fires involving large amounts of unsellable hand sanitizer have broken out across the country in the past year, from Dallas to downtown Los Angeles. In Elgin, Illinois, boxes of hand sanitizer under recall caught fire outside an abandoned building across the street from a high school. In August 2022, in Wharton, Texas, what the local police department described as a “large quantity of hand sanitizer” caught fire, prompting a temporary shelter-in-place order. Near the border in Brownsville, Texas, a warehouse storing pallets of recalled hand sanitizer ignited that same month, and then again on two more occasions.

Outside Oklahoma City, hand-sanitizer-fueled fires broke out at factories and warehouses in August and October of 2022. The sites are allegedly operated by developer Brannan Bordwine, whose company faces $6.6 million in proposed fines for allegedly dumping and burying hand sanitizer in an open pit and for the fires, one of which a fire marshal announced may have been set intentionally. Bordwine did not respond to requests for comment. On April 3, 2023, fire crews in Moreno Valley, California, put out a fire that erupted among pallets of hand sanitizer that had been sitting outside for three weeks.

In a statement to WIRED, an FDA spokesperson defended the agency’s handling of the hand sanitizer shortage, writing that “the FDA continues to test hand sanitizer products and proactively work with companies, when appropriate, to recall products and encourage retailers to remove products from store shelves and online marketplaces when quality issues arise.” The agency declined to answer specific questions about methanol poisonings, benzene contamination, hand sanitizer fires, or ArtNaturals.

LAST SUMMER, JILL Johnston and Arbor Quist, environmental epidemiologists at the University of Southern California, met with Carson residents to follow up on their health. The two scientists were conducting an ongoing survey on the health effects of exposure to hydrogen sulfide, which they say are not well understood. According to preliminary findings from 108 subjects, 81 reported headaches, 78 reported dizziness, and seven went to the emergency room. About half reported burning eyes; fatigue; and difficulty breathing, concentrating, and sleeping, as well as anxiety and depression. 

Carson residents still become emotional when they recount the experience—the disrespect they felt from county officials, the fear of the smell returning or of something worse happening later on. In the last three months of 2022, nearly a year after the crisis was considered over, there were 33 complaints from zip codes in Carson, Gardena, and other nearby cities about a rotten egg odor. Some described it getting into their homes, and several said that the smell is “constant.”

In a way, the explosion was a more intense form of what residents have lived with for decades. The largest oil refinery on the West Coast, run by Marathon Petroleum, sits on the Dominguez Channel within a few miles of homes and elementary schools. A few weeks before the hand sanitizer fire, it had massive flares that looked like large fire balls, and some locals think it could have played a role in the smell as well. Now, says Ana Meni, “we’re more aware of things that typically we were just accustomed to.”

Joseph Nourollah and his brothers currently face criminal charges in LA County for the safety violations the fire department documented prior to the fire. They have pleaded not guilty. They are no longer allowed to sell hand sanitizer, after the FDA visited their warehouses in the spring of 2022 and found “that the quality assurance within your facility is not functioning in accordance with requirements.” The company told the FDA it would cease production. The family and its companies also face a $12 million fine from the regional air quality board and the county water board for allegedly polluting the Dominguez Channel and causing the smell, but a hearing to finalize the fine was delayed until December.

ArtNaturals hand sanitizer is listed as out of stock on its website, but it is still available on Walmart.com.

Updated 6/1/23 at 12:30pm: A previous version of this article stated that the FDA declined to answer specific questions about methanol poisonings, benzene contamination, and ArtNaturals. They have provided answers.

Source

It's a handy way for insurers to keep revenue high—and just the sort of thing that provisions of the Affordable Care Act were meant to prevent.

Because the law prohibited insurers from deploying previously profit-protecting measures such as refusing to cover patients with pre-existing conditions, the authors worried that insurers would compensate by increasing the number of denials.

And so, the law tasked the Department of Health and Human Services with monitoring denials both by health plans on the Obamacare marketplace and those offered through employers and insurers. It hasn't fulfilled that assignment. Thus, denials have become another predictable, miserable part of the patient experience, with countless Americans unjustly being forced to pay out-of-pocket, or faced with that prospect, forgoing needed medical help.

A recent KFF study of ACA plans found that even when patients received care from in-network physicians—doctors and hospitals approved by these same insurers—the companies in 2021 nonetheless denied, on average, 17% of claims. One insurer denied 49% of claims in 2021; another's turndowns hit an astonishing 80% in 2020. Despite the potentially dire impact that denials have on patients' health or finances, data shows that people appeal only once in every 500 cases.

Sometimes, the insurers' denials defy not just medical standards of care but also plain old human logic. Here is a sampling collected for the KFF Health News-NPR "Bill of the Month" joint project.

• Dean Peterson of Los Angeles said he was "shocked" when payment was denied for a heart procedure to treat an arrhythmia, which had caused him to faint with a heart rate of 300 beats per minute. After all, he had the insurer's preapproval for the expensive ($143,206) intervention. More confusing still, the denial letter said the claim had been rejected because he had "asked for coverage for injections into nerves in your spine" (he hadn't) that were "not medically needed." Months later, after dozens of calls and a patient advocate's assistance, the situation is still not resolved.

• An insurer's letter was sent directly to a newborn child denying coverage for his fourth day in a neonatal intensive care unit. "You are drinking from a bottle," the denial notification said, and "you are breathing on your own." If only the baby could read.

• Deirdre O'Reilly's college-age son, suffering a life-threatening anaphylactic allergic reaction, was saved by epinephrine shots and steroids administered intravenously in a hospital emergency room. His mother, utterly relieved by that news, was less pleased to be informed by the family's insurer that the treatment was "not medically necessary."

As it happens, O'Reilly is an intensive-care physician at the University of Vermont. "The worst part was not the money we owed," she said of the $4,792 bill. "The worst part was that the denial letters made no sense—mostly pages of gobbledygook." She has filed two appeals, so far without success.

Some denials are, of course, well considered, and some insurers deny only 2% of claims, the KFF study found. But the increase in denials, and the often strange rationales offered, might be explained, in part, by a ProPublica investigation of Cigna—an insurance giant, with 170 million customers worldwide.

ProPublica's investigation, published in March, found that an automated system, called PXDX, allowed Cigna medical reviewers to sign off on 50 charts in 10 seconds, presumably without examining the patients' records.

Decades ago, insurers' reviews were reserved for a tiny fraction of expensive treatments to make sure providers were not ordering with an eye on profit instead of patient needs.

These reviews—and the denials—have now trickled down to the most mundane medical interventions and needs, including things such as asthma inhalers or the heart medicine that a patient has been on for months or years. What's approved or denied can be based on an insurer's shifting contracts with drug and device manufacturers rather than optimal patient treatment.

Automation makes reviews cheap and easy. A 2020 study estimated that the automated processing of claims saves U.S. insurers more than $11 billion annually.

But challenging a denial can take hours of patients' and doctors' time. Many people don't have the knowledge or stamina to take on the task, unless the bill is especially large or the treatment obviously lifesaving. And the process for larger claims is often fabulously complicated.

The Affordable Care Act clearly stated that HHS "shall" collect the data on denials from private health insurers and group health plans and is supposed to make that information publicly available. (Who would choose a plan that denied half of patients' claims?) The data is also supposed to be available to state insurance commissioners, who share with HHS the duties of oversight and trying to curb abuse.

To date, such information-gathering has been haphazard and limited to a small subset of plans, and the data isn't audited to ensure it is complete, according to Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at KFF and one of the authors of the KFF study. Federal oversight and enforcement based on the data are, therefore, more or less non-existent.

HHS did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The government has the power and duty to end the fire hose of reckless denials harming patients financially and medically. Thirteen years after the passage of the ACA, perhaps it is time for the mandated investigation and enforcement to begin.

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The three-year study found that a daily drop in each eye of a low dose of atropine, a drug used to dilate pupils, was better than a placebo at limiting eyeglass prescription changes and inhibiting elongation of the eye in nearsighted children aged 6 to 10.

That elongation leads to myopia, or nearsightedness, which starts in young kids and continues to get worse into the teen years before leveling off in most people. In addition to requiring life-long vision correction, nearsightedness increases the risk for retinal detachment, macular degeneration, cataracts and glaucoma later in life—and most corrective lenses don't do anything to stop myopia progression.

"The idea of keeping eyeballs smaller isn't just so people's glasses are thinner—it would also be so that in their 70s they don't suffer visual impairment," said lead study author Karla Zadnik, professor and dean of the College of Optometry at The Ohio State University.

"This is exciting work for the myopia research community, which I've been part of for 35 years. We've talked about treatment and control for decades," she said. "And it's exciting to think that there could be options in the future for millions of children we know are going to be myopic."

The results of the CHAMP (Childhood Atropine for Myopia Progression) trial are published today (June 1, 2023) in JAMA Ophthalmology.

About one in three adults worldwide is nearsighted, and the global prevalence of myopia is predicted to increase to 50% by 2050. Though one federally approved contact lens can slow progression of nearsightedness, no pharmaceutical products are approved in the United States or Europe to treat myopia.

Animal studies years ago hinted at atropine's ability to slow the growth of the eye, but the full-strength drug's interference with near vision and concerns about pupil dilation hindered early considerations of its potential as a human therapy for myopia. More recent research has suggested a low dose of atropine might be the ticket.

This new double-masked, randomized phase 3 trial assessed the safety and effectiveness of two low-dose solutions, with atropine concentrations of either .01% or .02%, versus placebo. Treatment for each of the 489 children aged 6 to 10 assessed for the drug's effectiveness consisted of one daily drop per eye at bedtime, which minimized the disruption of any blurring effects atropine might have on vision.

Researchers were a bit surprised to find that the most significant improvements at all time points compared to placebo resulted from the solution containing .01% of atropine. Though the .02% atropine formulation was also better at slowing progression of myopia than placebo, the results were less consistent.

"The .01% story is clearer and more obvious in terms of significantly slowing both the growth of the eye as well as then resulting in a lower glasses prescription," Zadnik said.

Including a measure of the eye's growth was a key component of the study because "the field is actually moving toward axial elongation being as important as or more important than the glasses prescription in terms of the most meaningful outcome," she said. "If we're trying to slow eye growth to prevent bad outcomes for people in their 80s, measuring the eye growth directly is really important."

The drugs' safety was assessed in a larger sample of 573 participants that also included children as young as 3 and up to age 16. Both low-dose formulations were safe and well tolerated. The most common side effects were sensitivity to light, allergic conjunctivitis, eye irritation, dilated pupils and blurred vision, although reports of these side effects were few.

The CHAMP trial was the first study of low-dose atropine to include placebo controls for three years and to involve a large, diverse population recruited from 26 clinical sites in North America and five countries in Europe. In a second section of the trial, researchers are evaluating how the eyes respond when the treatment is over.

The experimental drug is made without preservatives, and if federally approved as a therapy, would be distributed in single-use packaging for convenience and to prevent contamination. Off-label low-dose atropine that can currently be obtained at compounding pharmacies may contain preservatives that can lead to dry eye and corneal irritation, researchers noted.

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The sun is an ordinary star, but it's not the only kind of star out there. Most stars in our galaxy are M dwarfs (sometimes called red dwarfs), which are significantly smaller and redder than the sun — and many of them may have the potential to host life, new research shows.

A new reanalysis of data from the planet-hunting Kepler mission shows that one-third of planets around M dwarfs may be suitable for life — meaning there are likely hundreds of millions of habitable planets in the Milky Way alone.

For the analysis, astronomers at the University of Florida incorporated new information from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, which precisely measures the distances and motions of stars, to fine-tune measurements of exoplanets' orbits. The researchers wanted to pin down a parameter of each orbit known as eccentricity, a measure of how stretched out the planet's path around its star is.

"The distance is really the key piece of information we were missing before that allows us to do this analysis now," Sheila Sagear, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Florida and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Planets around M dwarfs with big eccentricities — very elongated, oval orbits — end up fried by the star if they're close enough, in a process called tidal heating. Tidal heating is caused by the planet's wonky orbit, which leads to stretching and squeezing from the star's gravity. Just like rubbing your hands together, all that motion leads to heat from friction. If there's too much heat, a planet loses its water, along with the chances for life to evolve on its surface. (Because it is necessary for life as we know it, water is generally the focus in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth.)

If a planet around an M dwarf was further away, that distance may prevent torment by tidal heating — but, then the planet would be too cold, lacking the warmth needed for life. Therefore, exoplanets around M dwarfs must live close to their stars for even a chance of being warm enough for life, putting them at risk of tidal heating if their orbit isn’t a clean circle.

"It's only for these small stars that the zone of habitability is close enough for these tidal forces to be relevant," Sarah Ballard, an astronomer at the University of Florida and co-author of the study, said in the statement.

With their new-and-improved measurements for a slew of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope, Sagear and Ballard found that two-thirds of planets around M dwarfs would be crisped by the heat of their host stars, burning away their chances for habitability. But that leaves one-third of planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone where liquid water could theoretically exist — along with the potential for life. The chances of a planet having a stable, circular orbit in the Goldilocks zone also went up if it had another exoplanetary pal around the same star.

"I think this result is really important for the next decade of exoplanet research, because eyes are shifting toward this population of stars," Sagear said. "These stars are excellent targets to look for small planets in an orbit where it's conceivable that water might be liquid, and therefore the planet might be habitable."

The results were published May 30 in the journal PNAS.

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That might not be such a bad thing, according to a recent study by researchers from the University of California, Davis (UCD), and the University of California, Holtville.

They warn current production methods of lab-grown meat could end up being way worse for the environment than beef farming, despite being touted as a sustainable alternative.

Their life-cycle assessment of current meat-growing processes – which has yet to be peer-reviewed – found cultured meat production could emit between four to 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef and all its hidden costs, depending on the techniques used.

"This is an important conclusion given that investment dollars have specifically been allocated to this sector with the thesis that this product will be more environmentally friendly than beef," UCD food scientist Derrick Risner and colleagues write in their paper.

"My concern would just be scaling this up too quickly and doing something harmful for the environment," Risner elaborates.

Cultured meat is grown from nonspecific animal cells coaxed into forming tissues we'd be happy to eat, such as fats, muscle, and connective tissues.

While cultured meat uses less land than herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, not to mention less water and antibiotics, environmental costs of the highly specific nutrients required to grow the product rapidly add up.

These include running laboratories to extract growth factors from animal serums, as well as growing crops for sugars and vitamins.

Then there's the energy required to purify all of these broth ingredients to a high standard before they can be fed to the growing meat lumps. This energy-intensive, extreme level of purification is needed to prevent introducing microbes to the culture.

"Otherwise the animal cells won't grow, because the bacteria will multiply much faster," Risner told New Scientist.

It's not all bad news though. Reducing pharmaceutical-grade purification to a food-grade standard should drastically reduce the energy requirements. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions from cultivated meat production could drop to a little over a quarter more than typical beef farming. In best case scenarios, it could be a greener option, being 80 percent better than raising cattle.

Yet the most efficient cattle-grown beef systems that already exist today can still outperform this scenario of cultivating food-grade meat, according to the researchers' estimates.

"It's possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media," explains UCD food scientist Edward Spang.

What's more, the researchers' calculations only included the energy costs of making lab-grown meat using current methods, but not the impact of building larger facilities to house large scale production.

Animal cell cultures are a lot harder to grow than bacteria and fungi as they're far more sensitive to their environment. Unsurprising, really, given they evolved to be safely tucked within other protective layers of a body.

This means they require specialized, sterilized, energy-hungry bioreactors to provide the right conditions and protections for these fragile cells.

The researchers say it would make more sense to invest in increasing the efficiencies of existing livestock farms to limit their environmental footprint, which may provide greater emissions reductions sooner that this fledgling industry of lab-grown meat can.

"Given this assessment, investing in scaling this technology before solving key issues… would be counter to the environmental goals which this sector has espoused," Risner and team conclude.

Those improvements better come quick. Overall demand for meat is expected to jump more than 70 percent by 2050 and livestock farming currently represents about 15 percent of all current human greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Alas, for those of us who would sorely love a more sustainable meat alternative, it looks like plant proteins are still the most viable option.

But if more of us just reduced our meat consumption rather than eliminate it entirely, which is also great for our health, we could still drastically reduce the environmental impact of our flesh-eating habits together.

The research can be found on the preprint server bioRxiv.

Source

Researchers get primate embryos to start organ development in culture dishes

Will this be a busy season?

Great question. We don't know.

Aren’t you getting paid by the word?

Good point.

 

Let's start by acknowledging that seasonal hurricane forecasting is somewhere between an art and a science. I admire scientists like Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State because he takes a rigorous approach to seasonal forecasting, publicly shares his methodology, and applies scientific techniques. He's predicting a slightly below-normal-activity Atlantic season, by the way.

 

The problem is that seasonal forecasting like this doesn't do much good. Let's say you're living in Miami in 1992. Everyone is wearing sleek white sport coats and thinks it's a hip place to hang because they all just watched Miami Vice. At first, it looks like a slow year for hurricanes. Not a single storm has formed by the middle of August, which is way late to get the season started. But—sorry—one just formed on August 16. And I'm sorry to say, but Hurricane Andrew has become a Category 5 hurricane. It just struck Miami.

 

Overall, there were just seven named storms in 1992, half of the seasonal average. But the worst tropical system to ever hit Florida wrecked Miami. So was it a slow season?

 

There's a corny old adage in hurricane forecasting: "It only takes one." And that's true. If there's just one named storm in a given season, but it hits you, it's a "busy" season. So I look at seasonal hurricane forecasts. I like the forecasters. But I don't place too much stock in them.

Didn’t NOAA make a hurricane season prediction?

Why yes, yes it did. And it's super helpful. According to NOAA, we have a 30 percent chance of a below-normal season, a 30 percent chance of an above-normal season, and a 40 percent chance of a near-normal season. Thanks, guys, that really clears things right up.

 

In reality, I think the forthcoming season will be really difficult to predict, and this is reflected in the ambivalence of the seasonal forecasts.

 

What does that even mean?

It means there are good reasons to think this season will be busy as hell and good reasons to think it will be rather slow. For example, seasonal forecasters are banking on a fairly strong El Niño developing and persisting in the tropical Pacific Ocean this summer, which would tend to increase wind shear over the Atlantic Ocean. That would be great, as it would hamper storm formation and could rip existing hurricanes apart.

 

However, some climate scientists, like Gavin Schmidt, have noted that the evidence for a strong El Niño isn't exactly clear-cut, especially when the period of time we're really concerned about doesn't start for another three months. So we'll see on that one.

 

More problematically, the global oceans are smoking hot right now. Since March, the daily sea surface temperature of the world's oceans is hotter than at any point in the last 40 years, the period for which detailed records are available. Much of this warmth is doubtlessly due to climate change. That's very bad for a lot of things on planet Earth, including the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season.

 

What's more, the temperature anomalies are especially pronounced in the "main development region" of the Atlantic Ocean, between Africa and the Caribbean Sea. This is the region where most storms form before moving west toward the continental United States, Caribbean Islands, Mexico, and Central America. This bathtub-like temperature trend is likely to persist into the summer months when hurricanes are most active.

 

My gut feeling is that this season will end up being pretty active. Looking at recent satellite images, the tropics already look fairly sporty for the start of the season, and I'm guessing this is a harbinger of things to come. But that's just a guess, so treat it as such.

 

Is there any good news?

There is. Whereas seasonal hurricane forecasts are of limited utility, actual hurricane forecasts are pretty darn good, and they're getting better every year. A slew of global models, statistical models, and hurricane-specific models are improving thanks to higher resolutions, more powerful supercomputers, and better data input.

 

The upshot is that our track forecasts are frequently very accurate out to four or even five days, and sometimes longer. We're also getting a better handle on intensity fluctuations. Forecasts are far from perfect, of course, but they're so much better than they were when I first got into this business.

 

By the way, you can get your weather forecasts from countless places online and on television, but for simplicity's sake, the National Hurricane Center's products are the best in the business. It's one area where your tax dollars are exceptionally well-spent.

Can you actually offer me any helpful advice?

Setting aside snark for sincerity, and as someone who has lived with hurricanes for more than a quarter of a century and written about them for as long, let me tell you this. The overall chance of any community being directly affected by a hurricane in any given year is quite low. Even along the Gulf Coast, where I live, there are about 10 years on average between serious impacts.

 

So be wary, not worried.

 

What this means is that a bit of preparation now will go a long way when a storm threatens. For example, know the vulnerabilities of where you live. Are you at risk for storm surge? If so, have a plan for how to evacuate: figure out what you'll need to bring; how you'll account for family members, pets, and important documents; and where you'll go.

 

If you're not at risk for storm surge—which is by far the most deadly aspect of a hurricane—the question of whether to evacuate is a bit more difficult. Sometimes, people evacuate for more than just concerns about life and death.

 

In Houston a few years ago, a Category 2 hurricane named Ike made landfall along the upper Texas coast. Houston fell on the "weak" side of the storm, and much of the city did not even see sustained hurricane-force winds as Ike moved inland. Nevertheless, a large chunk of the 6 million residents of the greater Houston area were without power for two weeks. In September. For people with medical needs, it was life-threatening. But even for reasonably healthy people, the heat and humidity was not pleasant. Do you want to deal with the aftermath? Think about how you would handle that now and make plans and buy supplies accordingly.

 

There are many variables that go into everyone's personal situation with hurricanes. Considering your vulnerability to a storm's various threats now, and what you will do to mitigate it, will ensure you're ready for action if the worst comes. Which hopefully it wont. Because hurricanes suck.

 

No, really, they do. They're centers of low pressure. I'll see myself out now.

 

The Atlantic hurricane season has begun: What we know and what we don’t

The “death of self-driving cars” has been greatly exaggerated

NASA has just held its first public meeting on its study of UFOs, revealing some surprisingly juicy information about the reports they've gathered. Among the hundreds of sightings they have received, many have involved reports of unexplained metallic orbs flying at high altitudes all around the world.

The was panel launched last year with the aim of studying UFOs – unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as they are now officially referred to – using data-driven scientific standards. The public meeting this week comes ahead of a final report that’s expected to be published this summer. 

The panel of experts said there have been around 800 events collected over the past 27 years. All of these sightings were made in Earth’s airspace, not space nor even the sea. Many of these can be explained as commercial aircraft, civilian and military drones, or weather and research balloons.

However, between 2 to 5 percent of those events were said to “display signatures that could be anomalous” and are not readily understandable. Around half of these reports involve unusual orbs or round spheres, which appear metallic, that have been spotted by aircraft at high altitudes.

“This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of. We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers,” Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the US Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told the crowd. 

The hotspots of UAP sightings were located on the east and west coasts of the US, over the Middle East, and in the Pacific. However, Kirkpatrick explained this is likely to be a sampling bias, as these are the parts of the world that are closely monitored by the US military.

One of the chief takeaways of the session was that the scientific study of UAPs needs more high-quality data to properly investigate unusual sightings.

"Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the highest scientific standards we set for resolution,” added Kirkpatrick.

The panel was also keen to stress that NASA’s UAP study team has been harassed by online trolls, something they say is hampering their efforts to understand this phenomenon. 

“It is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panelists have faced online all because they're studying this topic,” commented Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field significantly hindering scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter. harassment also obstructs the public's right to knowledge,” she added. 

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This year’s scorching heatwave across much of Southeast Asia, which saw daily temperatures soar past 40 degrees Celsius, is incendiary warning of things to come.

Average temperatures have been increasing for decades; Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam are among the countries most affected by climate change and global warming this century.

As temperatures rise in a region of over half a billion people reliant for the most part on locally-grown crops such as rice, food production and labor productivity will be severely affected.

The impact on human security will in turn affect socio-economic stability and upset regional relationships. Climate change is already a key driver of conflict in Africa; Southeast Asia is not that far behind.

For the time being, climate change is imposing hardships on people already suffering in conflict zones. Myanmar is considered one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods and cyclones.

In central Myanmar’s dry zone, determined resistance to military-imposed rule since February 2021 occurs in areas already ravaged by drought and rising average temperatures.

In Sagaing and Magway, increasingly parched regions heavily dependent on agriculture, farmers have been struggling for years to survive. Migration northward and eastward towards China and Thailand has been the main response. 

Now, even if people manage to migrate to cities and more developed areas of the central region of Myanmar, scarcity of fresh water and electricity makes existence hard in situations where work must be carried out at times in temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius.

Managing this slow onset of climate change impact has been thwarted by limited state resources and armed resistance to central authorities. This was evident in the wake of Cyclone Mocha, the category five super cyclone that hit Rakhine state in mid-May.

Quite apart from the difficulty of entering affected areas controlled by resistance forces, the UN cited obstacles to providing much-needed aid posed by banking restrictions and the need for Yangon’s travel authorization.

Although detailed information and data is scarce, Myanmar may be the first country in Southeast Asia to see the debilitating nexus between climate change and conflict impact human security severely. 

Cyclone Mocha left a path of death and destruction in Myanmar. Image: Twitter / Straits Times

Elsewhere in the region, this year’s excessively hot dry season brought with it economic and health problems: the combination of high temperatures and air pollution from the burning of crop stubble affected the health and residents in Northern Thailand and depressed the critical tourist industry.  

In Chiang Mai, the air quality index measuring particulate matter (PM 2.5) remained above 300 for two weeks from the end of March— 20 times above the upper limit recommended by the World Health Organization.

As a result, hotel occupancy was running below 50% in a traditionally high season for tourists and more than two million people were reportedly treated in hospitals for respiratory effects.

While the difference with Myanmar is that there is no paralyzing internal conflict, studies point to the appearance of local tensions – between urban residents affected by the pollution and provincial agrarians accused of the crop burning. 

Ahead of a general election in mid-May, the Thai government mobilized to order people in the worst affected areas to work from home and reached out to neighboring countries to see about reducing crop stubble burning.

These moves will become routine in the region as climate change impact intensifies every year. But the question is how well prepared are regional governments for more serious social and economic fallout – and what needs to be done to help the region more effectively respond?

Perhaps the tools of dialogue and mediation can be helpful. 

In conflict zones like Myanmar, as in parts of Africa, where governance is impaired by conflict, it will be important to help communities help themselves.

But even as top-down solutions are out of the question, the severe impediments imposed on local civil society and welfare organizations make it hard to extend help and advice to affected communities. 

In Myanmar, the UN notes there is “a high risk that natural disaster relief – in the case of, for instance, cyclones, flooding and drought – will be undermined or be used as an oppressive political tool, with the military preventing humanitarian organizations from helping affected populations.” 

To cope with the worsening situation, international aid agencies are urged by experts to tap into local civil society networks, especially in conflict areas. In more stable areas, where government and civil society operate unimpeded, there are still significant challenges to managing the situation.

Blame for environmental degradation is easily placed on vulnerable groups in society. Data-sharing is a major obstacle between states in a region where sovereignty is a barrier to cooperation. Deep mistrust and misalignment between state structures and civil society make for slow progress on designing effective coping strategies and policies.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all will be managing climate change displacement. Whether voluntary, forced or planned, and although not so evident today, large-scale movement of people will soon become a feature of the region’s response to climate change.

Floods in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in a file photo. Photo: IMF / Twitter

Natural disasters displaced almost 8 million people in Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam and the Philippines in 2021, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. The World Bank estimates that between 3.3 and 6.3 million people will be displaced by climate change in the Lower Mekong region between now and 2050.

Strong government structures in some countries will help ensure that planned re-location can be arranged. The bigger challenge will be cross-border migration that impacts labor and other human rights, for which inter-state monitoring and arrangements will be needed.

In sum, given that rising temperatures and drought, not to mention the rapid onset of extreme weather events, are already taking a toll on human security in the region, more organized and institutional anticipation and planning needs to be broached both at the national and inter-state level.

Relying on international agencies and global initiatives won’t necessarily generate responses well-tailored to the region or address the specific constraints on cooperation. Rather, a more concerted minilateral approach is urgently needed.

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As the global economic intelligentsia debates how to “decouple” or “de-risk” from China, Elon Musk clearly didn’t get the memo.

The Tesla founder was feted like a returning king in Beijing this week. From the moment his private jet arrived on Tuesday, Musk is reportedly being called “Brother Ma,” putting him in rarified league with Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma.

There are many takeaways from Musk’s first China visit in three years. One is that not everyone is decoupling from China, least of all the globe’s most influential electric vehicle (EV) evangelist and owner of Twitter. Another: the future of EV production and innovation is shifting toward Asia’s biggest economy.

Yet the most important one may be how Beijing is putting out a huge welcome mat for foreign chieftains – from Musk to JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon – to signal that China really is open for business again.

The perception that China is becoming hostile toward foreign capital intensified after Ma ran afoul of Xi Jinping’s regulators in late 2020.

In March, China’s leader installed a new premier, Li Qiang, to take the lead in changing that narrative. And what better way than Musk visiting China and reaffirming his commitment to producing more Teslas in mainland factories?

Of course, Li and Ma go way back. It was Li, back in his days as Shanghai party boss, who lobbied Musk to open a Tesla “gigafactory” in the city. The facility, which opened in April 2022, was Tesla’s first outside the US.

Now, here is Musk, controversial as he is, hinting at an even bigger production presence in China. In 2022, Tesla contributed roughly one-quarter of Shanghai’s overall total automotive production.

The next objective for local governments around China: angling for closer ties with Tesla to win some of those jobs as Musk looks to expand his autonomous driving fleet and sales to Chinese consumers.

It’s just what Li’s image makers might have hoped for as Tesla looks to “aggressively focus on building out its China footprint,” says analyst Daniel Ives at investment firm Wedbush.

Even though China has its own promising EV companies, including BYD Co, Musk understands that Xi’s nation has become “the golden goose EV market,” Ives says. As such, Tesla’s mainland plant is now the “heart and lungs” of Musk’s global production.

Musk is also giving Xi and Li a big public relations win in another way. At his meeting Tuesday with Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Musk gave the thumbs down to Washington’s decoupling from China strategy. Musk said, effectively, that the relationship between the two biggest economies is too symbiotic to fail.

Elon Musk thinks the US-China relationship is too big to fail. Image: Twitter / Screengrab

This is music to Li’s ears as China welcomes a who’s-who of multinational company chieftains. In recent days, top officials from Starbucks Corp, Jardine Matheson, Franklin Templeton and UK chip software giant Arm Ltd dropped by. Later this month, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang is reportedly coming to town.

The frenetic pace of these meetings comes as China’s foreign direct investment experiences an ill-timed U-turn. In the first three months of the year, roughly US$30 billion zoomed away from China. Stock investors are pivoting elsewhere, too. Since its 2021 high, the MSCI China Index has lost more than half of its value.

On the debt side, China “suffered outflows” in April to the tune of $3.8 billion “as the positive effect of the Covid reopening fades away,” says economist Jonathan Fortun at the Institute of International Finance.

Hence the urgency to dispel the gathering notion that China’s leadership is in an anti-foreigner sentiment phase. Xi chose Li to lead the China-is-open-for-business repair effort.

First, there’s a matter of improving the odds of reaching a 5% economic growth rate this year. Analyst Kelvin Wong at OANDA notes that the latest reading from China’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) data “further reinforced an increasing slowdown in external demand and lackluster internal domestic demand ex-post re-opening from Covid-19 stringent lockdowns.”

On closer inspection, Wong notes, the data “indicated a risk of a deflationary spiral at play.” The input cost – main raw material purchase prices – sub-component of the manufacturing PMI declined at the fastest pace in May since July 2022 – 40.8 versus 46.4 – while the output cost sub-component fell for the third consecutive month and recorded its steepest decline for ten months in May to 41.6 from 44.9.

The bottom line, Wong says, is Beijing needs to halt the narrative about “the risk of the deflationary spiral in China.”

Economist Lu Ting at Nomura International added that “the sharper contraction in the manufacturing PMI suggests that the risk of a downward spiral, especially in the manufacturing sector, is becoming more real.”

Others are more sanguine. Some economists argue that China Beige Book data shows that manufacturing activity may be perking up.

Goldman Sachs China economist Hui Shan says recent trends in China’s emerging industries PMI seem a “tentative sign that manufacturing activity may begin to stabilize.”

At the same time, a “loss of economic momentum amid weakening demand both at home and abroad” is getting harder for Premier Li’s team to ignore, says economist Carlos Casanova at Union Bancaire Privée.

Li, Casanova notes, has “vowed more targeted measures to expand domestic demand and stabilize external demand earlier in May, in an effort to promote a sustained economic rebound, but it remains to be seen whether these will be effective.”

Li Qiang is trying to show the world that China is back open for business. Image: Screengrab / NDTV

Yet Li is also focused on structural reforms needed to restore investor confidence. Here, Musk’s timing could not be better.

In recent weeks, Beijing basked in the glow of global headlines over China surpassing Japan as the world’s biggest exporter of autos for the first time. Some of that dynamic reflects China’s embrace of EVs, while Toyota Motor and many Japan Inc peers stick with hybrid vehicles.

The narrative shift followed an earlier Li era victory: a move to break up Alibaba Group into six units – and founder Ma’s return to China after a long absence. Alibaba’s structural shakeup was a win for reformers and a vital gesture to reassure global investors that the regulatory crackdown on Big Tech is finished.

Since then, analysts like Kelvin Ho at Fitch Ratings have noted how “this could boost Alibaba’s credit strength if capital is freed up from businesses that generate little cash and deployed in stronger cash-generating businesses or used to pay down debt.”

The hope, too, is that Alibaba’s example could become a model for other internet giants in harm’s way, including Baidu, ByteDance, Didi, Tencent and others. If so, it would unlock value in China’s biggest service sector companies, enticing global investors.

Both Xi and Li surely appreciate Musk’s firm rejection of the idea that the US and China can thrive economically separately.

As economists at Allianz argue in a note to clients: “The economic implications of a further decoupling between the West and China could be far-reaching,” noting that the fallout for China’s economy could be “far from negligible.”

“China,” they argue, “could retaliate by curtailing the supply of critical raw materials in which it has a dominant position, which could severely disrupt global supply chains. But this is unlikely as it already applies some forms of outbound investment restrictions and is still looking towards economic pragmatism.”

At the margin, though, Musk’s doubling down on China and offering an alternative to the loud decoupling debate have given Beijing one of the best weeks of global headlines it’s had in some time.

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