This investigation gives us a valuable perspective on the long-term alterations to these glaciers and ice caps due to climate change. It has been observed that these changes have been responsible for approximately one-fifth of the total global sea-level rise in the past ten years.

By utilizing historical data, researchers were able to chart the existence of 5,327 glaciers and ice caps at the conclusion of the Little Ice Age in 1900, a time marked by a considerable decline in global temperatures, reaching a drop of up to 2°C. By doing this, they established that these massive ice bodies had broken down into 5,467 distinct glaciers and ice caps by the year 2001.

The study, which was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, said Greenland’s glaciers have lost at least 587 km3 of ice over the last century, accounting for 1.38 millimeters of sea-level rise.

It estimated that the speed at which the water melted between 2000 and 2019 was three times higher than the long-term – since 1900 – average.

Lead author, Dr. Jonathan L. Carrivick from the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, said: “The impact of meltwater runoff from Greenland into the North Atlantic extends beyond global sea-level rise, affecting North Atlantic ocean circulation, European climate patterns, and Greenlandic fjord water quality and marine ecosystems.

“This has immense implications on humans too, with these glacier changes having a direct impact on the economic activities of fishing, mining, and hydropower, as well as affecting people’s health and behavior.”

Near Jungersen Gletschur in Greenland. The white lines show where scientists believe the glacier edges were in 1900. Credit: Bob Elberling.

 

Greenland’s glaciers and ice caps rank as the second-largest source of meltwater, after Alaska.

Co-author, Dr. Clare Boston from the School of the Environment, Geography, and Geosciences at the University of Portsmouth, said: “Previous research using satellite data suggests Greenland’s glaciers and ice caps could lose between 19 percent and 28 percent of their volume by 2100.

“These predictions only use information gathered from the past few decades, whereas our research provides baseline data from more than 100 years ago. Seeing how glaciers have evolved over a longer period of time, can give us a better chance of predicting how they’ll change in the future.

“It’s also important to note, that we only looked at glaciers and ice caps that were at least 1 km2 in area, so the overall amount of ice that has melted would be even more than our predictions if you take into account the smaller ones.”

The paper stresses the importance of understanding these changes in the context of global sea-level rise.

The research also emphasizes the complex nature of glacier evolution due to considerable differences in locations, temperatures, and the influence of regional and local factors.

Glaciers in the North have experienced the greatest speed up in rate of mass loss compared to other regions. Glaciers terminating in lakes have increased the most in their rate of mass loss.

Dr. Carrivick added: “This study contributes great spatial coverage, spatial resolution, and temporal detail to our understanding of Greenland’s glacier changes, providing a valuable resource for policymakers, scientists, and stakeholders concerned with climate change and its impacts.

“It represents a crucial step towards unraveling the dynamics of Greenland’s glaciers and their role in global climate change, as the world faces the challenges posed by a warming Arctic.”

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Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have developed a ‘twin stem cell model’ therapy to treat melanoma brain metastases. One stem cell releases a tumor-attacking virus while the other, genetically modified to resist the virus, strengthens the immune system. This locally delivered therapy, successful in preclinical mouse models, holds promise for future clinical trials.

Overall survival for patients with melanoma that has spread to the brain is only four to six months. Immunotherapies, which harness the power of the immune system to attack cancer cells, have garnered excitement in recent years for their potential to revolutionize the treatment of metastatic melanomas, but results from early clinical studies indicate that the prognosis for most patients remains poor. Now, scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, have integrated multiple therapeutic approaches to more effectively target melanoma in the brain. In preclinical studies, the scientists successfully activated immune responses in sophisticated mouse models that mimic human settings. Findings are published in Science Translational Medicine.

“We know that in advanced cancer patients with brain metastases, systemic drugs, given intravenously and orally, do not effectively target brain metastases,” said corresponding author Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, director of the Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy (CSTI) and the vice chair of research in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Brigham and faculty at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI). “We have now developed a new immuno-therapeutic approach that is sustainable and delivered locally to the tumor. We believe that locally delivered immunotherapies represent the future of how we will be treating metastases to the brain.”

The therapy designed by the scientists uses an engineered “twin stem cell model” to maximize an attack on cancer cells that have spread to a part of the brain known as the leptomeninges. One stem cell releases a cancer-killing (oncolytic) virus, a strategy that has previously shown promise in reducing tumor growth. Using stem cells to deliver the virus amplifies the amount of virus that can be released and ensures that the virus will not be degraded by circulating antibodies before it is released on the cancer cells.

However, the oncolytic virus also destroys the very cells that release it, making it an unsustainable therapeutic option on its own. Therefore, the scientists used CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing to a create a second stem cell that cannot be targeted by the oncolytic virus, and which instead releases proteins (immunomodulators) that fortify the immune system to help fight off the cancer.

The twin stem cells can be delivered via intrathecal injection, a technique already used in the treatment of other diseases. Unlike other immunotherapies that have emerged in recent years, it does not need to be repeatedly administered. The authors emphasize that this approach can be used in other cancers with brain metastasis, such as lung and breast cancer, and are working to design similar treatments for these cancers.

Notably, the authors were able to design a preclinical mouse model that faithfully represents a human model of melanoma with leptomeningeal metastasis, which they used to test their therapy. They found that the therapy successfully activated immune responses in their models that mimic human responses, improving the likelihood that the therapy may succeed in a Phase I trial, which the authors are hoping to launch in the near future.

“A number of biological therapies that look promising often fail in Phase I or Phase II clinical trials, in part because the preclinical models do not authentically replicate clinical settings,” Shah said. “We realized that if we did not fix this piece of the puzzle, we would always be playing catch-up. I don’t think we have been at a point in the last 20 years where we have been as close to curing metastases in the brain as we are now.”

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In 1985, upon the discovery of a hole over Antarctica, international communities united to draft a treaty aimed at conserving the ozone layer, which serves as Earth’s shield against detrimental ultraviolet radiation levels. This collaboration led to the inception of the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which took effect in 1989. At this time, the treaty’s influence on the global climate was not well-understood.

The Montreal Protocol, having the unique distinction of being the only United Nations treaty ratified by all nations across the globe, had the primary objective of reducing the prevalence of ozone-depleting substances (ODSs). These substances were often found in everyday products such as refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosols, and fire extinguishers. For over half a century, this treaty has served as a significant climate mitigation measure, profoundly impacting various aspects of the global climate.

A new study shows that the treaty’s impact goes as far as the Arctic

A new study led by climate researchers at Columbia Engineering and the University of Exeter demonstrates that the treaty’s impact reaches all the way into the Arctic: its implementation is delaying the occurrence of the first ice-free Arctic by as much as 15 years, depending on the details of future emissions. The study was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The first ice-free Arctic summer–with the Arctic Ocean practically free of sea ice–will be a major milestone in the process of climate change, and our findings were a surprise to us,” said the study’s co-author Lorenzo Polvani, Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and professor of earth and environmental sciences. “Our results show that the climate benefits from the Montreal Protocol are not in some faraway future: the Protocol is delaying the melting of Arctic sea ice at this very moment. That’s what a successful climate treaty does: it yields measurable results within a few decades of its implementation.”

Impact of ODSs

Polvani noted that the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice is the largest and clearest signal of anthropogenic climate change. Current projections indicate that the first ice-free Arctic summer will likely occur by 2050, owing largely to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. However, other powerful greenhouse gases have also contributed to Arctic sea ice loss, notably ODSs. When ODSs became strictly regulated by the Montreal Protocol In the late 1980s, their atmospheric concentrations began to decline in the mid-1990s.

Polvani and his co-author Mark England, Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and a former Ph.D. student with Polvani, were particularly interested in exploring the impact of ODSs because their molecules, while a lot less common in the atmosphere, are tens of thousands of times more powerful at warming the planet than carbon dioxide.

Analysis of new climate model simulations

The researchers analyzed new climate model simulations and found that the Montreal Protocol is delaying the first appearance of an ice-free Arctic summer by up to 15 years, depending on future CO2 emissions.

They compared the estimated warming from ODS with and without the Montreal Protocol under two scenarios of future CO2 emissions from 1985–2050. Their results show that if the Montreal Protocol had not been enacted, the estimated global mean surface temperature would be around 0.5 °C warmer and the Arctic polar cap would be almost 1 °C warmer in 2050.

“This important climate mitigation stems entirely from the reduced greenhouse gas warming from the regulated ODSs, with the avoided stratospheric ozone losses playing no role,” said England. “While ODSs aren’t as abundant as other greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide, they can have a real impact on global warming. ODSs have particularly powerful effects in the Arctic, and they were an important driver of Arctic climate change in the second half of the 20th Century. While stopping these effects was not the primary goal of the Montreal Protocol, it has been a fantastic by-product.”

Continued monitoring is critical

Since the mid-1990s, the Montreal Protocol has successfully reduced atmospheric concentrations of ODSs and there are signs that the ozone layer has started to heal. But recent research has suggested a slight rise in ODS concentrations from 2010-20, and England and Polvani stress the importance of staying vigilant.

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This is the first X-ray taken of a single atom

 

One of the auto industry trends I'm most excited about these days is the move to clean-sheet designs for car platforms and architectures. For decades, features have accumulated like cruft in new vehicles: a box here to control the antilock brakes, a module there to run the cruise control radar, and so on. Now engineers and designers are rationalizing the way they go about building new models, taking advantage of much more powerful hardware to consolidate all those discrete functions into a small number of domain controllers.

 

The behavior of new cars is increasingly defined by software, too. This is merely the progression of a trend that began at the end of the 1970s with the introduction of the first electronic engine control units; today, code controls a car's engine and transmission (or its electric motors and battery pack), the steering, brakes, suspension, interior and exterior lighting, and more, depending on how new (and how expensive) it is. And those systems are being leveraged for convenience or safety features like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, remote parking, and so on.

 

Of course, this only works if that software is any good. "There is absolutely no question that software has been treated like a stepchild—I always say the fifth wheel in the car. So like a necessity, but not something that has been managed with care," said Maria Anhalt, CEO of the automotive supplier Elektrobit, which develops digital systems and software for OEMs.

 

"But what we also see is that every OEM and every SOP and every product line starts from scratch in procurement and doing things for the first time. So part of the complexity is doing things multiple times and not thinking of reuse and architecture and modularity and upgradability," Anhalt explained.

Domain-controlled architecture

One can certainly see the appeal of a clean-sheet design that leverages modern computing to simplify a car's underlying design.

 

"It is much more elegant," said Oliver Hoffmann, Audi's board member in charge of technology development. That doesn't make it easy, though. "But to be honest, it is challenging, because all those functions which were located all over the car—a lot more than 200 controllers—you have to bring all those functions into the domain controller. But it is a very smart solution," he said.

 

"So as an example we have what we call the high compute platform, and we have a dedicated domain for infotainment, and we are able to update but also to upgrade, so that every year or every two years you can bring an upgrade in terms of hardware, and we are able to run over-the-air updates," Hoffmann told me.

 

The first Audi we'll see adopt this approach is next year's Q6 e-tron, an electric SUV that is one of the first EVs to use Volkswagen Group's new PPE (Premium Platform Electric) architecture, which will also be used to create the A6 e-tron and the next Porsche Macan.

 

All the domains—which include driving behavior, thermodynamics, and energy management as well as infotainment—are upgradeable over the air; some earlier implementations of OTA updates by automakers have only allowed for certain systems in those vehicles (like infotainment, but not the powertrain) to be easily updated. "So [it's] a very, very big advantage with this kind of platform, and it's a smart solution," he said.

 

I was curious if the move from tens or hundreds of discrete black boxes meant completely rewriting all those functions from scratch. While that's always an option, Hoffmann said that Audi was able to use its experience to make the job a little easier. But for PPE that still meant a new way of working.

 

"It was a completely new way to work together with suppliers," Hoffmann said. "So in the past you had a supplier responsible for the ABS, which was a separate and dedicated controller. Now, there's an interaction between all these domain controllers, so you have to double-check if all this works together with all these other domains or with the rest of the software in the main controller, which makes it very complex," he explained. The solution was to organize "supplier parties" to bring everyone together. This was also complicated, Hoffmann told me, "but I think it is the new way for a collaboration model," he said.

Throw out all those black boxes and say hello to the software-defined car

At issue is sucralose, a widely used artificial sweetener sold under the trade name Splenda. Previous work by the same research team established that several fat-soluble compounds are produced in the gut after sucralose ingestion. One of these compounds is sucralose-6-acetate.

"Our new work establishes that sucralose-6-acetate is genotoxic," says Susan Schiffman, corresponding author of the study and an adjunct professor in the joint department of biomedical engineering at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"We also found that trace amounts of sucralose-6-acetate can be found in off-the-shelf sucralose, even before it is consumed and metabolized.

"To put this in context, the European Food Safety Authority has a threshold of toxicological concern for all genotoxic substances of 0.15 micrograms per person per day," Schiffman says. "Our work suggests that the trace amounts of sucralose-6-acetate in a single, daily sucralose-sweetened drink exceed that threshold. And that's not even accounting for the amount of sucralose-6-acetate produced as metabolites after people consume sucralose."

For the study, researchers conducted a series of in vitro experiments exposing human blood cells to sucralose-6-acetate and monitoring for markers of genotoxicity.

"In short, we found that sucralose-6-acetate is genotoxic, and that it effectively broke up DNA in cells that were exposed to the chemical," Schiffman says.

The researchers also conducted in vitro tests that exposed human gut tissues to sucralose-6-acetate.

"Other studies have found that sucralose can adversely affect gut health, so we wanted to see what might be happening there," Schiffman says.

"When we exposed sucralose and sucralose-6-acetate to gut epithelial tissues—the tissue that lines your gut wall—we found that both chemicals cause 'leaky gut.' Basically, they make the wall of the gut more permeable. The chemicals damage the 'tight junctions,' or interfaces, where cells in the gut wall connect to each other.

"A leaky gut is problematic, because it means that things that would normally be flushed out of the body in feces are instead leaking out of the gut and being absorbed into the bloodstream."

The researchers also looked at the genetic activity of the gut cells to see how they responded to the presence of sucralose-6-acetate.

"We found that gut cells exposed to sucralose-6-acetate had increased activity in genes related to oxidative stress, inflammation and carcinogenicity," Schiffman says.

"This work raises a host of concerns about the potential health effects associated with sucralose and its metabolites. It's time to revisit the safety and regulatory status of sucralose, because the evidence is mounting that it carries significant risks. If nothing else, I encourage people to avoid products containing sucralose. It's something you should not be eating."

The paper, "Toxicological and pharmacokinetic properties of sucralose-6-acetate and its parent sucralose: in vitro screening assays," is published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B. The paper was co-authored by Troy Nagle, Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NC State and UNC and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State; Terrence Furey, professor of genetics and biology at UNC; and Elizabeth Scholl, a former researcher at NC State who is currently at Sciome LLC.

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The Atlantic hurricane season starts on June 1, and forecasters are keeping a close eye on rising ocean temperatures, and not just in the Atlantic.

Globally, warm sea surface temperatures that can fuel hurricanes have been off the charts in the spring of 2023, but what really matters for Atlantic hurricanes are the ocean temperatures in two locations: the North Atlantic basin, where hurricanes are born and intensify, and the eastern-central tropical Pacific Ocean, where El Niño forms.

This year, the two are in conflict – and likely to exert counteracting influences on the crucial conditions that can make or break an Atlantic hurricane season. The result could be good news for the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts: a near-average hurricane season. But forecasters are warning that that hurricane forecast hinges on El Niño panning out.

Ingredients of a hurricane

In general, hurricanes are more likely to form and intensify when a tropical low-pressure system encounters an environment with warm upper-ocean temperatures, moisture in the atmosphere, instability and weak vertical wind shear.

Warm ocean temperatures provide energy for a hurricane to develop. Vertical wind shear, or the difference in the strength and direction of winds between the lower and upper regions of a tropical storm, disrupts the organization of convection – the thunderstorms – and brings dry air into the storm, inhibiting its growth.

How hurricanes form. National Geographic.

The Atlantic Ocean’s role

The Atlantic Ocean’s role is pretty straightforward. Hurricanes draw energy from warm ocean water beneath them. The warmer the ocean temperatures, the better for hurricanes, all else being equal.

Tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures were unusually warm during the most active Atlantic hurricane seasons on recent record. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season produced a record 30 named tropical cyclones, while the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season produced 28 named storms, a record 15 of which became hurricanes, including Katrina.

The top images show where Atlantic tropical storms traveled in 2005, on the left, and in 2020, on the right. The lower images show the corresponding sea surface temperature anomalies for the August-October peak of the hurricane season compared with the August-October 1991-2020 average in degrees Celsius. Image Credit: NOAA

How the Pacific Ocean gets involved

The tropical Pacific Ocean’s role in Atlantic hurricane formation is more complicated.

You may be wondering, how can ocean temperatures on the other side of the Americas influence Atlantic hurricanes? The answer lies in teleconnections. A teleconnection is a chain of processes in which a change in the ocean or atmosphere in one region leads to large-scale changes in atmospheric circulation and temperature that can influence the weather elsewhere.

Three examples of of how sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific change during El Niño events. Image Credit: Christina Patricola

One recurring pattern of tropical Pacific climate variability that initiates teleconnections is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

When the tropical eastern-central Pacific Ocean is unusually warm, El Niño can form. During El Niño events, the warm upper-ocean temperatures change the vertical and east-west atmospheric circulation in the tropics. That initiates a teleconnection by affecting the east-west winds in the upper atmosphere throughout the tropics, ultimately resulting in stronger vertical wind shear in the Atlantic basin. That wind shear can tamp down hurricanes.

How El Niño conditions affect the Walker Circulation’s air flow, which can affect weather around the world. Image Credit: Fiona Martin/NOAA Climate.gov

That’s what forecasters are expecting to happen this summer. The latest forecasts show a 90% likelihood that El Niño will develop by August and stay strong through the fall peak of the hurricane season.

A tug of war between Atlantic and Pacific influences

My research and work by other atmospheric scientists has shown that a warm Atlantic and a warm tropical Pacific tend to counteract each other, leading to near-average Atlantic hurricane seasons.

Both observations and climate model simulations have shown that outcome. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2023 forecast calls for a near-average 12 to 17 named storms, five to nine hurricanes and one to four major hurricanes. An earlier outlook from Colorado State University forecasters anticipates a slightly below-average season, with 13 named storms, compared with a climatological average of 14.4.

Sea surface temperature anomaly in degrees Celsius forecast for August to October 2023 shows a warm season relative to the 1991-2020 average for the same months. Based on NCEP Climate Forecast System version 2 (CFSv2)

The wild cards to watch

Although tropical Atlantic and Pacific Ocean temperatures often inform skillful seasonal hurricane forecasts, there are other factors to consider and monitor.

First, will the forecast El Niño and Atlantic warming pan out? If one or the other does not, that could tip the balance in the tug of war between the influences.

The Atlantic Coast should be rooting for El Niño to develop as forecast, since such events often reduce hurricane impacts there. If this year’s expected Atlantic Ocean warming were instead paired with La Niña – El Nino’s opposite, characterized by cool tropical Pacific waters – that could have led to a record-breaking active season instead.

Two other factors are also important. The Madden-Julian Oscillation, a pattern of clouds and rainfall that travels eastward through the tropics on a time scale of 30 to 90 days, can either encourage or suppress tropical storm formation. And dust storms from the Saharan air layer, which contains warm, dry and dusty air from Africa, can suppress tropical cyclones.

Christina Patricola, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Iowa State University

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

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On May 30, there were more people in orbit around our planet than there have ever been before. Hailing from five different countries, the 17 astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts, were split between the International Space Station and Tiangong, the Chinese space station. The previous record was set when the privately funded Inspiration4 crew blasted into orbit a couple of years back.

On the International Space Station (ISS), there are the members of Expedition 69, cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin, and Andrey Fedyaev from Russia, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen, and Warren Hoburg from the US and Emirati astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi, the first astronaut from the UAE on a long term mission in space (he even took part in Ramadan in space).

Also on the ISS, there were the members of the private mission Axiom-2: Commander Peggy Whitson, private astronaut John Shoffner, and Saudi Arabian astronauts Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi. Barnawi is the first Arab woman in space and the 600th person to ever orbit Earth. The Axiom-2 crew returned to Earth just a few hours ago.

On Tiangong, there were the three taikonauts of Shenzhou 15 – Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming, and Zhang Lu – and they were joined by the member of Shenzhou 16, taikonauts Jing Haipeng, Zhu Yangzhu, and the first civilian taikonaut, Gui Haichao. Shenzhou 15 will come back to Earth in a few days.

This is not the record for the largest number of people in space – it depends on the definition you use for space. If you take the internationally recognized Kármán line – so an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles) – the largest number of people in space was on December 11, 2021, when Blue Origin's NS-19 got to 107 kilometers (66 miles) in its 10-minute trip to space and back. There were 19 people in space.

By going with the US definition of space at 80 kilometers (50 miles), that record was broken last week with the suborbital flight of Virgin Galactic Unity 25 on May 25, as the SpaceShipTwo spaceplane VSS Unity carried six people up to 87.2 kilometers (54.2 miles).

That made a total (Virgin + Expedition 69 + Shenzhou 15 + Axiom-2) of 20 people in space.

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The infamous IQ test. Having a high IQ is perhaps the only thing that can make you seem both incredibly smart and incredibly dumb at the same time, depending on who you speak to when bragging. It has a fraught history of questionable science, elitism, and even eugenics, yet it is still used in some of the highest echelons of healthcare and research. 

So, what is IQ, why is it used, and why won’t people stop using it? 

What is IQ?

Intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a test that combines a number of different psychometric tests to form one single metric of human intelligence. It has a dark history tracing back hundreds of years, but French psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon were among the first to devise a definite test. Called the Binet-Simon test, they designed it as a method of finding children who needed extra help by sending them to special education centers, instead of labeling them as “slow” and sending them to an asylum. 

It centers around the idea that verbal reasoning, visual-spacial skills, and working memory are all components of a larger idea of general intelligence, which can be measured by testing each of the former components. 

The questions were adjusted for age and the score was then divided by the child's age and multiplied by 100 – this was their IQ. Their IQ supposedly measured how well they performed relative to children of a similar age, and could then identify those who would struggle at school and require extra help. 

Intentions were noble when IQ was first conceived, a way to help those who needed it by quantifying something that is essentially unquantifiable. However, as Binet even admitted at the time, the notion of a measurable general intelligence is flawed. Ultimately, their tests were doomed to be misused for nefarious means, which is exactly what happened. 

How IQ has been mishandled throughout history

Throughout history following the creation of a standardized test, IQ has been used by those wishing to feel superior over another class or race of humans, in an effort to segregate or even eradicate those groups. 

IQ testing found a particular home in the surging eugenics movement of Europe and the US, which is the belief that people with desired traits should be selected for and allowed to have children, while those who have undesirable traits should be prevented from doing so. Eugenics was so popular and accepted around the early-mid 1900s that famous faces like Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and John D. Rockefeller Jr all subscribed to this horrific ideology. In fact, the original creator of Kellogg’s was such a strong supporter of eugenics, or as he called it “race betterment”, that he attempted to actively prevent the “feeble-minded” from procreating; it may be unsurprising, then, that IQ tests were a powerful weapon in their arsenal against those they wished to remove from society. 

IQ tests were continually used to determine those who were so-called “feeble-minded” during the US eugenics movement. In 1924, the state of Virginia implemented a policy of forced sterilization of people with low IQ scores, a decision that was later upheld by the Supreme Court during a famous case called Buck v Bell, 1927. The idea was that the sterilized woman involved came from a long line of such people and that she must be prevented from continuing it. High-ranking officials even called for the execution of “feeble-minded” people, and it took another 75 years for the US to bar execution of people with mental impairment. 

Throughout these decades of segregation and persecution, the flawed IQ tests were used to claim superiority over those who needed help – the exact opposite of the creators’ intentions. 

From there, most cases of extreme persecution have been at least partially rooted in IQ scores. The Holocaust looked to eradicate low-IQ people, among the many other marginalized groups, while the Civil Rights movement saw Black people beaten with the terribly constructed notion that they had lower IQs on average. Even now, famous studies are still cited by some to demonstrate that people of color, particularly residents of Africa, have lower than average IQs, completely ignoring the poor scientific method, poor metrics of intelligence, and cultural differences that lead to those results being entirely worthless.  

Is IQ a good measure of intelligence?

So IQ has been wielded by the worst hands of human history, that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad measure of intelligence, right? Correct, but the way it is interpreted and used often does. 

In the 1900s, the test was used to marginalize groups based on a single IQ test score. What these tests failed to take into account was that many of those people taking the tests were immigrants, who spoke poor English and so likely didn't perform as well as they should have. It would be like giving the average American a test in Latin and then saying they can no longer reproduce because they failed – those test results mean nothing about the participant’s intelligence. Working class people often scored lower than those educated to a high level, but that does not necessarily indicate overall intelligence, it simply indicates privilege. 

As IQ tests were calibrated for newer generations, scores rose rapidly, at a much faster rate than could be explained by evolution – this is called the Flynn Effect. It’s highly debated why this occurred: it could be education, better food, and healthcare; it could also be that IQ tests simply do not reflect intelligence that well and do not translate into modern cultural settings. 

More recent tests into whether IQ has any clinical relevance haven’t done it any favors, either. A meta-analysis found that correlations between job performance and IQ are flimsy at best, and rife with statistical error at worst. There have been weak correlations found between IQ and success in school, but this may be down to the fact that IQ tests speak the same cognitive language as schoolwork, so a child performing well in academic tasks may feel at home with cognitive tests like IQ. Small links between success and IQ have been found, and some careers even test it, but other predictors of intelligence have just as much – if not more – predictive value. 

Is IQ worthless?

All this is to say that as a measure of total intelligence, IQ does not stack up. However, it is not entirely worthless. IQ tests are an indication of performance for a specific type of cognitive task, ones that can be helpful in academia, careers, and general life.

Performing well could bode well for your future, but IQ scores need to be interpreted carefully. 

Human intelligence does not have a single definition – a gifted scientist may not find success in creative fields, and vice versa, but to say one is more intelligent than the other is reductionist. IQ tests are used in research now as a measure of one subset of intelligence, combining towards an overall picture of how smart a person is, but even that is dependent on cultural differences and various other environmental factors. Using it as a metric to compare different groups of people is often poor science, and such investigations are almost impossible with how varied humans truly are. 

All we can do is to stop looking for ways to appear superior and instead look for ways we can help, just like Binet and Simon wished. 

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Before long, we might have smart fridges that help us keep track of what foods are about to expire and when to shop. How could this be harmful? Who would be interested in the expiry date of your milk or monitoring your food inventory?

When you think about it, everyday objects in a modern smart home process a lot of data that you probably don't wish to share with all and sundry.

Your thermostat, for example, could give clues about when you are away from home. Your fitness equipment often stores health information about you and your family.

And as an American software developer recently demonstrated—your smart speaker may have security holes that allow eavesdropping on your private conversations.

In the wrong hands, this is information can be misused for everything from burglary to identity theft and extortion. Smart devices are increasingly finding their way into large companies and government institutions, a trend that does not exactly make the situation any less serious.

Automating ethical hacking looks more promising

The work of uncovering security holes in computer systems is today largely carried out manually by so-called penetration testers or ethical hackers. This is time-consuming and expensive work, and the results entirely depend on the individual tester's expertise.

Many people have therefore wanted to automate the process. This goal has turned out to be a far more difficult task than imagined— especially in connection with smart devices.

Researchers from NTNU in Gjøvik recently published an article in the journal Sensors. In addition to reporting on their progress in automating security testing on smart devices, the researchers also revealed that critical devices in maritime shipping are still being manufactured with well-known security holes.

Multitude of smart devices complicate matters

Security testing of smart devices is in principle no different than testing any other computer system. The problem with the smart devices is their vast number of different applications. The technologies can vary considerably, and often they have very different areas of use.

"A smart speaker has been created with completely different tasks in mind than a smart thermostat. Its vulnerabilities may be linked to its own completely unique functions, sensors or other components that a smart thermostat does not have," says Basel Katt, an associate professor at NTNU's Department of Information Security and Communication Technology in Gjøvik.

"Smart devices use a lot of different protocols," says the researcher, "and they have many sets of specific rules to communicate between the computer systems."

The tools that have been developed to automatically test security so far have therefore been of limited use on smart devices. They have mostly been used for very specific tasks, usually only as part of an otherwise manual process, and have not performed nearly as well as human testers.

The NTNU researchers have developed a system that draws from several existing tools and combines them in coordinated simulation attacks on smart devices.

They have developed an independent software agent based on previous work by Fartein Lemjan Færøy, postdoc Muhammad Mudassar Yamin and Katt.

An independent software agent is a computer program that reacts to changes and events in the environment it is in, completely independently of direct instructions from humans. Instead, it acts according to a predetermined decision model. The model in question in this case was developed by Yamin and Katt to specify a software agent's behavior, especially in cyber ranges.

Cyber range—for training

Let us explain: A cyber range is an virtual training arena that gives users and systems the opportunity to test themselves against simulated computer attacks under controlled conditions, not unlike a military training ground.

Katt explains that an automated testing system could cover several roles in a cyber range and potentially make such exercises less time- and resource-consuming.

He further believes that such a system could be of great use both in developing and producing new smart devices, as well as in teaching and research.

"The testing system can demonstrate different ways of hacking and how vulnerabilities can be exploited," Katt says. "It can also be used to show students the consequences of various vulnerabilities."

Put device out of play

The researchers describe in their technical article how they try out their automated test system on an AIS unit. AIS stands for "automatic identification system." This is a widely used technology in shipping that communicates important information about vessels to the Norwegian Coastal Administration and other ships and ports in the vicinity.

Many Norwegian leisure boats are equipped with AIS transmitters, and the technology is required on board larger vessels, such as yachts, cruise ships and cargo ships. The transmitters must also be operational at all times.

"Just figuring out that the automated test system could relatively easily disable an expensive and widely used AIS system was a major discovery in itself," says Katt.

The severity level increased considerably when the researchers found that the connection could also be "spoofed."

Spoofing is when a person or computer program pretends to be someone else by using falsified data. In a maritime context, this could take the form of someone sending out false GPS signals via the AIS system. Worst case scenarios could lead to grounding or colliding with other ships or ports.

The manufacturer of the AIS product in question could probably have caught and rectified the weakness long ago if they had had access to a similar test system during the development and production phase.

Still a way to go

Despite the promising results, Katt emphasizes that the work on automating ethical hacking in smart devices is far from finished.

"Significant progress still needs to be made in working with information exchange across different protocols, in order to develop a fully functional system that can uncover security holes in smart devices with minimal human intervention," says Katt.

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We currently use high-energy X-ray light to help us understand atoms and molecules and how they're arranged, catching diffracted beams to reconstruct their configurations in crystal form.

Now, scientists have used X-rays to characterize the properties of a single atom, showing that this technique can be used to understand matter at the level of its tiniest building blocks.

"Here," write an international team led by physicist Tolulope Ajayi of Ohio University and Argonne National Laboratory in the US, "we show that X-rays can be used to characterize the elemental and chemical state of just one atom."

Schematic of the iron supramolecular assembly, with the iron atom in red and rubidium in cyan. (Ajayi et al., Nature, 2023)

X-rays are considered a suitable probe for the characterization of materials on an atomic level because their wavelength distribution is comparable to an atom's size.

And there are several techniques for chucking X-rays at stuff to see how it's put together on really tiny scales.

One of those is synchrotron X-rays, in which X-rays are accelerated to high energies so they shine much more brightly.

To try to resolve really fine scales, Ajayi and his colleagues used a technique that combines synchrotron X-rays with a microscopy technique for atomic-scale imaging called scanning tunneling microscopy. This employs an excellent sharp-tipped conducting probe that interacts with the electrons of test material in what is known as "quantum tunneling".

At very close proximities (like, half a nanometer), the precise position of an electron is uncertain, smearing it across the space between the material and the probe; the state of the atom can then be measured in the resulting current.

Together, the two techniques are known as synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy (SX-STM). The amplified X-radiation excites the sample, and the needle-like detector collects the resulting photoelectrons. And it's an exciting technique that opens up some pretty incredible possibilities: Last year, the team published a paper on using SX-STM to rotate a single molecule.

This time, they went smaller still, attempting to measure the properties of a single iron atom. They separately created supramolecular assemblies, including iron and terbium ions inside a ring of atoms in what's referred to as a ligand. One iron and six rubidium atoms were linked with terpyridine ligands; terbium, oxygen, and bromine were linked using pyridine-2,6-dicarboxamide ligands.

Left: Schematic of the terbium supramolecular assembly, with terbium in cyan, bromine in blue, and oxygen in red. Left: SX-STM image of the terbium supramolecular assemblies. (Ajayi et al., Nature, 2023)

These samples were then subjected to SX-STM.

The light the detector receives isn't the same as the light beamed at the sample. Some wavelengths are absorbed by electrons in the atomic core, which means that there are some darker lines on the X-ray spectrum received.

These darker lines, the team found, are consistent with the wavelengths absorbed by iron and terbium, respectively. The absorption spectra could also be analyzed to determine the chemical states of these atoms.

For the iron atom, something interesting occurred. The X-ray signal could only be detected when the probe tip was located precisely above the iron atom in its supramolecular structure and at extremely close proximity.

This, the researchers say, confirms detection in the tunneling regime. Because tunneling is a quantum phenomenon, this has implications for studying quantum mechanics.

"Our work," the researchers write, "connects synchrotron X-rays with a quantum tunneling process and opens future X-rays experiments for simultaneous characterizations of elemental and chemical properties of materials at the ultimate single-atom limit."

That's probably at least as good as bones.

The research has been published in Nature.

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Over the years, I have seen hand wounds from cutting implements and foot wounds from lawn mowers and garden forks. In recent weeks, I have seen falls from ladders, head wounds from falls on concrete—and, sadly, confirmed the death of a person in their later years whose enthusiastic shoveling proved too much.

Even in times past, the garden could be quite the health hazard. One of the first patients to be treated with penicillin was a police officer who had apparently contracted sepsis after a scratch from a rose thorn. In those days, the most minor of wounds could have the deadliest of consequences—and it turns out this can still happen, with a UK woman recently dying from sepsis after scratching her hand while gardening.

But these aren't the only dangers lurking in your garden. Here are just a few things to look out for before you next head out to tend your plants:

1. Tetanus

Tetanus is a particularly nasty disease. The muscles go into spasm due to the effects of the toxin from the bacteria, Clostridium tetani. The suffering is almost indescribable, causing painful muscle spasms and a locked jaw.

Many associate tetanus with objects such as rusty nails. But this surprisingly common organism is also found in the soil, particularly if manured, because clostidia are found in the gut. Roses like soil with manure, so this could turn these beloved flowers deadly if you get cut by contaminated thorns or if the soil gets into a cut.

Luckily, I have yet to see any cases in the emergency room because the UK immunizes against tetanus. And I never want to see a case, because of how nasty it is. The case fatality rate can exceed 50% in people who aren't immunized. This is why it's important to check that your tetanus jab is up to date.

2. Bacteria and fungi

Lurking in a humble bag of compost is an ingredient many of us wouldn't expect: Legionella.

This bacteria can cause an infection called Legionnaires' disease which is particularly harmful for the elderly and people with a compromised immune system. It can lead to a nasty and often fatal pneumonia when inhaled. Warm, stagnant water involved in the composting process may account for its presence.

It isn't only pre-packaged compost that's hazardous. Your own compost heap is also be filled with various bacteria and fungi, which, if properly maintained, should cause you no trouble. But often the mold Aspergillus can grow when it's hot outside. This can give rise to some nasty lung lesions and may even become more widespread in the body—especially in the elderly and immunosuppressed and can be fatal.

Mold spores can also trigger allergies in some people, a condition known as extrinsic allergic alveolitis or "farmer's lung". This condition was classically due to exposure to moldy hay, but compost heaps can also do the same because of the presence of organisms such as Aspergillus and the bacteria Actinomycetes.

3. Leptospirosis

Leptospira is a bacterium that may be found in water contaminated with rat urine. With rats often building habitats near humans, it might be best to take care near the pond or rainwater barrels when gardening.

Leptospira can cause leptospirosis, a rather unpleasant infection that causes headaches, fevers, chills, vomiting, jaundice and then later, liver failure, kidney failure and meninigitis.

4. Power tools

While power tools can make our work easier in the garden, they can also make it much easier to injure ourselves, too. Hedge trimmers may be a great way to tame trees and bushes, but they can also amputate digits and inflict wounds very efficiently. Be sure to wait until the hedge trimmer is fully turned off before clearing any branches you've removed.

Hedge trimmers and lawn mowers can also easily cut through electric cables, which can lead to electrocution. Power tools can also be disastrous if you fall while up a ladder and if you have power lines crossing your garden, then please avoid them.

Stay safe

While these hidden dangers are certainly a risk, luckily there are many simple things you can do to avoid harm from them, including:

•     Cleaning and covering wounds while gardening.

•     Make sure your immunisations are up to date (especially for tetanus).

•     Keeping compost bags away from your face when you open them.

•     Deter rats by not putting cooked food on compost heaps, covering water butts and setting up traps if you have an infestation.

•     Set up ladders firmly on even ground away from power lines.

•     Enjoy having wildlife but leave it alone (snakes can be just as much a danger as rats).

And one last piece of advice from me. Every year the burns unit at my hospital sees a number of people who have tried to speed up the process of lighting their barbecue or bonfire by using petrol. Not all survive. So if you are planning to cook the fruits of your labors on a barbecue in your garden, make sure you don't use inflammable liquids to get the flame started, and have a fire extinguisher on hand just in case.

Gardening is a rewarding hobby that has many health benefits. Just be sure to take sensible precautions.

Provided by The Conversation

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At home, at work and in civic spaces, it's not uncommon to have conversations that make you question the intelligence and benevolence of your fellow human beings.

A natural reaction is to put forth the strongest argument for your own—clearly superior—perspective in the hope that logic and evidence will win the day. When that argument fails to have the intended persuasive impact, people often grow frustrated, and disagreement becomes conflict.

Thankfully, recent research offers a different approach.

For many years, psychologists have touted the benefits of making parties in conflict feel heard. Making someone you're arguing with feel that you're listening can calm the troubled waters, allowing both parties to get safely to the opposite shore. Two problems can get in the way, though.

First, when encountering disagreement, most people jump into "persuasion mode," which doesn't leave much room for listening, or even for pursuing other goals for the interaction. Any conversation could be an opportunity to learn something new, build a relationship that might bear fruit later, or simply have an interesting experience. But most of those goals get forgotten when the urge to persuade sets in. Second, and just as important, is that even when people do wish to make their counterparts feel heard they don't know how to do so.

I lead a team of psychologists, negotiation scholars and computational linguists who have spent years studying ways that parties in conflict can behave to make their counterpart feel they are thoughtfully engaging with their perspective.

Rather than trying to change how you think of or feel about your counterpart, our work suggests that you should focus on changing your own behavior. Focusing on behavior rather than thoughts and feelings has two benefits: You know when you are doing it right, and so does your counterpart. And one of the easiest behaviors to change is the words that you say.

A conversational toolbox, based on what works

We used the tools of computational linguistics to analyze thousands of interactions between people who disagree with each other on hot-button social and political issues: police brutality, campus sexual assault, affirmative action and COVID-19 vaccines. Based on these analyses, we developed an algorithm that picks out specific words and phrases that make people in conflict feel that their counterpart is thoughtfully engaging with their perspective.

These words and phrases comprise a communication style we call "conversational receptiveness." People who use conversational receptiveness in their interactions are rated more positively by their conflict counterparts on a variety of traits.

Then we experimented with training people to use the words and phrases that have the most impact, even if they're not naturally inclined to do so. For example, in one of our earlier studies, we had people who held different positions about the Black Lives Matter movement talk to each other.

Those who received a brief conversational receptiveness training were seen as more desirable teammates and advisers by their counterpart. Training also turned out to make people more persuasive in their arguments than those who did not learn about conversational receptiveness.

We encapsulate this conversational style in the simple acronym H.E.A.R.:

• H = Hedge your claims, even when you feel very certain about your beliefs. It signals a recognition that there are some cases or some people who might support your opponent's perspective.

• E = Emphasize agreement. Find some common ground even when you disagree on a particular topic. This does not mean compromising or changing your mind, but rather recognizing that most people in the world can find some broad ideas or values to agree on.

• A = Acknowledge the opposing perspective. Rather than jumping in to your own argument, devote a few seconds to restating the other person's position to demonstrate that you did indeed hear and understand it.

• R = Reframing to the positive. Avoid negative and contradictory words, such as "no," "won't" or "do not." At the same time, increase your use of positive words to change the tone of the conversation.

Measuring benefits of the tools in practice

In a recent set of studies, my colleagues and I recruited people who were supportive of or hesitant about getting COVID-19 vaccinations. We paired vaccine-supportive participants with the vaccine hesitant and instructed them to persuade their partner to get the shot. Before the interaction, we randomly assigned the vaccine supporters to receive brief instructions in conversational receptiveness or guidance simply to use the best arguments they could think of.

We found that participants who received a couple minutes of instruction in conversational receptiveness were seen as more trustworthy and more reasonable by their counterparts. Their counterparts were also more willing to talk to them about other topics.

In a subsequent study, we explained the concept of conversational receptiveness to participants on both sides of the issue. Just knowing that they'd be engaging with someone trained in this technique made both parties report being 50% more willing to have a vaccine conversation. People felt more confident their discussion partner would hear them and less worried they'd be a dismissive jerk.

Dialing down the acrimony

This approach might be especially beneficial in conversations in which one party is highly motivated to engage while the other is less so. When such conversations turn contentious, the less motivated person can simply walk away.

That's an all-too-familiar experience for parents of teenagers who seem to have advanced degrees in ignoring unwelcome advice. Health care providers often face a similar challenge when they try to persuade patients to change behaviors they do not wish to change. In the workplace, this burden is most acutely felt by people lower in the hierarchy trying to have their views heard by higher-ups who just don't have to listen.

Conversational receptiveness is effective because it makes the interaction less confrontational and therefore less unpleasant. At the same time, it allows both parties to express their perspective. As a result, it gives people some confidence that if they approach a topic of disagreement, their partner will stay in the conversation, and the relationship will not sustain damage.

In recent years, many scholars across the social sciences have expressed concern about Americans' seeming inability to talk to their political opponents.

Yet the skills that are necessary for Democrats and Republicans to engage with one another are similarly lacking in our families and in our workplaces.

Our work on conversational receptiveness builds on extensive prior research on the benefits of showing engagement with opposing perspectives. By focusing on language that can be easily learned and precisely measured, we offer people a broadly applicable toolkit to live up to their best conversational intentions.

Provided by The Conversation

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The weight will be anonymously recorded in a database but not be visible to airline staff or other passengers, the firm said.

Air New Zealand said knowing average passenger weight would improve fuel efficiency in the future.

Participation in the survey is voluntary, the airline added.

The airline previously weighed domestic passengers in New Zealand in 2021.

"Now that international travel is back up and running, it's time for international flyers to weigh in," the airline said in a press statement.

Before the pandemic, the airline flew more than 17 million passengers every year, with 3,400 flights per week.

Knowing the weight of everything that goes on its aircraft is a "regulatory requirement", airline spokesman Alastair James explained in a video.

"We know stepping on the scales can be daunting. We want to reassure our customers there is no visible display anywhere," Mr James said. "By weighing in, you'll be helping us fly safely and efficiently every time."

Air New Zealand will be asking more than 10,000 customers travelling on its international network to take part in the survey.

Passengers will be weighed at the gates of certain flights departing from Auckland International Airport between 29 May and 2 July.

The airline said that everything that goes on its aircraft - from cargo and onboard meals to luggage in the hold - is weighed, and that for customers, crew and cabin bags it used average weights based on survey data.

Air New Zealand is the national carrier of the country and has 104 operating aircraft.

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mRNA technology for vaccines and more: An Ars Frontiers recap

Beating the heat: These plant-based iridescent films stay cool in the sun

Like many autistic people, Madi Young, a consultant in Seattle, has learned to perform the social behaviors and body language that neurotypical people expect. But masking, as it’s called, is hard work and can lead to misunderstandings.

So Young was pleased to recently find a conversational partner whom they feel more closely mirrors the way they speak: ChatGPT. “It’s not getting the mismatch with my body language—it’s only getting my words,” says Young, who uses the chatbot for therapeutic conversations and as a “brainstorming buddy” or “friend.”

Young also uses the chatbot to help them in their work with neurodivergent entrepreneurs and creatives on brand and business strategy. That has included ChatGPT generating communication strategies that can translate well between autistic and neurotypical people, says Young, who has held a workshop to help other neurodivergent entrepreneurs learn to use the chatbot.

“A lot of autistic people have grown up being told that they are aliens, or that they sound like robots, or there’s just something wrong with them,” Young says. When ChatGPT came along, they “quickly realized that it kind of sounded like I do”—logical and specific.

Young is far from the only autistic person using the popular chatbot as a part of their daily routine. For some, it’s a place to chat about their interests when other people grow bored, or to work up social scripts to help them navigate conflict. It’s also a new resource to turn to for support. Unlike a therapist or social worker, the bot is always available and doesn’t bill by the hour.

Hadley Johnston, a first-year college student at Iowa State University, is navigating the dynamics of living with roommates for the first time. When she got into an argument with one of them, Johnston struggled to articulate her emotions. “I kind of go silent in those situations,” she says. But with AI on hand, she could model a conversation and try out ways to express herself. “Having ChatGPT, I didn’t have to go to my parents for this.” For Johnston, that’s huge. ChatGPT isn’t just a source of knowledge, but independence.

Autism affects people in many different ways and individuals can have varying needs. ChatGPT may not work for some or even most, but a common feature of autism is that social interactions can be difficult or confusing.

Using a chatbot to help with communication may seem unconventional, but it’s in line with some established ideas used in social work to help people become more independent. “We talk about empowering people and helping people to be fully autonomous and experience success on their own terms,” says Lauri Goldkind, a professor in Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Service who focuses on the marriage of social work and technology. An accessible tool like a generative AI bot can often help bridge the gap left by intermittent access to mental health services like therapy, Goldkind says. 

But the true impact of ChatGPT for therapeutic reasons is largely unknown. It’s too new—WIRED reached out to four clinical therapists and counselors for input. Each of them declined to comment, saying that they have yet to explore the use of ChatGPT as a therapeutic tool or encounter it in their sessions. 

The chatbot’s flexibility also comes with some unaddressed problems. It can produce biased, unpredictable, and often fabricated answers, and is built in part on personal information scraped without permission, raising privacy concerns.

Goldkind advises that people turning to ChatGPT should be familiar with its terms of service, understand the basics of how it works (and how information shared in a chat may not stay private), and bear in mind its limitations, such as its tendency to fabricate information. Young said they have thought about turning on data privacy protections for ChatGPT, but also think their perspective as an autistic, trans, single parent could be beneficial data for the chatbot at large.

As for so many other people, autistic people can find knowledge and empowerment in conversation with ChatGPT. For some, the pros outweigh the cons.

Maxfield Sparrow, who is autistic and facilitates support groups for autistic and transgender people, has found ChatGPT helpful for developing new material. Many autistic people struggle with conventional icebreakers in group sessions, as the social games are designed largely for neurotypical people, Sparrow says. So they prompted the chatbot to come up with examples that work better for autistic people. After some back and forth, the chatbot spat out: “If you were weather, what kind of weather would you be?”

Sparrow says that’s the perfect opener for the group—succinct and related to the natural world, which Sparrow says a neurodivergent group can connect with. The chatbot has also become a source of comfort for when Sparrow is sick, and for other advice, like how to organize their morning routine to be more productive.

Chatbot therapy is a concept that dates back decades. The first chatbot, ELIZA, was a therapy bot. It came in the 1960s out of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was modeled on Rogerian therapy, in which a counselor restates what a client tells them, often in the form of a question. The program didn’t employ AI as we know it today, but through repetition and pattern matching, its scripted responses gave users the impression that they were talking to something that understood them. Despite being created with the intent to prove that computers could not replace humans, ELIZA enthralled some of its “patients,” who engaged in intense and extensive conversations with the program.

More recently, chatbots with AI-driven, scripted responses—similar to Apple’s Siri—have become widely available. Among the most popular is a chatbot designed to play the role of an actual therapist. Woebot is based on cognitive behavioral therapy practices, and saw a surge in demand throughout the pandemic as more people than ever sought out mental health services.

But because those apps are narrower in scope and deliver scripted responses, ChatGPT’s richer conversation can feel more effective for those trying to work out complex social issues.

Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at startup Hugging Face, which develops open source AI models, suggests people who face more complex issues or severe emotional distress should limit their use of chatbots. “It could lead down directions of discussion that are problematic or stimulate negative thinking,” she says. “The fact that we don't have full control over what these systems can say is a big issue.”

Earlier this year, a man in Belgium died by suicide after weeks of intense conversations with a bot based on GPT-J, an open source AI model developed by the nonprofit group EleutherAI. 

Search engines and many other online services—including Woebot—direct users to hotlines or other sources of support if they seem particularly at risk of self-harm or violent behavior. ChatGPT does instruct conversers to seek out human support if their messages appear concerning, but did not direct to an emergency hotline during tests WIRED performed. 

Andrea Vallone, product policy manager at OpenAI says the company has tried to make ChatGPT respond appropriately to people who may be vulnerable but it is not intended to be used as a replacement for mental health treatment. “We trained the AI system to provide general guidance to the user to seek help,” she says. The chatbot doesn't suggest a specific place to look for help to avoid pointing people to resources not available in their region. “We encourage users to seek support from professionals,” Vallone says.

Mitchell believes recent advances in generative AI will lead to chatbots tuned for therapy that are more capable and based on datasets from people with specific needs, including autism. For now, ChatGPT can still serve an important role in self-expression for people of all kinds, especially those who don’t always have another person to converse with who understands their style.

Sparrow says they’ve also used ChatGPT to talk through their thoughts at length. But Sparrow started dating someone recently, and is spending less time with ChatGPT. For all its benefits, a chatbot is no substitute for human connection. “Some of that has dropped off because I have an actual human being,” they say. “There is an aspect of human connection that it just can’t replace.”

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for free, 24-hour support from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line. Outside the US, visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for crisis centers around the world.

For Some Autistic People, ChatGPT Is a Lifeline

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COVID outbreak at CDC gathering infects 181 disease detectives

Published in the journal Brain, the research is a follow-up to the team’s 2019 discovery of the FAAH-OUT gene and its rare mutations, which make Jo Cameron almost immune to pain, and devoid of fear and anxiety. The latest study elucidates how this mutation reduces the expression of the FAAH gene and impacts other molecular pathways associated with mood and wound healing. The insights garnered from these findings could potentially pave the way for novel drug targets and foster further research in these domains.

Jo, who lives in Scotland, was first referred to pain geneticists at UCL in 2013, after her doctor noticed that she experienced no pain after major surgeries on her hip and hand. After six years of searching, they identified a new gene that they named FAAH-OUT, which contained a rare genetic mutation. In combination with another, more common mutation in FAAH, it was found to be the cause of Jo’s unique characteristics.

The area of the genome containing FAAH-OUT had previously been assumed to be ‘junk’ DNA that had no function, but it was found to mediate the expression of FAAH, a gene that is part of the endocannabinoid system and that is well-known for its involvement in pain, mood, and memory.

In this study, the team from UCL sought to understand how FAAH-OUT works at a molecular level, the first step towards being able to take advantage of this unique biology for applications like drug discovery.

This included a range of approaches, such as CRISPR-Cas9 experiments on cell lines to mimic the effect of the mutation on other genes, as well as analyzing the expression of genes to see which were active in molecular pathways involved with pain, mood, and healing.

The team observed that FAAH-OUT regulates the expression of FAAH. When it is significantly turned down as a result of the mutation carried by Jo Cameron, FAAH enzyme activity levels are significantly reduced.

Dr. Andrei Okorokov (UCL Medicine), a senior author of the study, said: “The FAAH-OUT gene is just one small corner of a vast continent, which this study has begun to map. As well as the molecular basis for painlessness, these explorations have identified molecular pathways affecting wound healing and mood, all influenced by the FAAH-OUT mutation. As scientists, it is our duty to explore and I think these findings will have important implications for areas of research such as wound healing, depression, and more.”

The authors looked at fibroblasts taken from patients to study the effects of the FAAH-OUT-FAAH axis on other molecular pathways. While the mutations that Jo Cameron carries turn down FAAH, they also found a further 797 genes that were turned up and 348 that were turned down. This included alterations to the WNT pathway that is associated with wound healing, with increased activity in the WNT16 gene that has been previously linked to bone regeneration.

Two other key genes that were altered were BDNF, which has previously been linked to mood regulation and ACKR3, which helps to regulate opioid levels. These gene changes may contribute to Jo Cameron’s low anxiety, fear, and pain.

Professor James Cox (UCL Medicine), a senior author of the study, said: “The initial discovery of the genetic root of Jo Cameron’s unique phenotype was a eureka moment and hugely exciting, but these current findings are where things really start to get interesting. By understanding precisely what is happening at a molecular level, we can start to understand the biology involved and that opens up possibilities for drug discovery that could one day have far-reaching positive impacts for patients.”

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New research shows that it is now virtually impossible for natural causes to explain satellite-measured changes in the thermal structure of Earth’s atmosphere.

The analysis conducted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and colleagues for the first time demonstrates that extending “fingerprinting” techniques — used to identify the human effects on climate — to the mid-to upper stratosphere (25-50 kilometers above Earth’s surface) improves the detection of human effects on climate by a factor of five.

“Including the mid- to upper stratosphere in vertical fingerprinting yields clear evidence of human effects on the thermal structure of Earth’s atmosphere,” said Stephen Po-Chedley, LLNL climate scientist and co-author of a paper appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Differences between tropospheric (lower layer of the atmosphere) and lower stratospheric temperature trends have long been recognized as a “fingerprint” of human effects on climate. This fingerprint, however, neglected information from the mid- to upper stratosphere, according to co-author Karl Taylor, also at LLNL.

“Extending fingerprinting to the upper stratosphere and comparing improved climate model results with observed temperature measurements, now covering 37 years, means that it is now virtually impossible for natural causes to explain satellite-measured trends in the full structure of Earth’s atmosphere,” Taylor said.

Noise in the troposphere can include day-to-day weather, interannual variability arising from El Niños and La Niñas and longer-term natural fluctuations in climate. In the upper stratosphere, the noise of variability is smaller, and the human-caused climate change signal is larger, so the signal can be much more easily distinguished.

Detectability occurs because of the distinctive pattern and magnitude of stratospheric temperature change due to CO2 emissions. The human-induced stratospheric cooling is large and grows with altitude. In contrast, natural variations in stratospheric temperature are smaller and yield a different pattern of cooling.

In simulations performed with a simple radiative convective climate model in 1967, Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald quantified the temperature effects of CO2. Their research yielded warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere, with cooling predicted to amplify with greater height above the tropopause. The vertical profile of temperature predicted by Manabe and Wetherald was subsequently confirmed by more complex models and observations.

But early pattern-based studies seeking to discern a human fingerprint in weather balloon and satellite atmospheric temperature data neglected the mid- to upper stratosphere, where the temperature signal of CO2 increase is expected to be considerably larger than in the troposphere or the lower stratosphere.

“In searching for a human CO2 signal, the mid- to upper stratosphere layer has the additional advantage that it is less affected than lower atmospheric layers by particulate pollution and by human-caused changes in stratospheric ozone,” Po-Chedley said.

The new work expands on earlier fingerprint studies that relied solely on Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) data for estimating latitude-height profiles of atmospheric temperature change. In the new study, the team compared the atmospheric temperature trends seen in improved satellite data sets to those obtained in newer model simulations of the historical period. The simulations provided estimates of the expected “signal” due to human influence on the climate.

The team also used an ensemble of pre-industrial control runs with no year-to-year changes in human or natural external factors. The control runs provide multi-model estimates of the “noise” resulting from natural internal variations in climate. The satellite-observed changes in atmospheric temperature were consistent with the human-caused changes and produced a large signal-to-noise ratio.

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A new immunotherapy developed in Israel has been announced to be around 90 percent effective at putting patients with multiple myeloma into complete remission, offering hope for people with a currently incurable disease. 

The innovative therapy is already used in other cancers where possible. It involves reprogramming the patient’s immune cells to recognize and attack their tumor cells and is recognized as one of our best shots at treating aggressive cancers. 

The ongoing Phase 1 clinical trial has been producing incredible results over the last few months and the latest results have been outlined by local news outlet the Jerusalem Post, which reports that over 90 percent of the 74 patients treated with the therapy entered complete remission.  

Previous results showed that in a smaller cohort of 20 patients with advanced multiple myeloma, 85 percent of patients responded to the treatment and 71 percent had a complete response, eradicating any signs of the disease from the body. 

In the previous study, the treatment boosted patient survival by an average of 308 days, but six patients had no sign of disease progression by the time the data recording was stopped around a year and a half later. 

Chimeric Antigen Receptor Cell Therapy (CAR-T) is an extremely promising line of immunotherapy against many different cancers, due to its individualized approach. It takes place over a number of weeks and involves a blood sample from the patient being genetically modified, with a receptor that recognizes cancer cells added to their T cells, which are part of the immune system. From here, the newly engineered cells are put back into the patient, and it is hoped they will aid the immune system in destroying any tumors, along with protecting against future relapse. 

It sounds ideal, and it is, except for one fatal flaw – all that cutting-edge lab work for a single person comes at a high cost. Currently in the US, a single CAR-T therapy can cost anywhere from $500,000-$1,000,000 depending on the cancer, making it difficult to both research and bring to market. It is also tough to expand to the mass market, as each cancer needs to be analyzed and engineered for specifically.  

Still, despite the intense costs, the researchers state there is no shortage of people looking to be treated. 

“We have a waiting list of more than 200 patients from Israel and various parts of the world at any given time,” said Professor Polina Stepansky, of Hadassah-University Medical Center, in a statement to the Jerusalem Post.  

“Due to the complexity of the production and the complexity of the treatment itself, only one patient a week enters the treatment, which is still being conducted as an experiment.” 

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"Is there anybody there that's willing to help this lady and not let her die?" the dispatcher said. It made the local news, which elicited a national outcry and prompted a police investigation. But the woman was already dead — her heart had stopped. And according to family, the woman had wished to "die naturally and without any kind of life-prolonging intervention."

So why the controversy? It comes down to a widespread misconception of what CPR can, and can't, do. CPR can sometimes save lives, but it also has a dark side.

The discovery that chest compression could circulate blood during cardiac arrest was first reported in 1878, from experiments on cats. It wasn't until 1959 that researchers at Johns Hopkins applied the method to humans. Their excitement at its simplicity was clear: "Anyone, anywhere, can now initiate cardiac resuscitative procedures," they wrote. "All that is needed is two hands."

In the 1970s, CPR classes were developed for the public, and CPR became the default treatment for cardiac arrest. Flight attendants, coaches, and babysitters are now often required to be certified. The allure of CPR is that "death, instead of a final and irrevocable passage, becomes a process manipulable by humans," writes Stefan Timmermans, a sociologist who has studied CPR.

"This is the truest of emergencies and you give people the simplest of procedures," Timmermans told me. "It seems too good to be true," he said, and it is.

Many people learn what they know about CPR from television. In 2015, researchers found that survival after CPR on TV was 70%. In real life, people similarly believe that survival after CPR is over 75%. Those sound like good odds, and this may explain the attitude that everyone should know CPR, and that everyone who experiences cardiac arrest should receive it. Two bioethicists observed in 2017 that "CPR has acquired a reputation and aura of almost mythic proportions," such that withholding it might appear "equivalent to refusing to extend a rope to someone drowning."

But the true odds are grim. In 2010 a review of 79 studies, involving almost 150,000 patients, found that the overall rate of survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest had barely changed in thirty years. It was 7.6%.

Bystander-initiated CPR may increase those odds to 10%. Survival after CPR for in-hospital cardiac arrest is slightly better, but still only about 17%. The numbers get even worse with age. A study in Sweden found that survival after out-of-hospital CPR dropped from 6.7% for patients in their 70s to just 2.4% for those over 90. Chronic illness matters too. One study found that less than 2% of patients with cancer or heart, lung, or liver disease were resuscitated with CPR and survived for six months.

But this is life or death — even if the odds are grim, what's the harm in trying if some will live? The harm, as it turns out, can be considerable. Chest compressions are often physically, literally harmful. "Fractured or cracked ribs are the most common complication," wrote the original Hopkins researchers, but the procedure can also cause pulmonary hemorrhage, liver lacerations, and broken sternums. If your heart is resuscitated, you must contend with the potential injuries.

A rare but particularly awful effect of CPR is called CPR-induced consciousness: chest compressions circulate enough blood to the brain to awaken the patient during cardiac arrest, who may then experience ribs popping, needles entering their skin, a breathing tube passing through their larynx.

The traumatic nature of CPR may be why as many as half of patients who survive wish they hadn't received it, even though they lived.

It's not just a matter of life or death, if you survive, but quality of life. The injuries sustained from the resuscitation can sometimes mean a patient will never return to their previous selves. Two studies found that only 20-40% of older patients who survive CPR were able to function independently; others found somewhat better rates of recovery.

An even bigger quality of life problem is brain injury. When cardiac activity stops, the brain begins to die within minutes, while the rest of the body takes longer. Doctors are often able to restart a heart only to find that the brain has died. About 30% of survivors of in-hospital cardiac arrest will have significant neurologic disability.

Again, older patients fare worse. Only 2% of survivors over 85 escape significant brain damage, according to one study.

CPR can be harmful not just for patients, but also for medical providers. In 2021, a study found that 60% of providers experienced moral distress from futile resuscitations, and that these experiences were associated with burnout. Another study linked intrusive memories and emotional exhaustion to difficult resuscitations. Holland Kaplan, a physician and bioethicist, told me that "the bad experiences far outnumber the good ones, unfortunately."

She has written about performing chest compressions on a frail, elderly patient and feeling his ribs crack like twigs. She found herself wishing she were "holding his hand in his last dying moments, instead of crushing his sternum." She told me that she's had nightmares about it. She described noticing his eyes, which were open, while she was performing CPR. Blood spurted out of his endotracheal tube with each compression.

"I felt like I was doing harm to him," she told me. "I felt like he deserved a more dignified death." It's no wonder that many doctors are not fond of CPR, and choose not to receive it themselves.

The true purpose of CPR is to "bridge the person to an intervention," Jason Tanguay, an emergency physician, told me. "If they can't get it, or there isn't one, then what is it accomplishing?" This is the crucial insight that doctors have and most others don't. CPR is a bridge, nothing more. Sometimes it spans the distance between life and death, if the cause can be quickly reversed, and if the patient is fairly young and relatively healthy. But for many that distance is too great. "The act of resuscitation itself cannot be expected to cure the inciting disease," the Hopkins researchers wrote in 1961.

A patient with terminal cancer who is resuscitated will still have terminal cancer. In those cases, the most humane approach may be to ease the pain of the dying process, rather than build a bridge to nowhere.

How can physicians help patients make these choices in advance? Part of it is education. Studies have found that half of patients changed their wishes when they learned the true survival rates of CPR, or after watching a video depicting the reality of CPR.

Another part is communication. According to one survey, 92% of Americans believe it's important to discuss end-of-life care, but only 32% have done so. Physicians (or patients) should initiate these conversations early, especially for those who are elderly or have chronic medical problems, so that their wishes are known in advance if they suffer a cardiac arrest.

Language matters too. Doctors often ask if patients "want everything done" if their heart stops. But that puts a burden on patients and families. "Who wants to feel like they don't want everything done for their loved one?" Kaplan says. Instead, if CPR would likely be futile, doctors could recommend "allow natural death" instead of "do not resuscitate," suggests Ellen Goodman, director of a non-profit that encourages end-of-life conversations.

"Give people something they can say yes to," she told me. Physicians have the knowledge and experience to guide patients in choosing measures they may benefit from, declining those that may harm, and aligning interventions with their wishes and values. The most important thing, instead of always taking action, is to ask.

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One of the most profound insights to come about in all of physics has been what’s easily Einstein’s most famous equation: E = mc². Quiet simply, it states that energy is equal to an object’s mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. This simple-seeming mathematical relation holds an enormous amount of physics inside of it, including:

• if you have a certain amount of energy available, you can spontaneously create new matter-antimatter pairs of particles as long as their rest mass is less than the amount of energy required to create them,

• if a matter-antimatter pair of particles annihilates, they will produce a specific amount of energy given by the masses of the pair of particles that annihilated,

• and that every time you have a nuclear reaction, whether fusion or fission, if the mass of the products is less than the mass of the reactants, E = mc² tells you how much energy will be liberated in that reaction.

This one equation, E = mc², describes how much energy is inherent to any massive particle at rest, including how much energy it takes to create it and how much energy is released if you destroy it.

But what if your particle isn’t at rest, or what if it doesn’t have any mass at all? In those cases, E = mc² is only half of the meaningful equation. The other half is far more interesting, and is required to make physical sense of what’s going on.

The production of matter/antimatter pairs (left) from pure energy is a completely reversible reaction (right), with matter/antimatter pairs annihilating back to pure energy. If the particle/antiparticle pair annihilate at rest, the energy of each of the two photons produced will be given by E = mc², where “m” is the rest mass of both the matter and antimatter particle. (Credit: Dmitri Pogosyan/University of Alberta)

The reason “rest mass” is such an important concept is because motion — the rate of change of an object’s position over time — isn’t an “absolute” physical property in our Universe. Instead, the key lesson from Einstein’s relativity is that irrespective of what your position is or how your position is changing with time, the laws of physics and the constants of nature, including the speed of light, are always going to appear to be the same.

So if, for example, you have a clock where “one second” is defined by how long it takes light, moving at the speed of light, to:

•     rise from the bottom of the clock to the top,

•     reflect off of a mirror at the top,

•     and come back down to the bottom once again,

then two observers in relative motion to one another will experience the passage of time differently. From the perspective of one observer, they’re the ones at rest, and their definition of a “second” is the correct one: a round-trip for that light, to go from the bottom to the top to the bottom of the clock, that defines their passage through time. For anyone in motion relative to them, that additional motion means that those external, moving clocks appear to run slow.

A light-clock, formed by a photon bouncing between two mirrors, will define time for any observer. Although the two observers may not agree with one another on how much time is passing, they will agree on the laws of physics and on the constants of the Universe, such as the speed of light. A stationary observer will see time pass normally, but an observer moving rapidly through space will have their clock run slower relative to the stationary observer.

(Credit: John D. Norton/University of Pittsburgh)

The reason for this is that motion through space and time are connected and inextricable: woven together into a fabric known as spacetime. The maximum “motion through time” you can possess is what you experience when you’re at rest with respect to the Universe, or when your motion through space is zero. If you do move through space, however, your motion through time slows, which is why the closer you move to the speed of light, the less you age and experience the passage of time. This has a myriad of applications, from global positioning systems (GPS) to high-energy particle physics.

But this is where we have to look at another part of Einstein’s E = mc²: when you’re in motion, your energy isn’t just given by your rest-mass energy, which is the mc² contribution to your energy. Instead, you also have kinetic energy: the energy of motion itself.

Whenever two objects collide, whether they stick together (inelastically) or bounce off of one another (elastically), it’s the kinetic energy that they possess, based on their motion relative to one another, that determines how fast they’ll each wind up moving after they crash into each other. This “energy of motion,” or kinetic energy, is essential to the physics of objects in motion, from billiard balls to automobiles to planetary systems.

In Newton’s theory of gravity, orbits make perfect ellipses when they occur around single, large masses. However, in General Relativity, there is an additional precession effect due to both the curvature of spacetime and the fact that the planets are in motion with respect to the Sun, and this causes the orbit to shift over time, in a fashion that is sometimes measurable. Mercury exhibits the largest such effect within our Solar System, precessing at a rate of an extra 43″ (where 1″ is 1/3600th of one degree) per century due to this additional effect. (Credit: dynamicdiagrams.com, 2011, now defunct)

But you’ll notice that Einstein’s most famous equation, E = mc², has absolutely no dependence on motion at all! If energy is simply mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, then how does motion factor into this? Where does kinetic energy come from?

Perhaps an even more compelling argument that there must be more to the story becomes apparent if we consider light: a quantum of energy that has no rest mass at all. Light, whether we treat it as a wave whose energy is defined by its wavelength or a particle whose energy is quantized into packets known as photons, has no rest mass, so the m in E = mc² has to equal zero. But light carries energy, so E = mc² can’t be all that there is, or E would equal zero, too, which it cannot.

There’s a hint towards the solution if you took physics in High School or college, and learned about the “standard” formula for kinetic energy: KE = ½mv², where v is the speed of the object in motion. This formula only applies at speeds that are low compared to the speed of light: where v is much smaller than c, the speed of light in a vacuum. (That’s the same “c” that’s in E = mc²: 299,792,458 m/s.)

This 1934 photograph shows Einstein in front of a blackboard, deriving Special Relativity for a group of students and onlookers. Although Special Relativity is now taken for granted, it was revolutionary when Einstein first put it forth, and it isn’t even his most famous equation; E = mc² is. (Credit: public domain)

The reason that “kinetic energy” offers such a useful hint is because it leads you one step closer to the real key concept in completing Einstein’s most famous equation: momentum.

Momentum is the “quantity of motion” that an object has, and it’s well-defined whether the thing that’s in motion is massive or massless, and, if massive, whether it moves close to the speed of light or not. Momentum, labeled with a p for very Latin reasons — arising either from the verb “pellere” (to push forcefully) or “petere” (to go) — is basically a measure of how much “Ooomph!” an object has to its motion, and consequently, how difficult it is to bring it to rest.

• For massive particles moving slow compared to the speed of light, momentum can be well-approximated by the simple formula p = mv.

• For massive particles moving at any speed, even at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, momentum is more precisely written p = mγv, where “γ” is the Lorentz factor: 1/√(1-(v/c)²).

• And for massless particles, like light, that move at the speed of light and have no rest mass at all, momentum can’t be written in terms of mass, but can be written in terms of energy very simply, as p = E/c.

The particle tracks emanating from a high energy collision at the LHC in 2012 show the creation of many new particles. By building a sophisticated detector around the collision point of relativistic particles, the properties of what occurred and was created at the collision point can be reconstructed, but what’s created is limited by the available energy from Einstein’s E = mc². (Credit: Panos Charitos/Wikimedia Commons user PCharito)

If we want to give the true expression for the energy inherent to any particle, then, we need to include the effects of its quantity of motion on energy as well as its rest mass’s effects on energy. E = mc², as simple, compact, and notorious as it is, only applies to massive particles at rest: a useful quantity only in certain cases.

Fortunately, there’s an almost-as-simple formula that incorporates both the rest mass energy of a particle, when present, along with the contribution of its quantity of motion to energy as well. That formula for energy is as follows:

E = √(m²c⁴ + p²c²)

Think about what happens in all the different cases that apply here. If momentum (p) is zero, then that last term goes away entirely, and you simply get E = √(m²c⁴), which just becomes good old E = mc² once again: Einstein’s original rest mass-energy equivalence equation.

When a meson, such as a charm-anticharm particle shown here, has its two constituent particles pulled apart by too great an amount, it becomes energetically favorable to rip a new (light) quark/antiquark pair out of the vacuum and create two mesons where there was one before. A strong enough electric field, for long-enough lived mesons, can cause this to occur, with the needed energy for creating more massive particles coming from the underlying electric field, and with the amount of energy required to create these new particles (or particle-antiparticle pairs) described by E = mc². (Credit: The Particle Adventure/LBNL/Particle Data Group)

What if we’re moving slow compared to the speed of light, and we just put in p = mv for momentum?

Then the equation becomes E = √(m²c⁴ + m²v²c²), or, if we pull out an mc² from inside the square root,

E = mc² * √(1 + (v/c)²).

This might not look particularly familiar to you, but consider the following: this equation only works for values of speed, or v, that are slow compared to the speed of light, or c in this equation.

Therefore, the part of the equation that reads √(1 + (v/c)²) is only going to be a little bit greater than one, because the (v/c) term is small. Whenever you have, in mathematics, an expression that’s √(1 + x), wherever “x” is small compared to 1, it can be excellently approximated by 1 + ½*x.

If we do that to our expression for energy, we turn √(1 + (v/c)²) into 1 + ½*(v/c)², which turns our expression for energy into

E = mc² * (1 + ½*(v/c)²),

which becomes, when we multiply the terms out:

E = mc² + ½mv²,

which tells us that the total energy is the rest mass energy (the mc² part) plus the kinetic energy (the ½mv² part).

This image shows a hole that was made in the panel of NASA’s Solar Max satellite by a micrometeoroid impact. Although this hole likely arose from simply a piece of dust, the “v²” term in the equation for non-relativistic kinetic energy (½mv²) can become very large, very quickly. (Credit: NASA)

When we have a massive particle that moves close to the speed of light, however, we can no longer make any such approximations with any sort of reliability; you simply have to calculate the full thing for yourself, using the equation E = √(m²c⁴ + p²c²).

But as you get to very high momentums, which is precisely the case that we deal with in our largest and most powerful particle accelerators, the rest mass term contributes very little to the overall energy. At 99.999%+ the speed of light, the m²c⁴ term will be much smaller than the p²c² term in the equation, which means we can neglect it.

If we do, then we simply get E = √(p²c²), which becomes E = pc: the equation for the energy-momentum relationship for photons and other massless particles. We sometimes call this the ultra-relativistic approximation, as it’s useful wherever the rest mass energy of a system is small compared to the energy due to motion; we can neglect that first term — the m²c⁴ term — even if the object moving ultra-relativistically isn’t truly massless.

Both photons and gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light through the vacuum of empty space itself. At extremely high energies, the rest masses of ultra-relativistic particles can be safely neglected when calculating their energy. In both cases, for massless and ultra-relativistic massive particles, their energy is well approximated by the formula E = pc. (Credit: NASA/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet)

What’s kind of remarkable about this story is that one of the key tests of Einstein’s relativity came in 1919: during a total solar eclipse. According to Einstein’s theory, the presence of a large amount of energy, all in one location in spacetime (the Sun), would bend and distort the path of all objects that traveled close to it. This included the light from background stars, which, although massless, would still follow the path created by curved space: the important key concept of General Relativity.

But what would the older theory that General Relativity was trying to supersede — Newton’s theory of universal gravitation — predict?

Some people insisted that it would predict zero deflection, since light had no rest mass and Newton’s theory relied solely on mass for gravitational attraction. But others recognized that photons still carried energy in the form of E = pc, and therefore, if you used the energy that photons had in place of where you would’ve typically used mass (i.e., if you substituted a photon’s E/c² in place of the Newtonian mass, m), you could actually predict a deflection for Newtonian gravity, too. The fact that Einstein’s theory predicted double the Newtonian value, and that was indeed borne out by the observations, was the key test that enabled us to verify and validate Einstein’s theory, leading to a revolution in how we understood the Universe.

The results of the 1919 Eddington eclipse expedition showed, conclusively, that the General Theory of Relativity described the bending of starlight around massive objects, overthrowing the Newtonian picture. This was the first observational confirmation of Einstein’s theory of gravity. (Credit: London Illustrated News, 1919)

When you think of Einstein’s most famous equation, you should still recognize how profound the simple statement, E = mc², actually is. It tells us that every massive particle has an inherent amount of energy inherent to it, even when it’s at rest, and that its energy can never drop below that key value: mc². If you want to create a particle like it, you require at least that much energy; if you must create that particle along with its antiparticle counterpart, you require at least double that energy. And if you destroy or annihilate any massive particle away, all of that rest mass energy, all mc² of it, will become part of the energy that all of the “daughter particles,” or particles produced in the annihilation, carry away.

But you should also recognize that E = mc² is only part of the full story: because particles not only exist at rest, but also move through the Universe. The quantity of motion that they carry with them, momentum, leads to a certain amount of energy-of-motion being associated with that particle as well. For slow-moving, massive particles, you can approximate that energy-of-motion with E = ½mv². For massless particles and ultra-relativistic massive particles, you can approximate that energy of motion with E = pc. But if you want the general case, where rest mass and momentum both are included, you need the full equation for the energy of a particle:

E = √(m²c⁴ + p²c²)

As famous as it is, E = mc² is only half of the full equation that’s needed to describe a particle’s energy. To get the other half, you have to remember that you cannot simply describe the Universe by taking a snapshot of it. It has a kind of beauty — and energy — that moves.

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Evidence discovered at CERN of a rare form of Higgs boson decay may be just what scientists need to prove the existence of particles beyond those predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics – indirectly, at least.

Speaking at the Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference last week, researchers working on a pair of CERN experiments – ATLAS and CMS – said their combined datasets offer the first evidence of a Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson (an electrically neutral carrier of the weak force) and a photon.

Higgs bosons decay in various ways. They can split into four electrons, for example, or a pair of the electron's heavier cousin, muons. It's also possible for a Higgs boson to decay into two photons, but here's where things start to get tricky and weird: a Higgs boson doesn't decay directly into two photons.

Instead of going from Higgs directly to photons, "the decays proceed via an intermediate 'loop' of 'virtual' particles that pop in and out of existence and cannot be directly detected. These virtual particles could include new, as yet undiscovered particles that interact with the Higgs boson," CERN said.

As with decay into two photons, a Higgs boson that decays into a Z boson and photon goes through the same loops of virtual, and potentially undiscovered, particles. That's not all, either: the ATLAS/CMS findings also suggest the Standard Model of particle physics, which the Higgs boson should have completed, is actually pointing toward theories that extend the Standard Model.

According to said Standard Model and CERN, around 0.15 percent of Higgs bosons should decay into a Z boson and photon, but the data indicates it's actually happening in around 6.6 percent of decays picked up by the Large Hadron Collider. In theoretical models that extend the Standard Model to include other particles the Higgs' Z boson/photon decay rate varies from the 0.15 percent predicted by the standard Standard Model. In other words, something interesting and potentially undiscovered is going on.

"Through a meticulous combination of the individual results of ATLAS and CMS, we have made a step forward towards unraveling yet another riddle of the Higgs boson," said ATLAS physics coordinator Pamela Ferrari.

Of course, there's also the certainty of this discovery to assess, and it's not as sure a thing as the discovery of the Higgs boson itself by CERN scientists in 2012. While the Higgs boson's evidence was given a statistical significance of 5-Sigma (roughly equivalent to a one in 3.5 million chance that its discovery was an error), the Z boson/photon decay discovery only rates 3.4-Sigma – still a pretty low chance of being a mistaken observation, but greater than the discovery of the Higgs boson itself.

In other words, the science continues with hopes more Higgs observations will help clear things up. "This study is a powerful test of the Standard Model. With the ongoing third run of the LHC and the future High-Luminosity LHC, we will be able to improve the precision of this test and probe ever rarer Higgs decays," said CMS physics coordinator Florencia Canelli. ®

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Gravitational wave observations are set to expand the frontiers of our knowledge of the cosmos. But there was a time when physicists had doubted their existence, until the maverick physicist Richard Feynman settled the debate with an ingenious thought experiment.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the gravitational field, just as light waves are ripples in the electromagnetic field. They interact with matter very weakly, making them both famously hard to detect and invaluable sources of information about the universe. Gravitational waves produced billions of years ago are virtually undistorted when they reach us, giving us perfect snapshots of the cataclysmic events that created them. We will peer much further and deeper into the cosmic past when we start ‘seeing’ the universe in gravitational waves.

Scientists are currently setting up a network of gravitational-wave observatories around the world, including one in India that recently received the Union Cabinet’s approval.

Einstein’s solution

Gravitational waves are clearly the future but the field itself has a humble history. Scientists originally ignored the idea in its infancy, including its progenitor Albert Einstein.

In 1915, Einstein discovered the theory of general relativity to describe the effects of gravity. The centrepiece of the theory is a set of equations now known as Einstein’s equations. They are notoriously difficult to solve. Solutions to these equations describe the gravitational fields possible in nature. In 1916, Einstein showed that there was a solution corresponding to a gravitational field with ripples streaming through. He had in effect shown that his theory could describe gravitational waves.

But Einstein himself was not convinced. There was a catch: Einstein had used some approximations to solve the equations. So he suspected that gravitational waves were not so much a feature of his theory as a bug that the approximations had smuggled in. His scepticism rubbed off on the community of gravitational physicists, and not much happened in the next 20 years.

In 1936, Einstein returned to the question with a young collaborator named Nathan Rosen. They wrote a paper solving the Einstein equations without using any approximations and claimed that their results showed gravitational waves do not exist. They sent their paper to a journal, where it was rejected by an anonymous referee. Unhappy with the decision, Einstein wrote an indignant letter to the journal’s editor.

A raging debate

But the referee was right, Einstein came to realise. Einstein had been tripped up by a tricky aspect of general relativity that had confused many others in its early years – the issue of coordinate systems. A coordinate system is like a map of some part of space-time. One has to choose a coordinate system first to understand the gravitational field there. But like our standard world maps may lead us to believe that Greenland is as big as Africa, coordinate systems too can be misleading. A faulty coordinate system may show phenomena that are artefacts of that coordinate system and don’t appear in reality. Einstein and Rosen had made that mistake and ended up concluding that gravitational waves could not exist.

The debate on whether gravitational waves were real or figments of mathematics raged on for decades. In the 1950s, it centred around a question: can gravitational waves transmit energy? People on both sides of the debate produced long, intricate calculations that they each claimed would settle the question in their favour. The confusion stemmed chiefly from the knotty issue of coordinate systems, and the field was tangled up in confusion.

The gravity conference

Enter Richard Feynman. One of the leading figures in 20th century physics, Feynman was as famous for his ability to cut through tangles and grasp the essence of a problem as his cultivated irreverence towards authority. In 1957, he decided to attend a conference on gravity in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was his first gravity conference, and he was not impressed by what he saw. “There are hosts of dopes here,” he wrote to his wife about his fellow participants.

The debate on whether gravitational waves could transmit energy was at the centre of the conference. Listening to several experts in the field drone on on the issue and produce complicated but useless calculations, Feynman realised there was a simple solution to their problem. The murky math issues that experts were lost in, Feynman simply bypassed with an ingenious thought experiment of his making.

Forget all the coordinate confusion and think simply, the thought experiment said. Focus on the following question: can we get gravitational waves to burn some energy?

Feynman considered a situation involving two tiny beads lying on a stick. A gravitational wave passes through this set up at right angles to the stick. The ebb and flow of the passing wave would cause the beads to oscillate along the stick, coming close and then moving away, periodically.

Now, suppose the stick is just a little sticky, that there is some friction between the beads and the stick. So when the beads move, they must generate some heat as they rub against the stick.

But heat is a form of energy and energy cannot be created, only transferred. Where did it come from here? The only possible answer is that it came from the gravitational wave! It is the energy carried by the gravitational wave that gets converted to heat.

Think on your own

Feynman’s argument was an instant success, cutting through the Gordian knot of confusion and converting almost all gravitational-wave sceptics.

After the Chapel Hill conference, many physicists were encouraged to work on gravitational waves. One of them was Joseph Weber, who participated and was influenced by Feynman’s argument. Weber became the first to attempt to detect gravitational waves using an experiment.

While his decades-long efforts failed, they inspired and guided others who came after.

Eventually, scientists announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2016, 30 years after Feynman’s passing. He would have been pleased, and might have reminded us to not be dopes who blindly follow authorities but to think on our own.

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