Enrique Echeburúa (San Sebastian, Spain, 72 years old), Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), says that when a suicide occurs, there are other victims beyond the deceased, and they do not receive adequate support. “The first thing [we need to do] is make it easier for the family that has lost a child, or the person who has lost their partner, to unburden them, to be able to talk about it,” he explains. “Silence is the worst thing, because many people don’t talk to them, even their social circle of neighbors and friends, because they don’t know how to approach [them], which leads to social isolation,” Echeburúa continues in a video call conversation.

The psychologist just published a book entitled Death by Suicide. In just over 150 pages, Echeburúa summarizes the fundamental aspects of a particularly human and painful phenomenon. “We have a very high cognitive capacity that can make us experience suffering and disappointments very intensely, and it makes us aware that we can put an end to our lives. People who attempt suicide want to stop suffering, not stop living,” he says. In the book, he presents suicide as a public health problem and explains it so we can better understand it and combat the stigma that has made it difficult to take adequate prevention measures and increased the suffering of survivors.

Question: Can suicide be addressed as if it were a disease?

Answer. Suicide is not a mental disorder like depression or addiction. In a high percentage—70% to 90%—of cases, there is an underlying mental disorder but there are 10% to 20%, who are people who may reach a point where they make an existential calculation, see that their life no longer makes sense, that they do not have a life project, and they feel isolated and experience a certain tiredness of living. These people may be influenced by external factors, such as a financial setback. At a given moment, shame or feeling socially ostracized can also lead them to an impulsive act of desperation, because death is seen as the only way to escape suffering.

Q. At the moment, there’s a lot of concern about suicides among young people and adolescents in particular. Has the situation worsened?

A. In Spain, most deaths by suicide do not occur in young people. The highest incidence is in adulthood, between 30 and 59 years of age, and a second peak occurs in those over 65 years of age, who may account for approximately 25 to 30% [of the cases]. Teenagers and young adults, between 15 and 30 years of age, may account for about 13%. [Suicide] is much less common than in the elderly, but we are much more sensitive to suicide by a young person. Another important issue is that, in Spain, the number of deaths caused by traffic accidents has decreased dramatically in recent years, and those deaths affected mostly young people. Now, suicide seems much more relevant as [a cause of] unnatural death in this [age] group.

Q. There is also more concern about mental disorders other than suicide among teenagers.

A. There are other phenomena [that are] linked to suicide but are not suicide, such as self-harm in adolescent girls and suicidal ideation. There are many people who have suicidal ideation that, if not treated properly, can eventually translate into a fatal suicide attempt. In Spain, since the pandemic, there has been a clear increase in the number of people with suicidal ideation and teenagers who self-harm. On the other hand, with respect to the number of deaths by suicide, there hasn’t been enough time for us to be able to draw conclusions. In principle, suicide is relatively stable numerically. The most relevant fact is not the increase, but the fact that the numbers have not decreased, when [deaths] have been reduced in other areas, such as traffic accidents, homicides and femicides. It is also true that there is a much greater sensitivity to this phenomenon now, which is clearly a positive thing, because it can lead us to invest more resources [in stopping it].

Q. Why hasn’t the number of deaths by suicide decreased?

A. There is a lack of understanding, and suicide prevention programs, which are [just] starting to develop now, have not been done in a meaningful way. The situation is much better than it was five years ago. Suicide prevention programs are included in [Spain’s] National Mental Health Strategy, which has made this problem a priority issue. [Spain’s] autonomous communities also have suicide prevention plans at the school level. We are training the police, firefighters and professionals in [matters related to] this type of behavior. These [initiatives] will likely yield results in the medium term.

Psychologist Enrique Echeburúa recently published the book 'Death by Suicide'.

Javier Hernandez Juantegui

Q. Is there anything that could be done to prevent suicide that is not being done yet?

A. If we’re talking about adolescents, for example, much more needs to be done. Many teenagers are very sensitive to emotional upheaval, which is experienced far more intensely in adolescence than in adult life; serious disappointments—in romantic relationships, with parents, with friends, school performance, being bullied for being different—can lead them to attempt suicide in a fit of impulsivity. The family and the role of the school play a very important role for teenagers. In the family, parents may not detect the risk of suicide, but they may see that their child has depression, or an anxiety problem, or stops eating or becomes addicted to social media. These are risk factors, and it is a good idea to get those problems checked out, not necessarily [because of] suicide. In the most serious cases, you can also involve the school, or educational psychologists who may work at the school, or a primary care physician to refer [the teenager] to a mental health center. And there are also hotlines that have been set up by the government, the ANAR Foundation, the Hope Hotline, the hotline set up by the Ministry of Health. All of this makes it easier to deal with crisis situations and makes it less likely for a fatal suicide attempt to occur. Then, we must also realize that sometimes suicide occurs impulsively and there is no [unusual] behavior to detect. But… controlling access to drugs, places like high bridges and access to firearms [can help prevent it].

Q. And are there general suicide prevention measures for people of all ages?

A. Additional risk factors should be monitored, such as having a family member who died by suicide, having attempted suicide [before], being male, being over 60 years old, living alone or having a chronic or debilitating disease. We should pay attention to these risk factors in order to provide extra medical, psychological and social support. As we have said, it is also important to monitor serious mental disorders, depression, psychosis…alcoholism or an eating disorder.

From the educational point of view, both in a family and at school, it is important to create what we call protective factors—[ways] to make these people resilient in the face of disappointments, trials and tribulations or setbacks that they may experience in their lives. [Such strategies are] based on building self-esteem. For example: do not ridicule them if they are not at the head of the class. In general, it is a matter of ensuring that they have emotional stability, that they are taught to solve problems and to manage emotions and stressful situations, to foster social relationships, to share their sorrows and joys with the people around them. All of that is very important protection for a person.

Q. Can we improve our knowledge about suicide to better address it?

A. There is something that is not usually done…called a “psychological autopsy.” Essentially, it was created at the request of insurance companies to determine whether a person’s cause of death was an accident or a suicide, because sometimes insurance policies do not cover suicides. Therefore, they were interested in determining the cause of death. Then, they wanted to see which circumstances in each specific case could have led to that person’s loss of life. And this was a study that was carried out with the [help of the deceased person’s] relatives, with the people who had been around that person; [the study took place] a few months after the death, when people were ready to provide information. Thus, we wanted to know more about the variables that lead to suicide to establish better prevention programs. This [study] is not done systematically, because it is very complicated to do so, but it would shed light on how to conduct better prevention campaigns and more specific treatments for different age groups.

Source

Take a walk on Mumbai’s Juhu beach and little has changed in five years—except for the QR codes adorning every food stall. Go to São Paulo in Brazil, Beijing in China, or many other cities across the emerging world and you find something similar. “Most people only want to use UPI,” says Govind, a seaside-snack vendor at Juhu, referring to India’s fast-growing payments network.

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a platform that allows free and fast account-to-account transfers using fintech apps such as PhonePe or Google Pay. Unlike Alipay in China, it is open, so users are not locked into a single company and can take their financial history to competitors, notes Praveena Rai, the chief operating officer of the National Payments Corporation of India (NpCI), which manages the platform. And it is facilitated by QR codes or easy-to-remember virtual IDs.

UPI is drawing attention from across the world. “Look at what India has accomplished with the UPI, Aadhaar and the payments stack,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has marvelled. Overall, it processed over $1trn in transactions in 2022, equivalent to a third of India’s GDP. It was bolstered by the government’s surprise “demonetisation” of 2016, when multiple high-denomination banknotes were discontinued. UPI also benefited when covid left consumers scared of cash. It has grown from around 17% of 31bn digital transactions in 2019 to 52% of 88.4bn transactions by 2022.

“India leads the world in real-time digital payments by clocking almost 40% of all such transactions,” Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has boasted.

The Indian model is inspiring others. Brazil’s Pix, which facilitates bank-to-bank payments with a small fee, was launched in November 2020. It now accounts for some 30% of Brazil’s electronic payments (credit and debit cards take up around 20% each). Such open instant-payment systems are an alternative both to the bank/card model in the rich world and to the closed fintech one in China. “What we have shown is that it doesn’t cost that much to move money if your network is well designed,” says Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of the Indian tech giant Infosys, and an architect of India’s “digital stack”, including UPI.

An even bigger prize than efficiency is the chance to supercharge development. Raghuram Rajan, a former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor, notes that digital payments generate real-time data on sellers’ businesses and buyers’ purchasing habits. That allows lenders or insurers to reach customers who may have neither the financial history nor enough assets to participate in traditional finance. As Patrick Collison of Stripe, a payments firm, puts it, “The provision of credit is more socially valuable the less legible the creditworthiness of the borrower.”

Digital development

Digital forms of money have long been a source of progress in emerging markets. In 2007 M-PESA, a mobile-money service, was launched in Kenya by the telecoms giant Safaricom. Users give cash to designated agents to top up an account linked to their phone’s SIM card. Payments are sent by SMS to friends, family or retailers. M-PESA is now used by over 90% of Kenyan households. It makes it much easier than before to send money to relatives over distances. Consumer spending tends to go up when money can be moved with less friction. Academic estimates suggest that M-PESA has reduced extreme poverty in Kenya by at least 2%.

In China Ant Group, which was spun out of Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, and its fellow payments firm, WeChat Pay, have largely digitised the payments business. Once the fintech behemoths have lured consumers, they can offer loans and other financial services, helped by algorithms that gobble up data. More than 90% of digital payments in China now occur on these two apps. Before the recent government crackdown, Ant was involved in over 20% of Chinese short-term consumer credit. But Chinese fintech firms have had several high-profile clashes with the government: Ant’s planned flotation was blocked and the lending of fintech firms was forced to shrink. Yet Christopher Beddor of Gavekal Dragonomics, a China-based research firm, says the worst of the attack on tech is over. In December 2022 Ant won approval to raise $1.5bn in capital.

The Alipay model is being widely copied elsewhere. PayTM, an Indian fintech giant that listed publicly at a value of nearly $20bn in 2021, has tried to replicate Alipay by creating a similar closed fintech ecosystem in India. It counts Ant as one of its biggest investors. Grab and Gojek, two South-East Asian superapps, have pursued similar attempts at digitisation.

The benefits of digital finance tend to be bigger in emerging economies than in the rich world, says Saurabh Mukherjea of Marcellus, an asset manager. That is because people in rich countries already have access to most modern financial services through well-kept record systems, as well as assets that can be collateralised. The hope is that UPI and similar systems might now let some poorer countries leapfrog the West. The Indian government has given nearly all households a bank account in a scheme called “Jan Dhan Yojana” that is making UPI far more accessible. New payments systems may even foster a credit boom. EY, a consultancy, says that fintech lending in India reached $270bn in 2022, up from just $9bn a decade earlier. This could be supercharged by the Account Aggregator scheme, which, like open banking in Europe, allows users to carry their financial history to a competitor.

Open payments systems may not produce another giant with the clout of Ant in China. Alipay charges 0.1% for withdrawals above a certain threshold. Retailers pay an average of 0.55% in transaction fees. Its lending division once made comparable revenues. That open payments reduce the likelihood of a similar Indian giant emerging is partly by design. “Without UPI we’d get something like Ant without the tools to deal with it,” says one Indian grandee, referring to the inability of the government to curb monopoly abuse.

State support has been critical to the open platforms’ success. Chinese fintechs thrived partly because of scant regulation. India’s central bank has heavily promoted UPI, even requiring retailers above a particular size to accept it. It also mandates zero fees and subsidises participants. Brazilian banks are similarly mandated to offer Pix. Though it is not free, its fees average only around 0.2% for traders, compared with over 2% for credit cards.

Competitive advantage

Boosters of India’s system like noting that UPI promotes competition among fintechs and banks. Consumers want to use the most accepted payment systems; retailers similarly need access to the widely used. That is why card networks or closed systems often end up favouring a few players. Visa and Mastercard dominate the rich world, as Alipay and WeChat Pay dominate China, giving them huge market power. The architects of UPI and Pix see their models as breaking such a trend to concentration. “We see UPI as a public utility,” says Ms Rai of NPCI.

Yet the state-led, zero-fee model has downsides. Indian bankers claim that a shortage of revenue has dissuaded banks and fintech firms from investing in consumer protection. “There are tech costs, maintenance costs, fraud and dispute costs,” complains one. “Why would a financial firm incur all those expenditures when there’s no revenue stream?” asks Ajay Shah of the XKDR Forum, a think-tank in Mumbai. “This is a wake up call…maybe the answer is to charge a little more,” says Mr Rajan, the former RBI governor.

Ms Rai counters that UPI’s zero cost boosts economic growth. The government compensated banks and some fintechs with just over 2,000 crore rupees ($250m) in 2022 as a subsidy for their public service in sustaining UPI. But that is a paltry 0.025% of the total value of transactions, and also far less than what it costs to run the UPI system, reckons one banker. Despite calls either to allow fees or to raise the public subsidy, India’s 2023 budget will cut it by about 25%.

Customer protection has suffered. A survey by Renuka Sane, an Indian economist, and her co-authors, found that 18% of UPI users had some grievance with the system, such as fraud or a mistaken payment. Less than 30% have seen their complaints resolved. Uttam Nayak, a former boss of Visa in India, notes that, although UPI has rapidly growing volumes, the overall transaction value has not taken off as much. Consumers prefer safer payment methods for big-ticket items. “I use UPI to buy chai. But I wouldn’t use it for a plane ticket,” says one architect based in Mumbai.

There are other flaws with UPI. Transaction success rates, a key metric that can encourage more spending, are lower than for payment systems in developed markets. Financial-data sharing, which promotes competition among banks and unlocks access to credit, has been slow to take off. Sahamati, an association of account aggregators, finds that the number of linked accounts has grown to 5m in April 2023. But that is small when set against India’s vast population.

Developing UPI will require more investment. Ms Rai notes that it offers a useful customer-acquisition channel for banks and fintechs that could benefit from its massive amounts of data. “We see digital payments as a way to onboard customers,” says Harshjit Sethi, managing director at Sequoia India, a VC firm. “Then you layer other financial services around them…like the holy grail of lending.” Sameer Shetty of Axis Bank, one of India’s largest, says that “Account aggregator is where UPI was in 2017.”

But such change can happen only if the fintechs are let in. BharatPe, one leading Indian fintech, has a lending licence. Others such as PayTM, Google Pay and PhonePe do not. Politics could get in the way. A paper from the RBI in August 2022 looked at fees for larger value payments. Insiders familiar with the NPCI, the RBI and the finance ministry say the first two are open to transaction fees, but the government has all but shut the door on the idea.

No instant-payment system is perfect, but UPI is a clear improvement on cash

Will state-directed entities be able successfully to maintain such a technologically advanced payment system? “What you want is for the market to churn rather than picking winners,” says Mr Shah of the XKDR Forum. “UPI was central planning.” Even those who champion UPI see a need for multiple payment options. One grandee talks of “concentration risk”. They note that “If NPCI goes down, then the whole payment system goes down,” adding that there “could be a role for a second NPCI.”

No instant-payment system is perfect, but UPI is a clear improvement on cash. In March the RBI launched UPI for feature-phones equipped with buttons, not touchscreens, which could expand access to the system. And it is spreading abroad. Already UPI is integrated with Singapore’s payments system, letting people send remittances with a relatively low 3% fee. India wants UPI to become a payment option abroad, just as Alipay is widely accepted outside China. Ms Rai says other countries may even adopt the entire UPI stack. Mr Nilekani hopes UPI will eventually be used everywhere. “If I go to Lulu in Dubai or Harrods in London, I should be able to make a payment with UPI.” That would surely create new competition for the bank/card behemoths in the West.

Source

The chemistry of fermented coffee

The report, known as the Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, warns if humanity fails to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero, increasingly worse heat records will tumble beyond this decade.

So what is driving the bleak outlook for the next five years? An expected El Niño, on top of the overall global warming trend, will likely push the global temperature to record levels.

Has the Paris Agreement already failed if the global average temperature exceeds the 1.5 °C threshold in one of the next five years? No, but it will be a stark warning of what's in store if we don't quickly reduce emissions to net zero.

Global average surface temperatures relative to 1850-1900 from major datasets. The temperature is increasing by about 0.2 °C per decade. (UK Met Office)

Warming makes record heat inevitable

The World Meteorological Organization update says there is a 98 percent chance at least one of the next five years will be the hottest on record. And there's a 66 percent chance of at least one year over the 1.5 °C threshold.

There's also a 32 percent chance the average temperature over the next five years will exceed the 1.5 °C threshold. The chance of temporarily exceeding 1.5 °C has risen steadily since 2015, when it was close to zero. For the years between 2017 and 2021, it was a 10 percent chance.

Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have already driven up global average temperatures by more than 1 °C since the late 19th century.

The update notes the 2022 average global temperature was about 1.15 °C above the 1850-1900 average, despite the cooling influence of La Niña conditions. Temperatures are now rising by about 0.2 °C per decade.

We now have more than a century of global mean temperature data. That means it should be getting harder, not easier, to achieve new records. If there was no trend, we would expect to see fewer records as time passes and the data we've collected better captures the full range of natural climate variability.

Instead, because we are warming the world so quickly, more heat records are being set globally and at the local level. The human influence on the climate is pushing temperatures to unprecedented highs with alarming frequency.

The heat stretching from Western Africa across the Middle East and into India atm is incredible. 45C plus (113F) in many regions across the entire landmass. These 3 major regions, where billions live, are identified as being virtually uninhabitable in a world of 2C global heating pic.twitter.com/LBjeTqlzAa

— Peter Dynes (@PGDynes) May 17, 2023

Add El Niño, then extreme highs are likely

The current record global average temperature dates back to 2016. A major El Niño event early that year pushed up the global average temperature.

El Niño events are associated with warmer-than-normal seas over much of the central and eastern Pacific. This helps warm the lower atmosphere and raise global temperatures by about 0.1 °C . This might not sound like much, but with rapid background warming it's often enough to break the previous record.

In the seven years since the current global temperature record, humanity has continued to intensify the greenhouse effect. This is making a new record ever more likely.

While the Pacific Ocean is currently ENSO-neutral, the chance of El Niño development during winter as well as the possibility of a positive Indian Ocean Dipole are contributing to the warmer and drier long-range forecast. El Niño WATCH continues: https://t.co/FMwRFTEnCH pic.twitter.com/yj2vCyPONS

— Bureau of Meteorology, Australia (@BOM_au) May 9, 2023

El Niño conditions are starting to form in the Pacific and are looking increasingly likely to take hold in June and July. This could be the first significant El Niño since 2016. An El Niño would greatly increase the chance of breaking that year's record high global average temperature, particularly in 2024.

Does this mean the Paris Agreement has already failed?

Almost all nations around the world have signed the Paris Agreement. The aim is to limit global warming to well below 2 °C and preferably below 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

The prediction that an individual year above 1.5 °C global warming is more likely than not is alarming. But it doesn't mean we have failed to achieve the Paris Agreement's goals. The agreement aims to limit long-term global warming to a level that avoids major climate impacts, including ecosystem loss. One or two years that pop over the 1.5 °C level don't constitute failure.

However, the world is getting closer to the 1.5 °C global warming level due to our continuing high greenhouse gas emissions. The forecast of a probable year that exceeds that level should serve as a warning.

The difference between 1.5°C & 3°C global warming means vastly different scenarios for the future.

Our survival on this planet hinges on these few degrees.

Addressing the climate crisis & limiting temperature rise is possible, if we #ActNow. https://t.co/X0Shwfcd3n via @UNFCCC pic.twitter.com/NUxzA1V18T

— United Nations (@UN) May 11, 2023

Yet another sign of humanity's damage to the climate

Past inaction on reducing emissions and tackling climate change means we have already warmed the world by more than 1.2 °C . Global emissions remain at near-record high levels, so we are continuing to intensify the greenhouse effect and warm the planet.

If we are to limit global warming to well below 2 °C , then we must act so future generations don't suffer a much less hospitable planet.

We have understood the solution for decades. We must reduce emissions to net zero to stop warming Earth. Countries such as Australia, with high historical emissions, have a leading role to play by decarbonizing electricity supply and ramping down coal, oil and gas production in line with goals laid out by the United Nations.

Failure to act should not be considered an option. Otherwise we are locking in more record hot years and much worse climate change impacts for decades and centuries to come.

Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne

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

Source

Detecting the faint emission from an extrasolar radiation belt is challenging, however, since that dim glow of a radiation belt is difficult to resolve.

But challenging does not mean impossible: For the first time, astronomers have imaged a radiation belt wrapped around an extrasolar object.

That object is a very low-mass red dwarf star named LSR J1835+3259 that's just over the diameter of Jupiter, has about 77 times the mass of Jupiter, and sits some 20 light-years away.

"We are actually imaging the magnetosphere of our target by observing the radio-emitting plasma – its radiation belt – in the magnetosphere," says astronomer Melodie Kao of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "That has never been done before for something the size of a gas giant planet outside of our Solar System."

Artist's impression of the star and its radiation belts. (Chuck Carter, Melodie Kao, Heising-Simons Foundation)

Earth has its Van Allen belts, filled with particles from the solar wind. Uranus, Neptune, Mercury, and Saturn all have radiation belts.

Jupiter's enormous radiation belts are predominantly supplied by volcanic moon Io as it coughs out great gouts of volcanic material. Even Jupiter's moon Ganymede – the only Solar System moon with its own magnetic field – has a sort of radiation belt.

And although the radiation belts and magnetic fields confining them had not been detected in extrasolar objects, we have seen clues of their presence.

Low-mass stars and brown dwarfs have exhibited activity similar to the auroras in the Solar System. Auroras – seen on multiple planets – are generated when accelerated charged particles are channeled along magnetic field lines to fall into a planet's atmosphere and interact with particles therein.

Having shown signs of this auroral activity (thus suggesting the presence of a global magnetic field), LSR J1835+3259 represented the perfect place to look closely for radiation belts.

Using a network of 39 radio telescopes across the globe to effectively create an Earth-sized radio telescope, Kao and her colleagues took observations of the star, looking carefully at the space around it, where a radiation belt, viewed from the side, would appear like two radio-emitting lobes.

The image of the star's radiation belt and auroral emissions. (Kao et al., Nature, 2023)

Sure enough, images revealed a double-lobed structure around the star, emitting faint radio waves, similar to the lobes of Jupiter's radiation belt.

However, because the star is much farther away than Jupiter, its radio lobes are much, much more intrinsically bright, around 10 million times brighter than Jupiter's.

And the radiation observed is a type that has been seen before in low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, but it had been attributed to flares in the stellar corona.

These findings not only confirm that objects such as stars can have radiation belts, but they also mean that we may have already seen radiation belts in other such objects and didn't know what we were looking at.

"Now that we've established that this particular kind of steady-state, low-level radio emission traces radiation belts in the large-scale magnetic fields of these objects, when we see that kind of emission from brown dwarfs – and eventually from gas giant exoplanets – we can more confidently say they probably have a big magnetic field, even if our telescope isn't big enough to see the shape of it," Kao says.

It's a result that astronomers hope will help search for potentially habitable worlds in the future as techniques and instruments are refined. That's because Earth's magnetic field is thought to be essential for life to flourish. It deflects harmful solar radiation from reaching the surface, protecting the atmosphere and the vulnerable organisms that inhabit the surface.

Tools that allow us to find magnetic fields around other worlds will help us find similarly protected planets.

That's still a bit of a way off, but this discovery puts us on the right path.

"This is a critical first step in finding many more such objects and honing our skills to search for smaller and smaller magnetospheres," says astronomer Evgenya Shkolnik of Arizona State University, "eventually enabling us to study those of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets."

The research has been published in Nature.

Source

"There is a tremendous amount of evidence that chronic stress is a serious factor in determining overall health. Now our findings indicate that people with higher long-term hair glucocorticoid levels appear significantly more likely to develop heart and circulatory diseases in particular," says lead author Dr. Eline van der Valk from Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Long-term levels of scalp hair cortisol and its inactive form, hair cortisone, are increasingly used biomarkers that represent the cumulative exposure to glucocorticoids over the previous months.

There is a large body of evidence indicating that the stress hormones cortisol and cortisone affect the body's metabolism and fat distribution. But data on these stress hormone levels and their effect on long-term CVD outcomes is scarce.

To find out more, researchers analyzed cortisol and cortisone levels in 6,341 hair samples from adult men and women (aged 18 and older) enrolled in Lifelines—a multi-generational study including over 167,000 participants from the northern population of the Netherlands.

Study participants' hair was tested, and participants were followed for an average 5-7 years to assess the long-term relationship between cortisol and cortisone levels and incident CVD. During this time, there were 133 CVD events.

Researchers adjusted for factors known to be linked with increased risk of CVD including age, sex, waist circumference, smoking, blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes.

The researchers found that people with higher long-term cortisone levels were twice as likely to experience a cardiovascular event like a stroke or heart attack, and this rose to over three times as likely in those aged 57 years or younger.

However, in the oldest half of CVD cases (aged 57 and older), hair cortisone and cortisol were not strongly linked to incident CVD.

"Our hope is that hair analysis may ultimately prove useful as a test that can help clinicians determine which individuals might be at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Then, perhaps in the future targeting the effects of stress hormones in the body could become a new treatment target," says Professor Elisabeth van Rossum, the principal investigator of the study from Erasmus University Medical Center.

The authors acknowledge several limitations of the study, including that it is observational and does not prove that stress causes CVD but indicate that they are linked. They also note that most participants self-identified as white and were from one area of the Netherlands so the findings might not be generalizable to other populations. And although age, sex, waist circumference, smoking, blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes were adjusted for in the analysis, there may be other unmeasured factors that may have influenced the results.

Source

The US Supreme Court has ruled that Google and Twitter did not break the nation's Anti-Terrorism Act by publishing and recommending content that supported the Islamic State terrorist organization, also known as ISIS.

In a Thursday decision, the justices unanimously sided with Big Tech in cases Twitter Inc v. Taamneh and Gonzales et al v. Google.

The cases were brought by the families of Nohemi Gonzalez and Nawras Alassaf, who died in ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris and Istanbul in 2015 and 2017, respectively. The families sued Twitter, Google, and Facebook under a provision of the Anti-Terrorism Act that allows those who have been injured by acts of terror to seek civil damages. The plaintiffs accused the tech giants of contributing to the deaths of their family members by recommending terrorist propaganda and recruitment material to users of their platforms.

While the suits concerned the Anti-Terrorism Act, Google's defense relied in part on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which more or less protects internet companies from liability for content generated by their users. There are some caveats.

Crucially, Section 230 states: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The idea here is that websites and apps that allow people to communicate with each other shouldn't normally be held liable for the content of that communication.

In the opinion for Twitter Inc v. Taamneh, Justice Clarence Thomas declared that plaintiffs had failed to prove a direct link, showing that pro-ISIS content on the social media platform led to the 2017 attack in the Reina nightclub in Istanbul.

"As alleged by plaintiffs, defendants designed virtual platforms and knowingly failed to do 'enough' to remove ISIS-affiliated users and ISIS-related content – out of hundreds of millions of users worldwide and an immense ocean of content – from their platforms," he wrote [PDF].

"Yet, plaintiffs have failed to allege that defendants intentionally provided any substantial aid to the Reina attack or otherwise consciously participated in the Reina attack – much less that defendants so pervasively and systemically assisted ISIS as to render them liable for every ISIS attack. Plaintiffs accordingly have failed to state a claim under [the Anti-Terrorism Act]."

The court came to a similar conclusion in Gonzales et al v. Google.

"Since we hold that the complaint in that case fails to state a claim for aiding and abetting under [the Anti-Terrorism Act], it appears to follow that the complaint here likewise fails to state such a claim," they concluded [PDF].

"Countless companies, scholars, content creators and civil society organizations who joined with us in this case will be reassured by this result," Halimah DeLaine Prado, general counsel at Google, told The Register in a statement.

"We'll continue our work to safeguard free expression online, combat harmful content, and support businesses and creators who benefit from the internet."

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Although Big Tech has successfully dodged liability claims, is it a win for Section 230 and its safeguards for internet platforms?

Not exactly. The Supreme Court's decisions only show that they did not find a direct link between the ISIS attacks and Google and Twitter recommending pro-terrorist videos or posts – not that the companies were protected by Section 230.

"We think it sufficient to acknowledge that much (if not all) of plaintiffs' complaint seems to fail under either our decision in Twitter or the Ninth Circuit's unchallenged holdings below. We therefore decline to address the application of [Section 230] to a complaint that appears to state little, if any, plausible claim for relief," the court wrote.

The decision therefore offers little to advance the debate about whether Section 230 should be modified – an idea advanced by both sides of the political world on the grounds that the internet is full of fake news, child abuse material, and other contentious content that internet companies should perhaps do more to filter or combat. Calls for reform have, however, collided with concerns about the potential harm to free speech and the ability to run massive communication systems. ®

Source

In a clear shot at Amazon, Minnesota lawmakers became the third state congressional body in America to pass a law protecting warehouse workers from unfair quotas and allowing them proper time for toilet breaks and the occasional meal.

Minnesota House Bill 36, was passed on Wednesday in the state senate by a razor-thin 34-33 margin after previously passing the house by a slightly wider 70-61 vote. While no one's mentioning Amazon by name, the consequences of the legislation will be clear for it.

If the bill is signed into law by Governor Tim Walz, which is likely given his views, it would place a number of restrictions on Amazon and other companies operating large warehouses, most notably a requirement that all employees are notified of each and every quota they're held to, and banning companies from taking any "adverse employment action" on employees failing to meet quotas that they weren't made aware of.

In addition, HB 36 also requires companies to not impose quotas "that prevent compliance with meal or rest or prayer periods" or use of restrooms – including the necessary time to get there and back again. Workers would also have the right to request a written description of the quotas they're held to, as well as 90 days of their own work speed data and aggregated data of employees in similar roles.

In a clear shot at Amazon, Minnesota lawmakers became the third state congressional body in America to pass a law protecting warehouse workers from unfair quotas and allowing them proper time for toilet breaks and the occasional meal.

Minnesota House Bill 36, was passed on Wednesday in the state senate by a razor-thin 34-33 margin after previously passing the house by a slightly wider 70-61 vote. While no one's mentioning Amazon by name, the consequences of the legislation will be clear for it.

If the bill is signed into law by Governor Tim Walz, which is likely given his views, it would place a number of restrictions on Amazon and other companies operating large warehouses, most notably a requirement that all employees are notified of each and every quota they're held to, and banning companies from taking any "adverse employment action" on employees failing to meet quotas that they weren't made aware of.

In addition, HB 36 also requires companies to not impose quotas "that prevent compliance with meal or rest or prayer periods" or use of restrooms – including the necessary time to get there and back again. Workers would also have the right to request a written description of the quotas they're held to, as well as 90 days of their own work speed data and aggregated data of employees in similar roles.

The bill also gives Minnesota labor law enforcement agencies the right to inspect any warehouse that has an employee injury rate at least 30 percent above the average yearly injury rate for such workers, and to have inspection rights and safety meetings.

The Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of US labor unions, found in a report released last month that Amazon's injury rate at its warehouses was 70 percent higher than at non-Amazon warehouses last year.

Amazon's serious injury rate was more than double the industry average, SOC claimed. Similar numbers were reported in previous years, including 2021 when Amazon employees were injured at twice the rate as those working in Walmart facilities.

California was the first state to enact such rules in 2021 when Governor Gavin Newson signed AB 701 into law, requiring disclosure of production quotas and prohibiting disciplinary action for employees missing quotas due to health or safety-related breaks.

New York State passed a bill with similar rules last year, and the Minnesota proposal is quite similar in scope. Lawmakers in Washington and New Hampshire are also weighing similar actions.

Amazon objects

Amazon, naturally, disagrees with Minnesota's assessment of its warehouse safety practices, spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel told The Register. "At Amazon, employees' safety is our top priority and at the core of everything we do. Amazon does not have fixed quotas at our facilities."

"We assess performance based on safe and achievable expectations and take into account time and tenure, peer performance, and adherence to safe work practices," Lynch Vogel said, adding that Amazon knows it doesn't have a perfect safety record, but that the company is "committed to continuous improvement when it comes to communicating with and listening to our employees and providing them with the resources they need to be successful."

Amazon told us that it has invested more than $1 billion into safety since 2019, and since then has managed to reduce its injury rate by nearly a quarter. Despite those improvements, Amazon was hit with three citations from US safety inspectors earlier this year who found that warehouses in New York, Illinois, and Florida exposed employees to ergonomic hazards that put them at high risk for injuries and musculoskeletal disorders.

According to inspectors who visited the warehouses, Amazon's processes focus on speed to the detriment of employees, and at its Illinois facility still had nearly double the industry average injury rate. ®

Source

< View the video at the source page. >

A Stanford professor who has researched unidentified aerial phenomena for the US government says he believes extraterrestrial intelligence has not only visited earth but “it’s been here a long time and it’s still here”.

Dr Garry Nolan also claimed that whistleblowers who have worked on “reverse-engineering downed craft” had recently given classified testimony to Congress, creating a “hornet’s nest in Washington”.

Dr Nolan, a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine who has published more than 300 research articles and holds 40 US patents, made the bombshell comments during a talk at the Salt iConnections conference in New York on Thursday titled “The Pentagon, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Crashed UFOs”.

The respected researcher is one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying the phenomenon, including by analysing the brains of people who say they’ve experienced a UFO encounter.

During the session, moderator Alex Klokus, founder and managing partner of Salt Fund, asked Dr Nolan, “Do you believe that extraterrestrial intelligence has visited planet earth?”

“I think you can go a step further — it hasn’t just visited, it’s been here a long time and it’s still here,” Dr Nolan replied.

“You know, people talk about the ‘Wow! signal’ looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. The ‘Wow! signal’ is that people see it on an almost regular basis, that’s the communication that’s already here.”

The ‘Wow! signal’ was a powerful 72-second, narrow-bandwidth signal picked up by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope in 1977 which has not been detected since, and has long been a source of speculation in the stargazing community.

Mr Klokus told Dr Nolan his statement would be “tough to believe” for many, asking him “what probability” he would assign.

“One hundred per cent,” Dr Nolan said.

“And that’s not just my opinion — the National Defense [Authorization] Act passed last year, signed by Biden in December, 30 pages of that is the establishment of an unidentified aerial phenomena office.”

Dr Nolan said that office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which has 25 people working in it, had been tasked with “collecting the information across all of the US Department of Defense, intelligence offices, and collation of that into a uniform format for the very first time, and provision of that then to Congress”.

“Twelve US Senators have signed onto a document that basically says we want the information,” he said.

“The creation of a whistleblower program specifically that allows people from within who, I’m going to say this, have been working on the reverse-engineering programs, reverse-engineering of objects, so that they can come in and break their oaths but specifically just to talk to Congress and give that information in classified settings.”

He said ‘100 per cent’ ET had visited earth. Picture: @ProjectUnity/YouTube

He added, “And the most recent one that happened was just last weekend and it created quite a hornet’s nest in Washington.”

Asked by Mr Klokus what the “most compelling evidence” was for his claim, Dr Nolan said “you just need to look at what your government is doing right now about it”.

“Just go and look at the number of politicians on both sides of the aisle who have come together and signed off on this statement,” he said.

“What are they basing their opinions on? They’re basing their opinions on the dozens of individuals who in one manner or another have come forward and talked to them in classified settings.”

Dr Nolan said in addition he had “personal experience” with “people who, frankly, I know have worked or are working on the reverse-engineering programs”.

“Of downed craft,” he stressed.

“Now the first question that people will ask is, well if they’re so frigging advanced why are they crashing? Because what’s crashing is not actual living things. I use this example a lot — if you wanted to study a tribe of cannibals in the middle of the Amazon, are you going to go yourself and show up in the middle of the tribe and not hopefully become dinner? If you’re an advanced intelligence, you’re not going to put your life and limb at risk by coming here.”

Dr Nolan said “mostly what you’re seeing here are either drones or some sort of advanced AI or whatever it is”.

“We’re already dealing with an alien intelligence in our own emails, ChatGPT et cetera, we don’t know what it’s doing, so imagine if you were a million years ahead of us — how do you have a dialogue with something like that?” he said.

Declassified video of a US Navy pilot UFO encounter. Picture: DoD/AFP

Dr Nolan also discussed his work analysing alleged materials from UAPs.

“What is it you hope to discover out of a material?” he said.

“A grain of silicon back in the ‘50s or ‘60s changed our culture and world. Something as small as that, the discovery of what you could accomplish with a little piece of germanium doped with the right elements changed our understanding.”

Alluding to the now-famous 2004 USS Nimitz incident off the coast of San Diego, Dr Nolan noted “we have multiple simultaneous sensor systems that have seen these objects go from 50 feet above the water to up to 14 miles and then back in less than a second”.

“It does stuff that we can’t do, we know that the Russians and Chinese are not doing … what is the physics that accomplishes that?” he said.

“What that tells you is we need to rethink our physics, first of all. We saw birds fly, it took us 3000 years and we figured out how to fly. But now we see these things doing this, so what is it that that lets us do?”

Dr Nolan said he knew “some of the physicists on the inside who work at some of these big defence corporations, who basically said here’s how you tweak general relativity to accomplish that”.

“But then how much energy is required to do it? Well more than the whole nuclear output of the planet per day,” he said.

“Who could do that? We can’t. Will we be able to do it in a thousand years? But if we had a piece of any of this, let’s say it’s a thousand revolutions ahead of us, a million revolutions ahead of us, even a tiny piece of knowledge from that could revolutionise what we’re doing.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy outside the US Capitol. Picture: Win McNamee/Getty Images/AFP

Mr Klokus asked if Dr Nolan was sure humans possessed “literal physical material to evaluate, to analyse”.

“Yes, 100 per cent,” he said.

“It’s there. I was working with a group about seven or eight years ago and I literally got within a few weeks of gaining access to one of the objects. And when the people who didn’t want us to gain access to it found out about it they pulled some bureaucratic administrative tricks and snatched it away.”

Mr Klokus remarked at one point, “I’m glad we’ve got some people here to witness these statements — I think they’re very consequential.”

Previous speakers at the Salt conference, billed as a “global thought leadership forum encompassing finance, technology and public policy”, include US President Joe Biden, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

Dr Nolan’s comments come after the head of Pentagon’s new UFO office told Congress last month it had no credible evidence of aliens.

In a rare open hearing, AARO head Dr Sean Kirkpatrick said his team were reviewing more than 650 potential UFO cases.

Despite the unexplained sightings, Dr Kirkpatrick said there was no suggestion of alien activity.

“AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” he said at the hearing.

Most UAPs turn out to be “balloons, aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources”, Dr Kirkpatrick added.

Source

Rinvoq is meant to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease who have not had success with TNF (tumor necrosis factor) blockers. The daily pill is the first oral treatment for this group of patients.

Crohn's is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease. It causes inflammation in any part of the digestive tract, typically affecting the small intestine and the beginning of the large intestine. Common symptoms include diarrhea, cramping, stomach pain and weight loss.

The medication was previously approved for several other conditions, including eczema, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis and ulcerative colitis, according to the website of pharmaceutical company AbbVie.

Researchers evaluated its safety and effectiveness in two randomized trials in 857 patients with the disease. Participants received either 45 mg of Rinvoq or a placebo daily for 12 weeks.

More patients treated with the medication achieved remission than those treated with the placebo, the FDA said in a news release. Also, more people treated with the medication had improvement in intestinal inflammation, which was assessed with a colonoscopy.

The FDA also assessed Rinvoq as a maintenance treatment, evaluating 343 patients who had responded to the 12 weeks of medication. This group received 15 mg or 30 mg once daily or a placebo for a year. More of those on the maintenance treatment achieved remission and reduced intestinal inflammation than those on the placebo.

Side effects of the medication were upper respiratory tract infections, anemia, fever, acne, herpes zoster and headache.

The drug is not recommended for use with other Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors, biological therapies for Crohn's disease or with strong immunosuppressants including azathioprine and cyclosporine.

Among the risks are serious infections, death, cancer, major adverse cardiovascular events and thrombosis (blood clot).

Patients should take 45 mg of Rinvoq once daily for 12 weeks and then start a 15 mg maintenance dose. A higher 30 mg maintenance dose can be considered for patients with refractory, severe or extensive Crohn's disease, according to the FDA.

Source

"We almost universally dislike stress, and understandably so, but stress actually helps us achieve our goals and plays a key role in promoting our survival," says Jeffrey Birk, Ph.D., who studies the relationship between emotions and health at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

When things go well, we conquer the thing causing stress and move on with our lives. We may even learn something that helps us to react faster to the stressor in the future or even avoid it entirely. But sometimes stress lingers, lasting for days, weeks, and months.

"On short timescales, the stress response restores the body's balance. Over longer periods of time, stress leads to imbalance," says Birk.

Research shows that chronic stress is associated with such health issues as muscle tension, digestive problems, headaches, weight gain or loss, trouble sleeping, heart disease, susceptibility to cancer, high blood pressure, and stroke.

People who have cardiovascular disease can experience chronic stress related to their health condition and associated medical comorbidities, says Birk. Being a caregiver for a partner with a chronic health condition can be a major source of chronic stress, too.

We asked Birk about chronic stress and its impact on our bodies.

Stress basics

Stress disrupts the body's normal balance, moving from a stable state toward an imbalanced state. As our body and mind respond to situations we perceive as challenging or threatening—the stress response—we can feel this change in status.

Typically, stress becomes noticeable to us and we "feel stressed" when we perceive the demands of a situation to be greater than our ability to cope. The perceptions of threat and demand are what determine level of stress. Those perceptions may differ for different people in the same situation or for the same person at different times in their life. Either way, the more perceived demands outweigh a person's coping capacity, the more severe stress becomes.

When the stress response is activated, the body releases cortisol and other stress hormones. As the level of activation increases, the impact on the body is even more negative. Usually, cortisol levels decrease after a stressful event is over, but chronic stressors can keep cortisol levels high, without a break, wearing down the body on a cellular level.

The more we mentally dwell on troubling demands, the more our health is impacted. In fact, previous research of ours published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that when people spent more time thinking about a stressor, they had higher levels of stress, and we showed that more time spent mentally stewing in our problems may be associated with higher blood pressure. It is possible constant worriers who develop cardiovascular disease may find themselves in a health-endangering feedback loop.

Adaptive stress response: the ideal

It's quite unpleasant in the moment, but when a stressor is sufficiently brief (a few seconds, minutes, or hours), stress can be helpful. Imagine slipping on ice, tripping on a curb, or getting a tricky question in an interview. You need an immediate solution: a safe place to land, the right words. Ideally, stress helps us focus and solve problems.

After a stressor appears, our bodies adapt and rise to the challenge by instantaneously releasing catecholamines such as adrenaline, which briefly mobilize our energy to act. More slowly, our bodies release stress hormones, such as cortisol, which are controlled by a stress response system called the HPA axis (centered in the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, adrenal glands).

Catecholamines and stress hormones help focus our energy, allowing us to rise to the challenge of a difficult situation and restore balance. After balance is restored, stress hormones subside.

Chronic stress and its impacts

As many of us know all too well, sources of stress can pile up, and this has cumulative effects on our bodies.

Chronic stress happens over a longer timeframe (days, weeks, months, or years). It is the result of sustained stressors (debt, long-term illness, caregiving, being unhoused) or stressors that repeat frequently over time (recurring arguments, crowded subway rides, construction noise, difficult relationships).

Chronic stress can lead to a state of imbalance in the body that does not correct itself, keeping the HPA axis activated and levels of stress hormones high.

We know from decades of research that chronic stress can:

• raise blood pressure, making you more susceptible to heart attack or stroke

• increase heart rate, increasing risk of medical emergency

• cause the heart to beat irregularly

• increase inflammation in the body, weakening your immune response and making you more susceptible to illness and viruses

• make you feel anxious, overwhelmed, or irritable, which makes you more likely to avoid healthy behaviors like physical activity and turn to unhealthy behaviors such as smoking

The difference between normal and chronic stress

Short-lived stress and chronic stress are ultimately similar, but they differ in course and effects on the body. If you are wondering whether you are experiencing short-lived stress or chronic stress and what to do about it, pay attention to which bodily and emotional symptoms you feel, their severity, and how long they last.

Imagine one stressful week at work or school with three particularly difficult days. On each of these days you feel moderately anxious, have a headache, and bodily and mental fatigue that makes you consider canceling your evening plans. However, you feel relatively replenished and back to normal physically and mentally on most mornings after these difficult days. In this case, you are probably experiencing instances of typical stress.

Now imagine many weeks in a row of difficult days and feeling emotionally overwhelmed. You are consistently depleted to the point of exhaustion, often feel your heart beating quickly even when sitting still, or you are developing a mysterious, debilitating pain in your lower back that is getting progressively worse. In this case, you could be experiencing the effects of chronic stress.

How to manage stress

It is important to identify the sources of stress in your life and find ways to cope with them that work well for you.

Fortunately, even when life circumstances remain difficult (such as when managing a chronic health condition), there are proven ways to reduce the effects of chronic stress: physical exercise, mindfulness meditation, spending time with loved ones, and slow-paced breathing.

Recent research at Columbia shows that people who develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may benefit from this kind of practice to lower their symptoms of distress.

By managing stress effectively, you can improve your well-being and reduce the risk of future health problems.

Source

Time perception depends on how quickly the brain can process incoming information. Scientists have attempted to measure it by showing animals pulses of light, which start slowly and then speed up. There comes a point when the light is flashing so quickly, that it looks as though it is on permanently. Carefully placed brain electrodes can reveal when this moment occurs.

Studies show that smaller animals with faster metabolisms can detect higher frequencies of flickering lights than chunkier, slower animals. Just like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix, movements and events may seem to unfold more slowly.

Salamanders and lizards, it seems, perceive time more slowly than cats and dogs. And while this may help to explain the infuriating ability of flies to elude rolled-up newspapers, it also raises an important question: why?

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for animals that need to respond quickly – for example, to evade predators or catch fast-moving prey – to perceive time at finer resolutions, but what’s remarkable is that some animals appear to dial up or down their experience of time to suit their needs. Before they set off hunting, some swordfish, for example, boost blood flow to the brain, slowing their perception of time, and boosting the number of frames that they can process per second. It helps them to react more quickly.

Elsewhere, studies on mice have shown that time perception can be speeded up by stimulating dopamine-producing neurons in the brain. These findings have profound implications for people with dopamine-related disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Here, there is a reduction in dopamine, so sufferers could perhaps be impulsive because they perceive time more slowly.

Conversely, drugs that boost dopamine levels may be of use, because they speed up the perception of time. However, this is only a working hypothesis, so for now, only time will tell.

Source

Newly discovered exoplanet could have liquid water, lots of volcanoes

Once again, NASA leans into the future by picking an innovative lunar lander

Rocket Report: Canada places premium on a spaceport, Lueders heads to Starbase

From selective breeding to environmental modifications, we're altering so much of our world that we're not only now driving the climate, but the direction of life itself.

In a massive project involving 287 scientists across 160 cities in 26 countries, researchers examined how urbanization has influenced evolution on a global scale.

Their study, published last year, used white clover (Trifolium repens) as a model – a plant native to Europe and west Asia, but found in cities all around the world.

"There has never been a field study of evolution of this scale, or a global study of how urbanization influences evolution," said evolutionary biologist Marc Johnson from the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

Collecting more than 110,000 samples along gradients that extended from the cities, through suburbs and out to the country, they found that clover in cities is now more similar to clover in another city a world away than it is to that found in nearby farmland or forests, regardless of climate.

This is an example of parallel adaptive evolution – when separate populations are shaped by the same selective pressure for specific traits in different locations. It shows that the ways humans have changed the environment are having a bigger influence in shaping these traits than natural phenomena like local population genetics and climate.

While urbanization obviously shares many features around the world, it was not yet established that these were acting together to push evolution in the same direction.

"We just showed this happens, often in similar ways, on a global scale," said UTM ecologist James Santangelo.

"For urbanization to drive parallel evolution, urban areas must converge in environmental features that affect an organism's fitness," the researchers explained in their paper.

Taking a closer look, the international team identified that one of the features changing along urban to rural lines was the plant's production of hydrogen cyanide. White clover uses this chemical as a defense mechanism against its herbivorous predators. It also helps them resist drought.

Plants in the furthest rural populations were 44 percent more likely to be producing hydrogen cyanide than those in the center of the cities. It appears that grazing is favoring the production of more hydrogen cyanide in rural areas than in cities, where grazing pressure isn't as strong; in absence of this pressure, drought becomes the driving factor.

This was despite strong gene flow between the white clover populations along each gradient, meaning that the levels of this chemical are being strongly selected for, time and time again.

We've already broken the natural size spectrum of animals in the ocean, in part by selectively removing large fish through fishing, leaving more fish with small fish genes to create subsequent generations. Many fishes are now 20 percent smaller and their lifecycles are 25 percent shorter on average.

The unintended consequences of our actions are also changing the shape of birds.

"The wing span of cliff swallows has evolved to be shorter near roads, with roadkilled swallows having longer wings, consistent with selection for increased maneuverability in the face of traffic," zoologist Sarah Otto explained in 2018.

These latest findings contribute another example of a clear urban signal in evolution. Studies have already suggested rates of evolutionary change are greater in urbanizing landscapes compared with natural and nonurban human systems.

"This is the most compelling evidence we have that we are altering the evolution of life in [cities]. Beyond ecologists and evolutionary biologists, this is going to be important for society," said UTM biologist Rob Ness. Particularly as we're expected to triple the amount of urbanized land by 2030 when compared to 2000.

The researchers have amassed a large database they can now further investigate for human impacts on clover evolution. By better understanding how we're incidentally driving such changes, we have a better chance of being able to intentionally take the wheel and direct evolution in an informed and safer way.

"This knowledge could help conserve some of Earth's most vulnerable species, mitigate the impacts of pests, improve human wellbeing, and contribute to understanding fundamental eco-evolutionary processes," the authors concluded.

This research was published in Science.

Source

These tiny jumping spiders walk like ants to evade predators

IN EARLY APRIL 2020, shortly after the British prime minister Boris Johnson had announced the first pandemic lockdown in the United Kingdom, a urologist named Archie Fernando reached out to one of her colleagues, Nadine Hachach-Haram.

The two doctors worked at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital, one of the busiest in the country, at a time when nearly a thousand people were dying of Covid-19 every week. Most surgeries were being deferred, except for life-or-limb cases and urgent cancer surgeries, and Hachach-Haram, who is a reconstructive plastic surgeon, recalls how useless she felt. “I would just walk into the wards and ask the nurses what I could do to help,” she says. “I started doing everything, like portering and proning, turning patients over to make their breathing slightly better.”

Hachach-Haram was also the founding CEO of a small health-tech startup called Proximie. The company had developed an augmented reality platform that allowed surgeons to collaborate remotely. Its web-based software enabled surgeons to talk to each other while sharing a live video stream of an operation—including up to four feeds displaying different camera perspectives and medical scans—and featured a computer-generated overlay which could be used to draw instructions on the shared screen.

Fernando wanted to use Proximie for an urgent and complicated procedure. Her patient was Mo Tajer, a 31-year-old man who had undergone chemotherapy for testicular cancer. The cancer had spread into his abdomen, where a 5-centimeter tumor was attached around the aorta and the inferior vena cava, two of the largest blood vessels in the body, making its surgical excision challenging. In normal circumstances, Fernando would have performed an open surgery, but this would have also required a two-week postoperative recovery period in the intensive care ward during the peak of the pandemic. “That’s not an environment where you want someone who’s immunosuppressed to be sitting around,” Hachach-Haram says. “They needed him in and out of the hospital as fast as possible.”

The safer alternative was a minimally invasive robotic keyhole surgery, but Fernando wasn’t experienced enough in that procedure. With Proximie, however, she would be able to operate with the guidance of a colleague, a US-based surgeon named Jim Porter. Porter, who was the medical director for robotic surgery at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, had not only pioneered this type of operation, he was also one of the most experienced laparoscopic surgeons currently working.

The surgery took place on May 21. Fernando, wearing full personal protective equipment, operated the console of the surgical robot, two meters away from the patient. The robot has four articulated arms, three fitted with surgical instruments and a fourth holding a thin tube with a camera at the end, which, upon insertion into Tajer’s abdomen, allowed Fernando to see inside the patient. Porter, wearing his pajama robe and sitting at his home in Seattle, had access to that exact same view on his laptop. For five hours, he guided Fernando through the surgery step by step, talking to her while using an augmented-reality pointer to identify anatomical parts and drawing annotations to pinpoint where specific incisions should be made.

Hachach-Haram, who had logged in to watch the operation, was “speechless.”

“I was just in awe of how calm they were,” she says. This was the first time since the start of the pandemic that she was seeing Proximie being used in a surgery. She realized that, without her invention, that lifesaving surgery could have never taken place, and as she watched it unfold, she began crying.

Like most surgeons, the education of Nadine Hachach-Haram followed a pedagogy known in medical circles as “see one, do one, teach one.” It’s a tradition that dictates that trainees, once they have observed a particular type of surgery or use of equipment, should then attempt to perform it, the first few times under supervision and subsequently on their own. After enough firsthand experience has been accumulated, surgeons are then expected to teach those skills to the next generation. Hachach-Haram still vividly remembers the first surgery she observed, at the age of 14. She had moved to Beirut from her native San Diego four years before, in 1990, after her parents had decided to return to their country of origin. Lebanon’s civil war had ended by then, but the fight between the Israeli army and the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah continued unabated, bringing injury and death to masses of innocent civilians. “It wasn’t the safest time to be growing up in Lebanon,” Hachach-Haram says. “You would see a lot of people with serious burns, deformities, limbs missing.”

One day, her family received a visit from a friend, a plastic surgeon from New York who regularly traveled to Lebanon to operate on trauma victims. Hachach-Haram was intrigued, and she convinced him to let her accompany him to one of his surgeries. She watched mesmerized as he operated on a young girl who had a foot contracture, a severe tightening of the skin that restricted her movements. “Her foot had burned from a bomb blast,” Hachach-Haram says. “The surgeon had to do what we call a Z-plasty, where you release a contracture by geometric cuts that allow you to move skin and revise scars. It was astonishing to me that he was able to help her walk again just by moving skin from one place to another.” That was the day Hachach-Haram decided what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to be just like that plastic surgeon from New York, someone who was willing to fly 9,000 kilometers across the world to operate on someone who desperately needed it. “I wanted to help everyone around the world get that same quality of care,” she says. “I wanted to give people a chance.”

Hachach-Haram would perform her first surgery 12 years later, assisting a senior surgeon on the removal of a thyroid gland as a first-year medical student in London. She went on to specialize as a reconstructive plastic surgeon for breast and pelvic cancer, teaching others as she progressed in her own training. In 2006, she started volunteering for global health charities, flying to places like Peru, Vietnam, and Lebanon to train and learn from local doctors. For a while, she could describe herself as fulfilled. But gradually, over the years, a different feeling began taking hold, a feeling that what she was doing just wasn’t enough.

She recalls one day in particular when that sense of frustration took over. It was April 2015, and she was sitting alone in the operating room, pregnant with her third child, having just returned from yet another long trip and due soon to make another. The Lancet medical journal had just published a report which concluded that nine in 10 people in low- and middle-income countries did not have access to basic surgical care. That cold statistic felt, as she puts it, “like a punch in the guts … I’d been working so hard to try to improve access and help and make all this difference, and suddenly it all just felt futile.”

As she reflected on her own teaching experience, it dawned on her that it wasn’t so much the case that she wasn’t doing enough but that she had been doing it wrong. “I would train people, and then I would never see them again,” she says. “I had no idea how they adopted the technique, if they were doing it properly.” And this inefficacy, she realized, was a direct consequence of the pedagogy of “see one, do one, teach one.” “It was antiquated,” she says. “It just doesn’t scale.”

What the operating room needed, she thought, was an operating system. A digital interface that could connect surgeons during live operations, in a way that they could watch, learn, collaborate, and share expertise, unconstrained by geography. She often describes having this vision of a revolving planet dotted with operating rooms all around the world, all connected in a network.

With the help of a software engineer, by the end of 2015 she had developed an app that allowed surgeons to share a view of their surgical fields remotely and overlay simple illustrations and annotations by drawing on the shared screen. To test the idea, she enlisted a surgeon in California who volunteered for the Global Smile Foundation, which provided cleft palate surgery for children. As part of that program, he traveled to Trujillo, Peru, every three months to train a local doctor. That year, instead, he used Hachach-Haram’s prototype to conduct the training remotely every week. “Within that year, he was able to significantly upskill the Peruvian doctor. They measured that not only had she become more efficient, but her decisionmaking was also quicker,” she says.

A few months later, Hachach-Haram received a call from a colleague working in Gaza who needed her help. He told her that an 18-year-old man had injured his left hand while trying to dismantle an unexploded bomb. Now he couldn’t shower or dress himself. He had undergone six unsuccessful operations with local surgeons and, because of the Israeli blockade, couldn’t travel to seek treatment abroad.

Although Proximie had not been used in a live surgery, Hachach-Haram asked a trauma surgeon in Beirut to assist the local surgeon remotely. “I was very nervous,” she says.” The possibility of changing this person’s life was very important to me. It was like the dream I had since I was 14 coming true.”

The success of that surgery emboldened Hachach-Haram to turn her research project into a proper company. She raised money, hired a team to develop the technology, and spent the next couple of years relentlessly proselytizing at conferences about the digital operating room. “I would fly 10 hours just to give a 10-minute talk,” she says. In 2019, Proximie was ready for its commercial launch.

When the Covid-19 pandemic reached the UK a year later, Proximie had already been used in 1,200 surgeries in over 30 countries. “Like every company in the first few weeks of the pandemic, we announced to our shareholders that we were going to prioritize our mental wellness and just try to survive,” Hachach-Haram says. A week later, she changed her mind. “I realized, hold on a minute, this is exactly when people are going to need our technology,” she says. She called another shareholder meeting and announced: “Scrap the previous plan. We’re going to accelerate.” In six months, the number of users grew tenfold, and the number of surgical sessions increased to 5,500. Today more than 20 percent of NHS hospitals have access to the software. “Before, we were just a sci-fi concept with some potential,” she says. “Suddenly, we were the only way of doing things.”

Due to the suspension of routine operations during the pandemic, Hachach-Haram went many months without performing a single operation. “When we came back to operating, our confidence was hit,” says Hachach-Haram. “We needed to get back into it, so we would buddy up and ask a colleague to help us through it, because we needed that support.”

When it wasn’t possible to have another consultant physically present, many used Proximie to receive remote support instead. If loss of skill and confidence during the pandemic was a concern for experienced surgeons, the problem was even more pronounced for their junior colleagues: According to official data, NHS trainees saw a 50 percent reduction in training opportunities to operate. “Many trainees in the prime of their education missed out on 18 months of practice,” she says. “We don’t have the luxury of taking 10 years to train people. We had to think about how Proximie could accelerate that.”

The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, for instance, shipped anatomically realistic porcine tissue models to trainees working from home, so they could practice abdominal wall hernia repairs while being assisted by experts remotely. The Hip Preservation Society, on the other hand, set up a regular virtual education program which included live surgery—a labral reconstruction procedure, for instance, was broadcast to over 500 people all over the world. “Historically, only a couple of trainees would be having access to a procedure,” she says. “Now hundreds could have access to the few cases that were happening.”

Currently, more than 95 percent of the surgical sessions using Proximie are also recorded onto its online library, which enables surgeons to edit and tag footage that can be later used for training or debriefing. This library currently stores more than 20,000 videos of surgeries, making it the largest database of this sort. “When we started we only had in mind the live surgery feature,” she says. “But then we thought, what if people want to have feedback after the operation or to review their performance? That’s why we built the library.” When she first watched footage of her own surgeries, Harach-Haram learned, for instance, that her behavior was, as she describes it, “a bit pushy.” “I noticed I liked to do the operations myself, even when there were trainees in the room,” she says. Now, in similar situations, she forces herself to hand over the surgical instruments, purposefully clasps her hands near her chest, and steps away from the operating table. “I learned not to be in their space,” she says. “I just give them the room.”

This article appears in the July/August 2023 edition of WIRED UK magazine.

The Daring Robot Surgery That Saved a Man’s Life

(May require free registration to view)

We’re effectively alone in the Universe, and that’s OK

New animal family tree raises questions about the origin of nervous systems

But how will the industry continue to grow while doing its fair share on climate change? Unless global aviation changes tack, its greenhouse gas emissions are projected to cause about 0.1℃ of total global warming by 2050.

So-called "sustainable aviation fuels" are being promoted by the aviation and energy industries as the preferred solution. These fuels can be made from organic matter such as plants (also known as biomass), waste such as used cooking oil, and synthetic kerosene.

However, as our new research published in Science of The Total Environment shows, sustainable aviation fuel is not a silver bullet. Even if the industry could make the shift, there's not enough land or renewable energy potential on Earth to produce all the sustainable fuels airlines need.

A tough ask

In 2021, the International Air Transport Association released a plan for airlines to achieve net-zero carbon by 2050.

Individual airlines have made similar commitments, including American Airlines, Qantas and Air New Zealand.

But there are very few low-carbon alternatives to traditional fossil jet fuel. That makes reducing emissions from the aviation sector extremely difficult.

Two options—batteries and liquid hydrogen—face significant challenges. For example, neither are suitable for long-haul flights. That's why industry is turning to sustainable aviation fuels.

These fuels effectively perform in the same way as their fossil fuel-derived counterparts. They are suitable for long flights and can be used in existing planes so airlines wouldn't have to replace whole fleets.

But at the moment, very little sustainable aviation fuel is being produced—and it's much more expensive than fossil jet fuel.

Sustainable aviation fuel also raises serious environmental concerns. So is the transition actually feasible? Our new research set out to answer this question.

What we found

Our study involved analyzing 12 "roadmaps" or plans for decarbonizing the global aviation industry. They were published by the industry, outside organizations and academics.

We found the plans rely heavily on biofuels in the medium-term and synthetic e-kerosene in the longer term.

Currently, all sustainable aviation fuels used commercially are produced from food waste such as cooking oil or animal fat. Energy crops (such as soy and willow), agricultural residues (husks, bagasse), and forest biomass (such as logging residue and manufacturing waste) provide larger volumes of raw materials, but chemical engineering processes to turn them into fuel are still developing.

If e-kerosene is to be produced cleanly, it requires electricity produced from renewable energy sources to "split" the water (a process called electrolysis) and produce hydrogen. This hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide.

Our research found the roadmaps largely omitted a number of fundamental problems with sustainable aviation fuels.

The first is the huge amount of biomass and clean energy needed. On average across the roadmaps, producing sustainable aviation fuels would require about 9% of global renewable electricity and 30% of available biomass in 2050. Even then, about 30% of fuel used by airlines in 2050 would be fossil-derived.

Other industries also use biomass resources. For example, the cosmetics industry uses tallow in skincare products. Bagasse—the pulp left after sugar cane juice is extracted—is used for heat in sugar mills. So demand for sustainable aviation fuels risks displacing other industries.

Second, the process of converting raw materials into sustainable aviation fuels leads to a major loss of energy, in the form of heat. In the case of e-kerosene, only about 15% of the primary renewable electricity remains to power the aircraft.

Not only is this inefficient, it leaves less clean energy for other industries wanting to decarbonize.

Third, producing sustainable aviation fuels creates greenhouse gas emissions. Growing bio-crops, for instance, requires the use of emissions-intensive fertilizer, harvest machinery and transport.

And already, vast tracts of rainforest are being razed to make way for crops used in biofuels. If sustainable aviation fuels were produced in this way, they'd be considerably worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

Finally, carbon dioxide is not the only aviation emission that contributes to climate change. Others include nitrogen oxides, water vapor and soot. Research to date is inconclusive about whether sustainable aviation fuels will improve this problem.

'Unrealistic and irresponsible'

The above is not an exhaustive list of the potential climate damage caused by sustainable aviation fuels. But clearly, while the fuels will play a useful role to some extent, the industry's growth plans are unrealistic and irresponsible.

Private and government investment should instead be directed to lower-carbon forms of transport, such as rail. And for the traveling public, a shift in mindset is required, involving how often and how far we need to travel.

Aviation is not the only industry that must rapidly decarbonize in coming decades. The whole global energy system needs to transition.

That means airlines must not take more than their fair share of finite resources to claim the label of "sustainable."

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

Source

Hyperuricemia is most often associated with gout, an increasingly common form of arthritis characterized by severe pain, redness, and tenderness in joints. Pain and inflammation occur when too much uric acid crystallizes and deposits in the joints. In addition, hyperuricemia is associated with metabolic syndrome, diabetes, hypertension, and kidney and cardiovascular diseases.

The prevalence of hyperuricemia increases with age in all populations and especially in women after menopause. That's because, according to previous studies, hyperuricemia is inversely related to estrogen levels.

A suggested approach to lowering the risk of hyperuricemia is adequate sleep duration that unfortunately becomes more of a challenge during the postmenopausal phase. Sleep is known to be essential for many people's immune response, cognition, performance, psychological state, and disease status. Several studies have shown that too little or too much sleep is related to poor health problems such as hyperuricemia, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and even mortality.

In this latest study involving nearly 1,900 participants, the researchers hypothesized that weekend catch-up sleep could be a solution to making up for lost sleep during the week and effectively lowering the risk of hyperuricemia in postmenopausal women, who often struggle to get sufficient sleep. This is the first known study to investigate the relation between weekend catch-up sleep and hyperuricemia in postmenopausal women.

Study results suggest that weekend catch-up sleep is linked with a lower prevalence of hyperuricemia in postmenopausal women with insufficient sleep. Further studies are required to identify the causal relationships between sleep recovery and hyperuricemia in postmenopausal women.

The results of this study are published in the article "Association between weekend catch-up sleep and hyperuricemia with insufficient sleep in postmenopausal Korean women: a nationwide cross-sectional study."

"Elevated serum uric acid levels are associated with multiple cardiovascular disease risk factors, whereas sufficient, good-quality sleep has proven health benefits. This study shows that weekend catch-up sleep of just 1 to 2 hours was linked with a lower prevalence of hyperuricemia in postmenopausal women with insufficient sleep. Although the mechanisms responsible for these findings remain unclear, a weekend nap may be just what the doctor ordered," says Dr. Stephanie Faubion, NAMS medical director.

Source

The city that never sinks?

New geological research warns that the weight of New York City’s skyscrapers are actually causing the Big Apple — whose more than 1 million buildings weigh nearly 1.7 trillion pounds — to sink lower into its surrounding bodies of water.

The city is plopping closer to the water at a rate of 1 to 2 millimeters a year “with some areas subsiding much faster.”

While that may not seem significant to untrained eyes, the gradual descension makes NYC extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, according to lead researcher and geologist Tom Parsons of the United States Geological Survey.

Lower Manhattan is particularly at risk, and there is concern for both Brooklyn and Queens as well, according to the study.

Lower Manhattan is at unique risk of flooding due to NYC sinking.
Paul Martinka

“New York faces significant challenges from flood hazard; the threat of sea level rise is 3 to 4 times higher than the global average along the Atlantic coast of North America…A deeply concentrated population of 8.4 million people faces varying degrees of hazard from inundation in New York City,” he and his team wrote in the new report.

The city has already seen these harsh effects starting more than a decade ago.

“Two recent hurricanes caused casualties and heavy damage in New York City,” he wrote. “In 2012, Hurricane Sandy forced sea water into the city, whereas heavy rainfall from Hurricane Ida in 2021 overwhelmed drainage systems because of heavy runoff within the mostly paved city.”

The weight of NYC buildings puts the city at additional flood risk.
Paul Martinka

As awful as Sandy and Ida were — the more recent of the two hurricanes forcing people to abandon their cars on major roadways across the city — Parsons fears that the structural integrity of the city’s many buildings could be at risk in the future.

“The combination of tectonic and anthropogenic subsidence, sea level rise, and increasing hurricane intensity imply an accelerating problem along coastal and riverfront areas,” he wrote. “Repeated exposure of building foundations to salt water can corrode reinforcing steel and chemically weaken concrete causing structural weakening.”

Not to mention, the threat of severe storms is more likely than it was years ago, according to Parsons.

Greenhouse gas “appears to be reducing the natural wind shear barrier along the US East Coast, which will allow more frequent high intensity hurricane events in the coming decades.”

Areas like Queens are at risk of flooding, according to geologists.
Getty Images/iStockphoto

Incredibly, many of New York’s real estate additions built since the devastation of Sandy are not taking the situation seriously enough, he added.

“New York City is ranked third in the world in terms of future exposed assets to coastal flooding and 90% of the 67,400 structures in the expanded post-Hurricane Sandy flood-risk areas have not been built to floodplain standards.

“New York is emblematic of growing coastal cities all over the world that are observed to be subsiding, meaning there is a shared global challenge of mitigation against a growing inundation hazard.”

Source