Unsafe foods, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), contribute to poor health, including impaired growth and development, micro-nutrient deficiencies, noncommunicable and infectious diseases, and mental illness. Globally, one in ten people are affected by food-borne diseases each year. Antonina Mutoro, a nutrition researcher at the African Population and Health Research Center, explains what causes food contamination and how we can lower the risk of disease.

What is food contamination?

Access to safe and nutritious food is a basic human right which many do not enjoy, partly because of food contamination. This is defined as the presence of harmful chemicals and microorganisms in food that can cause illness. According to the WHO, food contamination affects about one in every ten people globally and causes about 420,000 deaths annually.

Food contamination can be:

• physical: foreign objects in food can potentially cause injury or carry disease-causing microorganisms. Pieces of metal, glass and stones can be choking hazards, or cause cuts or damage to teeth. Hair is another physical contaminant.

• biological: living organisms in food, including microorganisms (bacteria, viruses and protozoa), pests (weevils, cockroaches and rats) or parasites (worms), can cause disease.

• chemical: substances like soap residue, pesticide residue and toxins produced by microorganisms such as aflatoxins can lead to poisoning.

What are the most common causes of food contamination?

The most common cause of food contamination is poor food handling. This includes not washing your hands at the appropriate time – before eating and preparing food, after using the toilet, or after blowing your nose, coughing or sneezing. Using dirty utensils, not washing fruits and vegetables with clean water, and storing raw and cooked food in the same place can also be harmful. Sick people should not handle food. And you should avoid consuming under-cooked foods, particularly meat.

Poor farming practices can also contaminate food. This includes the heavy use of pesticides and antibiotics, or growing fruits and vegetables using contaminated soil and water. The use of inadequately composted or raw animal manure or sewage is also harmful.

Fresh foods can lead to a number of illnesses. In Kenya, for instance, the contamination of meat, fruits and vegetables with human waste is relatively common. This is attributed to the use of contaminated water to wash food. Flies carrying contaminants can also directly transfer faecal matter and bacteria onto plant leaves or fruits.

Street foods are another common source of food contamination. These foods are widely consumed in low- and middle-income countries because they’re cheap and easily accessible.

What are the signs that you’ve eaten contaminated food?

Biological and chemical substances are the most common food contaminants. They account for more than 200 food-borne illnesses, including typhoid, cholera and listeriosis. Food-borne illnesses usually present as diarrhoea, vomiting and stomach pains.

In severe cases, food-borne illnesses can lead to neurological disorders, organ failure and even death. It’s therefore advisable to seek immediate medical attention if you begin to experience symptoms like persistent diarrhoea and vomiting after eating or drinking.

Children aged under five are the most vulnerable to food-borne illnesses. They bear 40% of the food-borne disease burden. A child’s immune system is still developing and can’t fight off infections as effectively as an adult’s.

In low- and middle-income countries, reduced immunity in children can also occur as a result of malnutrition and frequent exposure to infections due to poor hygiene and sanitation, including a lack of access to safe water and toilets. Additionally, when children are ill, they tend to have poor appetites. This translates to reduced food intake. Coupled with increased nutrient losses through diarrhoea and vomiting, this can lead to a cycle of infection and malnutrition and, in extreme cases, death.

Pregnant women and people with reduced immunity due to illness or age are equally vulnerable and extra care should, therefore, be taken to prevent food-borne illnesses among these groups.

What can we do to prevent food contamination?

Food-borne illnesses also have negative economic impacts, especially in low- and middle-income countries. The World Bank estimates it costs more than US$15 billion annually to treat these illnesses in these countries. So it’s important to have preventive strategies in place.

Food contamination can be prevented through simple measures:

• washing your hands at key times (before preparing, serving or eating meals; before feeding children, after using the toilet or after disposing of faeces)

• wearing clean, protective clothing during food preparation

• storing food properly

• washing raw foods with clean water

• keeping raw and cooked foods separate

• using separate utensils for meats and for food meant to be eaten raw.

Good farming practices, such as the use of clean water and application of approved pesticides in recommended amounts, can help prevent food contamination.

Food vendors also need to be trained on food safety, and provided with clean water and proper sanitation.

As part of the research team at the African Population and Health Research Center, I’m working on the Healthy Food Africa project, which aims to boost food security in urban informal settlements through the promotion of food safety. In Kenya, the project is working closely with the Nairobi county government to develop a food safety training manual targeting street food vendors. This will go a long way towards improving food safety in the city.

Antonina Mutoro, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, African Population and Health Research Center

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

Source

Immersion in cold water is definitely an activity that divides people – some love it others hate it. But many now practice it weekly or even daily in the belief that it’s good for their mental and physical health.

Cold water therapy, as it has come to be known, can take the form of outdoor swimming – in lakes, rivers or the ocean – cold showers or even ice baths. It has been used for a while by sportspeople as a way to reduce muscle soreness and speed up recovery time – with people typically spending about ten minutes after exercise in cold water that’s about 10-15°C.

Cold water has also been used to help treat symptoms of depression, pain and migraine. Indeed, there are many accounts of how cold water therapy has changed lives, cured broken hearts and helped people during difficult times.

While many studies have shown benefits linked to ice baths and post-exercise recovery, research from 2014 found there could be a placebo effect going on here.

Indeed, research into the potential benefits of cold water therapy or outdoor swimming is in its early stages, but what is clear is that cold water immersion can have potentially harmful effects on the human body.

Cold water risks

With any activity that’s intended for therapeutic effect, the minimum requirement is that it “does no harm”. But we can’t say that about cold water – as it comes with a lot of risks.

At the moment, the science to fully support cold water as a therapy is not available and it’s not yet known if there is a certain duration or temperature that works best. But what we do know is that less is definitely more when it comes to cold water immersion. In other words, going in colder water or staying in for longer is not better for you. In fact, it can have just the opposite effect.

In the UK, the water temperatures in natural environments are roughly between 10-28°C in the summer, falling to between 0-7°C in the winter. And it’s important to point out that open water temperatures lag behind air temperatures, so in April when the air temperature can be warm the sea temperature, even on the south coast, is likely to be below 10°C.

It might seem that when it comes to cold water therapy, showers and baths are a less hazardous option because you have greater control in terms of temperature and exposure time compared with open water. But due to the colder temperatures showers and ice baths can achieve and the solitary nature of the immersion they still pose significant risks.

One of the little-known problems associated with cold water immersion is what’s known as non-freezing cold injury. When we are exposed to the cold, it’s normal for the hands and feet to feel very cold or numb and they may tingle or be painful on rewarming.

For most people, these symptoms are transient, with normal sensations returning within a few minutes. But for those with non-freezing cold injury, these symptoms (pain, altered sensation and cold sensitivity) can persist in the affected areas for many years due to nerve and blood vessel damage.

It’s caused by prolonged exposure to cold and wet conditions such as those seen in the trenches during wars – hence its nickname “trench foot”. It’s not just the military who are susceptible though, cases have been recently reported in rough sleepers and those undertaking water sports.

Another issue is that it’s not known how cold is too cold when it comes to cold water immersion and non-freezing cold injury. There are also a lot of differences in the way our individual bodies respond to cooling. For example, those from African and Caribbean backgrounds seem to be more susceptible to non-freezing cold injury – so the risks from cold exposure will vary between different people.

Encouragingly though, one study from 2020 with cold water swimmers indicates that although they may have cold sensitivity, this was not associated with damage to the blood vessels in the skin.

Cold water tips

So if you are wanting to give cold water therapy a go, here are some things to consider:

• Check with your GP beforehand to make sure it’s safe for you to do.

• Make sure you’re not alone and the water is safe – if outdoors consider tides, currents, waves, underwater obstacles, pollution and jelly fish.

Always make sure you’re careful when immersing yourself in cold water, don’t stay too long, and look after yourself afterward. Image Credit: Michele Ursi/Shutterstock.com

• Plan how you’re going to get in and out of the water safely (remember that your muscles won’t work as well when you’re cold and you may not be able to feel with your hands and feet).

• Know how you’re going to get warm afterwards - make sure you have towels, dry clothes, windproofs, a hot drink and somewhere to shelter. Don’t drive or cycle until you have completely warmed up.

• Only stay in cold water for a short period of time, get out before you experience numbness, pain or shivering.

Heather Massey, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Science & Health, School of Sport, Health & Exercise Science, University of Portsmouth; Clare Eglin, Principal Lecturer in the School of Sport, Health, and Exercise Science, University of Portsmouth, and Mike Tipton, Professor of Human and Applied Physiology, University of Portsmouth

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

Source

 

The Artemis program to return humans to the Moon has an aura of inevitability now, with broad political support, robust international participation, and a successful first mission—Artemis I—under its belt.

 

Perhaps most critically, for Artemis, is that in a rare show of bipartisanship, both Republicans and Democrats support NASA's plan to send humans to the Moon later this decade, at least once a year, reaching a point at which astronauts stay for 30 days at a time. Crafted during the Trump administration, the Biden White House reaffirmed these Artemis plans within days of taking office. Biden diplomats have also continued to add nations to the "Artemis Accords," with two dozen countries now participating.

 

For all of this support, however, there is one worrying sign. The Artemis program's budget is ballooning, and it is unclear when people will start flying to the Moon. These concerns were highlighted this week at a meeting of NASA's Advisory Committee for Human Spaceflight.

Big budget request

The space agency's chief official for human spaceflight in deep space, Jim Free, discussed the budget from fiscal year 2024 through fiscal year 2028. During this five-year period, the space agency will spend at least $41.5 billion on the Artemis program, when there is likely to be a single human landing at most. This includes some staggering sums for the Space Launch System rocket, $11 billion, which has already been developed for this mission.

 

This $11 billion is approximately the same amount of money that NASA proposes spending on not one, but two lunar landers for humans, which are arguably as complex as the SLS rocket, which has been in development since 2011. NASA did not award its first lunar lander contract until 2021. It is not clear why NASA needs to spend as much money on a flight-proven rocket as it does on the development of two large and technically challenging human landers.

 

Asking during the meeting about the ongoing high costs for the SLS rocket, Free said the space agency was attempting to bring the costs down by shifting from development to operations.

 

"We're trying to transition to the Exploration Production Operations Contract, and that's happening towards the end of this budget horizon where we're trying to get our dollars down," Free said. "So you won't see that necessarily captured in this line item. We're looking for more than a little bit to get the affordability."

 

NASA's budget also proposes to spend $4 billion for a Lunar Gateway that will not be used during the first lunar landing. While it may provide a nice way station capability, the Gateway is unnecessary for actual lunar landings.

 

During his presentation, Free warned that even with the president's budget proposal, there probably was not enough funding to carry out the Artemis program as conceived, which calls for an initial human landing in 2025 (which almost certainly will slip two or three years), and a follow-up landing in 2028 (again, slips are expected).

 

"A lot of the program managers are here in the room," he said of major components of the Artemis plan, including the SLS rocket, Orion spacecraft, and lunar lander. "And I'm sure they tell you, they need more than this to execute."

Congressional priorities

Free also said Congress' inability to pass a timely budget, and its reliance on continuing resolutions (CR), has made starting new programs to get the Artemis program moving difficult.

 

"That feels like the weight of the world on my shoulders, trying to get stability in Congress," Free said. "If we're trying to grow on budget to launch more stuff, and we're on a CR, it's our budget from last year, so we can't grow. We can't start new programs when on a CR, without an exception."

 

One of the major problems for Artemis, then, is that its budget is ballooning at a time when Republicans in Congress are seeking to pare back the federal budget, a debt-limit crisis is looming, and the cost of borrowing money is rising with each interest rate hike. At some point, does Artemis become a luxury rather than a necessity? The chair of the advisory committee, Wayne Hale, suggested as much as he spoke about Congress' need to meet multiple priorities.

 

"Ultimately, what kind of space program we have depends on what the American people want from their elected representatives," Hale said. "We as space aficionados here would like to have much more, but the use of taxpayers' money comes with priority setting, among all the different things the government has to do."

 

NASA’s Artemis program may face a budget crunch as costs continue to rise

In 2020, a team of engineers and physicists at the University of Rochester in New York, led by mechanical engineer Ranga Dias, published a paper in the journal Nature claiming to have created a compound that, when exposed to extreme pressure, became a superconductor at room temperature. Soon thereafter, Nature retracted the paper due to the use of undocumented data by the research team.

More recently, the same team published another paper in Nature claiming to have created a different material that became superconductive at room temperature—at much lower pressure than the material described in their first paper. In this new effort, the team in China duplicated the work, hoping to find the same results.

The work involved following the same steps taken by the team at the University of Rochester (UoR), doping a lutetium-hydrogen chemical with nitrogen. The idea behind the effort is that hydrogen-rich chemicals can, under the right conditions, incite the formation of Cooper pairs of electrons, which have been associated with superconductivity.

The team in China found that the process did lead to the formation of a compound that at first glance appeared to be identical to that created by the team at UoR. A closer look using an X-ray machine showed its structure, a hydrogen-lutetium-nitrogen compound, that looked nearly identical to the UoR compound. And testing with Ramen spectroscopy showed it had the same vibrational frequencies. The Chinese team even found the same color changes reported by the UoR team as the material was subjected to high pressure.

Unfortunately, things did not look the same when the material was tested for superconductivity. The team in China was not able to detect any transition changes, even when they tested it at super-cold temperatures.

The Chinese team is not rejecting the results obtained by the team at UoR—instead, they suggest it is possible that the nitrogen dopant present in their material was of insufficient quantity to produce the desired effect. They also note that in their sample, the dopant was unevenly distributed. They suggest further testing is needed to verify the results obtained by the group at UoR.

Source

A new study suggests the rings are between 400 million and 100 million years old – a fraction of the age of the Solar System. This means we are just lucky to be living in an age when the giant planet has its magnificent rings. Research also reveals that they could be gone in another 100 million years.

The rings were first observed in 1610 by the astronomer Galileo Galilei who, owing to the resolution limits of his telescope, initially described them as two smaller planets on each side of Saturn's main orb, apparently in physical contact with it.

In 1659, the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens published Systema Saturnium, in which he became the first to describe them as a thin, flat ring system that was not touching the planet.

He also showed how their appearance, as viewed from Earth, changes as the two planets orbit the Sun and why they seemingly disappear at certain times. This is due to their viewing geometry being such that we on Earth periodically see them edge-on.

The rings are visible to anyone with a decent pair of binoculars or a modest back garden telescope. Cast white against the pale yellow orb of Saturn, the rings are composed almost entirely of billions of particles of water ice, which shine by scattering sunlight.

A page from the System Saturnium published in 1659. (US Library of Congress)

Amid this icy material are deposits of darker, dusty stuff. In space science, "dust" usually refers to tiny grains of rocky, metallic, or carbon-rich material that is noticeably darker than ice. It is also collectively referred to as micrometeoroids. These grains permeate the Solar System.

Occasionally, you can see them entering the Earth's atmosphere at night as shooting stars. The gravitational fields of the planets have the effect of magnifying or focusing this dusty, planetary "in-fall".

Over time, this in-fall adds mass to a planet and alters its chemical composition. Saturn is a massive gas giant planet with a radius of some 60,000 kilometers, about 9.5 times that of Earth, and a mass of about 95 times that of Earth. This means it has a very large "gravity well" (the gravitational field surrounding a body in space) that is very effective at funneling the dusty grains towards Saturn.

Collision course

The rings extend from some 2,000 kilometers above Saturn's cloud tops to about 80,000 kilometers away, occupying a large area of space. When in-falling dust passes through, it can collide with icy particles in the rings. Over time, the dust gradually darkens the rings and adds to their mass.

Cassini-Huygens was a robotic spacecraft launched in 1997. It reached Saturn in 2004 and entered orbit around the planet, where it stayed until the end of the mission in 2017. One of the instruments aboard was the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA).

Using data from the CDA, the authors in the new paper compared the current dust counts in space around Saturn with the estimated mass of dark dusty material in the rings. They found that the rings are no older than 400 million years and may be as young as 100 million years. These may seem like lengthy time scales, but they are less than one-tenth of the 4.5 billion-year age of the Solar System.

This also means that the rings did not form at the same time as Saturn or the other planets. They are, cosmologically speaking, a recent addition to the Solar System. For over 90 percent of Saturn's existence, they were not present.

Death Star

This leads to another mystery: how did the rings first form, given that all of the Solar System's major planets and moons formed much earlier? The total mass of the rings is estimated to be about half as much as one of Saturn's smaller icy moons, many of which exhibit enormous impact features on their surfaces.

One in particular, the little moon Mimas, which is nicknamed the Death Star, has a 130 kilometer-wide impact crater called Herschel on its surface.

This is by no means the largest crater in the Solar System. However, Mimas is only about 400 kilometers across, so this impact would not have needed much more energy to obliterate the moon. Mimas is made of water-ice, just like the rings, so it's possible that the rings were formed from just such a cataclysmic impact.

Saturn's moon Mimas, showing Herschel crater. (NASA/JPL/SSI)

Ring rain

However they formed, the future of Saturn's rings is in little doubt. The impact of the dust grains against the icy particles happens at very high velocities, leading to tiny fragments of ice and dust getting chipped away from their parent particles.

Ultra-violet light from the Sun causes these fragments to become electrically charged via the photo-electric effect. Like the Earth, Saturn has a magnetic field, and once charged, these tiny icy fragments are released from the ring system and trapped by the planet's magnetic field.

In concert with the gravity of the giant planet, they are then funneled down into Saturn's atmosphere. This "ring rain" was first observed from afar by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft during their brief Saturn flybys in the early 1980s.

In a more recent paper from 2018 scientists used dust counts, again from the CDA, as Cassini flew between the rings and Saturn's cloud tops, to work out how much ice and dust is lost from the rings over time. This study demonstrated that about one Olympic-sized swimming pool of mass from the rings is lost into Saturn's atmosphere every half-hour.

This flow rate was used to estimate that, given their current mass, the rings will probably be gone in as little as 100 million years. These beautiful rings have a turbulent history, and unless they are somehow replenished, they will be gobbled up by Saturn.

Source

The most recent results, obtained Feb. 21-28, 2023, are based on 5,167 U.S. adults surveyed by web as part of the Gallup Panel, a probability-based panel of about 100,000 adults across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Respondents were asked, “Has a doctor or nurse ever told you that you have depression?” and “Do you currently have or are you currently being treated for depression?” Both metrics are part of the ongoing Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.

Rates Among Women, Young Adults, Black and Hispanic Adults Rising Fastest

Over one-third of women (36.7%) now report having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime, compared with 20.4% of men, and their rate has risen at nearly twice the rate of men since 2017. Those aged 18 to 29 (34.3%) and 30 to 44 (34.9%) have significantly greater depression diagnosis rates in their lifetime than those older than 44.

Women (23.8%) and adults aged 18 to 29 (24.6%) also have the highest rates of current depression or treatment for depression. These two groups (up 6.2 and 11.6 percentage points, respectively), as well as adults aged 30 to 44, have the fastest-rising rates compared with 2017 estimates.

Lifetime depression rates are also climbing fast among Black and Hispanic adults and have now surpassed those of White respondents. (Historically, White adults have reported marginally higher rates of both lifetime and current depression.)

< View the statistical chart at the source page. >

Implications

Alarming rates of depression are not unique to the U.S. Globally, nearly four in 10 adults aged 15 and older either endure significant depression or anxiety themselves or have a close friend or family member who suffers from it. Other Gallup research has estimated that 22% of Northern American adults have experienced depression or anxiety so extreme that they could not continue regular daily activities for two weeks or longer, similar to a global rate of 19% and matching estimates found in Western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia.

Clinical depression had been slowly rising in the U.S. prior to the COVID-19 pandemic but has jumped notably in its wake. Social isolation, loneliness, fear of infection, psychological exhaustion (particularly among front-line responders such as healthcare workers), elevated substance abuse and disruptions in mental health services have all likely played a role. While experiences of significant daily loneliness have subsided in the past two years amid widespread vaccinations and a slow return to normalcy, elevated loneliness experiences during the pandemic likely played a substantive role in increasing the rates of the longer-term, chronic nature of depression. Currently, 17% of U.S. adults report experiencing significant loneliness “yesterday,” projecting to an estimated 44 million people.

Among subgroups, women have historically reported substantially higher levels of depression than men. That this gap has notably widened further since 2017 is likely explained by several COVID-related factors, including the fact that women were disproportionately likely to lose their jobs or to exit the workforce altogether due in part to the pandemic driving children home from school or day care. Women also made up 78% of workers in all healthcare occupations in 2019, exposing them to enhanced emotional and psychological risk associated with the pandemic.

Young adults, in turn, are more likely to be single and to report loneliness, particularly so during the pandemic. They also need more social time to boost their mood than older adults, something directly impacted by COVID-19. Daily experiences of sadness, worry and anger -- all of which are closely related to depression -- are highest for those under 30 and those with lower income levels. And, like women, young adults and people of color were disproportionately likely to lose their jobs altogether due to the pandemic.

Source

Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood.

Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can’t be explained by classical physics. It has been known for more than a century that the rules of classical mechanics, like Newton’s laws of motion, break down at atomic scales. Instead, tiny objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics describes the properties of atoms and molecules.

For humans, who can only perceive the macroscopic world, or what’s visible to the naked eye, quantum mechanics can seem counterintuitive and somewhat magical. Things you might not expect happen in the quantum world, like electrons “tunneling” through tiny energy barriers and appearing on the other side unscathed, or being in two different places at the same time in a phenomenon called superposition.

I am trained as a quantum engineer. Research in quantum mechanics is usually geared toward technology. However, and somewhat surprisingly, there is increasing evidence that nature – an engineer with billions of years of practice – has learned how to use quantum mechanics to function optimally. If this is indeed true, it means that our understanding of biology is radically incomplete. It also means that we could possibly control physiological processes by using the quantum properties of biological matter.

Quantumness in biology is probably real

Researchers can manipulate quantum phenomena to build better technology. In fact, you already live in a quantum-powered world: from laser pointers to GPS, magnetic resonance imaging and the transistors in your computer – all these technologies rely on quantum effects.

In general, quantum effects only manifest at very small length and mass scales, or when temperatures approach absolute zero. This is because quantum objects like atoms and molecules lose their “quantumness” when they uncontrollably interact with each other and their environment. In other words, a macroscopic collection of quantum objects is better described by the laws of classical mechanics. Everything that starts quantum dies classical. For example, an electron can be manipulated to be in two places at the same time, but it will end up in only one place after a short while – exactly what would be expected classically.

Electrons can be in two places at the same time, but will end up in one location eventually.

In a complicated, noisy biological system, it is thus expected that most quantum effects will rapidly disappear, washed out in what the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called the “warm, wet environment of the cell.” To most physicists, the fact that the living world operates at elevated temperatures and in complex environments implies that biology can be adequately and fully described by classical physics: no funky barrier crossing, no being in multiple locations simultaneously.

Chemists, however, have for a long time begged to differ. Research on basic chemical reactions at room temperature unambiguously shows that processes occurring within biomolecules like proteins and genetic material are the result of quantum effects. Importantly, such nanoscopic, short-lived quantum effects are consistent with driving some macroscopic physiological processes that biologists have measured in living cells and organisms. Research suggests that quantum effects influence biological functions, including regulating enzyme activity, sensing magnetic fields, cell metabolism and electron transport in biomolecules.

How to study quantum biology

The tantalizing possibility that subtle quantum effects can tweak biological processes presents both an exciting frontier and a challenge to scientists. Studying quantum mechanical effects in biology requires tools that can measure the short time scales, small length scales and subtle differences in quantum states that give rise to physiological changes – all integrated within a traditional wet lab environment.

In my work, I build instruments to study and control the quantum properties of small things like electrons. In the same way that electrons have mass and charge, they also have a quantum property called spin. Spin defines how the electrons interact with a magnetic field, in the same way that charge defines how electrons interact with an electric field. The quantum experiments I have been building since graduate school, and now in my own lab, aim to apply tailored magnetic fields to change the spins of particular electrons.

Research has demonstrated that many physiological processes are influenced by weak magnetic fields. These processes include stem cell development and maturation, cell proliferation rates, genetic material repair and countless others. These physiological responses to magnetic fields are consistent with chemical reactions that depend on the spin of particular electrons within molecules. Applying a weak magnetic field to change electron spins can thus effectively control a chemical reaction’s final products, with important physiological consequences.

Birds use quantum effects in navigation.

Currently, a lack of understanding of how such processes work at the nanoscale level prevents researchers from determining exactly what strength and frequency of magnetic fields cause specific chemical reactions in cells. Current cellphone, wearable and miniaturization technologies are already sufficient to produce tailored, weak magnetic fields that change physiology, both for good and for bad. The missing piece of the puzzle is, hence, a “deterministic codebook” of how to map quantum causes to physiological outcomes.

In the future, fine-tuning nature’s quantum properties could enable researchers to develop therapeutic devices that are noninvasive, remotely controlled and accessible with a mobile phone. Electromagnetic treatments could potentially be used to prevent and treat disease, such as brain tumors, as well as in biomanufacturing, such as increasing lab-grown meat production.

A whole new way of doing science

Quantum biology is one of the most interdisciplinary fields to ever emerge. How do you build community and train scientists to work in this area?

Since the pandemic, my lab at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Surrey’s Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre have organized Big Quantum Biology meetings to provide an informal weekly forum for researchers to meet and share their expertise in fields like mainstream quantum physics, biophysics, medicine, chemistry and biology.

Research with potentially transformative implications for biology, medicine and the physical sciences will require working within an equally transformative model of collaboration. Working in one unified lab would allow scientists from disciplines that take very different approaches to research to conduct experiments that meet the breadth of quantum biology from the quantum to the molecular, the cellular and the organismal.

The existence of quantum biology as a discipline implies that traditional understanding of life processes is incomplete. Further research will lead to new insights into the age-old question of what life is, how it can be controlled and how to learn with nature to build better quantum technologies.

Source

Also:  Quantum biology on horizon? How futuristic physics theory could revolutionize life sciences

Early one morning last year, Dr. Daniel Bender, a psychiatrist at a child-and-adolescent inpatient unit in Pittsburgh, sat in his office looking through his caseload. He had 12 patients, ages 10 to 17, half of whom had been admitted to the hospital for attempting suicide or for wrestling with ongoing thoughts about it. Some had psychotic disorders or behavioral problems. Most would stay in the hospital for several days to a couple of weeks.

By 9 a.m., Bender was headed to a conference room to join his team — a psychiatric nurse, a social worker and a psychiatry resident — and to hear updates about his patients. Two colleagues, also psychiatrists, covered another 20 or so patients. And still, despite a need for mental health care that has been rising for years, only two-thirds of the beds in Bender’s unit at Western Psychiatric Hospital, which is part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, were full. U.P.M.C., like many hospitals, simply lacked the staff to treat more children. Too many nurses, aides and other personnel had quit since the pandemic. Overwhelmed by the work, they had retired, sought higher paying jobs or found different careers altogether.

Bender’s caseload that day included a 15-year-old boy who said he would kill himself after his parents, furious, caught him smoking weed. He was convinced his parents hated him. “Kids make threats and say things or do crazy things like that all the time, but not every parent brings them to the hospital,” Bender said to the team, wondering why the child was admitted. Then the psychiatry resident told Bender more of the boy’s story: He had not been eating or sleeping much, he had been cutting himself (a risk factor for suicide) and he showed little interest in anything, including his friends. His parents found him a therapist, who suggested he try antidepressants, but he resisted; he worried that meds would blunt his emotions.

During rounds, about an hour after the conference-room meeting, Bender asked the boy what he imagined his life to be like five years from now: “All the worst things” is how Bender characterized the boy’s response to the team.

Suicidal children are caught in a vortex of pain, and those around them are often unsure how to respond. Some pediatricians, as well as therapists, school counselors and others, lack the training to best help a teenager who reveals suicidal thoughts, leaving parents to wonder what to do. At what point do you take your child to the hospital? What if they refuse to go? If they have attempted suicide, do you consider residential care in a facility, where children live for weeks or months at a time? What else can you do to protect them? How do you know they won’t die the next time? You lock up your medications, your kitchen knives, your guns if you have them. You find a good therapist, if you’re lucky. But a teenager can always find a way. What alarm system, safety locks or rules guard against a desperate child’s resourcefulness?

And the numbers of teenagers — in particular, girls — who are in despair about their lives is surging. Three out of five teenage girls felt persistent “sadness or hopelessness” in 2021, the highest rate in a decade, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released this year. And almost one in three girls (double the rate for boys) seriously considered attempting suicide; more than one in 10 girls actually tried to do so. (Though suicide rates among boys have long been greater, their feelings of sadness or hopelessness haven’t increased nearly as significantly.)

Bender’s cases that day included a teenage girl who arrived on the unit a few days earlier after she tried for a second time to kill herself by attempting an overdose. (Bender never revealed the names of his patients to me.) Her parents told a psychiatry resident at the hospital that they were shocked; the suicide attempts seemed to come out of the blue. But the girl said she had had thoughts of taking her own life since fifth grade.

She told the resident that a romantic breakup had been the precipitating factor. Her parents didn’t even know she was in a relationship. Two attempts in one year worried the team. Bender and the resident wanted her to enroll in what’s known as a partial hospitalization program, which runs six hours daily, five days a week and includes one-on-one therapy, group sessions with other teenagers and weekly appointments with a psychiatrist. The first time she was hospitalized after a suicide attempt, months earlier, Bender’s team recommended the same program to the family.

She never went. The social worker explained that the family had no health insurance and would have to apply for Medicaid. They also didn’t have transportation to take their daughter to treatment. Bender suggested family-based therapy, in which therapists come to the home, as a start. “Is there any family therapy we can refer her to?” he asked the team. “Because I’m always hearing there are no openings.”

A couple of hours later, Bender met with a third-year medical student, who had interviewed the teenager. Bender explained that the girl was fixated on being discharged: “She has one goal — to get out — and you’re in her way. What’s truly at the root of that? You are never going to get the story from her. Go through the chart. Did you notice when I walked around the table? She followed me and couldn’t turn her back on me.” To Bender, her vigilance suggested a history of trauma. And that only led to more questions: Did her parents have mental-health or substance-use issues? Did she have a history of sexual or physical abuse?

Bender was reminded of another adolescent who was hospitalized a few months earlier, during the first day I spent with him on the unit. The teenager was nonbinary and had been to Western Psych multiple times, most recently after a near-fatal overdose. The mother was considering a residential facility that treated children for suicidal thoughts and attempts, among other things.

Dr. Daniel Bender, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.Credit...Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times

At the time, Bender and a child-psychiatry fellow discussed the role that social media can play in enabling teenagers to act on their suicidal impulses. Then the fellow confessed that this case kept her up at night. “I don’t know if residential for six months is different than here for two weeks,” she told Bender. “But I get it. If it’s my kid, I want to put them in residential for safety.”

Bender gets it, too. “Everyone wants to keep the kid wrapped up and protected at all times,” he said. “Maybe we can prevent a suicide by keeping them in the hospital, but maybe we can’t.” Bender warns parents about the risks of isolating children from people they love, including family members (though some chronically mentally ill children, including those with deeply dysfunctional families, may need more intensive care outside their home). “You can end up perpetuating the issue, where the kid feels progressively less seen, less heard,” he said.

Experts cannot reliably forecast when someone will attempt suicide. In one prominent study of people who killed themselves, one-third of those who were screened the month before their deaths denied having suicidal thoughts at that time. “We don’t know if they weren’t truthful or if it came on quickly,” says David Brent, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and one of the country’s leading experts in adolescent suicide. “Even if you can identify who is at risk, you can’t very well predict when they are at risk.”

And hospitalization can do only so much: It is short-term, designed to stabilize children and then discharge them, ideally into outpatient treatment. “We’re going to discharge at the end of next week,” Bender told his team. He pointed out that the teenager seemed motivated to get better. But he acknowledged: “It’s a risk they could kill themselves. It’s the limitation of this place.”

Bender, like so many pediatric and mental-health workers, finds himself on the front lines of a crisis of despair among adolescents, one that affects numerous parts of the medical system. Visits to emergency departments for children with psychiatric problems has climbed a startling 8 percent each year on average from 2015 to 2020, with suicide-related and self-harm visits outpacing those for all other mental-health problems.

There aren’t enough therapists and psychiatrists to meet the demand. The United States has only 14 child-and-adolescent psychiatrists for every 100,000 children — there are more in urban areas, fewer in rural and underserved ones — and wait times to see them can stretch to months. Pediatricians have responded by prescribing antidepressants and other psychiatric medications for children who might otherwise have relied on psychiatrists. In recent years, a growing number of pediatricians began calling U.P.M.C.’s TiPS line, a service that offers primary-care providers access to child-and-adolescent psychiatrists, according to Dr. Abigail Schlesinger, the clinical chief of child-and-adolescent psychiatry at U.P.M.C.

Doctors are calling not only to ask how to prescribe psychiatric meds; they are also seeking advice for children with mental-health problems or who are thinking about suicide. They need help getting children into services. Some admit they feel at a loss. They have been considering retiring.

Bender got into the field — in addition to psychiatry, he trained in psychodynamic therapy, a form of in-depth talk therapy — in part because he was the teenager whom friends confided in, and he never forgot how life can feel out of control when you are an adolescent. He wanted a career that allowed him to help children as much as possible by prescribing meds and providing therapy.

Bender, who still has a boyish face at 35, wears his hair neatly combed and prefers plaid shirts (he never wears a doctor’s coat). He’s a horror-movie fan: His office décor includes a poster from “Halloween” and small figurines like Pennywise, Wolf Man and Stripe from “Gremlins.” With his patients (who don’t see him in his office), Bender plays the role of curious, open-minded confidant. By the time he gets to them, some children are, as he put it to me, “so done” — frustrated by school, parents, on-and-off-again friendships, romantic relationships, their lack of control over much of anything, life. “They are mad, so mad,” he says. One threw apple juice in his face; two girls threatened to kill him after they said they found his address on the internet. “I tell kids, please hate me if you need to,” he says. “I prefer you hate me instead of your parents.”

His goal is to understand how it feels to be them, not to tell them what they need to do. “When you can’t make sense of your despair, I can make sense,” says Bender, who has won several teaching and clinical-care awards. “Not ‘expert’ sense, but a realistic sense of what may be going on. I can help them feel contained and engage them. Or not react in the same way as their family. I’m not going to understand everything while they are here. But we can find a closer gray about what the real story is. And, hopefully, help parents do so, too.”

As he talked, more children were waiting at the hospital’s Psychiatric Emergency Services, six floors below. The PES (pronounced Pez) is the first stop when children and adolescents come to Western Psych’s emergency department after passing through security and handing over their phones and bags. To fill out forms, they have to use soft, bendable plastic pens, so they can’t harm themselves or others. (For the same reason, the bathrooms’ metal toilets have nondetachable seats.) TVs play cartoons, cooking shows, Hallmark movies. The only available phone is attached to the wall. Patients often spend hours in one of two pediatric waiting areas, sometimes wearing hospital gowns after having been transferred from another medical center. They sit in the blue-and-orange plastic chairs around a table with board games or in leather chairs that fold out to become single beds. Some patients stay overnight — or several nights — when Bender’s unit cannot accommodate them.

Psychiatrists at PES interview children and their parents (or other caregivers) separately, to figure out if the patients needs to be admitted or if a referral for outpatient care, which can include crisis services, will be enough. Most teenagers who experience suicidal thoughts don’t need to be hospitalized and most don’t kill themselves (about 2,800 did in 2021). Psychiatrists have to weigh the possible protective factor of admitting a child against the reality of limited beds and the fact that hospitalization can make anxiety worse, which can drive adolescents away from mental health care altogether.

Medical professionals use the word “suicidality” to refer to a range of thoughts and actions, from passive death wishes, like the desire to go to bed and not wake up, to more active thoughts and, at the most extreme, suicide attempts and death. Though we know a lot about some causes of suicidality — mood disorders, child abuse, substance use — experts don’t understand why the numbers have been rising, on the whole, over the last decade. Some blame social media, which can both deprive children of sleep — the lack of which is associated with increased suicidal thoughts — and increase loneliness and feelings of being left out (even as it offers helpful communities for children, especially those who feel marginalized). Since 2020, the pandemic has likely been another factor.

Systemic conditions can also fuel anxiety, anger, dread and, in turn, suicidal thoughts and actions among particular groups — Black children facing trauma and persistent racism, for example, or trans children forced to use the wrong bathroom for them at school and made to feel ostracized, unseen and alone. Rates of suicidality in both populations have increased in recent years. “Ignore the social and family context at your peril,” says Brent, who has tracked the rise in adolescent suicide for years.

“It’s hard to be in this field,” he says, “and watch things getting worse.”

Salena Binnig spends most of her working hours trying to help teenagers feel understood and well enough that they don’t try to hurt or kill themselves. She is one of 10 therapists at U.P.M.C.’s STAR Center, which was co-founded by Brent 37 years ago. Patients arrive there via various routes, including a referral from a therapist, a psychiatrist or Western Psych. Parents, too, call STAR (which stands for Services for Teens at Risk) to make intake appointments for their children.

Binnig, who is 32 and has worked at the center for four years, has an air of unassuming confidence and a broad smile. In addition to her regular appointments with patients, she sometimes checks in with them throughout the week, especially if they have been harming themselves or mentioning thoughts of suicide. She fields voice-mail messages and email from worried parents. She also runs an intensive outpatient program, known as an I.O.P., for college students and teaches a weekly class for parents to explain what their children learn in an I.O.P. In her leftover time, she occasionally talks to school counselors managing high-risk students.

On a Monday afternoon earlier this year, I met with Binnig and her colleague Layne Filio in Binnig’s office during a lunch break. Each had been an intern at STAR, which is one of the few comprehensive youth suicide-prevention centers in the country.

During one of the worst periods in the pandemic, in the fall of 2020, Binnig’s typical caseload of 15 to 17 patients climbed to 29, several of whom she worried were at a high risk of suicide. For her and the rest of the staff, the responsibility was (as it continues to be) enormous. Sometimes they have had to take a child directly from a therapy session to the Western Psych’s emergency department, which is several blocks away.

“In private practice,” she said, “you can just shut down your practice and say you’re full. We don’t do that.” Around the country, in fact, many therapists do have long waiting lists or have stopped taking new clients. But at STAR, the mission, Binnig said, is to do its best to meet demand, especially for high-risk teenagers. The staff also prides itself on evaluating adolescents quickly. And though the wait list to see a therapist reached six weeks at one point during the pandemic, that was shorter than at many places.

Filio, who now works in a clinic for families and children, is often assigned suicidal children because, she said, “everyone knows I’m not afraid of them.” Filio is 32 with long dark hair and several tattoos. On her arm there are images of drawings by Shel Silverstein, the children’s book author, and, on one finger, three dots (“like Beyoncé,” Filio said), and two small lines on another, a symbol supposedly used by hobos in the Great Depression to mean “the sky is the limit.” She told me that the hardest stretch in her career took place last fall, during the week I first met with her.

Two of her adolescent patients had been hospitalized after suicide attempts, and her concern about one of them in particular was causing her to lose sleep. The girl had just made her fourth attempt and had already gone through an intensive outpatient program. She and Filio had worked on what’s known as a safety plan for suicidality — in which, among other things, the girl listed coping strategies that might help if she felt herself entering a downward spiral. But the girl didn’t look at it later. “She does great one week and then feels awful in the moment and doesn’t know how to self-regulate,” Filio told me. Even though the girl felt a connection with Filio, Filio knew she wasn’t always telling the truth.

That was just one case. Filio had so many others, including Black and L.G.B.T.Q. kids who were suffering from systemic harms. “We are holding people’s trauma for them, until they are able to hold it for themselves,” she said, “and that weighs on me. Incredibly.”

Filio tries to find ways to relate on a personal level with her patients. For years she has been learning about Fortnite and talking to many of her patients about the online game. She sometimes tells teenagers about her own struggles with depression to destigmatize their feelings. And if a child who seems to need medications is wary about taking them, she reveals that she takes meds for depression.

“Part of how I do therapy is to meet them where they are and take them at their word,” she said. “I don’t have any other options. I’m trying to understand what they are trying to say rather than tell them what they are trying to say, which is what it felt like when I was a kid.”

Good therapists can be any age, of course, but younger therapists like Filio and Binnig can help suicidal children feel “this person gets me,” says Jonathan Singer, a suicide expert and professor of social work at Loyola University Chicago. “A key experience of being suicidal is a feeling like you don’t have a place in the world, you are a burden. You’ve failed in some fundamental way.”

As Filio and I sat in a coffee shop last fall, not far from the house where she lives with her partner and dog, she looked over her list of 50 clients. “Five, six, seven, 12, um, 19,” she said, totaling how many grappled with suicidal thoughts. About half of the group were L.G.B.T.Q. Several of them had parents or other adults in their lives who wouldn’t use their pronouns, refused to accept their sexual identity or suggested that being trans or gay was a “stage.” In one case, a 13-year-old girl wanted to join an L.G.B.T.Q. support group that Filio had started, but because of her age, the girl needed parental permission. After Filio raised the prospect with the mother in an online meeting, the mother’s screen went blank. Filio never heard from her or her daughter again. According to the Trevor Project, which provides crisis services for L.G.B.T.Q. youth, children whose families don’t support their identity or who are in schools or communities that don’t accept or affirm L.G.B.T.Q. people have higher rates of attempted suicide.

Families can increase the likelihood of suicide attempts, too, by rejecting the standard advice about locking up medications and guns. A 1993 study by Brent and his colleagues found that the biggest risk factor for suicide by adolescents who had no identifiable psychiatric disorder was having a loaded gun in their house. One 16-year-old girl told me the only reason she’s alive is because her parents locked up their medications.

Some of the parents Binnig works with don’t fully buy into the program — they don’t want to lock up their meds and guns, they don’t like how much therapists check in with their children, they don’t believe in mental-health treatment. Binnig is known among her colleagues as the “queen of irritable parents,” because she is empathetic with parents and stays calm when they are anxious, unhappy or angry. She also tries to help parents understand why their teenagers refuse to go to school, turn in homework late or cut themselves — and that there are more supportive responses to those problems than grounding their children or taking away their phones.

Then there are the parents who are so anxious and desperate for someone to alleviate their child’s pain that they blame the therapist when she can’t pull it off. When Binnig recommended to one father that his daughter might need hospitalization, in addition to continuing her therapy, he told Binnig she was incompetent.

Binnig never dissuades parents from telling her what’s going on with their children — indeed, she needs to know if they are harming themselves. But sometimes parents call or email Binnig with small updates: She was in the bathroom last night crying about her boyfriend. She is spending too much time in bed. She had a fight with her best friend at school. Binnig understands the stress the parents feel, but she reminds them that she is the child’s therapist, not theirs. “ ‘I need your kid to be telling me these things,” she explains to them. “ ‘I don’t want to keep constantly saying, ‘Your mom told me this.’”

As Binnig’s colleague James Russell puts it, “Therapists aren’t superheroes.” Russell’s office is just down the hall from Binnig’s, and sometimes she or other STAR therapists refer clients to him for family therapy. As one of the only Black therapists at U.P.M.C., he is in high demand by families who might be wary of white therapists or of therapy in general, given the long history of racism in psychiatry and psychology. (Among many other failings in the field, diagnoses of schizophrenia and conduct disorder are disproportionately given to Black children.) “We call it ghosts of therapy past,” Russell says, referring to the negative experiences that families have had with health care professionals. “We see it a mile away when we get these folks. Some damage has been done, and we have to repair.”

Russell, who is 41, became interested in therapy after a college adviser suggested he study psychology. His family didn’t talk about strong emotions or the impact of trauma on their lives: “It didn’t feel natural or safe to do so,” he says. He also didn’t believe therapy was for people who looked like him or experienced the world as he did. Still, the psychology classes he took intrigued him and after college, and while getting his master’s degree, he worked various mental health care jobs before landing in family therapy.

But in 2020, he decided to reduce his patient caseload and begin training and supervising U.P.M.C. staff members. Early that year, his father-in-law died. Then, in May, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. Part of him wanted to go to protests; another part of him feared, he says, that “it could happen to me.” He also thought he could be arrested, which would leave his patients without a therapist. Months later, his own father became gravely ill. He would be on a call with his family discussing whether to remove him from life support and then have to go directly into a therapy session at which a client might start talking about her own father. He would briefly lose himself in thought. At the same time, the pandemic was raging. “It’s one of the hardest times in history,” says Russell, whose father died later that year. “And you have a mission. But then you think, Wait, is this right for me after all, or is this exactly what I expected? You’re working to make sure everyone’s OK, but you don’t have time to process your own loss and grief. With frontline staff, it’s all well and good if things are going well for us. But life stressors hit us, too.”

That same fall, in 2020, as Russell wrestled with family losses and as Binnig’s caseload ballooned, a 15-year-old girl named Sophie began attending STAR, where Binnig became her therapist. Sophie quickly came to trust that with Binnig, unlike with her previous therapist, she could confess to having suicidal feelings or cutting the back of her thighs without panicking that she would be “sent away.” She liked that Binnig took her worries seriously without rushing to try to fix them or responding like an authority figure. (Binnig would not disclose details about her or any of her clients for privacy reasons. A U.P.M.C. psychiatrist put me in touch with Sophie.) She didn’t say, as others had about her cutting, “Why would you do something like that to yourself?” That only made Sophie feel worse.

Sophie (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy) is a thoughtful, emphatic person, with pale teal eyes. An animal lover — her bed is covered with stuffed animals — she makes her mom stop the car so she can take dead squirrels, raccoons or possums from the street and give them a proper burial in her backyard.

But by late summer 2020, before she was seeing Binnig, Sophie could barely get out of bed. Her grades had fallen from As to Fs. Though her thoughts of suicide were mostly passive, her panic attacks had grown more frequent — small ones arrived every couple of days; large ones, every few weeks. A small conflict or feeling of anxiety would lead to painful memories and then ruminations in endless loops. Her body shook, her teeth chattered, she drooled and she often couldn’t speak. She felt as if she was losing her mind. She didn’t care if she lived or died. She just wanted the agony to go away.

When her mother couldn’t find a psychiatrist to see her — the ones her mother called weren’t accepting new patients or had six-week waiting lists — she and her ex-husband took their daughter to Western Psych’s emergency department for an evaluation. The psychiatrist referred Sophie to STAR.

Days later, Sophie had an intake session with a STAR staff member, during which they created a safety plan. The next week, when she first met with Binnig, they continued to talk about the plan, which included leaving her room if she was heading into a cycle of despair; playing with her two pet rats; and listening to a playlist she had created to distract her, with songs like “Chop Chop Slide,” by Insane Clown Posse; “Juicy,” by Doja Cat and Tyga; and “Obsessed,” by Mariah Carey. The plan also listed whom Sophie would call when she felt out of control: her mother, then two local crisis programs where she could talk to someone.

Binnig encouraged Sophie to join STAR’s intensive outpatient program, too, where about 10 teenagers met for a few hours with therapists, three afternoons a week. The I.O.P. is less group therapy than a skills workshop. The program centers on dialectical behavior therapy, or D.B.T., which was developed over the past five decades by a psychologist named Marsha Linehan, who was suicidal herself. Studies suggest that D.B.T. reduces suicide attempts in adolescents experiencing high levels of suicidality. Sophie and the other adolescents learned D.B.T. techniques, including how to identify feelings of anxiety, depression, anger and disappointment and put those emotions into words. The patients can write down their feelings about suicide, but they aren’t allowed to talk about them in depth with others in their sessions, only with a therapist — teenagers, more than any other group, are vulnerable to the contagion effect in which a peer’s suicide can lead to copycat attempts.

Therapists encouraged Sophie and the other teenagers to practice short-term goals — complete a school assignment, engage more with friends, exercise — and to understand that there’s more than one way to see a situation or solve a problem, something Binnig reinforced in her sessions. And on a typical day they did a guided mindfulness exercise and worked on cognitive-behavioral-therapy exercises like avoiding negative self-talk to challenge their thinking about their depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts.

‘Everyone here deserves nothing but kindness and relief.’

The exercises aren’t always immediately effective — Binnig has had to send some patients to the hospital even after they have completed an I.O.P. more than once. Suicidality can also be like a wave that subsides only to return suddenly as an untamable swell. So it was for Sophie. After stretches of feeling stronger in 2021, that summer Sophie’s on-again-off-again girlfriend once again broke up with her. Sophie was struggling with her dad and stepmother and her feelings of abandonment. She had few friends; she had lost interest in jewelry making and playing music. The breakup felt like the final blow. As she listened to her girlfriend on the phone, Sophie began hyperventilating and sobbing in heaves; her hands and toes twitched. She wasn’t sure where she was.

She hung up the phone and poured a bunch of pills into her hand. But just then her stepsister walked into her room. It was like cold water splashing in her face, awakening her. She put the pills back in the bottle.

Sophie was in family therapy at that point, and the therapist encouraged her to attend a program similar to the I.O.P. but more extensive — six hours a day, five days a week. Before she got off the weekslong waiting list, she wrote in her journal that her pain felt like “a never-ending cycle and I’m losing my mind, like life is really pulling my final straws. I feel like I’m beyond coping now.”

But once she started the program, Sophie felt relieved to be among people who battled similar issues. After the third day, she wrote in her journal: “Everyone here is super nice and full of a beautiful, unique mixture of struggles, talent and personality. I hope to cross paths with everyone again, someday. Everyone here deserves nothing but kindness and relief.”

Still, that night she cut her thighs to distract herself from her anguish. But she also downloaded an app that helps users track self-harming behaviors and get support. And every weekday, for almost a month, she returned to the program, where she liked feeling that no one was judging her. When it was over, she resumed her weekly appointments with Binnig. Her progress was jagged for a long time, but with the help of Binnig and the coping strategies she learned, Sophie started to believe her identity extended beyond being a depressed person. She could imagine a future that would have felt impossible two years earlier. (She recently got into college with almost a full ride on tuition.) Her mother, who had become overwhelmed when Sophie wasn’t getting better, learned to stop trying to control parts of daughter’s life. She backed off making what she thought were helpful suggestions for Sophie — meditate, read self-help books, eat more, exercise — which Sophie just batted away.

It’s a difficult balance for worried parents. But as Binnig told me, those who do best by their children take their problems seriously while managing to not hover over them. Ultimately, she said, “getting better has to be the child’s own process.”

There is evidence that less intensive and less expensive therapeutic interventions against suicide might help children, at least those at the highest risk and, by extension, put less pressure on the medical system. For a study published in 2001, more than 800 patients in San Francisco who were hospitalized for suicidality or depression and who declined follow-up care were assigned to two groups: One had no follow-up contact and the other received periodic, typewritten letters from a health care worker who had interviewed them. The letters were brief but expressed concern and a desire to keep in touch. “It has been some time since you were here at the hospital, and we hope things are going well for you,” a typical letter read. “If you wish to drop us a note we would be glad to hear from you.” Patients in the contact group received eight letters the first year, then four letters for several years. Within two years of leaving the hospital — the span of time during which suicidal patients are most likely to kill themselves — the group that received letters was half as likely to die by suicide as the control group. Even several years later, the rate stayed lower. Since then, research has suggested that apps focused on suicide prevention may also help. Studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health are investigating the efficacy of digital interventions that encourage children and teenagers, upon discharge from the hospital, to gauge their suicidal feelings and gives them strategies to help; another provides support for parents and tips about safety planning.

Better, of course, would be reaching children far earlier. In the last two years, during which the American Academy of Pediatrics and other national children’s organizations declared a “national emergency” in child-and-adolescent mental health, President Biden’s administration began devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to mental health care. Many states have created suicide-prevention programs and efforts to connect students and families to community social services. We already know that schools that teach coping skills and ways for children to receive help when they are depressed or anxious reduce substance abuse, aggression and jail time, along with suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

But for now, therapists and psychiatrists contend with an unceasing flow of children. “There are people who do this for years and years, but most of us leave after a couple years,” Binnig says, referring to STAR therapists. Many go into private practice, where they might treat lower-risk children and have more flexibility and the opportunity to make more money. Binnig isn’t sure what she will do. She loves her team; she’s invested in her patients, but she thinks about a hard day not long ago with a patient who resisted therapy and felt deeply hopeless and sad. She told Binnig that she worried she might attempt suicide, but she didn’t want to go to the hospital. She had received inpatient treatment before, and it was lousy. Binnig and another clinician called her parents, took her to the hospital and waited with her so they could be part of the evaluation. That evening, Binnig didn’t get home until 9:30.

After hard days like that, Binnig usually collapses on the couch and stares at the TV with the volume low. “My husband gets it,” she says. But she is expecting their first child in August, and that gives her pause. “I wonder when I have my kids, will I be emotionally able to do the work that I do, and then come home to my kids and still have an emotional battery left?”

Bender knows the feeling. After a decade in this field, he’s good at compartmentalizing, but it has been impossible some days not to let cases get to him. Last year, for example, when his team was worried about the nonbinary teen who overdosed, he consulted with the child’s outpatient psychiatrist. “I have that feeling of, I’ve got to figure this case out,” he told his team. “Even though frequently you can’t in this setting.” While the teenager was hospitalized, Bender worked each day to understand their story and perspective. He regularly checked in with them: “Does this feel like we’re talking about things that matter?” Yes, they said. They also noticed how invested their mother was in family meetings, how she kept showing up and not giving up.

Bender doesn’t know how the teenager is doing now. When he discharges children, he is hopeful that something from their therapeutic work sticks. (As far as he knew, only one teenager who stayed on his unit later died by suicide.) Still, some children show up in the hospital over and over. And Bender has learned not to be surprised when he sees them; patterns are not so easy to break.

He has grown more patient since he was a psychiatry resident, when he often felt hopeless. No treatment was enough: not meds, not cognitive-behavioral therapy. He felt that he couldn’t save children from their agony. He became mad at the system, at the children themselves. “I felt like: What the hell is this? Nothing works,” he says. “I had to embrace my limitations, my helplessness. I only could really do this work when I started to ask: What am I capable of? Because if you feel like you’re going to ‘fix’ kids, really fix? Then you’re going to end up hating your work, because you’re going to end up disappointed.”

Instead, he shifted his views about the work and his impulse to safeguard suicidal children at all costs. He began focusing on making them feel “seen and human,” as Bender puts it. “If I can help a kid feel understood and help parents understand their kids,” he told me, “that is treatment.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Source

If you were ever scolded as a child for reading in the dark, or if you have used blue-light-blocking glasses when working on a computer, you might have incorrect ideas about eye health.

About four in 10 adults in the United States are at high risk for vision loss, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But many eye conditions are treatable or preventable, said Dr. Joshua Ehrlich, an assistant professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Michigan.

Here are nine common beliefs people have about eye health, and what experts have to say about them.

Reading a book or looking at an electronic device up close is bad for your eyes.

True. Our eyes are not meant to focus on objects close to our face for long periods of time, said Dr. Xiaoying Zhu, an associate clinical professor of optometry and the lead myopia researcher at SUNY College of Optometry in New York City. When we do, especially as children, it encourages the eyeball to lengthen, which over time can cause nearsightedness, or myopia.

To help reduce the strain on your eyes, Dr. Zhu recommends following the 20-20-20 rule: After every 20 minutes of close reading, look at something at least 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.

Reading in the dark can worsen your eyesight.

False. However, if the lighting is so dim that you need to hold your book or tablet close to your face, that can increase the risks mentioned above and create eyestrain, which can cause soreness around the eyes and temples, headache and difficulty concentrating. But these are usually temporary symptoms, Dr. Zhu said.

Spending more time outside helps eyesight.

True. Some research (mostly focused on children) suggests that outdoor time can reduce the risk of developing myopia, said Maria Liu, an associate professor of clinical optometry at the University of California, Berkeley. Experts don’t fully understand why this is, but some research suggests that bright sunlight may encourage the retina to produce dopamine, which discourages eye lengthening (though these experiments have mostly been conducted with animals, Dr. Zhu said).

Too much ultraviolet light can harm eyesight.

True. There is a reason experts say not to stare at the sun. Too much exposure to ultraviolet A and B rays in sunlight can “cause irreversible damage” to the retina, Dr. Ehrlich said. This can also increase your risk of developing cataracts, he said.

Too much UV light exposure can also increase the risk for developing cancers in the eye, Dr. Ehrlich said — though this risk is low. Wearing sunglasses, glasses or contacts that block UV rays can offer protection.

Taking a break from wearing glasses can prevent your eyesight from getting worse.

False. Some patients who need glasses tell Safal Khanal, an assistant professor in optometry and vision science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, that they don’t wear their glasses all the time because they think it will make their condition worse. “That’s not true,” he said. If you need glasses, you should wear them.

Even a little blue light from screens is damaging to your eyes.

False. While some research has found that exposure to blue light can damage the retina and potentially cause vision problems over time, no solid evidence has confirmed that this happens with typical exposures in humans, Dr. Ehrlich said. There’s also no evidence that wearing blue-light-blocking glasses will improve eye health, he added.

But screens can be bad for eyesight in the other ways described above, including by causing dry eyes, Dr. Zhu said. “When we stare at a screen, we just don’t blink as often as we should,” she said, and that can cause eyestrain and temporary blurred vision.

Smoking is bad for eye health.

True. A 2011 C.D.C. study linked smoking with self-reported age-related eye diseases in older adults, including cataracts and age-related macular degeneration, a disease where part of the retina breaks down and blurs your vision. Toxic chemicals in cigarettes enter your bloodstream and damage sensitive tissues in the eyes including the retina, lens and macula, Dr. Khanal said.

Carrots are good for your eyes.

True. While a diet full of carrots won’t give you perfect vision, some evidence suggests that the nutrients in them are good for eye health. One large clinical trial, for instance, found that supplements containing nutrients found in carrots, including antioxidants like beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, could slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration.

Following an antioxidant-rich diet won’t necessarily prevent an eye disease from occurring, but it can be helpful “particularly for people with early macular degeneration,” Dr. Ehrlich said.

Worsening eyesight is an inevitable part of aging.

False. Most causes of declining eyesight in adulthood — including age-related macular degeneration, cataracts and glaucoma — are preventable or treatable if you catch them early, Dr. Ehrlich said. If your vision is starting to wane, don’t dismiss it as “just aging,” he added. Seeing an optometrist or ophthalmologist right away (or regularly, every year) will give you the best chance of staving off these conditions, he said.

Source

Researchers say there's now a 66% chance we will pass the 1.5C global warming threshold between now and 2027.

The chances are rising due to emissions from human activities and a change in weather patterns expected this summer.

If the world passes the limit, scientists stress the breach, while worrying, will likely be temporary.

Hitting the threshold would mean the world is 1.5C warmer than it was during the second half of the 19th Century, before fossil fuel emissions from industrialisation really began to ramp up.

And breaking the limit even for just one year is a worrying sign that warming is accelerating and not slowing down.

The 1.5C figure has become a symbol of global climate change negotiations. Countries agreed to "pursue efforts" to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C under the 2015 Paris agreement.

Going over 1.5C every year for a decade or two would see far greater impacts of warming, such as longer heatwaves, more intense storms and wildfires.

But passing the level in one of the next few years would not mean that the Paris limit had been broken. Scientists say there is still time to restrict global warming by cutting emissions sharply.

Since 2020 the World Meteorological Organisation has been giving an estimate of the chances of the world breaking the 1.5C threshold in any one year.

Back then they predicted there was less than a 20% chance of breaking 1.5C in the five years ahead.

By last year this had increased to 50%, and now it's jumped to 66%, which the scientists say means it's "more likely than not."

What does going over 1.5C mean?

The figure is not a direct measure of the world's temperature but an indicator of how much or how little the Earth has warmed or cooled compared to the long term global average.

A school child tries to stay cool amid a heatwave in Indonesia this year

Scientists use average temperature data from the period between 1850-1900 as a measure of how hot the world was before our modern reliance on coal, oil and gas.

For decades they believed that if the world warmed by around 2C that would be the threshold of dangerous impacts - but in 2018 they significantly revised this estimate, showing that going past 1.5C would be calamitous for the world.

Over the past few decades our overheating world has nudged the mercury up so that in 2016, the warmest on record, global temperatures were 1.28C above the pre-industrial figure.

Now researchers say that figure is set to be smashed - they are 98% certain the high mark will be broken before 2027.

And in the years between now and then they believe there's a very solid chance the 1.5C limit will be surpassed for the first time.

"We really are now within reach of a temporary exceedance of 1.5C for the annual mean temperature, and that's the first time in human history we've been that close," said Prof Adam Scaife, head of long range forecasts at the Met Office, who compile the data from weather and climate agencies around the world.

Flamingoes in Spain find their nesting area hit by drought after fierce heatwave this spring

"I think that's perhaps the most stark and obvious and simplest statistic that we've got in the report," he told a news conference.

The researchers stress that temperatures would have to stay at or above 1.5C for 20 years to be able to say the Paris agreement threshold had been passed.

"This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5C level specified in the Paris Agreement which refers to long-term warming over many years," said WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas

"However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency," he said.

What difference will El Niño make?

There are two key elements - the first is the continuing high levels of carbon emissions from human activities that despite a fall during the pandemic are still going up.

The second, critical part is the likely appearance of El Niño, a weather phenomenon with global implications.

For the last three years the world has been experiencing a La Niña event which has dampened climate warming to some extent.

People sweep away mud after flooding connected to a coastal El Niño in Peru

But the extra heat that El Niño will bring to the surface of the Pacific will likely push the global temperature to a new high next year.

However there is still uncertainty around the onset and scale of the event.

"It's worth noting that a lot of our forecasts that are being made now for the El Niño that we think is developing this winter, are showing pretty big amplitude," Prof Scaife told reporters.

"But to actually predict the magnitude, or a subsequent event within the five-year period, we can't give the exact dates of that beyond this one year ahead, so it could be in three or four years from now we get to two and a half degree El Niño and that might be the one that does it. "

What are the likely impacts in the UK and elsewhere?

The Arctic will experience warming at a greater level than many regions, with the temperature anomaly expected to be three times as large as the global figure over the next five northern hemisphere winters.

Northern Europe including the UK will likely experience increased rainfall for the May to September period over the next five years, the report says.

Source

“We’re paying attention to these emissions now because of the success of the Montreal Protocol,” says Luke Western, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Global Monitoring Laboratory and the University of Bristol.

“CFC emissions from more widespread uses that are now banned have dropped to such low levels that emissions of CFCs from previously minor sources are on our radar now.”

The study, by an international team of scientists from NOAA, the University of Bristol, Empa, CSIRO, the University of East Anglia, the University of California San Diego, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Forschungszentrum Jülich, was recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

No immediate threat to the ozone layer – but a significant greenhouse effect

According to the researchers, emissions from these CFCs currently do not significantly threaten ozone recovery. With the current rate of increase, however, they could become a significant contribution of the total emissions of ozone-depletion chemicals. Also, because they are potent greenhouse gases, they do have an impact on climate: Combined, their emissions are equal to the CO2 emissions in 2020 for a smaller country like Switzerland. That’s equivalent to about one percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States or 1/1’000 of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

CFCs are chemicals known to destroy Earth’s protective ozone layer. Once widely used in the manufacture of hundreds of products including aerosol sprays, as blowing agents for foams and packing materials, as solvents and refrigerants, CFC production for such uses was banned under the Montreal Protocol in 2010.

Research with a view: Due to its unique place, year-round accessibility, and excellent infrastructure, the Jungfraujoch research station is well suited for long-term ground-based monitoring of trace gas concentration trends in the free troposphere. Credit: Empa

 

However, the international treaty didn’t ban the use and creation of CFCs during production of other chemicals including hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and, more recently, also hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs), which were both developed as replacements for CFCs.

This study focused on five CFCs with few, or no, known current uses – CFC-13, CFC-112a, CFC-113a, CFC-114a, and CFC-115 – and that have atmospheric lifetimes ranging from 52 to 640 years. In terms of their impact on ozone, emissions of these five CFCs are equivalent to around one-tenth of current emissions from CFC-11, one of the most abundant of this group of chemicals controlled under the Montreal Protocol.

A record-high abundance

In this study, the team used measurements from 14 sites all over the world, including the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) stations such as the one station at Jungfraujoch, managed by Empa, and an atmospheric transport model to show that global atmospheric abundances and emissions of these CFCs increased after their production for most uses was phased out in 2010; in fact, they reached a record-high abundance in 2020.

The researchers determined that for three CFCs they studied – CFC-113a, CFC-114a, and CFC-115 – the increased emissions may be due in part to their role during the production of two common HFCs used primarily in refrigeration and air conditioning. “As the currently most likely source of these compounds is a byproduct in the fluorocarbons industry, there are concerns of increasing emissions of these CFCs given the production projections for some of these new-generation fluorocarbon products,” says Martin Vollmer of Empa, a co-author of the study.

The drivers behind increasing emissions of the other two CFCs, CFC-13 and CFC-112a, are less certain, however. Vollmer: “We are not aware of any current chemical fluorocarbon process, in which these two substances appear as either intermediate or byproduct.”

Time to sharpen the Montreal Protocol?

The researchers didn’t determine where these emissions are coming from; they documented rising global emissions but weren’t able to identify particular source locations. One of the reasons for this, says Empa’s Stefan Reimann, another co-author of the study, is the numerous “blind spots” in the global monitoring network: “Even though this study combined measurements from several networks and groups, several regions of the world, including those with the largest global fluorocarbon productions, are severely undersampled.”

According to the researchers, if emissions of these five CFCs continue to rise, their impact may negate some of the benefits gained under the Montreal Protocol and also contribute substantially to global warming. The study noted these emissions might be reduced or avoided by reducing leakages associated with HFC production and by properly destroying any co-produced CFCs. “Given the continued rise of these chemicals in the atmosphere, perhaps it is time to think about sharpening the Montreal Protocol a bit more,” says another study co-author, Johannes Laube of the Forschungszentrum Jülich. One takeaway message, says Luke Western, is that the production process for some of the CFC replacement chemicals may not be entirely ozone-friendly, even if the replacement chemicals themselves are.

Source

Long-sought universal flu vaccine: mRNA-based candidate enters clinical trial

A trial has begun in the US for a drug that should prevent the harmful effects of radiation on the body in the event of a nuclear attack or incident. Prevention and treatment for radiation poisoning are currently extremely limited, so a drug that can effectively remove radioactive contamination from the body would be a landmark moment in defending against a currently unstoppable poison. 

HOPO 14-1 is an investigative drug that is hoped can protect and treat victims of nuclear fallout, by binding (or chelating) contaminated heavy metals and removing them from the body. It is thought to be effective against Uranium and other materials used in nuclear weapons, such as dirty bombs or ballistic missiles. 

It may also help treat lead poisoning, according to existing data on the drug type.

The first human clinical trial will see around 42 participants test a range of doses to assess the drug’s safety, the findings of which will be reported in 2024. HOPO 14-1 is not currently FDA-approved and is not available for emergency use either. 

There is already a compound on the market that binds radioactive heavy metals, but HOPO Therapeutics states that these DTPA molecules deplete the body of essential ions too (such as zinc and magnesium), while their drug does not.  

The remaining treatments for radiation are extremely rudimentary, with iodine tablets and Prussian blue being some of the only options. Iodine is relatively effective at removing radioactive iodine from the body and Prussian blue can handle caesium and thallium, but much of the fallout can still wreak havoc on the body.  In many cases, radiation poisoning comes down to hoping that the dose was low enough to survive. 

Source

Based in San Francisco, Laskie focused on revolutionizing the recruitment process by helping job seekers quickly find suitable job matches. The startup was founded by Chris Bakke in 2021, who previously sold another venture to the prominent online job board Indeed. Although Laskie's website now states that the service is no longer available, its LinkedIn page still describes its core offering.

According to PitchBook, Laskie had raised a total of $6 million in funding. The exact financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. However, a source familiar with the acquisition revealed that Twitter paid a combination of cash and stock, totalling "tens of millions" of dollars.

The acquisition of Laskie marks a significant step for Twitter under Elon Musk. By integrating job-matching technology, Twitter may provide users with an experience that combines social interaction with employment opportunities.

This acquisition is likely the first step in a series of moves aimed at diversifying Twitter's offerings. By integrating Laskie's technology, Twitter may enable users to discover job opportunities based on their interests, skills, and connections within the platform.

Source: Axios

Source

Nourseothricin is a natural product made by a soil fungus that contains multiple forms of a complex molecule called streptothricin. Its discovery in the 1940s generated high hopes for it as a powerful agent against Gram-negative bacteria, which, due to their thick outer protective layer, are especially hard to kill with other antibiotics. But nourseothricin proved toxic to the kidneys, and its development was dropped. However, the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections has spurred the search for new antibiotics, leading Kirby and colleagues to take another look at nourseothricin.

Early studies of nourseothricin suffered from incomplete purification of the streptothricins. More recent work has shown that the multiple forms have different toxicities with one, streptothricin-F, significantly less toxic while remaining highly active against contemporary multidrug-resistant pathogens. Here, the authors characterized the antibacterial action, renal toxicity, and mechanism of action of highly purified forms of two different streptothricins, D and F. The D form was more powerful than the F form against drug-resistant Enterobacterales and other bacterial species, but caused renal toxicity at a lower dose. Both were highly selective for Gram-negative bacteria.

Using cryo-electron microscopy, the authors showed that streptothricin-F bound extensively to a subunit of the bacterial ribosome, accounting for the translation errors these antibiotics are known to induce in their target bacteria. Interestingly, the binding interaction is distinct from other known inhibitors of translation, suggesting it may find use when those agents are not effective.

"Based on unique, promising activity," Kirby said, "we believe the streptothricin scaffold deserves further pre-clinical exploration as a potential therapeutic for the treatment of multidrug-resistant, Gram-negative pathogens."

Kirby adds, "Isolated in 1942, streptothricin was the first antibiotic discovered with potent gram-negative activity. We find that not only is it activity potent, but that it is highly active [against] the hardiest contemporary multidrug-resistant pathogens and works by a unique mechanism to [inhibit] protein synthesis."

Source

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, wrote a solemn letter in January, announcing his company's decision to lay off 12,000 employees.

”I have some difficult news to share,” wrote Pichai. The layoff, he continued, "weighs heavily on me," and was forced by "economic reality."

Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs.

Google filed dozens of applications for foreign workers to serve as software engineers, analytical consultants, user experience researchers, and other roles. Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google, also filed and received visa applications for engineering jobs. Many of the Google visas are for new employees, with some starting as soon as August 17th.

Newly disclosed data released yesterday by the Department of Labor shows thousands of recent H1-B foreign worker visas requested by firms that just underwent massive layoffs this year, including Facebook/Meta Platforms, Amazon, Zoom, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Palantir.

Source

By the end of March, the surface temperature of the world’s oceans was above anything seen in the 40 years that satellites have been measuring it.

Records were “headed off the charts” and, as the heat refused to fade for more than a month, the Earth marched into “uncharted territory”, scientists said.

The temperature at the ocean’s surface – like on land – is being pushed higher by global heating but can jump around from one year to the next as weather systems come and go.

But in the 2km below the surface, that variability is almost nowhere to be seen. The rising heat down there has been on a relentless climb for decades, thanks to burning fossil fuels.

“The heat-holding capacity of the ocean is mammoth,” says Dr Paul Durack, a research scientist specialising in ocean measurements and modelling at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“The ocean captures more than 90% of the imbalance of energy that we’re creating because of anthropogenic climate change.”

The ocean is much less reflective than the land and soaks up more of the direct energy from sunlight.

But as greenhouse gases trap more of the energy that’s reflected back – allowing less to escape to space – the ocean tries to balance itself with the heat in the atmosphere above.

A technical chart in a chapter of the latest UN climate assessment laid out the unfathomable heat gain. Between 1971 and 2018, the ocean had gained 396 zettajoules of heat.

More heat means more marine heatwaves that devastate marine ecosystems, causing bleaching on coral reefs and killing underwater plants. Photograph: VW Pics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

How much heat is that? Scientists have calculated it is the equivalent energy of more than 25bn Hiroshima atomic bombs. And that heat gain is accelerating.

A study in January found the ocean gained 10 ZJ more in 2022 than the year before – enough heat to boil 700m kettles every second.

Compared with the ocean, according to a study in January the atmosphere has held on to about 2% of the extra heat caused by global heating since 2006.

To understand what’s happening below the ocean surface, out of sight of satellites, scientists look at a vast network of thousands of thermometers on buoys, ships, underwater gliders and permanent moorings.

Durack says it wasn’t until the early 2000s that a view of the changes in the ocean – long-predicted by climate scientists – started to become clear as more and more data became available.

But scientists have been able to get a longer view going back many more decades by using climate models.

“When we look at the climate models and compare them with the observations, we get consistent results across that simulated Earth and the real Earth. They’re all showing consistent warming.”

Dr Bernadette Sloyan researches changes in the ocean at Australia’s CSIRO government science agency and spends her days analysing ocean data.

“This is where the ocean is like a flywheel that drives our climate and that’s all because of the amount of energy it takes to heat it up,” she says.

“We have this constant talking between the ocean and the atmosphere that’s driving our weather and, annually, that’s our climate.”

Sloyan says the ocean has acted like the planet’s air conditioner, relentlessly absorbing extra heat.

“But that air conditioner isn’t just passive. It is not a free service. Adding that heat has come with ocean acidification, rising sea levels and changes in the frequency of extreme weather.”

The effectsof the extra heat are almost everywhere. As the ocean heats up, it expands, pushing up sea levels around the globe. Just over one-third of the rise in global sea levels is down to thermal expansion.

More heat means more marine heatwaves that have devastated marine ecosystems, causing bleaching on coral reefs and killing underwater plants that act like forests, providing habitats for marine life and acting as nurseries for fisheries.

Ocean heating could also radically alter marine food webs, with warmer conditions favouring smaller species and algae at the expense of the larger species that humans tend to eat.

In the deep ocean, where species have adapted to stable temperatures, scientists have said warming there in the coming decades could devastate marine life.

Prof Matthew England says: ‘Remember the world is 70% covered by ocean. It should have been called Ocean, not Earth.’ Photograph: Stocktrek Images/Getty Images

Around the tropics, where oceans are warmest, scientists have found species are already migrating towards the poles to find cooler waters. But with no other species able to take their place, this leaves behind waters stripped of marine life.

In places like the Mediterranean, where land blocks a route to cooler waters, Prof David Schoeman says many species will run out of ocean.

“Fish can’t just climb out of the water so they may have to go deeper,” says Schoeman of the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, who helped coordinate the latest UN climate assessment’s work on the ocean.

But if species go deeper to survive the heat, this could present another problem. Schoeman says near the surface waters easily mix with the air above to provide enough oxygen for marine life. But as deeper waters warm they hold less oxygen, potentially cutting off another survival option for some species.

Schoeman says much of the heat that has pushed surface temperatures to new highs in recent weeks is likely coming from below.

“Every year about 134 million atomic bombs of heat is being trapped by the ocean. It has kept global temperatures down and kept the land livable but we have to realise that energy hasn’t gone.”

The latest UN climate report says the warming of the ocean is likely to continue “until at least 2300” even if greenhouse gas emissions are low because of the “slow circulation of the deep ocean”.

Prof Matthew England, an oceanographer and climate scientist at the University of New South Wales, is on a video call and shows an image of the globe taken over the Pacific, where almost no land is visible.

“Remember the world is 70% covered by ocean. It should have been called Ocean, not Earth,” he says.

England says that simple physics means the ocean “has this huge ability to absorb heat and then hold on to it”.

England holds his arms out wide to show the size of one cubic metre of air. To heat that air by 1C, he says it takes about 2,000 joules. But to warm a cubic metre of ocean needs about 4,200,000 joules.

“By absorbing all this heat, the ocean lulls people into a false sense of security that climate change is progressing slowly.

“But there is a huge payback. It’s overwhelming when you start to go through all the negative impacts of a warming ocean.

“There’s sea level rise, coastal inundation, increased floods and drought cycles, bleached corals, intensification of cyclones, ecological impacts, melting of ice at higher latitudes in the coastal margins – that gives us a double whammy on sea level rise.

“The oceans have stored the problem,” says England. “But it’s coming back to bite us.”

Source

For Anthony Meng, a senior at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, food insecurity can take on many different forms. On some days, it means skipping meals as he’s rushing to work or to class. On others, “it’s like, I don’t think I can afford groceries,” he said. “Which is difficult to say at times, but it’s the reality of the situation.”

Meng, 22, rolls out of bed every morning around 9 or 10am. His schedule is typically packed with back-to-back lectures and extracurriculars. More often than not, Meng finds himself heading out for the day with just a granola bar in hand, if anything at all.

Fortunately there’s a place on campus where he can seek refuge: the Food Resource Center, a beloved hangout where students and staff can stock up on free fresh produce and groceries. Funded by donations, grants and student fees, the center also offers prepared meals, microwaves to heat them up in, and couches and a TV for people to gather, eat and pass the time.

“It’s an area of campus where I can not only find solace,” Meng said. “The fact that I can go get a hot meal […] it means the whole world.”

Shelves are stocked with food and supplies inside the Food Resource Center at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The center serves as a community space where students and faculty can access free food with no questions asked. Photograph: Brooklynn T Kascel/The Guardian

Pantries like the Food Resource Center are an increasingly popular resource as food insecurity persists among college students. Recent estimates put the number of campus pantries at about 800, most of them established in the past decade.

According to a 2020 survey of more than 195,000 students across the country, conducted by the Hope Center at Temple University, nearly 30% of students at four-year colleges reported experiencing food insecurity. For those at two-year colleges, the number was even higher – almost 40%. And with changes to student eligibility requirements for federally funded hunger relief programs set to take place in May, advocates say the situation could get even worse.

Most Hamline students, including Meng, plan their visits to the Food Resource Center around its delivery days – Wednesdays and Fridays. After the food donation trucks pull away, the center’s aisles start to brim with a medley of staples and unexpected treats, from perfectly fine produce to an array of unsold Trader Joe’s snacks.

For the past two years, Meng has received no financial assistance from his family to cover tuition or rent, so he works at H&M on weekends to pay for school and basic needs. The ability to get food on campus at no cost, with no questions asked, means that it’s just a little bit easier to focus on simply being a student.

Anthony Meng at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Meng, a senior undergraduate student at Hamline, is a Food Access Student Coordinator at the Food Resource Center where students and staff can access free food. Photograph: Brooklynn T Kascel/The Guardian

Meng’s go-tos include fresh fruits, eggs and ingredients for Khmer cuisine like fish sauce and coconut milk. He will also grab a prepared meal to eat later, after the long dance rehearsals that take up the rest of the afternoon. For students who can’t make it to the center in person, there’s a grocery delivery service. During Ramadan, the center extended its hours to 9pm so observant Muslim students could grab something to eat after breaking their fasts.

Despite high rates of hunger, students face an uphill battle when trying to access the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), the federally funded hunger relief program that gives people monthly allowances for groceries. Since the 1980s, people who attend school on a more than part-time basis have been largely excluded from Snap, out of concern that students from well-to-do backgrounds would draw public resources instead of assistance from their families.

So instead of qualifying for Snap based on asset and income requirements – as the majority of Americans do – college students also need to work at least 20 hours a week, a requirement that anti-hunger advocates say is onerous and unreasonable for someone who is attending classes and doing school work every day. Advocates argue that strict eligibility rules for full-time students are based on antiquated ideas of who attends higher education. In the decades since these restrictions were put in place, the proportion of post-secondary students from low-income backgrounds has increased steadily. According to a 2019 Pew Research study, the number of undergraduate students from families in poverty was about 20% , representing a more than 50% jump in the prior two decades.

Yet despite the evolving profile of “typical” college students, lawmakers have done little to update Snap eligibility rules to reflect their current economic realities.

Kyler Daniels, 27, brings in groceries with her daughter, Nova, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina on 26 April. Daniels, who is pursuing a master’s degree in social work and works full time, is anticipating losing additional pandemic-era Snap benefits. Photograph: Rachel Jessen/The Guardian

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government temporarily lifted the 20-hour work requirement for students. But after the public health emergency declaration expired in May, Snap rules will soon revert to pre-pandemic standards. According to one study, pandemic Snap exemptions for students made an additional 3 million people eligible to enroll in the program than would not have otherwise. Now, many of them will find themselves without grocery money that they’ve grown to depend on for three years.

“Oftentimes, the general public thinks of college students as that 18- or 19-year-old who’s continuing their education from high school,” said Jaime Hansen, executive director of Swipe Out Hunger, which advocates for policies to alleviate food insecurity among college students. “That’s no longer the majority.”

Still, the archetype of the typical college student who can draw from family resources and devote all their time to school persists.

Kyler Daniels, a 27-year-old mother and student knows this intimately. Daniels lives in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, with her daughter and boyfriend. While pursuing a master’s degree in social work part-time and remotely, she also works a full-time job at a local non-profit that supports children.

As a parent, food security is always at the top of her mind. Her family relies on food stamps, but when we spoke in March, she was bracing for them to get cut after the recent elimination of extra pandemic benefits. She supplements grocery store hauls with food boxes from a local church, or occasional free food at work. She tries to feed her daughter fresh fruits and vegetables when possible, while also trying not to overspend.

Kyler Daniels, 27, outside her home with four-year-old daughter, Nova, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Photograph: Rachel Jessen/The Guardian

Daniels says she regularly faces a lack of empathy from professors and administrators about the challenges of balancing education with parenthood and a career. Situations like hers are often perceived as unusual or abnormal, she said, and she often encounters resistance when asking for accommodations that help her balance being a mom and a worker, as well.

“Moms, families, just individuals who have other things outside of going to school – I just wish people will be more considerate of that,” she said.

In the past decades, researchers have uncovered countless ways that hunger is detrimental to academic performance: it can impair student focus; it can lead to poor mental health, and serve as a strong predictor of depression and anxiety; and it can even get in the way of students graduating and getting their degrees at all.

Meng at Hamline isn’t enrolled in Snap, but knows many peers who are already bracing for the end of their benefits. At some campus food pantries, there have been worrisome hints in recent months that food insecurity is already on the rise.

Alex Silver, 21, is the student director of the food pantry at the University of Washington. In the fall quarter of 2022, the pantry saw over 3,600 visits – more than double the demand during the same window back in 2019. Part of this can be attributed to increased outreach and marketing. Nonetheless, Silver notes the pantry itself is struggling to keep up with the rapid increase in demand.

In February, the pantry saw more than 400 visits in a single week, a threshold it hadn’t hit before. Squeezed by high needs and high costs, the pantry has had to laser in on how it spends funding, which all comes from donations. The pantry’s canned foods used to include Spam, beets and carrots. Now that’s been replaced by rows and rows of canned corn. Previously, it was able to offer basic hygiene items, like toilet paper, shampoo and tampons in addition to groceries – those are all gone, too. To ensure that shelves don’t go empty as soon as the pantry opens, food has to be rationed out on a points-based system that considers each item’s caloric value and nutritional profile.

Kyler Daniels, 27, opens a ukulele her mother bought for Daniels’ daughter, Nova, at their home. Photograph: Rachel Jessen/The Guardian

“[People] are not just coming for themselves, but maybe their entire household,” Silver said. “It’s very hard for us to have enough food for everyone, certainly not enough for everyone to get as much as they need.

Silver pointed out that high demand is emblematic of a much broader problem, one that charitable organizations alone can’t resolve. “For us, the main struggle is that a lot of people hope or expect the food pantry to be the solution for food insecurity on our campus. And we’re just not at a point and probably will never be a point where that could be our function. But we can help dampen the effect of it in every single possible way that we can.”

Other food pantries on campuses around the country are feeling similar constraints, caught between rising demand and falling food donations. Looking toward to the summer and fall, advocates and students alike are concerned that food insecurity could soar as supports like Snap become harder to access once again.

“We are frankly really concerned,” Hansen said. “A lot of the pandemic resources that were supporting students in their higher education goals are falling by the wayside […] So we’re very worried about what the next couple of months is going to look like for our student population.”

Source

Over the last decade, wildlife researchers have refined techniques for recovering environmental DNA, or eDNA — trace amounts of genetic material that all living things leave behind. A powerful and inexpensive tool for ecologists, eDNA is all over — floating in the air, or lingering in water, snow, honey and even your cup of tea. Researchers have used the method to detect invasive species before they take over, to track vulnerable or secretive wildlife populations and even to rediscover species thought to be extinct. The eDNA technology is also used in wastewater surveillance systems to monitor Covid and other pathogens.

But all along, scientists using eDNA were quietly recovering gobs and gobs of human DNA. To them, it’s pollution, a sort of human genomic bycatch muddying their data. But what if someone set out to collect human eDNA on purpose?

New DNA collecting techniques are “like catnip” for law enforcement officials, says Erin Murphy, a law professor at the New York University School of Law who specializes in the use of new technologies in the criminal legal system. The police have been quick to embrace unproven tools, like using DNA to create probability-based sketches of a suspect.

That could pose dilemmas for the preservation of privacy and civil liberties, especially as technological advancement allows more information to be gathered from ever smaller eDNA samples. Dr. Duffy and his colleagues used a readily available and affordable technology to see how much information they could glean from human DNA gathered from the environment in a variety of circumstances, such as from outdoor waterways and the air inside a building.

The results of their research, published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, demonstrate that scientists can recover medical and ancestry information from minute fragments of human DNA lingering in the environment.

Forensic ethicists and legal scholars say the Florida team’s findings increase the urgency for comprehensive genetic privacy regulations. For researchers, it also highlights an imbalance in rules around such techniques in the United States — that it’s easier for law enforcement officials to deploy a half-baked new technology than it is for scientific researchers to get approval for studies to confirm that the system even works.

Genetic trash to genetic treasure

It has been clear for decades that fragments of our DNA cover the planet like litter. It just didn’t seem to matter. Scientists believed DNA in the environment was too small and too degraded to be meaningfully recovered, much less used to identify an individual human being, unless it came from distinct samples like a bloodstain or an object someone had touched.

Wildlife researchers embraced environmental DNA anyway because they’re only looking for very small segments of DNA — scanning for what they call bar codes that will identify the creatures in a sample to a species level. But after finding “surprising” levels of human eDNA in their samples while monitoring disease in Florida sea turtles, Dr. Duffy and his team set out to get a more accurate picture of the condition of human DNA in the environment, and to see how much information it could reveal about people in an area.

As a proof of concept in one of their experiments, the researchers scooped up a soda-can-size sample of water from a creek in St. Augustine, Fla. They then fed the genetic material from the sample through a nanopore sequencer, which allows researchers to read longer stretches of DNA. The one they used cost about $1000, is the size of a cigarette lighter and plugs into a laptop like a flash drive.

From the samples, the team recovered much more legible human DNA than they had anticipated. And as knowledge expands about human genetics, analysis of even limited samples can reveal a wealth of information.

The researchers recovered enough mitochondrial DNA — passed directly from mother to child for thousands of generations — to generate a snapshot of the genetic ancestry of the population around the creek, which roughly aligns with the racial makeup reported in the latest census data for the area (although the researchers note that racial identity is a poor proxy for genetic ancestry). One mitochondrial sample was even complete enough to meet the requirements for the federal missing persons database.

They also found key mutations shown to carry a higher risk of diabetes, cardiac issues or several eye diseases. According to their data, someone whose genetic material turned up in the sample had a mutation that could lead to a rare disease that causes progressive neurological impairment and is often fatal. The illness is hereditary and may not emerge until a patient’s 40s. Dr. Duffy couldn’t help but wonder — does that person know? Does the person’s family? Does the person’s insurance company?

Surveillance and forensics

Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who studies the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics research, said that environmental DNA hadn’t been widely discussed by experts in bioethics. But after the findings from Dr. Duffy and his colleagues, it will be.

Technology focused on eDNA, she said, could be used for surveillance of certain kinds of people — for example, people with a specific ancestral background or with particular medical conditions or disabilities.

The implications of such uses, researchers agree, depend on who is using the technology and why. While pooled eDNA samples could help public health researchers determine the incidence of a mutation that causes a disease in a community, that same eDNA sample could equally be used to find and persecute ethnic minorities.

“This gives a powerful new tool to authorities,” Dr. Lewis said. “There’s internationally plenty of reason, I think, to be concerned.” Countries like China already conduct extensive and explicit genetic tracking of minority populations, including Tibetans and Uighurs. Tools like eDNA analysis could make it that much easier, she said.

How much of an ethical minefield eDNA research will be also depends on the extent to which it’s possible to identify an individual. In some situations, it’s already achievable.

The kind of genetic data Dr. Duffy recovered from public places wouldn’t work with the methods law enforcement personnel in the United States currently use to identify individuals, said Robert O’Brien, a forensic biologist at Florida International University and a former crime laboratory DNA analyst.

When law enforcement DNA analysts compare a crime scene sample to a suspect, they’re looking at 20 markers spread across the human genome that are tracked by the F.B.I.’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, Mr. O’Brien said. Those markers are only useful if there’s certainty that several of them come from the same person, and because the eDNA fragments Dr. Duffy studied can’t capture more than one marker at a time, a public place like the Florida stream becomes a nightmarish jigsaw puzzle.

However, forensic researchers suggest that individual identification from eDNA could already be possible in enclosed spaces where fewer people have been. Last October, a team from the Oslo University Hospital’s forensic research center piloted a new technique to recover human DNA from air samples and was able to construct full CODIS profiles from airborne DNA inside an office.

That highlights the possibility that law enforcement officials could use eDNA collected at crime scenes to incriminate people, even though wildlife ecologists who developed the techniques say the science isn’t mature enough for such purposes. Scientists have yet to pin down the fundamentals of eDNA, like how it travels through air or water or how it degrades over time. And nanopore sequencing — the technology that allowed Dr. Duffy’s team to find longer and more informative DNA fragments — still has a much higher error rate than older technologies, meaning an unusual genetic signature that seems like a promising lead could be a red herring.

Who gets access when DNA is free for the taking?

In the United States, rules vary widely for who is allowed to capture and analyze DNA.

University scientists hoping to learn more about human eDNA must justify the scope and privacy concerns of their studies in an imperfect process involving ethics boards at their institutions that can limit or reject experiments. But there are no such guardrails for law enforcement officials trying out a new technology.

“There’s an imbalance in almost all systems of the world between what law enforcement is allowed to do, versus publicly funded research, versus private companies,” said Barbara Prainsack, a professor at the University of Vienna who studies the regulation of DNA technology in medicine and forensics.

While some countries, like Germany, have an approved green list of technologies and forms of evidence that law enforcement agencies can use, it’s exactly the reverse in the United States.

“It’s a total wild west, a free for all,” said Ms. Murphy, the N.Y.U. law professor. “The understanding is police can sort of do whatever they want unless it’s explicitly prohibited.”

Often, the public and other branches of government learn that law enforcement officials have adopted a new technique only at a news conference announcing an arrest, Ms. Murphy said. She pointed specifically to the arrest of the Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, which the police credited to the use of genetic genealogy — entering crime scene DNA into family history databases and triangulating a criminal’s identity based on distant cousins. In those high-profile cases, she said, law enforcement personnel rely “on the good will they engender when they do use the technology for really positive uses.” Other uses might not be disclosed.

Safeguards against misusing a new technology like eDNA rely on the courts, where experts say the track record is poor.

To keep immature or bunk science out of legal deliberations, trial judges are supposed to determine whether an expert’s scientific testimony “rests on a reliable foundation.” Ms. Murphy said it was unreasonable to expect every trial judge to keep abreast of the latest scientific advancements. The rules of evidence, she added, “favor the admission of evidence and expect the jury to sort out what to believe and what not to believe.”

For decades, organizations like the Innocence Project have worked to weed pseudoscience out of courts — microscopic hair analysis, blood spatter analysis and bite mark evidence have all been used to wrongly convict defendants. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that those technologies aren’t reliable, “courts are still reluctant not to allow it or to overturn a case” based on such lines of evidence because of the long precedent of their use, said Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., and counsel to the Forensic Justice Project.

The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable search and seizure” without probable cause is also supposed to prevent the erosion of privacy by a powerful new technology. However, since the early 2000s, many prosecutors and courts have taken the stance that any DNA not still attached to a person has been abandoned, meaning that the police don’t need a warrant to collect it.

But it may be almost impossible to avoid leaving DNA in public. Dr. Duffy and his colleagues found that they could successfully collect airborne human DNA even from people wearing gloves and surgical masks and gowns.

“That really belies the idea that we are in any way voluntarily shedding our genetic material,” said Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on constitutional claims regarding genetic privacy and who was not involved in the Florida team’s study.

Consent and genetic exceptionalism

It’s possible to compare human eDNA sampling to other surveillance technologies members of the public don’t individually consent to, like facial recognition cameras. But experts say there’s an important distinction.

When it comes to collecting DNA, individuals aren’t the only ones affected. It also implicates “family members and, in some contexts, communities,” said Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, a biomedical ethicist at Columbia University.

“DNA tracks to your extended relatives, tracks forward in time to your children, tracks backward in time to your ancestors,” Ms. Murphy added.

“In the future, who knows what DNA will tell us about people or how it might be used?”

There’s a wide market for genetic information — from pharmaceutical companies developing therapeutics, to insurance actuaries, to public health researchers. But protections for the public are stymied by the lack of workable legal definitions of what DNA actually is. Is it personal property, Ms. Murphy asks? Is it data? Is it always medical information? Who owns it once it has been collected?

Bioethicists and civil liberties experts say that Dr. Duffy’s warning provides decision makers a rare chance to discuss the ethics and the legality of a new genetic technique before it enters widespread use. Usually, they’re playing catch-up — but thanks to wildlife ecologists, now they have a modest head start.

The post Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air. Privacy Experts Are Worried. appeared first on New York Times.

Source

This resilience, evidenced by their ability to withstand events such as the death of their mother, indicates that gorillas have a superior capacity to overcome adversities compared to humans. Prior studies by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a charity dedicated to protecting endangered mountain gorillas, also observed that young gorillas show surprising resilience when losing their mothers, unlike many other species.

Young animals face many early life traumas in the wild

Despite the loss of a mother being only one of many potential adversities that young animals can face in the wild, the research team identified six different types of early life adversity. These include losing a parent, witnessing the death or killing of infants in their group, experiencing social group instability, having a limited number of age-mates in the social group, and having a sibling born soon after them. The collected data provided information about how many of these early adversities each gorilla experienced, the age at which they occurred, and the gorilla’s lifespan.

The researchers observed the outcomes when a gorilla experienced none, one, two, or three or more adverse events. They discovered that the more adversities gorillas faced before the age of six, the more likely they were to die young. However, if they managed to reach six years of age, their lifespans were not shortened, regardless of the number of adverse events they had encountered. Intriguingly, gorillas who experienced three or more forms of adversity tended to live longer, experiencing a 70-percent drop in the risk of death throughout adulthood.

This pattern was particularly noticeable in male gorillas. The researchers attribute this trend to a phenomenon known as viability selection, implying that a gorilla strong enough to survive such early life events might be a “higher-quality individual” and more likely to have a longer lifespan.

“I was expecting to see that these gorillas would have short lifespans and would not fare well as adults,” says Dr. Stacy Rosenbaum, the study’s author and an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, in a media release. “However, we found that while these events are associated with a higher risk of death when young, if you survive to age six, these events don’t shorten your lifespan. This is quite different from what we see in other species.”

A mother gorilla holds her baby. (© Martina – stock.adobe.com)

Why are gorillas so resilient?

The researchers propose several theories to explain the resilience of these mountain gorillas. One theory is the supportive nature of gorilla social groups. Previous studies have shown that when a young gorilla loses its mother, it does not become more isolated. Instead, other mother gorillas step in. Dr. Robin Morrison, a researcher with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, explains that young gorillas often spend more time near other gorillas after losing their mother, particularly the highest-ranking adult male.

“These strong networks might provide crucial social buffering, as has been shown in humans. The quality of our social relationships is a significant predictor of our health and longevity, sometimes even more so than genetics or lifestyle.”

Another theory relates to the resource-rich environment in which mountain gorillas live. Unlike other wild primates that constantly face the stress of finding enough food and water, gorillas may find it easier to survive challenging circumstances. The study results suggest that species similar to our own can exhibit significant resilience to early life adversity.

“We should not assume that the long-term negative effects of early life adversity are universal,” cautions Rosenbaum. “We often treat early adversity as a universally compromising experience, assuming that adulthood will be negatively impacted. However, the data, even in humans, are more complex. This research suggests similar complexity in other animals, which I believe is a hopeful story.”

Source

Five full-sized autonomous buses are now serving passengers in eastern Scotland.

In a first for the UK, the self-driving vehicles run along a 14-mile route between capital city Edinburgh and Fife, crossing Scotland's famous Forth Road Bridge.

Operated by Stagecoach, the black-and-white "driverless" buses include two staff members—one behind the wheel to monitor the technology, and another acting as "bus captain," helping passengers board and buy tickets.

"This demonstrates what a future autonomous service could feel like when a single bus 'captain' can leave the cab while the computer does the driving," according to a project press release.

(Credit: CAVForth)

The autonomous drive system, dubbed CAVStar, features a suite of sensors—cameras, LiDAR, radar, artificial intelligence—which receive information directly from traffic light systems to eliminate unnecessary braking and accelerating.

Buses travel up to 50mph only on pre-selected roads, including along highways, bus lanes, and private land. They can handle a "range of complex traffic maneuvers" like roundabouts, traffic lights, lane changes, and, of course, bus stops. Stagecoach estimates the five single-decker vehicles are capable of carrying some 10,000 passengers per week. (Earlier this month, Transport Minister Kevin Stewart kicked off a campaign(Opens in a new window) encouraging over-60s to choose public transportation over cars.)

The government-funded program was developed in partnership with Fusion Processing, Alexander Dennis, Stagecoach, Transport Scotland, Edinburgh Napier University, and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at UWE. A pilot was initially expected to run for six months beginning in 2022. Sky News this week reported(Opens in a new window) that the service will operate on a trial basis until 2025.

Source

A new execution method could potentially soon be used for the first time in the US: nitrogen hypoxia. While its proponents argue it is a humane and effective means of capital punishment, its critics say there’s simply not enough evidence to justify its use.

Nitrogen hypoxia involves forcing a person to breathe pure nitrogen gas, starving them of oxygen until they die. Although the exact protocols have not yet been drawn up, there is some idea of what they might entail:

“The protocol would likely involve placing some type of mask over the condemned inmate’s head and pumping it full of 100 percent nitrogen, thereby depriving that person of oxygen. The inmate would die not by suffocation, which is caused by an inability to exhale and a subsequent (and very painful) buildup of carbon dioxide in the body, but rather by becoming gradually oxygen-deprived, which is essentially painless,” according to The Marshall Project, a criminal justice NGO.

Just three US states have authorized the use of nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method – Alabama, Oklahoma, and Mississippi – but no state has performed an execution using it, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.

That could soon change, however. 

The experimental execution method has recently made the news because of the unusual case of Kenneth Eugene Smith, an Alabama inmate who was sentenced to death for a 1988 murder-for-hire. Together with accomplice John Parker, Smith was hired to kill Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett by her husband so he could collect her life insurance.

Smith was set to die in November 2022, but he survived after prison authorities couldn’t find an intravenous line for the lethal injection drugs before the state’s execution warrant expired at midnight.

Following the botched execution, his legal team had argued in federal court that he should be allowed to die by nitrogen hypoxia, alleging that attempting another lethal injection would subject him to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the US Constitution's 8th Amendment. 

After Smith won his case at the lower court level, Alabama officials appealed to the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS). However, on Monday, May 15, the SCOTUS allowed Smith's challenge to proceed.

Despite Smith’s desire to receive this method of execution, experts have previously expressed concern that the method hasn’t undergone enough testing and research. 

“There is a claim, that I think is baseless, that nitrogen gas inhalation would cause a death that would be peaceful and not cruel. There’s no evidence for any of that,” Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology at Emory University, told Scientific American in 2022. 

Research on nitrogen hypoxia in non-human mammals has led veterinarians and animal health regulators to conclude that the method is unacceptable for euthanizing animals. Some studies have shown that dogs take up to five minutes to die despite losing consciousness within one to two. For larger-bodied humans, it could take even longer.

Older studies, however, have found the opposite, concluding that nitrogen hypoxia is "effective, humane, safe, and economically feasible as a method of euthanasia."

Some also contend that it is notably more humane than lethal injection, which has been linked to a number of botched executions. 

“It’s a painless way to go. But more time needs to be spent [studying] that," Louisiana Department of Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc told the state legislative committee in April 2014.

In sum, there’s not enough evidence to make an informed judgment either way. It’s even unclear how this could be ethically tested and assess how humane this method of dying is. 

Despite these many ethical and practical questions, the US may become the first country in the world to officially use nitrogen in an execution chamber if these legal proceedings continue to drive the way they are going. 

Source

But around 1% of the time, things went sideways — quite literally. The shape of Mercury’s orbit changed significantly. Its elliptical trajectory gradually flattened, until the planet either plummeted into the sun or collided with Venus. Sometimes, as it cut its new path through space, its behavior destabilized other planets as well: Mars, for instance, might be ejected from the solar system, or it might crash into Earth. Venus and Earth could, in a slow, cosmic dance, exchange orbits several times before eventually colliding.

Perhaps the solar system was not as stable as people once thought.

For centuries, ever since Isaac Newton formulated his laws of motion and gravity, mathematicians and astronomers have grappled with this issue. In the simplest model of the solar system, which considers only the gravitational forces exerted by the sun, the planets follow their elliptical orbits like clockwork for eternity. “It’s kind of a comforting picture,” said Richard Moeckel, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota. “It’s going to go on forever, and we’ll be long gone, but Jupiter will still be going around.”

But once you account for gravitational attraction between the planets themselves, everything gets more complicated. You can no longer explicitly calculate the planets’ positions and velocities over long periods of time, and must instead ask qualitative questions about how they might behave.

Might the effects of the planets’ mutual attraction accumulate and break the clockwork?

Detailed numerical simulations, like those published by the Paris Observatory’s Jacques Laskar and Mickaël Gastineau in 2009, suggest that there’s a small but real chance of things going haywire. But those simulations, though important, aren’t the same as a mathematical proof. They can’t be completely precise, and as the simulations themselves show, a small imprecision might — over the course of billions of simulated years — lead to very different outcomes. Furthermore, they don’t provide an underlying explanation for why certain events might unfold. “You want to understand what mathematical mechanisms drive instabilities, and to prove that they actually exist,” said Marcel Guàrdia, a mathematician at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain.

Now, in three papers that together exceed 150 pages, Guàrdia and two collaborators have proved for the first time that instability inevitably arises in a model of planets orbiting a sun.

“The result is really very spectacular,” said Gabriella Pinzari, a mathematical physicist at the University of Padua in Italy. “The authors proved a theorem that is one of the most beautiful theorems that one could prove.” It could also help explain why our solar system looks the way it does.

Four Pages and a New Story

Centuries ago, it was already clear that interactions among the planets could have long-term effects. Consider Mercury. It takes approximately three months to travel around the sun on an elliptical path. But that path also slowly rotates — one degree every 600 years, a full rotation every 200,000. This kind of rotation, known as precession, is largely a result of Venus, Earth and Jupiter pulling on Mercury.

But research in the 18th century by mathematical giants like Pierre-Simon Laplace and Joseph-Louis Lagrange indicated that, precession aside, the size and shape of the ellipse are stable. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that this intuition started to shift, when Henri Poincaré found that even in a model with just three bodies (say, a star orbited by two planets), it’s impossible to compute exact solutions to Newton’s equations.

“Celestial mechanics is a delicate thing,” said Rafael de la Llave, a mathematician at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Alter the initial conditions by a hair — for example, by shifting the assumed position of one planet by a mere meter, as Laskar and Gastineau did in their simulations — and over long timescales the system can look very different.

In the three-body problem, Poincaré found a tangle of possible behaviors so complicated that at first he thought he’d made a mistake. Once he accepted the truth of his results, it was no longer possible to take the solar system’s stability for granted. But because working with Newton’s equations is so difficult, it wasn’t clear if the behavior of the solar system might be complicated and chaotic only on a small scale — planets might end up in different positions within a predictable band, for instance — or if, as Guàrdia and his collaborators would eventually prove in their own model, the size and shape of orbits might change so much that planets could conceivably crash into each other or travel off to infinity.

Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

Then, in 1964, the mathematician Vladimir Arnold wrote a four-page paper that established the right language for framing the problem. He found a specific reason why key variables in a dynamical system might change in a big way. First, he cooked up an artificial example, a strange blend of a pendulum and a rotor that didn’t remotely resemble anything you’d encounter in nature. In this toy model, he proved that, given enough time, certain quantities that usually stay constant can change by large amounts.

Arnold then conjectured that most dynamical systems should exhibit this kind of instability. In the case of the solar system, this might mean that the orbital shapes, or eccentricities, of certain planets could potentially shift over billions of years.

But while mathematicians and physicists eventually made a lot of progress on proving that instability arises in general, they struggled to show it for celestial models. That’s because the gravitational effect of the sun is so overwhelmingly strong that many features of the clockwork planetary model persist even when you consider the additional forces exerted by the planets. (In this context, Newtonian mechanics gives such a good approximation of reality that these models don’t need to consider the effects of general relativity.) Such inherent stability makes instability difficult to detect.

Could parameters that stayed so stable in computations done by Laplace, Lagrange and others really change significantly? “You have to handle an instability which is extremely weak,” said Laurent Niederman of Paris-Saclay University. The usual methods won’t catch it.

Numerical simulations offered hope that the hunt for such a proof was not in vain. And there were preliminary proofs. In 2016, for instance, de la Llave and two colleagues proved instability in a simplified celestial mechanics model consisting of a sun, a planet and a comet, where the comet was assumed to have no mass and therefore no gravitational effect on the planet. This setup is known as a “restricted” n-body problem.

The new papers tackle a true n-body problem — showing that instability arises in a planetary system where three small bodies revolve around a much larger sun. Even though the size and shape of the orbits might spend a long time oscillating around fixed values, they will eventually change dramatically.

This had been expected — it was widely believed that stability and instability coexist in this kind of model — but the mathematicians were the first to prove it.

The Ultimate Instability

Together with Jacques Fejoz of the University of Paris Dauphine, Guàrdia first attempted to prove instability in the three-body problem (one sun, two planets) in 2016. Though they were able to show that chaotic dynamics arose in the flavor of Poincaré, they couldn’t prove that this chaotic behavior corresponded to large and long-term changes.

Andrew Clarke, a postdoc studying under Guàrdia, joined them in September 2020, and they decided to give the problem another go, this time adding an extra planet to the mix. In their model, three planets revolve around a sun at increasingly large distances from each other. Crucially, the innermost planet starts out orbiting at a significant tilt relative to the second and third planets, so that its path practically forms a right angle to theirs.

The mathematician Andrew Clarke wakes up in the middle of the night, wondering if our solar system shows the same instabilities as the models that he studies.  Frith Carlisle

This inclination allowed the mathematicians to find initial conditions that result in instability.

They showed the existence of trajectories that led to pretty much any possible eccentricity for the second planet: Over time, it was possible for its ellipse to flatten until it almost looked like a straight line. Meanwhile, the orbits of the second and third planets, which had started out in the same plane, could also end up perpendicular to each other. The second planet could even flip a full 180 degrees, so that while all the planets might at first have moved clockwise around the sun, the second one ended up moving counterclockwise. “Imagine that you look forward a million years, and Mars is going the opposite way,” said Richard Montgomery of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “That would be weird.”

“You cannot avoid very wild orbits, even in this simple setting,” Niederman said.

Even so, the sizes of the orbits stayed stable. That’s because in this model, the planets move around the sun very quickly compared to how long it takes for their orbits to precess — allowing the mathematicians to gloss over the “fast” variables related to the planets’ motions. “It’s tedious to think about what’s happening every year if what you’re really interested in is what’s happening over a thousand years,” Moeckel said. Oscillations in the size of each ellipse (measured in terms of its long radius, or semimajor axis) average out.

This wasn’t surprising. “Common knowledge says that the inclination and the eccentricity should be more unstable than the semimajor axis,” Guàrdia said. But then he and his colleagues realized that if they placed the third planet even farther away from the sun, they might be able to add more instability into their model.

This new system and the equations that governed it were more complicated, and the mathematicians weren’t certain they’d be able to get any results. But “it was too much to ignore,” Clarke said. “If there was a chance of showing semimajor axes could drift, then I mean, you have to pursue that.”

Laskar, who has led much of the numerical work on instability in the solar system, said that if you superimposed this kind of solar system on our own, you might see the first planet nestled right up against the sun, the second planet where Earth would be, and the third planet all the way out at the Oort Cloud, at our solar system’s outer limits. (As a result, he added, this represents a “very extreme situation” — one he doesn’t necessarily expect to find in our own galaxy.)

The greater a planet’s distance from the sun, the longer it takes to complete an orbit. In this case, the third planet is so far away that the precession of the two inner planets occurs at a faster rate. It is no longer possible to average out the motion of the last planet — a scenario Lagrange and Laplace didn’t consider in their accounts of the solar system’s stability. “This will change completely the structure of the equation,” said Alain Chenciner, a mathematician also at the Paris Observatory. There were now more variables to worry about.

Clarke, Fejoz and Guàrdia proved that the orbits can grow arbitrarily large. “They finally get the size of the orbit to increase, as opposed to just the shape or something like that,” Moeckel said. “That’s the ultimate instability.”

Even though these changes accumulated very slowly, they still occurred more quickly than one might have expected — suggesting that in a realistic planetary system, changes might accumulate over hundreds of millions of years, rather than billions.

In 2009, the mathematical physicist Gabriella Pinzari independently rediscovered a complicated coordinate system that had been forgotten for decades, making new work on planetary instability possible.  Department of Mathematics of University of Padua

The results provide a potential explanation for why the planets in our solar system have orbits that all lie nearly in the same plane. It shows that something as simple as a large angle of inclination can be a source of a great deal of instability, on multiple counts. “If you start with a situation where the mutual inclinations are quite big, then you will destroy the system quite ‘quickly,’” Chenciner said. “It would have been destroyed hundreds, thousands of centuries ago.”

High-Dimensional Highways

These proofs required a clever combination of techniques from geometry, analysis and dynamics — and a return to basic definitions.

The mathematicians represented each configuration of their planetary system (the positions and velocities of the planets) as a point in a high-dimensional space. Their goal was to show the existence of “highways” through the space that correspond to, say, large changes in the second planet’s eccentricity, or in the third planet’s semimajor axis.

To do that, they first had to express each point in terms of coordinates that were so esoteric and complex that hardly anyone had even heard of them, let alone tried to use them. (The coordinates were discovered in the early 1980s by the Belgian astronomer André Deprit, then forgotten and later independently discovered by Pinzari in 2009 while she was working on her doctoral thesis. They’ve barely been used since.)

By using Deprit’s coordinates to describe their high-dimensional space of planetary configurations, the mathematicians gained a deeper understanding of its structure. “That’s part of the beauty of the proof: to manage to deal with this 18-dimensional geometry,” Fejoz said.

Fejoz, Clarke and Guàrdia found highways that traversed several special regions in that space. They then used their newfound geometric understanding to prove that the highways corresponded to unstable dynamics in the size and shape of the planets’ orbits.

“When I finished my Ph.D. 30 years ago,” Niederman said, “we were extremely, extremely far from these kinds of results.”

“It’s such a complicated system that you have this feeling that anything that is not obviously forbidden should happen,” Chenciner said. “But it’s usually very hard to prove it.”

Mathematicians now hope to use Clarke, Fejoz and Guàrdia’s techniques to prove instability in models that look more like our own solar system.

These kinds of results are becoming particularly meaningful as astronomers uncover more and more exoplanets orbiting other stars, showcasing a broad range of configurations. “It’s like an open lab,” said Marian Gidea, a mathematician at Yeshiva University. “To understand on paper what types of evolutions of planetary systems can happen, and to compare that with what you are able to observe — it is very exciting. It gives a lot of information about the physics of our universe, and about how much of this our mathematics is able to capture through relatively simple models.”

In hopes of making such a comparison, Fejoz has been speaking with a couple of astronomers about identifying extrasolar systems that resemble, even loosely,  the model he and his colleagues developed. Other researchers, including Gidea, say that the work could be useful for designing efficient trajectories for artificial satellites, or for figuring out how to move particles at high speeds through a particle accelerator. As Pinzari said, “Research in celestial mechanics is still very much alive.”

The ultimate goal would be to prove instability in our own solar system. “I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it,” Clarke said. “I would say that would be the real dream, but it would be a nightmare, wouldn’t it? Because we’d be screwed.”

Source

In previous generations, parents might have reached for the cough syrup to relieve a dry or chesty cough.

But we now know cough syrups aren't very effective at treating children's coughs.

And amid mounting evidence of harms from poisoning and deaths, many countries including Australia have restricted cough medicines so they can't be given to children aged under six.

What's in cough medicine?

Active ingredients in cough syrups vary depending on their claimed benefit. They can contain cough suppressants (dampening the body's cough reflex), expectorants and mucolytics (both of which help clear phlegm).

Other medicines marketed for cold and flu often contain decongestants (to relieve a blocked nose) and sedating antihistamines to relieve sneezing, stop a runny nose and to aid sleep.

The riskiest medications are those with a sedative action, such as sedating antihistamines or opioid-based cough suppressants. While sedation may be a desired effect for parents with a sleepless child, young children are particularly at risk of serious harm or death. Sedatives can also cause agitation and hyperactivity.

While cough syrups that don't contain sedatives are likely safer, there are very few studies of safety and efficacy of these products in children. Adverse events including agitation and psychosis have been reported, especially with overuse.

Overuse may result from parents misreading the label, intentionally using more in the hope it will work better, inadvertent extra doses and the use of inaccurate measuring devices such as household spoons.

How are cough syrups restricted?

Young children under two years old are most at risk of a fatal overdose from cough syrups. But Australia's drug regulator recommends against using cough syrups for anyone under six years of age.

As such, there are no dosing instructions for children under six years on the labels of these products.

Cough syrups are still available for older children and adults. Pharmacists are likely to ask the age of the person who will take it and provide guidance on dosing and appropriate use.

Our research, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, shows restricting the use of cough and cold medicines in children results in a significant and sustained decrease in poisonings.

Our study looked at dosing errors, adverse events at correct doses, and accidental "exploratory ingestions", such as when a toddler helps themselves to the medicine cabinet.

The government mandated labelling changes in 2012 and 2020 for these products.

In 2012, labels for medicated cough and cold products could no longer list dosing instructions for children under six, and had to carry additional warnings.

In 2020, warnings were put on sedating antihistamines saying they were not to be used in children under two years for any reason (including allergy and hayfever).

This resulted in a halving of the rate of poisons center calls, and a halving in the rate of hospitalizations. Despite this, hundreds of calls are still made to Australian poisons centers per year regarding these products in young children.

When is it OK to use cough syrups?

Harms have mostly been documented in younger children. This is likely due to their smaller size, meaning it takes less medicine to cause harm, and also their susceptibility to sedative effects due to their developing brains.

Cough syrups can be used for in children aged six to 11 years, however caution is still needed. These products should only be given in consultation with a doctor, pharmacist or nurse practitioner.

Some herbal products are available and marketed for children, such as Hedera helix (ivy leaf extract). Unfortunately, there is no convincing evidence these medications meaningfully improve cough symptoms. But the risk of poisoning is low.

Simple syrups containing no medication can also be effective: up to 85 percent of the effectiveness of cough medicines has been put down to the "placebo effect".

This could be due to syrups coating the throat and dampening that irritating tickling sensation.

So what can I do for my kid?

The best thing you can do for your child is give them rest and reassurance.

Antibiotics will only be needed if a doctor diagnoses them with acute bacterial pneumonia or with a chronic cough due to a bacterial infection, such as protracted bacterial bronchitis, whooping cough or a lung abscess.

Paracetamol or ibuprofen can be used if they have fever, aches and pains along with their cough. Check the correct dosage on the packaging for your child's weight and age.

If your child is older than 12 months and has a wet cough (producing phlegm in their throat), consider giving them honey. There is growing evidence honey can reduce the production of mucus and therefore, the amount of coughing.

Source