Well, just about all over. Surprisingly few species live in the oceans, and scientists have been trying to figure out why that's the case.

A research team from the US and Japan recently came up with an interesting hypothesis for this, claiming to have discovered a "simple explanation to a long-standing question".

They propose that a unique enzyme that helps insects harden their casings, called multicopper oxidase-2 (MCO2), is the reason why they are rare in marine environments but do well on land.

Biologist Tsunaki Asano from Tokyo Metropolitan University, who led the team, has previously shown that insects have evolved a special mechanism to harden their tough, outer layer that uses molecular oxygen and MCO2.

Now Asano and colleagues explain in a published review how this puts the various critters at a disadvantage in the oceans but helps them to thrive out of it. It essentially comes down to the abundance of chemicals in each environment, and how lightweight insect exoskeletons are.

"The emergence of insects is an important event in the evolution of life on Earth," the team writes, "and highlights a key adaptive expansion of living organisms into a new, terrestrial ecosystem."

Some of the planet's most successful creatures, insects are the largest group in the phylum Arthropoda, which contributes the largest biomass of all terrestrial animals. They play a crucial role in maintaining the balance of life on Earth.

Recent insights from molecular phylogenetics have revealed that insects and crustaceans (which mostly live in oceans) belong to the same clade, called Pancrustacea.

A phylogenetic tree showing the eco-evolutionary relationship between Insecta and Crustacea. (Asano et al., Physiol. Entomol., 2023)

Though insects diverged from their crustacean ancestors and developed land-based lifestyles, both still have exoskeletons made of wax and a tough cuticle of carbohydrates called chitin.

This cuticle is a protective layer that lines the body's surface, keeping moisture in and germs out, not unlike our skin. More than just a pretty casing, it also protects the body from external mechanical forces and helps maintain the body's shape and mobility, acting as an external scaffold.

However, while crustaceans primarily use calcium from seawater to harden their cuticles into shells, insects use molecular oxygen to transform their cuticles into durable casings for their organs through the mediation of MCO2.

Crustaceans harden their shells with calcium, while insects harden their exoskeletons with oxygen, matching what is abundant in their habitats.

(Tokyo Metropolitan University)

Asano and coworkers argue the presence of oxygen in the air makes land a lot more inviting to insects. The sea is now a harsh place for them because there isn't enough oxygen, not to mention it already houses and feeds many better-adapted species.

To insects' advantage, their cuticle gets harder and drier through the MCO2 pathway, which creates a biomaterial that is protective while more or less staying as light as a feather. This is a striking distinction compared to crustaceans, whose shells are much denser due to a direct proportion between shell density and calcification level, which doesn't lend itself well to a life in the air.

Insects may have developed the ability to climb plants, glide, and eventually fly thanks to MCO2's action, allowing them to move around more easily and fill in previously unoccupied ecological niches.

The team thinks that MCO2 might be what makes insects unique; as they say in their paper, "no MCO2, no insects."

Further explaining the insect specificity, Asano and team points out that: "other arthropods including the closest relatives of insects, the non-insect hexapods like springtails and two-pronged bristletails, do not possess genes for MCO2."

The researchers note that insects aren't the only arthropods that have adapted to life on terra firma, so MCO2 isn't a necessary requirement for successfully moving out of your ocean abode and setting up house on dry land.

But the unique way that insects' cuticles are made does provide a lot of information about how well they evolved to reside in the land environment.

"If insects had not acquired the MCO2-mediated system, insect evolution and success might have been significantly different from what we currently observe," the team concludes.

"We hope for further discussions on insect evolution and terrestrialization based on this viewpoint."

The review has been published in Physiological Entomology.

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The Ariane 6 rocket will now debut no earlier than the spring of 2024

The series is set in a post-apocalyptic world where parasitic fungi take control of the human brain, turning people into killer zombies. The scariest part of this premise is that it's not entirely implausible. Parasitic or "zombie" fungi that alter the mind and behavior of their hosts do exist.

Fortunately, real-life zombie fungi (known as Cordyceps) only infect insects. The fungus hijacks their bodies for the sole purpose of spreading its seed-like fungal spores.

When spores are ingested by insects, they germinate and grow, secreting molecules that travel to the host's brain and interfere with its function.

The fungus compels the insect to forego its aversion to heights and climb upwards. Upon reaching a position optimal for fungal survival, the fungus induces the "death grip" and then devours its host from the inside-out, sprouting spore-containing mushrooms from the insect carcass.

Fungi that alter our minds

In the case of humans, some fungi which produce small molecules, or metabolites, that alter our minds – and recent research shows these have therapeutic potential.

The most widely known is the hallucinogen psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, is another psychedelic with fungal origins.

Humans have known about the hallucinogenic properties of fungi for centuries. The Aztecs even gave magic mushrooms to people who were dying to promote a peaceful transition to the afterlife.

But recently, there's been an explosion of interest in fungal metabolites, specifically because of their neurological benefits and potential in treating mental health conditions. And it's no wonder, given the mechanisms fungal metabolites use to interact with our nervous system.

Think of our brain like a map. When we're young, we explore all corners of this map, sending out connections in every direction to make sense of our environment. Before long, we figure out basic truths – such as how to secure food, or where we live – and the neurological paths that make up these connections strengthen.

Over time, a network emerges that reflects our unique experiences. Regions we re-visit often will develop established paths, whereas under-used connections will fade away.

Conditions such as addiction, chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are characterized by processes such as repetitive negative thinking or rumination, where patients focus on negative thoughts in a counterproductive way. Unfortunately, these strengthen brain connections that perpetuate the unfavorable mental state.

But it's believed that fungal metabolites give our brain the freedom to explore less-visited territories again. Psychedelic "trips" are thought to allow people to experience a world without the boundaries of reality – and more recent research suggests this is a manifestation of novel brain exploration.

For example, psilocybin stimulates a receptor in the brain called 5-HT2a. This receptor usually binds to serotonin, a chemical in our body which controls communication between specific nerve cells.

But when psilocybin binds to the 5-HT2a receptor, it makes it easier for our brain to change and generate new connections (including causing hallucinations at high doses). We call this an increase in neuroplasticity.

Although the effects of a single large dose of psychedelics are transitory, evidence shows administering two smaller doses of psilocybin three weeks apart leads to a sustained increase in connectivity between different functional regions of the brain.

Such changes in neuroplasticity have the potential to disrupt the rigid thought patterns that underlie certain mental health conditions.

Furthermore, by increasing neuroplasticity, it is believed that psychedelics allow people to view life situations from a new perspective. Combining psychedelics with more traditional talking therapy could make it possible to explore – and more fully understand – the initial trigger for negative thought patterns.

This could potentially prevent the same negative cycle reestablishing after treatment. Indeed, research showed that combining therapy with psilocybin had a prolonged anti-depressive effect in adults with major depressive disorder.

Additional studies demonstrate the positive effect of fungal metabolites in treating a range of conditions – including anxiety, depression, and alcohol addiction. These studies also point out that psilocybin can affect the symptoms after only one or two doses – whereas anti-depressants may take many months to work.

No miracle cure

That said, psychedelics should not be considered a miracle cure as there is still a lot we don't know. Furthermore, most studies on psychedelics are still preliminary as they use a limited number of participants.

As such, experts are divided on the efficacy of psychedelic treatment. Furthermore, psychedelics are powerful and unpredictable – and the safety and long-term effects of such treatment is unknown.

But given the current mental health crisis, any intervention that offers a new approach to tackling these conditions – especially those that are treatment-resistant – needs to be carefully considered and rigorously researched.

Excitingly, many countries recognise the benefits of psychedelics for mental health treatment. The Australian government even legalized prescription psilocybin for medicinal use in 2022. Although the UK doesn't yet permit the prescription of psychedelics, multiple research centers are undertaking trials to establish the mental health benefits of fungal metabolites.

While there's still much we don't know about fungal metabolites – including whether other molecules exist that have a similar effect on neurological function – it's clear they have great potential in mental health treatment.

Perhaps it's time for us to relinquish certain negative connotations we have of illicit fungal drugs, and become comfortable thinking of brain-altering psychedelics as medicine.

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Musk confirmed Yaccarino’s new role in a tweet this morning, a day after he announced that he had completed his search for a new CEO.

“Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app,” wrote Musk.

Yaccarino announced on Friday morning that she was leaving her role as Chariman of Global Advertising & Partnerships at NBCU.

It’s smart to put a well-known advertising executive at the helm of Twitter, since Musk’s leadership has tanked that key facet of Twitter’s business. Musk said he will stay on as chairman and “CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.” With erratic content moderation policies and inconsistent, sometimes misleading verification systems, Twitter has bled advertisers. The company has also laid off critical teams for revenue generations, like its sales team.

Musk and Yaccarino already seem to have a bit of a rapport. Last month, Yaccarino interviewed Musk at an advertising conference in Miami, where she seemed complimentary of the business mogul.

“Elon has committed to being accessible to everyone for continual feedback,” she said on stage. “He’s also opened up himself to also participate in the new transparency and safety rules he posted yesterday. Just remember, freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.”

She also pointed out to Elon that “the people in this room are [Twitter’s] path to profitability.” Since its inception, Twitter’s most effective way to make money has been advertising, and Musk’s attempts to monetize the blue check have not been successful.

We don’t know whether the two of them were in negotiations at the time, but Yaccarino seemed motivated to sanitize the Twitter brand, encouraging audience members to voice their concerns to Musk in an Q&A. She echoed Musk’s viewpoint on freedom of speech as it pertains to advertisers, which is that freedom of speech doesn’t mean “freedom of reach.”

“If freedom of speech, as he says, is the bedrock of this country, I’m not sure there’s anyone in this room who could disagree with that,” Yaccarino said when interviewing Musk. “Could I get a round of applause for that?”

This story is developing…

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Published May 11 in the journal Nature Sustainability, the study is the first to track the number and size of farms year-over-year, from the 1960s and projecting through 2100.

The study shows that even rural, farm-dependent communities in Africa and Asia will experience a drop in the number of operating farms.

"We see a turning point from widespread farm creation to widespread consolidation on a global level, and that's the future trajectory that humanity is currently on," said Zia Mehrabi, assistant professor of environmental studies at CU Boulder. "The size of the farm and the number of farms that exist are associated with key environmental and social outcomes."

To evaluate the global state of farming, Mehrabi used data from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization on agricultural area, GDP per capita and rural population size of more than 180 countries to first reconstruct the evolution of farm numbers from 1969–2013 and then to project those numbers through 2100.

His analysis found that the number of farms around the world would drop from 616 million in 2020 to 272 million in 2100. A key reason: As a country's economy grows, more people migrate to urban areas, leaving fewer people in rural areas to tend the land.

Reap what you sow

A decline in the number of farms and an increase in farm size has been happening in the United States and Western Europe for decades. The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates there were 200,000 fewer farms in 2022 than in 2007.

Mehrabi's analysis found that a turning point from farm creation to widespread consolidation will begin to occur as early as 2050 in communities across Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean. Sub-Saharan Africa will follow the same course later in the century, the research found.

It also shows that even if the total amount of farmland doesn't change across the globe in coming years, fewer people will own and farm what land there is available. The trend could threaten biodiversity in a time where biodiversity conservation is top of mind.

"Larger farms typically have less biodiversity and more monocultures," Mehrabi said. "Smaller farms typically have more biodiversity and crop diversity, which makes them more resilient to pest outbreaks and climate shocks."

And it's not just biodiversity: Food supply is also at risk. Mehrabi's previous research shows the world's smallest farms make up just 25% of the world's agricultural land but harvest one-third of the world's food.

Moreover, fewer farms mean fewer farmers who may carry with them valuable Indigenous knowledge dating back centuries. As farms consolidate, that knowledge is replaced by new technology and mechanization.

Building a diverse food portfolio

J

ust as a diverse investment portfolio performs better than one that is not diversified, having diversity in the world's food source portfolio is beneficial in the long run, said Mehrabi.

"If you're investing in today's food systems with around 600 million farms in the world, your portfolio is pretty diverse," Mehrabi said. "If there's damage to one farm, it's likely the impact to your portfolio will be averaged out with the success of another. But if you decrease the number of farms and increase their size, the effect of that shock on your portfolio is going to increase. You're carrying more risk."

There are also upsides to the shift in corporate farm ownership: The paper points out that consolidation in farming can lead to improved labor productivity and economic growth with a larger workforce in non-farm employment and improved management systems.

One of the biggest benefits of farm consolidation, Mehrabi said, is improved economic opportunity for people, and the ability to choose their own career path within our outside of the agricultural sector.

But those future farm workers may need more support as suicide rates in the agriculture industry are among the highest rates by occupation in the U.S.

"Currently, we have around 600 million farms feeding the world, and they're carrying 8 billion people on their shoulders," Mehrabi said. "By the end of the century, we'll likely have half the number of farmers feeding even more people. We really need to think about how we can have the education and support systems in place to support those farmers."

By raising awareness of global agricultural trends, Mehrabi hopes his analysis will lead to policies that ensure biodiversity conservation, maintain climate resilience, preserve Indigenous knowledge and provide incentives to improve the rural economy in countries around the world.

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Now researchers led by the Stanford School of Medicine have found one of the first cellular connections between healthy fats—known as monounsaturated fatty acids—and lifespan in laboratory worms. The finding hints at a complex relationship between diet, fats and longevity.

"Fats are generally thought to be detrimental to health," said professor of genetics Anne Brunet, Ph.D. "But some studies have shown that specific types of fats, or lipids, can be beneficial."

The researchers learned that one of the fats in the Mediterranean diet, oleic acid, increases the number of two key cellular structures, or organelles, and protects cellular membranes from damage by a chemical reaction called oxidation. This protective effect has a big payoff: Worms fed food rich in oleic acid lived about 35% longer than those consigned to standard worm rations, the researchers found.

Surprisingly, one of the organelles, known as lipid droplets, served as a de facto crystal ball, predicting with increasing accuracy the number of days each animal would live.

"The number of lipid droplets in individual worms tells me that animal's remaining lifespan," said research scientist Katharina Papsdorf, Ph.D. "The worms with greater numbers of lipid droplets live longer than those with fewer droplets."

Brunet, who is the school's Michele and Timothy Barakett Professor of Genetics, is the senior author of the study, which was published May 1 in Nature Cell Biology. Papsdorf is the lead author of the research.

"For years, we've been very interested in learning how diet influences lifespan," Brunet said. "It will be fascinating to see whether we see a similar association between lipid droplets and longevity in mammals and humans. These findings suggest there may be a fat-based strategy to improve human health and longevity."

A fat by (many) other names

Anyone who has struggled to remember the difference between "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol" and how to cultivate one over the other will know that the language of fats can be confusing. In general, most monounsaturated fats, which are found in plant-based foods like avocados, olive oil and nuts, are considered relatively healthy. Saturated fats and trans fats—those that are solid at room temperature—can increase the risk of heart disease and other health complications. Fats and oils are made up of fatty acids; lipids include fats, oils, fatty acids and cholesterol.

Papsdorf and her colleagues used a tiny roundworm called C. elegans in their studies of longevity. The worms, which are about 1 millimeter long, normally live about 18 to 20 days. In the wild, they live in soil and feed on bacteria found on decaying plant matter. In the laboratory, they cruise in lazy arcs across the surface of specially prepared laboratory dishes peppered with bacteria. C. elegans reproduce quickly, are inexpensive and easy to keep, and their genomes and neural networks have been completely mapped, making them a good model for studying aging and disease.

"The worms allowed us to track molecular changes that occur with changes in diet, and to determine which of these changes affect lifespan," Papsdorf said.

Papsdorf and her colleagues compared the effect of feeding the worms bacteria grown on laboratory dishes supplemented with oleic acid versus a structurally similar compound called elaidic acid. Elaidic acid is a monounsaturated trans fatty acid (trans fats = bad!) found in margarine and dairy products and is known to be unhealthy in humans. It is missing a kink in its molecule structure that is present in oleic acid.

"We saw that the numbers of lipid droplets in the worms' intestinal cells increased if the worms were exposed to oleic acid, and that this correlated with an extension of lifespan," Brunet said. "In contrast, exposure to elaidic acid didn't increase the number of lipid droplets and had no effect on longevity."

Lipid droplets are reservoirs in which cells store fats. They play a central role in cellular metabolism—regulating when, where and whether the fats are used as energy for the cell. The accumulation of the droplets was critical to oleic acid's effect; blocking genes for droplet-making proteins reduced the animals' lifespans to normal.

In addition to tracking the numbers of lipid droplets, the researchers noted an increase in the number of peroxisomes in the intestinal tissue of worms exposed to oleic acid. Peroxisomes contain enzymes involved in metabolism and oxidation.

The numbers of lipid droplets and peroxisomes are higher in younger animals and naturally decrease with age, suggesting that they are co-regulated in some manner. They can also vary among individuals. Papsdorf found that among young worms fed a normal diet, those with greater numbers of lipid droplets lived a slightly, but statistically significant, longer duration than genetically identical animals of the same age with fewer droplets. The effect was more pronounced among older animals; middle-aged worms with more lipid droplets lived an average of 33% longer than their genetically identical peers.

"Interestingly, calorie restriction has also been associated with longevity in animals and humans," Brunet said. "But studies have shown that, among calorie-restricted mice, it is often the fattest individuals that live the longest. This suggests fat has a dual aspect. Some aspects are very negative, but other aspects can be positive."

Avoiding 'lipid oxidation'

Finally, the researchers showed that oleic acid supplementation reduced a chemical reaction called lipid oxidation, which damages cellular membranes. In contrast, elaidic acid increased lipid oxidation. "Membrane oxidation is very bad news for an organism," Brunet said. "Cell membranes can begin to leak and fail, which can cause a cascade of adverse biological effects."

The researchers' findings are the first to suggest that lipid droplets and peroxisomes are co-regulated through a biological pathway responsive to the presence of beneficial monounsaturated fatty acids, and that aging might be staved off by protecting cellular membranes from oxidation.

"There is still a lot of research to be done to learn whether and how these findings apply to humans," Brunet said. "Often when one sees lipid droplets in mammalian tissue it is an indication of obesity and other health problems. But it's possible that droplets of a certain size, or shape, or in a specific tissue have varying health impacts. We need to understand what distinguishes them in the context of disease and longevity."

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The results of the “hit and run” drug delivery system was recently published in the journal Advanced Therapeutics and represents the conclusion of a collaboration spanning over five years between Cornell University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), and the biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

“I’ve seen beautiful results before, but I’ve never seen something that eradicates a tumor like this,” said study co-lead author Dr. Michelle Bradbury, MSKCC director of intraoperative imaging and professor of radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The other co-lead authors are Ulrich Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, at Cornell Engineering; and J. Anand Subramony, vice president of protein engineering research and development at AstraZeneca at the time of the study.

Targeted cancer treatments such as antibody and nanoparticle therapies have seen narrow clinical use because of each therapy’s limitations, but the new therapeutic – an evolution of what the researchers call Cornell prime dots, or C’ dots – combines the best attributes of both into an ultrasmall, powerfully effective system.

As they are silica nanoparticles just 6 nanometers in size, C’ dots are small enough to penetrate tumors and safely pass through organs once injected into the body. Wiesner first developed them more than 15 years ago and, in collaboration with Bradbury, published a 2018 study that found an antibody fragment-nanoparticle hybrid to be especially effective in finding tumors.

This collaborative work with AstraZeneca set off the search for a new, molecularly engineered therapeutic version of this immuno-conjugate.

AstraZeneca “site engineered” fragments of antibodies so they would effectively attach to the C’ dots and target HER2 proteins associated with gastric cancer. The team optimized fragment conjugation to the C’ dot surface, along with specialized inhibitor drugs developed by AstraZeneca. This enabled the nanoparticles to carry about five times more drugs than most antibodies.

The final product was a version of C’ dots, armed with cancer-targeting antibody fragments and a large drug payload, all packed into a sub-7-nanometer, drug-immune conjugate therapy – a first of its kind in that size class, according to the researchers.

“We describe the mode of action as ‘hit and run,’” Wiesner said, “because the C’ dots either target the tumor microenvironment and kill the tumor cells or get safely cleared out of the body via renal clearance as a result of their small size, thereby minimizing off-target accumulation and associated side effects and toxicity.”

Mice with gastric cancer received three doses of the therapeutic. Not only did the treatment eradicate the disease in every mouse, but there was no evidence of tumor recurrence after nearly 200 days.

“Usually you’d have to couple the treatment with other therapies to see those kind of long-term results,” Bradbury said. “It showed that the very detailed, careful work of this team – the years spent on the stoichiometry and the surface chemical developments – it paid off.”

Bradbury underscored the versatility of the C’ dots platform, and said she envisions it being used not as a replacement for antibody treatments, but as a complementary tool that can be adapted to different types of cancers and other specific needs of patients.

“C’ dots have become unusually efficacious and safe in treating cancer. They completely obliterated the tumor, even at the cellular level,” said Wiesner. “This is what we ultimately had hoped for and it further supports our earlier decision to bet on therapeutic C’ dot applications.”

Wiesner and Bradbury said the research behind the new C’ dot therapeutic will be continued by Elucida Oncology, a startup company they founded to help bring the technology to market. They said that while Elucida is not using antibody fragments in their current clinical trial of C’ dots, the work will help them build new conjugates that can potentially utilize such fragments in future trials.

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Glacial retreat in the European Alps, Odenwinkelkees, Austria. Credit: University of Leeds

According to researchers, the rapid melting of glaciers due to climate change is causing widespread habitat loss for the invertebrates that live in the cold meltwater rivers of the European Alps.

Species of invertebrates are expected to be limited to higher, colder habitats in the mountains, which are also under threat from skiing, tourism, and the development of hydroelectric plants.

The research study – led jointly by the University of Leeds and the University of Essex – calls on conservationists to consider new measures to protect aquatic biodiversity.

Invertebrates – a key role in ecosystems

The invertebrates, which include stoneflies, midges, and flatworms, play a key role in nutrient cycling and organic matter transfer to fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals in the wider Alpine ecosystem.

Using glacier, landscape, and biodiversity mapping data collected across the Alps, scientists from across Europe simulated how key invertebrate populations across the mountain range are likely to change between now and 2100 because of climate change.

As the climate warms, the modeling predicted the invertebrate species would seek out colder conditions in the highest parts of the mountain range. In the future, these colder areas are also likely to be prioritized for skiing or tourism, or the development of hydropower plants.

Remnant glacier ice, Sulztal, Austria. Credit: University of Leeds

 

Lee Brown, Professor of Aquatic Science at the University of Leeds who co-led the research, said: “Conservationists need to be thinking about how protected area designations must evolve to take into account the effects of climate change.

“It may be that some species will have to be moved to refuge areas if we want to safeguard their survival as many of them are not strong fliers so they cannot disperse easily through the mountains.”

The research paper was recently published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Alpine climate is changing rapidly

The research, involving a collaboration between nine European research institutions, brought together data on invertebrate species distribution in the Alps, an area that covers more than 34,000 square kilometers, and mapped it alongside expected changes to glaciers and river flows.

There was sufficient data to model what was likely to happen to 19 invertebrate species, mainly aquatic insects, that live in the cold-water regions of the Alps.

Dr Jonathan Carrivick, from the School of Geography at Leeds who co-led the research, said: “We have quantified that as glaciers melt and retreat, the rivers running through the Alps will experience major changes in their water source contributions.

Glacial retreat in the European Alps, Sulztalferner, Austria. Credit: University of Leeds

 

“In the short term, some will carry more water and some new tributary rivers will form, but over several decades from now – most rivers will become drier, flow slower, and become more stable, and there could even have periods in a year when there is no water flow. Additionally, most water in Alpine rivers will also be warmer in the future.”

Losers and winners

By the turn of the century, the modeling predicts that most of the species would have experienced “consistent losses” of habitat.

Those hardest hit are expected to be the non-biting midges, Diamesa latitarsis grp., D. steinboecki, and D. bertrami; the stonefly, Rhabdiopteryx alpina; and mayfly, Rhithrogena nivata.

Glacial retreat in the European Alps, Odenwinkelkees, Austria. Credit: University of Leeds

 

However, several species are expected to benefit from the habitat changes, including the flatworm, Crenobia alpina and the flat-headed mayfly, Rhithrogena loyolaea.

Other species would find refuge in new locations. The scientists predict the stonefly Dictyogenus alpinus and the caddisfly Drusus discolor will be able to survive in the Rhone valley in southeast France while other species will be lost from the rivers that flow into the Danube basin.

Conservation

Writing in the paper, the researchers describe the “substantial work” that is necessary to protect the biodiversity in rivers that are being fed by retreating glaciers. The locations where glaciers still exist late in the 21st century are likely to be prioritized for hydropower dam construction and ski resort development.

Dr. Martin Wilkes, from the University of Essex and who co-led the research, said: “The losses we predict for Alpine biodiversity by the end of this century relate to just one of several possible climate change scenarios.

“Decisive action by world leaders to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could limit the losses. On the other hand, inaction could mean that the losses happen sooner than we predict.”

Understanding how invertebrate populations respond to climate changes is key to understanding how biodiversity in high mountainous areas can be affected, and the techniques developed in the study could be applied to other mountain environments.

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The first images of Earth from a brand new weather satellite have been sent back home and our planet looks spectacular. The new satellite reveals details about the weather over Europe and Africa at a level not possible before at 36,000 kilometers (22,370 miles) away from Earth.

The Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I1) is a new generation of satellites hoping to change weather forecasting across Europe. Images can be produced with a much higher resolution and more frequently than those of the previous generation. More details can be seen in the cloud structure allowing more accurate monitoring and weather forecasting.

Earth has never looked so good. You can view it in all its glory below.

The level of detail means forecasters will be able to detect and predict sever weather conditions faster and more accurately.

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Neuroscience owes much to the brains of the gruesomely injured, whose crushed cortices have enabled doctors to study the workings of the mind under conditions that could never be ethically recreated in laboratory experiments. One such case is that of Patient M, who began experiencing the world back-to-front after being shot in the head during the Spanish Civil War.

Until this point, neurologists believed the brain to be made up of distinct regions that were separated by abrupt boundaries with little to no overlap. However, Patient M’s mangled sensory apparatus challenged this idea and allowed a doctor called Justo Gonzalo Rodríguez-Leal to devise a new theory of brain dynamics.

The Spanish Civil War was a brutal conflict that engulfed the country from 1936 to 1939, ending with the Nationalist victory over the Republicans and resulting in the establishment of a dictatorship under Francisco Franco. Fighting on the side of the Republicans, Patient M was 25 years old when he was shot in the head on a battlefield in Levante, Valencia, in May 1938.

After waking from a coma two weeks later, the stricken soldier reported no vision in his left eye and only a faint glimmer in the right. Sporting two gnarly holes in his skull where the bullet had entered and departed, the man confounded doctors by regaining his health without requiring surgery or any type of special care.

Observing Patient M over the next five decades, Rodríguez-Leal described a number of highly perplexing symptoms. For instance, in addition to seeing everything multiplied by three, the man also perceived colors “unstuck” from objects. 

Most unusual of all, though, Patient M saw everything as though it had been inverted. Highlighting the case in his book, Cerebral Dynamics, Rodríguez-Leal revealed how the war veteran “found his abnormalities strange when, for example, he saw men working upside down on a scaffold.”

This sensory flip-flopping extended to the patient’s sense of sound and touch, both of which were processed by his brain as if originating from the opposite side of his body. Despite this severe discombobulation, the man was able to go about his life with little trouble – something Rodríguez-Leal attributed to the unconscious development of coping strategies, such as selective attention to intense stimuli.

In Cerebral Dynamics, the physician explains that the bullet appears to have impacted the left parieto-occipital region of Patient M’s brain. Observing the consequences of this injury, Rodríguez-Leal postulated that the brain might not be divided into distinct regions after all.

Based on the way in which the wound appeared to muddle the victim’s senses, he suggested that neurological functions might be organized into gradients that spread across the entire cortex, with different regions separated by gradual transitions.

In an interview with El Pais, Rodríguez-Leal’s daughter Isabel Gonzalo explains that Patient M – whose identity has never been revealed – lived a long and healthy life, passing away in the late 1990s. Despite surviving for 60 years in his back-to-front world, the former soldier was apparently largely untroubled by his peculiar condition. 

More importantly, Patient M’s backwards brain helped to turn the field of neuroscience on its head.

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Two new studies have highlighted that the use of cannabis by teenagers may greatly increase the risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders, particularly in young boys. While currently only correlational, the studies suggest that the scale of the issue may be larger than previously thought, supporting previous research into how cannabis may be involved in the onset of mental illness.  

The link was found even in teens that were using cannabis recreationally, not just in people with cannabis use disorder.

"Perceptions exist among youth, parents, and educators that casual cannabis use is benign,” said Ryan Sultan, MD, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia and one of the study's lead authors, in a statement.  

“We were surprised to see that cannabis use had such strong associations to adverse mental health and life outcomes for teens who did not meet the criteria for having a substance use condition." 

Previous studies have identified a link between cannabis use and schizophrenia specifically, with a 2002 study finding a causal link between the two and suggesting around 15 percent of UK schizophrenia cases could be avoided if cannabis use ceased.

Evidence also suggests cannabis use alters the development of the cerebral cortex, which controls reasoning in the brain, and that use during adolescence may be problematic. However, estimating the scale of the link and continuing to find evidence for it is paramount, as many studies remain tenuous. 

The first study looked at a sample of respondents from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and analyzed them for cannabis use. They found that around 1 in 10 were recreational users, and roughly 1 in 40 were considered to meet the criteria for cannabis use disorder. The researchers determined whether they had a cannabis use disorder based on a number of criteria, including whether they had constant cravings and social problems. 

For teens without a cannabis use disorder but that still used it recreationally, the study found a 2-2.5 times increased risk of adverse mental health outcomes, while teens with a use disorder had a 3.5-4.5 times increased risk. 

A separate study looked at 6 million people in Denmark. The researchers looked for correlations between people with cannabis use disorder and whether they were diagnosed with schizophrenia across different age groups and sexes. They found a strong correlation between cannabis use disorders and schizophrenia in men and women aged 16-49 – but it was particularly strong among men, with 15 percent of schizophrenia cases in 2021 attributed to cannabis use disorder in men and 4 percent in women. For young men aged 21-30, they estimated the number to be as high as 30 percent. 

“The entanglement of substance use disorders and mental illnesses is a major public health issue, requiring urgent action and support for people who need it,” said NIDA Director and second study coauthor Nora Volkow, in a statement. 

“As access to potent cannabis products continues to expand, it is crucial that we also expand prevention, screening, and treatment for people who may experience mental illnesses associated with cannabis use. The findings from this study are one step in that direction and can help inform decisions that health care providers may make in caring for patients, as well as decisions that individuals may make about their own cannabis use.”

Both studies argue that these links need to be further investigated to look for underlying mechanisms and hope that they can influence policy in reducing cannabis use disorder in young people. While the results are concerning, hope isn’t all lost – a recent report by the CDC has suggested that the legalization of cannabis in the US has actually reduced teen use. Education on its potential adverse effects needs to continue, but it’s possible that underage use is trending in a positive direction. 

The studies were published in JAMA Open Network and Psychological Medicine.

Source

Among the many ways humans have looked to master this planet, few ideas can be considered bold and more batsh*t than plans to flood the world’s largest desert, the Sahara, and create a vast new “sea” in Africa. For centuries, this idea has been floated time and time again. Now, with the world facing a deepening climate crisis, this dangerous idea has experienced yet another renaissance. 

To see how this plan might unfold, we only need to look at the Mediterranean Sea, which was created, at least as we know it, a little over 5 million years ago by the biggest megaflood the world has ever seen. 

Today, the Mediterranean is known for its balmy temperatures and picturesque coastlines that are perfect for beachgoers. However, just under 6 million years ago, this patch of the planet was largely just a dried-up basin caked in salt. If you happened to be around at this time, it would have been theoretically possible to walk from southern Europe straight to North Africa across this great salty plane.

This unusual situation arose around 6 million years ago when the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic Ocean. It’s not totally clear how and why this happened, but most explanations involve gigantic tectonic forces and the lowering of sea levels.

Prior to the crisis, sea levels had dropped about 70 meters (over 200 feet), making it harder for the Atlantic Ocean to flow into the Mediterranean. Paired with this, some argue that tectonic forces were at play around the Strait of Gibraltar, effectively raising the seafloor and creating a dam wall between Southwestern Europe and northwestern Africa.

As centuries passed, evaporation exceeded rainfall and the Mediterranean dried out. Scientists called this the Messinian salinity crisis.

Scientists believe the situation was resolved by the Zanclean flood, a theorized flood of water that reconnected the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean around 5.33 million years ago. Thanks to this new influx of water, the Mediterranean was eventually turned from a salt-ridden wasteland into a beautiful ecosystem, beaming with biodiversity. 

Less than 6 million years ago, this is what the Mediterranean looked like.

As far back as the 19th century, ambitious thinkers have dreamt whether it would be possible to create an event like this in the Sahara, creating an inland “Sahara Sea” that would turn the area from a barren desert into a lush land. Its proponents argue that this could bring a wealth of economic and humanitarian benefits, not to mention military advantages (for the lucky ones). 

One of the first to draw up the plans was Scottish engineer Donald McKenzie who proposed flooding the El Djouf basin in 1877. He argued that a 644-kilometer (400-mile) long channel from Morocco into the Sahara basin could create an inland sea of around 155,400 square kilometers (60,000 square miles), roughly the size of Ireland.

Similar proposals arose in the following decades and the idea of the “Sahara Sea” even serves as the setting of the 1905 novel Invasion of the Sea written by the "father of science fiction" Jules Verne. 

The idea continued to spark imaginations throughout the 20th century. Egypt has continually flirted with the plan to build a canal from the Mediterranean Sea that leads to the Qattara Depression to create an artificial lake amid the sand dunes. The theory is that it would transform the landscape while generating heaps of hydroelectric power from the steady flow of water. 

Now in the era of climate change, some are toying with the “moonshot” idea of sea flooding yet again. One such proposal has suggested flooding the Middle East’s Dead Sea, which is found at the borders of Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel. This could be done by passively piping water from the Mediterranean or the Red Sea to the Dead Sea Depression. 

Its advocates argue this would change the Dead Sea depression into a thriving ecosystem, much like how the Zanclean flood transformed the Med. In turn, it would foster the growth of forests, microalgae, and other plant life that would help to capture carbon and mitigate climate change. 

Needless to say, any geoengineering project on this scale has the potential to go very wrong. Scientists, on the whole, are very skeptical about geoengineering’s potential to address climate change, let alone the many unforeseen risks it may entail. 

Even Y Combinator, a US startup accelerator that's shown interest in “desert flooding”, has conceded it is “risky, unproven, even unlikely to work”.

Desert flooding is evidently a tempting idea, as shown by the heaps of interest it has attracted over the past 150 years, but it certainly feels like it’s best left to the sci-fi novels for now.

Source

Chinese Mars rover sends back images of recent water-shaped crusts

Two apparently brain-dead people taken off of life-support showed sudden spikes in neural activity, according to a study published on Monday.

The findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provide scientific support for accounts of “near-death experiences” — powerful and often mystical experiences that happen when a patient is about to die.

But they also shed new light into the surprisingly murky question of just how we die, said Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan.

In a small study of four patients taken off life support, Borjigin’s team found something surprising: the brains of two out of the four burst to life in the moments before death.

In particular, the patients displayed a sudden surge in the specific type of brain waves that usually indicate conscious thought.

Production of those brain waves — called gamma waves — spiked up to three hundred times in their previous levels in one patient in the moments before death. 

That dying patient’s gamma wave patterns reached levels higher than those found in normal conscious brains.

The process our bodies and brains go through when we die remains poorly understood. In the conventional account, death is simply the sudden end of the processes of life — in particular, brain and heart activity.

For example, scientists don’t really understand what is happening on the inside when an apparently healthy person suffers a sudden trauma — like a car accident, fall or heart attack — and quickly dies.

“If you don’t know how exactly they die, how do you save them?” Borjigin asked

In practice, someone is legally dead when they are pronounced dead by a medical professional.

That professional doesn’t make that call based on a searching inventory of the patient’s subjective mental state — but based on the persistent absence of either a heartbeat or brain waves.

After a long period of such inactivity, family members often elect to disconnect a patient from breathing machines, at which point their body slowly dies from lack of oxygen.

But the recent findings suggest something more complex and harder to detect is going on. Borjigin points out there remains the possibility that a “covert consciousness” — a conscious experience we aren’t currently able to detect — continues below the surface, and springs to urgent life as death approaches.

That may be an adaptive response similar to the surge of cognitive activity that wakes a sleeping person (or, perhaps, a seal) with sleep apnea — in which the body stops breathing while asleep — in time to recover, Borjigin said.

“The brain has an extremely sensitive mechanism to sense oxygen levels in your body,” she said. “Even tiny drops of oxygen levels — the brain knows about that and constantly regulates the supply of oxygen.”

That goes against the idea of the brain as a passive passenger — which, Borjigin argues, makes sense. 

“To think that when you are undergoing cardiac arrest — where the heart is stopping or not pumping blood — and the brain does nothing? It’s beyond me. The brain should be going crazy — which is exactly what happens,” she said.

Her next hypothesis is that “the brain drops everything else that is discretionary to focus on this essential function that is a survival, or self-resuscitation.”

This exploration of the inner territory of death is a far foray from Borjigin’s original area of specialization — circadian rhythms and the science of sleep.

In 2008, she was studying the impacts of stroke on the brain’s production of hormones that promote sleep, when she accidentally discovered something shocking. 

In the moments right before death, the brains of the rats hooked up to their machines displayed a sudden surge in serotonin, a brain chemical deeply enmeshed in the processes of thought and sensing. 

“Serotonin, as you probably know, is the essential neurotransmitter that’s important for brain functioning — which when it’s malfunctioning can leads to psychiatric disorders,” Borjigin told The Hill. 

“So first thing I was thinking — ‘Wow. I wonder if the rats are having hallucinations?’”

Her second thought was that this serotonin surge was probably a well-understood phenomenon. She was wrong — both about that and the understanding of the general mechanics of dying. “I started looking into the literature, and I was surprised to find we know literally almost nothing.”

In the conventional understanding of death, the brain is a semi-passive passenger carried along by the heart — and which dies when the heart dies, Borjigin said.

There’s not much room in that model, however, for what Borjigin had found: a sudden surge of activity in dying brains. She built on those findings in a 2013 PNAS study that found that the brains of dying rats produced a surge of gamma waves — the pattern indicative of consciousness — as they experienced heart attacks.

“These data demonstrate that the mammalian brain can, albeit paradoxically, generate neural correlates of heightened conscious processing at near-death,” her team wrote in the 2013 paper.

That sentence contains an important caveat, and it is one that hangs over all this research. Dying rats may show “correlates” or traces of the activity that, in conscious mammals, is linked to coherent brain activity — but it’s so far impossible to know, subjectively, what dying rats or humans are experiencing. 

Nonetheless, the 2013 paper, with its findings of surging brain activity in dying rats, made the New York Times. Its findings, the Times wrote, could “hold an explanation for the vivid, realistic visions experienced by some human victims of cardiac arrest” — visions reported by about 20 percent of heart attack patients.

These findings, Borjigin wrote at the time, could “explain why some individuals, during this state, can actually recall conversations happening in the operating room.”

These findings helped push Borjigin to the frontiers of consciousness research. Her sleep research focused on the pineal gland, a roughly almond-shaped organ under the forehead that releases the hormones that regulate sleep — and that many philosophical traditions have hypothesized as the seat of consciousness.

In 2013, Borjigin worked with Rick Strassman of the University of Mexico School of Medicine on a study that found the chemical dimethyltryptamine (DMT)  — the active ingredient in the powerful Amazonian psychedelic ayahuasca — in the pineal glands of rats.

Strassman is a leading scientist who helped relaunch research into medical applications of psychedelics in the 1990s — sparking a renaissance in a field that medicine had largely turned away from since the 1970s.

Many of Strassman’s hypotheses — including that the brain releases a rush of DMT at death, a phenomenon he suggested could be related to end-of-life religious experiences — sit uneasily with the mainstream understanding of medicine.

But in 2019, Borjigin and Strassman found that dying rat brains released a surge of DMT as well.

That’s a strong indicator that human brains are doing something similar, Borjigin told an interviewer at the time — because cognitive phenomena found in rats usually display in people too, although not vice versa. 

It’s hard to investigate much beyond that, however. The tests for a dying surge of DMT are highly invasive, and — absent end-of-life volunteers willing to have their skulls opened as they die in the name of science — very hard to corroborate.

And while the National Institutes of Health has poured money and attention over the past several years into the medical applications of psychedelics — particularly around curing depression or quitting dangerous drugs like alcohol or cigarettes — those studies largely focus on helping those who are unambiguously alive.

Also, “while psychedelic research has recently seen a renaissance, it’s mostly the use of psychedelics as a medicine or as a drug,” Borjigian added — rather than the study of how similar chemicals are produced and used by mammalian brains.

Since she began her studies on the cognitive life of the dying a decade ago, Borjigin hasn’t gotten a single NIH grant, she told The Hill.

“We definitely need to expand our studies, and we need NIH funders for these kinds of studies — to just study a lot more patients, maybe in a whole national network.”

That could lead to a reappraisal of the way the heart and brain work together to stave off the point of death — and therefore, potentially, to better understand their role in keeping us alive, Borjigin said.

SOURCE:

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3982026-human-brains-show-larger-than-life-activity-at-moment-of-death/
 

On May 1, 2019, the star next door erupted.

In a matter of seconds, Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, got thousands of times brighter than usual — up to 14,000 times brighter in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. The radiation burst was strong enough to split any water molecules that might exist on the temperate, Earth-sized planet orbiting that star; repeated blasts of that magnitude might have stripped the planet of any atmosphere.

It would be bad news if the Earth’s sun ever got so angry.

But the sun does have its moments — most famously, in the predawn hours of September 2, 1859. At that time, a brilliant aurora lit up the planet, appearing as far south as Havana. Folks in Missouri could read by its light, while miners sleeping outdoors in the Rocky Mountains woke up and, thinking it was dawn, started making breakfast. “The whole of the northern hemisphere was as light as though the sun had set an hour before,” the Times of London reported a few days later.

Meanwhile, telegraph networks went haywire. Sparks flew from equipment — some of which caught on fire — and operators in Boston and Portland, Maine, yanked telegraph cables from batteries but kept transmitting, powered by the electrical energy surging through the Earth.

The events of that Friday evoked biblical descriptions. “The hands of angels shifted the glorious scenery of the heavens,” reported the Cincinnati Daily Commercial. The actual impetus was a bit more prosaic: The skies had been set ablaze by an enormous blob of electrically charged gas, shot out from the sun following a flash of light known as a solar flare.

Space weather encapsulates the prevailing conditions in the solar system caused by the solar wind and the sun’s far-reaching magnetic field. Sudden changes on the sun, such as flares and eruptions of material, are like weather fronts, bringing with them magnetic “storms” that can be felt on the planets. On Earth, this can cause stunning auroras, but it can also create havoc with electronics. The flash of light from a flare takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth; solar material expelled from the sun in a coronal mass ejection (CME) may take hours to days to travel the distance. Magnetic storms may be brief or last for many days. (C. Crockett / Knowable Magazine)

Such a blob — a tangle of plasma and magnetic fields — is known as a coronal mass ejection. Upon arrival at Earth, such an ejection can trigger the most ferocious of geomagnetic storms. The 1859 storm, named the Carrington Event for the scientist who witnessed the flare that preceded it, has long been upheld as the most powerful wallop that the sun has ever delivered.

But in recent years, research has indicated that the Carrington Event was just a taste of what the sun can throw at us. Tree rings and ice cores encode echoes of dramatically stronger solar storms in the distant past. And other stars, such as Proxima Centauri, show that even the most energetic documented solar outbursts pale in comparison with what is possible.

Nevertheless, the Carrington Event offers important clues to what the sun might have in store for Earth in the future, solar physicist Hugh Hudson writes in the 2021 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. “Danger lurks for humanity’s technological assets, especially those in space,” writes Hudson, of the University of Glasgow. In the wake of a Carrington-like event today, entire power grids could shut down and GPS satellites could be knocked offline.

Understanding just how severe solar storms can be provides insights into what the universe may sling our way — and maybe how to foretell the next one so that we’re better prepared when it happens.

Anatomy of a flare

Roughly 18 hours before the 1859 event brightened Earth’s skies, an English astronomer noticed something strange on the surface of the sun.

While working in his observatory, Richard Carrington saw two brilliant points of light emerge from among a clutch of dark sunspots and vanish within five minutes. Another English astronomer, Richard Hodgson, saw the same thing, noting that it was as if the brilliant star Vega had appeared on the sun. At the same time, compass-like needles at England’s Kew Observatory twitched, a hint of the magnetic storm about to ensue.

Before then, no one knew about solar flares — mostly because no one was tracking sunspots every clear day the way Carrington was. Decades would pass before astronomers and physicists could unravel the physics of solar flares and their impact on Earth.

A solar flare is an eruption on the sun, a sudden flash of light — usually near a sunspot — that can release as much energy as roughly 10 billion 1-megaton nuclear bombs. The trigger is a sudden, localized release of pent-up magnetic energy that blasts out radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays.

Many solar flares, though not all, are accompanied by a coronal mass ejection, a massive chunk of the sun’s hot gas blown into space along with a tangle of magnetic fields. Billions of tons of sun stuff can billow out into the solar system, crossing the 150 million kilometers to Earth’s orbit in anywhere from about 14 hours to a few days.

Most solar eruptions miss our planet by a wide margin. But occasionally, one gets aimed right at Earth. And that’s when things can get interesting.

About eight minutes after a solar flare, its light reaches Earth in a flash of visible light. That’s also when a spike in ultraviolet light and X-rays sprays the upper atmosphere, causing a slight magnetic disturbance at the surface. That was the twitch the magnetic instruments at the Kew sensed in 1859.

The coronal mass ejection can trigger a geomagnetic storm when it encounters the magnetic field that envelops Earth. The disturbance to the magnetic field induces electrical currents to course through conductors, including wires and even the planet itself. At the same time, high-speed charged particles spewed by the sun crash into atoms in the upper atmosphere, lighting up the aurora.

On September 6, 2017, the sun emitted a powerful X-class solar flare — a designation reserved for the most intense flares. Seen here in ultraviolet light captured by NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the flare was one of the strongest seen in years and came amid a spate of solar eruptions that month. The glowing threads are scorching filaments of plasma ensnared by magnetic fields arcing over the sun’s surface. (NASA / GSFC / SDO)

The 1859 flare has long been, and remains, a standout in its energy and effects on Earth. Comparably powerful solar eruptions are often referred to as “Carrington events.” But it does not stand alone.

“It’s oftentimes described as the most intense storm ever recorded,” says Jeffrey Love, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Denver. “That’s possibly not exactly true, but it certainly is one of the two most intense storms.” Or three or four.

In May 1921, the sun dealt our planet a geomagnetic storm on par with the Carrington Event. As in 1859, a brilliant aurora appeared well beyond the polar regions. Telegraph and telephone systems broke down, with some sparking destructive fires.

And just 13 years after Carrington spied his eponymous flare, another solar storm came along that by some measures may have topped it. “It looks now, based on aurora and sparse magnetometer measurements, that an event in 1872 was probably larger than the Carrington Event,” says Ed Cliver, a solar physicist retired from the US Air Force.

These storms show that the Carrington Event wasn’t a “black swan,” Hudson says. If anything, the sun has been holding back in the modern era. Evidence from the more distant past points to a few solar storms that make the Carrington Event seem almost puny by comparison.

Forgotten flares

Trees have long memories. Each year of growth chronicles tidbits about environmental conditions at the time in concentric annual rings. From those rings researchers can reconstruct scenes from Earth’s past.

Some cedar trees in Japan recall a tsunami of atomic particles hurled from the sun around the year 775. Those trees recorded a significant uptick in carbon-14, a radioactive variant of carbon that trees absorb from the atmosphere. Carbon-14 emerges from run-ins between atmospheric nitrogen and cosmic rays — high-speed particles from space that pummel our planet daily. Some solar flares shower Earth with an excess of cosmic rays, which ramps up production of carbon-14. The change in carbon-14 levels recorded in 775 was about 20 times larger than the normal ebb and flow from the sun, researchers reported in 2012.

“The clear suggestion there was that super events could happen, because this was a factor of 10 — if it was a solar flare — a factor of 10 or 20 or more greater than the Carrington Event,” Hudson says.

In the early hours of March 1, 2011, a ripple in the solar wind whacked Earth’s magnetic field and triggered a minor geomagnetic storm, causing the ethereal aurora seen here over the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. (NASA / GSFC / JAMES SPANN)

A carbon-14 boost in tree rings showed signs of another sizable solar event in 994. Ice cores from Antarctica showed a corresponding increase, in both 994 and 775, of beryllium-10, another product of cosmic rays — adding more certainty to the tree ring findings.

Looking farther back in time, a study of ice cores suggests a third similar event around 660 BCE. And in August (in a paper still undergoing peer review), researchers reported two more carbon-14 spikes in tree rings from around 7176 BCE and 5259 BCE, possibly on par with the 775 event.

It’s hard to directly compare these past storms with the Carrington Event, says Ilya Usoskin, a space physicist at the University of Oulu in Finland and a coauthor of the August study. The 1859 flare did not produce a particle downpour on Earth, so there are no carbon-14 counts to compare. But the 775 event appears to be one of the strongest solar particle storms recorded in the last 12,000 years, Usoskin says.

There is a catch, Hudson notes. Tree rings are laid down annually, so a few smaller flares within the span of several months might appear as one big event in the tree ring record.

But even then, any one of these smaller flares may still have been impressive. “Every one of those events would be at least on the order of three times as big as the Carrington Event in terms of its energy,” Cliver says.

That, however, is still modest compared with some other stars in our galaxy.

Super flares

If life does exist on the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, it probably has a rough go of it.

“You really are looking at having something like a Carrington Event happening daily,” says Meredith MacGregor, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Even stronger “super flares,” like the one she and colleagues spotted in 2019, may go off roughly every other day. Her team spotted that flare, possibly 100 times as powerful as the Carrington Event, after watching the star next door for just 40 hours.

With a near-constant barrage of flares, any atmosphere clinging to the rocky planet snuggled up close to the star would never have time to recover. “Yes, a Carrington Event [on Earth] would fry some electronics and would ruin GPS signals,” MacGregor says, “but it’s not going to destroy the habitability of our planet.”

To be clear, Proxima Centauri is not like the sun. It’s an M dwarf, a diminutive orb that glows red. And these tiny stars are famous for their oversized flares. But some sunlike stars can send up super flares as well.

This realization has come from telescopes in space designed to look for planets around other stars. NASA’s now-defunct Kepler telescope did this by looking for subtle dips in starlight as planets crossed in front of their suns.

Over four years, Kepler recorded 26 super flares — up to about 100 times as energetic as the Carrington Event — on 15 sunlike stars, researchers reported in January. NASA’s ongoing TESS mission, another space-based telescope hunting for exoplanets, found a similar frequency of superflares on sunlike stars in its first year of operation.

The Kepler data imply that sunlike stars experience the most powerful of these flares roughly once every 6,000 years. Our sun’s most powerful eruption in that time span is an order of magnitude weaker — but could a super flare be in our future?

“I don’t think any theory has sufficient predictive capability to mean anything,” Hudson says. “The leading theory basically says that the bigger the sunspot, the greater the flare.” Sunspots mark where the sun’s magnetic field punches through its surface, preventing hot gas from bubbling up from below. The spot looks dark because it’s cooler than everything around it.

And that is one difference between the sun and its eruptive neighbors. Super flares seem to happen on stars with cool, dark spots far larger than ever appear on the sun. “Based on known spot areas, there would therefore be a limit,” Hudson says.

The intricacies of any star’s magnetic machinations — spots, flares, etc. — are still poorly understood, so tying all these observations into one cohesive story will take time. But the quest to understand all this might improve predictions about what to expect from the sun in the future.

Flares that are powerful enough to disrupt our power grid probably occur, on average, a few times a century, Love says. “Looking at 1859 kind of helps put it in perspective, because what’s happened in the space-age era, since 1957, has been more modest.” The sun hasn’t aimed a Carrington-like flare at us in quite a while. A repeat of 1859 in the 21st century could be disastrous.

Humanity is far more technologically dependent than it was in 1859. A Carrington-like event today could wreak havoc on power grids, satellites and wireless communication. In 1972, a solar flare knocked out long-distance telephone lines in Illinois, for example. In 1989, a flare blacked out most of Quebec province, cutting power to roughly 6 million people for up to nine hours. In 2005, a solar storm disrupted GPS satellites for 10 minutes.

The best prevention is prediction. Knowing that a coronal mass ejection is on its way could give operators time to safely reconfigure or shut down equipment to prevent it from being destroyed.

Building in extra resiliency could help as well. For the power grid, that could include adding in redundancy or devices that can drain off excess charge. Federal agencies could have a stock of mobile power transformers standing by, ready to deploy to areas where existing transformers — which have been known to melt in previous solar storms — have been knocked out. In space, satellites could be put into a safe mode while they wait out the storm.

The Carrington Event was not a one-off. It was just a sample of what the sun can do. If research into past solar flares has taught us anything, it’s that humanity shouldn’t be wondering if a similar solar storm could happen again. All we can wonder is when.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

Source

Nullius in Verba—Nothing on authority. In 1660, on the eve of its founding, The Royal Society of London took this defiant Latin phrase as its motto. For the United Kingdom’s main scientific body, it announced a new way of thinking that came to dominate the scientific revolution: Classical and scholastic authority could prove apocryphal. Only direct evidence, generated by experiment and first-person observation, revealed scientific truth.

Evidence was everything, and leading scientists of the era, including Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, developed a system for classifying it.

Qualities such as size, shape, or weight, which were directly measurable, were referred to as “primary” evidence. Texture, taste, or feelings that described human sensations and responses were considered “secondary.” While primary evidence was easier to collect and test, sensation and perception were considered legitimate fields of inquiry, and certain classes of data could only be demonstrated by self-experiment.

    “I feel like the sound of a harp.”

In a famous and graphic example, when Isaac Newton wished to establish whether a change in the curvature of the eye would present a distorted image to the perceiver, he took a large needle, or bodkin, and stuck it as far into his eye as he could. He then described in detail the colored circles that appeared to him. It was not possible to present direct evidence for these shapes, since they only existed in Newton’s mind, yet his fellow philosophers were not obliged simply to accept  Newton’s word for them. The experiment was described in such a way that any skeptic, if they so wished, could try it out on themselves.

This was also the case for drugs that acted on the mind. Like the circles in Newton’s vision, the changes in thought, mood, sensation, or perception they produced were secondary qualities, but this did not mean they were delusions. There was no correct or perfect way to present them, yet they offered unique insights into mental functioning. The language that offered itself most plausibly for describing them was that of medicine, in which the physician could only report the patient’s sensations and state of mind at second hand, but could add judicious glosses and interpretations suggested by their professional learning and experience of similar cases.

Robert Hooke, curator of experiments at the Royal Society, provided some of the earliest testimony, describing in detail the effects of the many drugs he used for overlapping purposes: verifying medical claims, managing his pain and moods, and “refreshing” himself during social and business meetings in the coffee houses he frequented in the afternoons. Hooke documented impressions not just of alcohol, chocolate, tea, coffee, and tobacco, but also of cannabis. On Dec. 18, 1689, as part of a lecture he delivered at the Royal Society entitled “An Account of the Plant, Call’d Bengue,” or cannabis, Hooke detailed his own experience with the drug, in the third person:

This Powder being chewed and swallowed, or washed down, by a small Cup of Water, doth, in a short Time, quite take away the Memory & Understanding; so that the Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth, heareth, or doth, in that Extasie, but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks Words without any Coherence, not knowing what he saith or doth; yet is he not giddy, or drunk, but walks and dances and sheweth many odd Tricks; after a little Time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh’d, and exceeding hungry …

Such perceptual and bodily experiences—of the kind elicited by doctors with the question “how do you feel?”—were not able to produce the kind of replicable results generated by vacuum pumps or thermometers. But in its place an informal criterion of expertise emerged, dubbed by the historian of science Simon Schaffer “the Cartesianism of the genteel”: the assumption that trained or educated observers were capable of using their minds to assess the evidence of their bodies—or, in the terms established by the philosophy of John Locke, of separating the intellect from the passions. As in Hooke’s case, it became the convention to relay such evidence in the third person or passive voice favored by physicians, with the confessional first person confined to diaries and private records.

    “Trains of vivid and visible images rapidly passed through my mind.”

As pharmacology developed through the 18th century, this language of quasi-medical reportage became firmly entrenched. Self-experiment with drugs was common practice, for ethical as well as practical reasons: Physicians were obligated to treat the sick according to the Hippocratic oath, doing no harm, and experimenting on them was the mark of an unscrupulous quack.

Practicing physicians were also aware that responses to drugs could vary widely between individuals. The growth of physical observation and measurement revealed that mind and body influenced each other in mysterious ways, and that even directly experienced phenomena could be proven false. One famous example was the committee set up in 1784 by the French Royal Academies of Science and Medicine, under the aegis of Benjamin Franklin, to investigate Anton Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism or mesmerism. “There is no proof of the existence of the Animal Magnetic fluid,” the committee’s report concluded. The lesson for self-experimenters was that hypervigilance to one’s own sensations could overinterpret the evidence of the body or generate symptoms based solely on expectation.

For the generation that followed, however, subjectivity was the new frontier of scientific knowledge. The inward turn emerged from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose treatise of 1781, Critique of Pure Reason, made a primary distinction between the “phenomenal” world—reality as revealed by sensation and perception—and a “noumenal” world of ideas and categories, including God, that existed prior to and independently of human experience. According to Kant’s distinction, the world as received via the senses was not the accurate reflection of an external reality but a construct, shaped by the human senses and limited by the parameters of the human mind.

This theory was strikingly corroborated in a series of drug experiments by the young chemist Humphry Davy. In 1799, at the age of 20, Davy was hired as the chemical assistant at the Medical Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, an experimental project initiated by the pioneering physician Thomas Beddoes for synthesizing and testing gasses in the treatment of lung conditions. One of the first compounds Davy created in the laboratory was nitrous oxide, a recently discovered gas that was believed to be highly toxic. Davy suspected this belief resulted from a confusion with a related compound, nitric oxide, a red-brown gas that was a powerful irritant. “I made a discovery yesterday which proves how necessary it is to repeat experiments,” he wrote to his and Beddoes’s friend Davies Giddy in April 1799; “The gaseous oxide of azote [nitrous oxide] is perfectly respirable when pure.”

LEGEND OF A MIND: Humphry Davy’s self-experimentation with mind-altering drugs led him to develop a “new language of feeling.” His ground-breaking report on these explorations linked the chemical and the medical to the sublime. Image credit: National Portrait Gallery / Wikimedia Commons.

Excited to have established a virgin field of inquiry, Davy and Beddoes heated ammonium nitrate crystals in an alembic and collected the escaping gas in an air holder, from which Davy inhaled through a breathing tube. As he filled his lungs, he noticed an unexpected sensation, “a highly pleasurable thrilling in the chest and extremities.” As he continued, “the objects around me became dazzling and my hearing more acute,” and the sensations built toward a climax in which “the sense of muscular power became greater, and at last an irresistible propensity to action was indulged in.”

Beddoes recorded that Davy leapt violently around the laboratory shouting for joy. For his own part, Davy retained only vague recollections of these ecstatic moments, and were it not for the scrawled notes he discovered the following morning, “I should even have doubted their reality.”

Unlike the speculative animal fluids of Mesmer, there was no doubt about the material cause of this paroxysm of pleasure. Nitrous oxide—first isolated by Joseph Priestley, who had named it “dephlogisticated nitrous air”—was a chemical substance with a known synthesis, and the experiment could be replicated and verified in any home laboratory. The effects of the gas, however, could only be captured in first-person testimony.

Davy was quick to elicit such testimony, and was perfectly placed to do so. The Pneumatic Institution was a hub for Bristol’s freethinking writers, philosophers, and physicians, and over the summer of 1799 dozens of them came to visit and experience the gas which the poet Robert Southey, the first of his friends to whom Davy had offered it, described as “the wonder-working air of delight.” After his first dose, Southey wrote to his brother that “Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.” Exploring it further was an invitation and a challenge that the keenest minds of Bristol were eager to accept.

As the experiments progressed, Davy realized that a new “language of feeling,” as he called it, was required to describe the effects of the gas. The standard question of medical description, “How do you feel?,” was tested to its limits by a torrent of sensations that encompassed dizziness, tingling, a sense of mental exhilaration, and onrushing cosmic epiphany that rapidly dissolved into incoherence and, frequently, hysterical laughter with no obvious cause. Davy and Beddoes attempted a few trials on patients with lung diseases; one responded to the question with, “I do not know, but very queer.” Another responded, obliquely but suggestively, “I feel like the sound of a harp.”

    “The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasure and pains!”

During the evenings they experimented further on healthy volunteer subjects. When Davy set the chemical reaction bubbling and offered a new subject a green silk bag of the gas, he often began by giving them a dose of ordinary air to rule out any elements of suggestion or expectation.

Once they had recovered from a lungful of the real thing, he asked them to write a brief description of their experience. As one of the volunteers, the surgeon Thomas Hammick, wrote after his intoxication, “We must either invent new terms to express these new and peculiar sensations, or attach new ideas to old ones, before we can communicate intelligibly with one another on the operations of this extraordinary gas.”

Nitrous oxide, for Davy and his circle, collapsed the distinction between the intellect and the passions: It stimulated both, with equal intensity. It was a profoundly embodied experience, susceptible to external measurements—for example, the amount of gas that was inhaled, or had dissolved into the bloodstream—but not reducible to them. It asked profound questions about the relation between mind and body: How could inhaling an artificially created chemical affect not merely the breathing and the pulse, but the emotions, the sense of wonder, and the imagination?

Davy’s ground-breaking report on the experiments, Researches Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide and its Respiration (1800), yoked body and mind, intellect and passion together with a structure that ascended from the chemical to the medical to the sublime. Its opening section was a description of nitrous oxide’s chemistry and synthesis; the next was a precise account of its physiological action, and it concluded with the subjective reports of over 30 volunteer subjects. Davy’s own contribution, after absorbing as much gas as humanly possible by enclosing himself in an airtight box filled with it for an hour and a quarter, gave the language of feeling full rein:

I heard every distinct sound in the room and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees as the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all touch with external things; trains of vivid and visible images rapidly passed through my mind and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and modified ideas. I theorised; I imagined I made discoveries … As I recovered my former state of mind, I felt an inclination to communicate the discoveries I had made during the experiment. I endeavoured to recall the ideas, they were feeble and indistinct; one collection of terms, however, presented itself … Nothing exists but thoughts! The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasure and pains!

Davy’s scientific ambition demanded that he push his experiments to the limit and experience the effects of the drug at their most intense. This in turn required a break with the impersonal conventions of medical reportage in favor of a first-person testimony that fused the roles of observer and experimental subject. He developed his “language of feeling” in parallel with that of the young poets among his volunteers, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who were also seeking a novel and introspective language to capture feelings and states of mind never previously described.

Davy aspired to be a hero of science, comparing himself in his youthful notebooks to Sir Isaac Newton, but his version of science took on the qualities of the dawning Romantic age and of its most exalted quality, genius. In theory, there was no role for genius in experimental science, since data was replicable and detachable from individual personality; but self-experiment, in Davy’s hands, had produced results inseparable from the dazzling mind of its subject. Subjective visions could in theory be confirmed by other researchers; but Davy represented a new breed of experimenter, both rigorous mechanic and inspired genius, prepared to take scientific discovery to heroic limits.

Excerpted from Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, by Mike Jay. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

Lead image: fran_kie / Shutterstock

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LHAASO, covering an area of 1.36 square kilometers located 4,410 meters above sea level in Daocheng County, Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Garze, southwest China's Sichuan Province, is one of the country's key national science and technology facilities.

According to CAS, the observatory is designed to explore the mysteries of the universe by observing cosmic rays.

"Cosmic rays carry important scientific information about the origin of the universe, the evolution of celestial bodies and solar activity," said Cao Zhen, chief scientist at LHAASO and a researcher at the Institute of High Energy Physics under CAS.

It will also be used for exploring cosmic evolution and high-energy celestial activities, and conducting research on dark matter, according to CAS.

With the unique advantages of a high altitude and key core technologies, LHAASO is the most sensitive ultra-high-energy gamma ray detector installation in the world, according to CAS.

The construction of the main part of the observatory began in 2017 and was completed in 2021. It has carried out international cooperation with 28 astrophysical research institutions on basic research in fields like cosmology, astronomy and particle physics, the CAS added.

(With input from Xinhua)

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University of Padova is an important centre for academic studies in Italy. It is the third oldest university in the world, and just turned 800 years old! The department of Physics and Astronomy itself has been selected for 2023-27 as a centre of excellence. And Padova is a very pleasant small town in north-eastern Italy, where over 70,000 students receive education in all fields of sciences and humanities.

The University has a unified call for all subjects, and within the call there are 44 positions for a PhD in physics. This is a rather large number, which should guarantee a significant rate of success for applicants passing the minimum admission criteria.

You can find all the information at these two links:

- this one (which points to the three documents to be downloaded, direct link here)
- and this one, which is from the Physics department and includes a video, and more information.

The positions are of two kinds: there are 13 "open" ones, which allow winners to freely decide what research topic to embark on and what supervisor to choose among the full body of staff members at the Department of Physics and the personnel of research institutes (e.g. INFN) in Padova. And then there is a large number of positions that target specific research topics. If you apply for a Phd in Physics, you need to be careful to "opt in" to the positions you may be happy to get, and not opt in to ones you would not want. In fact, the selection procedure is a bit baroque, and depending on what you do and do not tick, you may gain or lose the chance to be offered some of the 44 positions.

This year I invested some funds to offer a couple of joint PhD positions which are in the list. These two positions are "special" in the sense that they imply:

- a co-tutorship by me and a computer scientist from a different University
- the spending of 18 months in Padova and 18 months at the foreign University with the computer scientist tutor's research team
- the increase of the salary by 50% for the 18 months spent outside Italy
- the embedding of the winning candidates in the MODE collaboration (boosting their visibility and networking chances).

As for MODE, here is a defining slide for the collaboration (link: https://mode-collaboration.github.io).

Of additional interest is the fact that besides the allocated funds for travel to external schools that the student will be endowed with as part of the PhD program in Padova, I will make additional funding available to the students, and specifically encourage them to participate in a rich training program, with attendance to international events (Ph.D. schools in physics, computing, machine learning) and conferences, and stays at foreign institutes.

The snapshot below shows where the two positions are listed in the document available at the link provided above.

Lulea, Sweden

The first position is meant for applicants who will be jointly supervised by myself and by Prof. Fredrik Sandin. Fredrik is a full professor at the Computer Science department of Lulea Technical University. A physicist by background, he is an expert in neuromorphic computing, a topic about which I will discuss in a post in this blog very soon (I will put here a link when I write that piece).

In a nutshell, neuromorphic computing exploits the time-encoding of information in streams of "spikes", signals that travel to the synapse of neurons and produce changes in the membrane potential, activating an output signal. The time encoding allows for extreme reduction in power consumption with respect to normal digital computing, and the strength of the connection between synapses and neurons acts as a in-place memory storage, so that neuromorphic computing allows for co-location of memory and computing, avoiding the problem of data communication between storage and CPU normally seen in digital processors. NC is particularly exciting since it is a much more accurate model of the working of our brain, and offers applications in edge computing applications (such as the internet of things). Of high relevance is the energy efficiency of these devices, looking at the green transition.

The position we offer is for a graduate student who will work at applications of neuromorphic computing for fundamental science. This is a broad definition, and indeed although we have a couple of specific applications in mind, we will be able to adapt the work plan to the student's wishes. One possibility involves developing a triggering and processing strategy for radio antennas detecting the signal of neutrino interactions in the ice of the Arctic, in collaboration with another group of physicists from the University of Uppsala. In any case, the student will be embedded in the MODE collaboration and she or he will benefit from the rich program of activities we are carrying out within that group.

Kaiserslautern, Germany

The second position offers research work in collaboration with the RPTU University in Kaiserslautern, with as co-supervisor Prof. Nicolas R. Gauger. Nicolas is the chairholder for Scientific computing and director of the computing center RHRZ in Kaiserslautern-Landau. He has enormous competence in scientific computing and outstanding track record of teaching and advisorship.

In this case the research work is centered on optimization of particle physics detectors, and again the exact definition of the work is voluntarily left open to finalization according to the preferences of the winning candidate. One possibility is to study the development of highly granular hadron calorimeters for future particle colliders, when the integration with a tracker may provide a paradigm change with respect to current available technologies, looking forward to providing particle-ID capability in these instruments.

More information

If you need more information on these positions, and/or want to chat with me on the topic, I will make available a couple of slots for zoom meetings where I can answer all your questions. Just fill a when2meet poll here (use your email as your name, so I can identify you!, and possibly send me an email (at tommaso.dorigo(at)gmail(dot)com) about it too) to indicate the dates/times you prefer, and I will try to meet all demands! But be careful to indicate _all_ the time slots you can possibly make, as I need to then pick a couple of dates/times that maximize demand. Good luck!

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Shouting into the wind isn’t so ineffective after all.

The idiom is commonly used to describe an unsuccessful attempt to communicate. But it’s not actually more difficult to shout upwind, says acoustics researcher Ville Pulkki of Aalto University in Espoo, Finland.

Sending a sound upwind, against the flow of air, makes the sound louder due to an acoustical effect called convective amplification. Sound sent downwind is quieter. So, if you’re yelling upwind, a listener standing in front of you should have no problem hearing you — contrary to popular belief.

The misperception has a simple explanation, Pulkki says. “When you yell against the wind, you hear yourself worse.” That’s because, in this scenario, your ears are downwind of your mouth. That means your own voice sounds quieter to you.

Pulkki’s first attempt at testing the effect involved him hollering with his head out the top of a moving vehicle as microphones recorded the amplitude of his voice. The results were inconclusive about the reason yelling upwind seems hard, so Pulkki and colleagues upped their technology game.

For the new study, the team put a simulated yeller — a cylinder and a speaker playing multiple tones — on top of a moving vehicle. Microphones measured sound amplitude at the location of the mouth and ears when the yeller was facing either upwind or downwind. The experiments together with computer simulations confirmed the source of the misperception, the researchers report March 31 in Scientific Reports.

A similar effect occurs when an ambulance goes by. Most people are familiar with the sudden change of pitch of the siren’s sound due to the Doppler effect (SN: 8/2/13). But the siren is also slightly louder when moving toward a stationary observer than it is when it’s moving away. When you’re bellowing upwind, it’s not the source of sound that’s moving, but the medium in which the sound travels.

 Whichever way the wind blows, acoustics can explain it.

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In their paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, the group describes how they analyzed data from multiple sources to track the number of atmospheric rivers affecting India and how it has led to increased flooding in that country.

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) have been in the news of late due to several of them that caused flooding in California this past winter. But ARs do not impact just the US, they can form and cause increased amounts of rain in many parts of the world. In this new effort, the research team sought to learn more about the impact of ARs on India—a country well accustomed to annual flooding during the monsoon season.

ARs are channels of moisture-laden air. They form when air pressure systems collide, pushing air with a lot of moisture in a stream-like fashion through the atmosphere. As they grow in size, they become similar to rivers flowing across the sky. When they meet land, the air pressure relents, allowing the moisture to be released, quite often in dramatic fashion.

In this new effort, the researchers team examined weather records from the European Reanalysis Version, the Dartmouth Flood Observatory and the India Meteorological Department for the years 1951 through 2020 looking for evidence of ARs that have had an impact on India, most particularly during monsoon seasons.

In so doing, they found AR events impacted the country 596 times, 95% of which occurred during a monsoon season. They also found that 54% of the biggest AR events occurred over the past three decades, suggesting they are not only forming more often but are getting bigger as the planet grows warmer.

The researchers note that warmer ocean surface temperatures over parts of the Indian Ocean have led to more evaporation, which in turn has led to more rain when ARs form. The increase in rain amounts has led to massive floods which have destroyed property and killed thousands of people.

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A new analysis suggests that a high percentage of people who required help from a ventilator due to a COVID-19 infection also developed secondary bacterial pneumonia. This pneumonia was responsible for a higher mortality rate than the COVID-19 infection.

So while COVID-19 may have put these patients in the hospital, it was actually an infection brought on by the use of a mechanical ventilator that was more likely to be the cause of death when this infection didn't respond to treatment.

"Our study highlights the importance of preventing, looking for, and aggressively treating secondary bacterial pneumonia in critically ill patients with severe pneumonia, including those with COVID-19," says Benjamin Singer, a pulmonologist at Northwestern University in Illinois.

The team looked at records for 585 people admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, also in Illinois. They all had severe pneumonia and/or respiratory failure, and 190 had COVID-19.

Using a machine learning approach to crunch through the data, the researchers grouped patients based on their condition and the amount of time they spent in intensive care.

The findings refute the idea that a cytokine storm following COVID-19 – an overwhelming inflammation response causing organ failure – was responsible for a significant number of deaths. There was no evidence of multi-organ failure in the patients studied.

The researchers used machine learning to identify patterns. (Gao et al., J. Clin. Investig., 2023)

Instead, COVID-19 patients were more likely to develop ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) and for longer periods. Cases where VAP didn't respond to treatment were significant in terms of the overall mortality rates in the study.

"Those who were cured of their secondary pneumonia were likely to live, while those whose pneumonia did not resolve were more likely to die," says Singer.

"Our data suggested that the mortality related to the virus itself is relatively low, but other things that happen during the ICU stay, like secondary bacterial pneumonia, offset that."

These results suggest that ICU outcomes could be improved if there were better strategies to diagnose and treat VAP episodes – something that the researchers say needs to be addressed in the future.

It's worth bearing in mind that if a patient's requirement for a ventilator to treat COVID-19 complications leads to VAP, this doesn't imply that a COVID-19 infection is less dangerous, nor does it decrease the number of COVID-19 fatalities.

As the authors write in their paper, "The relatively long length of stay among patients with COVID-19 is primarily due to prolonged respiratory failure, placing them at higher risk of VAP."

But the findings highlight a need for further study and to be cautious when making assumptions about the cause of death in COVID-19 cases. A detailed molecular analysis from the same study should reveal more about what makes the difference between recovering or not from VAP.

It's also another example of how machine learning artificial intelligence can process vast amounts of data and spot patterns beyond us mere humans – whether it's analyzing proteins or advancing mathematics.

"The application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to clinical data can be used to develop better ways to treat diseases like COVID-19 and to assist ICU physicians managing these patients," says Catherine Gao, also a pulmonologist at Northwestern.

The research has been published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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Virginia Tech neuroscientist Georgia Hodes says that reports of depression and anxiety are up at least 3-fold since the start of the COVID epidemic. "While loneliness and isolation are likely contributors, the COVID infection itself triggers a depressive episode in approximately 20 percent of people. Understanding how infection impacts mood may help us find new ways to treat individuals that do not fully respond to current antidepressants."

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, social isolation and loneliness have been linked to increased risk for heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression and anxiety, suicidality and self-harm, dementia, and earlier death.

Hodes' research explores biomarkers and treatments for depression that target the body's immune response system. For studies linking loneliness and isolation to effects on the brain, she points to one study that showed "people who reported they were lonely but were otherwise healthy adults had greater pro-inflammatory immune responses to acute stress and immune activation. The data suggests that loneliness is priming the immune system to react more strongly to stress."

Hodes says that most studies on loneliness in humans have been done in older adults. She points to a recent study by Isabelle F. van der Velpen et al, that used MRI images from the Rotterdam study to examine the relationship between loneliness and brain matter volume. "At baseline higher loneliness scores were associated with decreased white matter volume. Perceived social support correlated positively with total brain and grey matter volume. In general, though there is little on perceived loneliness and specific changes in brain structures in humans."

"One of the most replicated findings is perceived loneliness in humans is related to higher levels of the cytokine IL-6 in the periphery. Previously, in mice we reported that altering IL-6 produced in the periphery by the white blood cells could induce or block the effects of stress on social behavior" says Hodes. "This is a protein that has increased levels when someone is sick. The human data suggest that loneliness is putting people into a constant state of low-grade inflammation which may then promote social withdrawl, depression and/or anxiety."

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