NASA engineers have come up with a power-saving strategy to eke more time—and more science—out of the Voyager probes, humanity’s longest-running spacecraft, as they continue venturing into unexplored reaches of interstellar space.

And time is of the essence: Voyager 1 and 2 have been flying since 1977, and their power sources have been gradually fading, putting their instruments at risk. Out in the vast abyss of deep space, unfathomably far from our sun, solar power isn’t viable. That’s why engineers equipped each Voyager with a trio of radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs. These work by converting the heat from the decay of radioisotope fuel, plutonium-238, into electricity. They’re basically nuclear batteries—and they’re finally running out of juice, losing a predictable 4 watts per year. While the Voyagers don’t need that power for propulsion, it’s essential to their ability to collect scientific readings of far-flung charged particles and magnetic fields—so far, humanity’s only opportunity to sample that data in interstellar space.

A couple of years ago, NASA began exploring ways to keep the Voyagers’ instruments running as long as possible. The first move, in 2019, was to start turning off the heaters for the science instruments. That worked; the devices kept working despite temperatures dropping some 50 degrees Celsius, much colder than the conditions they’d been tested in. But it still wasn’t enough, so at the end of March, a NASA team initiated an energy-saving strategy on Voyager 2 that dips into some reserve power meant to protect systems from voltage spikes.

While this strategy does leave the craft more vulnerable, the risk of such spikes seems to be very low, says Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Assuming all goes well, they’ll start similar voltage management on Voyager 1 as early as this fall. Altogether, Dodd thinks this could buy the probes’ science mission a few extra years. Voyager is still a mission of discovery, she says, and every piece of data the spacecraft obtain in interstellar space is valuable. “I continue to be amazed by these spacecraft and by the engineers who come up with clever ways to operate them,” says Dodd.

Now 45 years old, the Voyagers spent their first two decades flying through the solar system, snapping photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune as they zoomed by. Voyager 1 also captured the iconic “pale blue dot” photograph of a tiny, distant Earth. As they kept going, they continued capturing data. They have long outlived their predecessors, Pioneer 10 and 11, which were the first probes to fly by the gas giants but shut down more than 20 years ago. Both Voyagers have flown well beyond the Kuiper belt, a region hosting Pluto and other small, icy bodies. In 2012, Voyager 1 left the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the sun, beyond which lies the interstellar medium. Its twin followed six years later, at which point both were officially in interstellar territory, cruising at 35,000 miles per hour into the unknown.

Today, Voyager 1 is 159 astronomical units from home, and Voyager 2 is at 133 AU, traveling in a different direction. (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and sun, or about 93 million miles.) The spacecraft are surely showing signs of age—the team dealt with telemetry problems on Voyager 1 last year—but the cosmic workhorses are continuing on.

It’s not uncommon for NASA missions to far outlive their expected lifetimes, and to be granted extensions after achieving their main objectives. The Opportunity Mars rover rolled on for nearly 15 years, rather than three months. The Saturn-focused Cassini orbiter, which NASA operated in collaboration with the European Space Agency, persevered for 20 years instead of four. But the Voyagers surely take the cosmic cake. If the energy-conserving gambit of Dodd’s team works, the two could reach the unprecedented age of 50—with a “stretch goal” of reaching 200 AU around the year 2035.

But this will require sacrificing the science instruments one by one.

Voyager 2 still has five instruments humming along: a magnetometer, a plasma wave surveyor, a plasma science experiment, a cosmic ray detector, and a low-energy charged particle detector. The first two only take about 2W to run, and their electronics are in the body of the probe, so they’ll probably be the last to be shut down. The others are housed on the boom of the craft, where it’s frigid, and they use between 3 and  5 watts each, so turning each one of them off would buy another year of life.

Interstellar space might seem completely empty, but it’s not: There are still solar particles and magnetic phenomena to study. “The further we get from the sun, the more interesting it gets because we really don’t know what we might find. And having two Voyager spacecraft is like seeing through binoculars,” says Linda Spilker, the Voyager project scientist at JPL. For instance, astrophysicists expected that outside the heliosphere, the sun’s magnetic field would slowly rotate into the direction of the interstellar medium, and the Voyagers would be able to track that. But they’ve seen no such rotation yet, Spilker says, suggesting models of the magnetic fields need updating.

The spacecraft have also used their instruments to survey interstellar material and to detect radiation from a dazzlingly bright gamma-ray burst in another galaxy last October.

Missions based on newer probes will take advantage of Voyager’s ongoing solar science. As early as 2025, NASA plans to launch the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) to survey the heliosphere. The Voyagers are already well outside of the heliosphere, so the measurements from the distant probes can be compared to those from the much closer new one. “Having the Voyagers out there during IMAP will be really wonderful. As we’re seeing imaging with IMAP, the Voyagers are also going to be making valuable measurements locally,” says David McComas, a Princeton physicist who leads the IMAP collaboration. He likens it to doctors taking a CAT scan of a person’s brain for the big picture, plus a biopsy for detailed information.

The Voyagers aren’t done yet, but they already have an impressive legacy. That includes NASA’s New Horizons probe, which glided by Pluto in 2015. Now 55 AU away from Earth, that spacecraft is probing the edge of the heliosphere with newer, better sensors than the Voyagers are equipped with, and it has already taken images of objects that hadn’t even been discovered when the Voyagers launched, like Pluto’s moons and a Kuiper Belt object called Arrokoth. “For all of us at New Horizons, the Voyager team, they are our heroes,” says Alan Stern, the collaboration’s principal investigator and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. New Horizons is the only other distant human-made probe still operating, and it could last until 2050, Stern says. The team is now looking for a new target for a flyby.

Inspired by the Voyagers’ tremendous success, engineers are already designing next-generation spacecraft concepts, such as those that could be powered by lasers and lightsails and could one day whiz into our interstellar environs faster and farther than 1970s probes could. What advice should they glean from the Voyagers’ long and healthy lives? First, says Dodd, it’s useful to have plenty of fuel and redundant systems, because even robust instruments eventually fail. And it’s important to pass knowledge on, she says, in case the craft outlives the generation of engineers who designed it.

Voyager 2 Gets a Life-Extending Power Boost in Deep Space

(May require free registration to view)

This month, Reuters reported that Taiwanese defense contractor Aerospace Industrial Development Corp (AIDC) is seeking US assistance in designing its next-generation fighter jet.

At a Taiwan-US defense industry forum in Taipei, AIDC chairman Hu Kai-hung said according to Reuters that “when it comes to the development of the next generation fighter, we hope the US supports Taiwan to develop it itself, including the engine, avionics, control systems, environmental controls and so on, which are all an opportunity for Taiwan-US cooperation.”

The Reuters report notes that Taiwan first announced its next-generation fighter program in 2017, mentioning at the time that it would have stealth characteristics, but has yet to provide additional details since then.

The US and other countries have so far not provided advanced military technology to Taiwan, either due to concerns of irking China or fears it could be compromised or exposed to spying in Taiwan’s famously porous military installations.

That has forced Taiwan to develop and produce indigenously weapons such as drones, missiles, warships and submarines.

Reuters points out that Taiwan has two notable indigenous jet aircraft, the Indigenous Defense Fighter (IDF), which first flew in 1989, and the AT-50 Brave Eagle trainer, which was flight-tested in 2020.

Taiwan’s current fighter force consists of F-16s, Mirage 2000s, IDFs, and F-5s, which are unlikely enough to repel a Chinese invasion in their current state and configuration.

A 2012 report by the US-Taiwan Business Council first warned of a looming fighter gap between China and Taiwan, noting that the latter must field a fleet of between 360-400 fighters to defend against invasion versus 700 People’s Liberation Army–Air Force (PLA-AF) fighters stationed directly next to Taiwan.

China’s J-20 fighters fly in formation at an air show. Image: China Daily

Although the report notes that qualitative upgrades to Taiwan’s fighter fleet can enhance combat effectiveness, these cannot replace quantity and physical presence.

The Washington Post corroborates that report in an April 2023 article, stating that barely half of Taiwan’s fighters are fully mission capable. The report says it would take at least a week to move the jets inside hardened shelters, which poses a huge problem if China launches pre-emptive air and missile attacks to destroy those aircraft on the ground.

Military Watch notes in a March 2021 article that Taiwan’s F-16s and IDFs are its most capable fighters, while its Mirage and F-5s are slated for retirement due to performance issues and advanced age, respectively. However, Military Watch mentions that Taiwan’s F-16s and IDF fighters were first delivered in the 1990s, hinting at possible obsolescence without upgrades. 

It says that while the F-35 was considered the natural successor to the F-16, US concerns about Chinese espionage prevented the former’s sale to Taiwan. Taiwan’s F-16s were upgraded in the 2000s to fire the AIM-120C beyond-visual-range (BVR) air-to-air missile with a 100-kilometer range, followed by upgrades such as the AN/APG-83 radar, new mission computers, improved electronic warfare suite, and modern avionics and precision weapons.

Military Watch says Taiwan’s IDF is the lightest fourth-generation twin-engine fighter in service and benefits from integrating indigenous technologies.

Although it notes that the IDF is slower than the F-16, it can use indigenously-developed weapons such as the Sky Sword air-to-air missile and Wan Chien cruise missile, which is superior to anything deployed by F-16s, and benefits from more frequent upgrades at a lower cost compared to Taiwan’s F-16 fleet.

Despite those upgrades, the source notes that Taiwan’s long-term inability to acquire higher-end aircraft from the US puts it at a severe disadvantage to the PLA-AF, which fields heavier, longer-ranged and ever-more sophisticated aircraft such as the J-20 5th generation stealth fighter.

Aside from low fleet strength, low readiness levels and possibly more capable Chinese fighters, Taiwan’s air force also faces a pilot shortage.

For example, the Washington Post notes in a February 2023 article that even if Taiwan manages to increase its F-16 fleet to 200 aircraft by 2026, its low rate of pilot training – it added only 21 F-16 pilots from 2011 to 2019 – falls far short of the 100 pilots needed in three years to fly its growing fleet.  

The Washington Post mentions that China’s intensified air operations around Taiwan have exacerbated Taiwan’s pilot shortage, as senior F-16 pilots have to be pulled from training duties to intercept ever-intensifying Chinese air incursions.

It also notes that Taiwan has had to lower entry standards for prospective pilots, pay bonuses to retain F-16 pilots nearing retirement, recruit officers from other military branches for pilot training and allow pilots trained on other fighter jets to fly F-16s.

Taiwan regularly scrambles its US-made F-16 fighter jets like these to intercept planes from the mainland in its airspace. Photo: AFP / Sam Yeh

Yet bolstering Taiwan’s fighter fleet strength may not be the answer to the self-governing island’s increasingly precarious security situation.

Matthew Revels mentions in an April 2023 article for the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs that while Taiwan’s public statements emphasize an asymmetric defense, its continued acquisition of high-end prestige assets like fighter jets tell the opposite.

Revel mentions that Taiwan will likely attempt to contest China’s command of the air by pitting its outnumbered fighters against the latter’s numerically and qualitatively superior aircraft, a likely losing strategy.

He says that Taiwan also downplays how vulnerable its aircraft on the ground are to saturation air and missile attacks. In an attack, China will likely prioritize destroying Taiwan’s fighter force and runways, seeing these assets as the former’s air defense centers of gravity.

Instead of spending big on fighter jets, Revel says that Taiwan should abandon its purchases of crewed fighter jets in favor of a denial strategy focused on a robotized air force supported by numerous short-range air defense (SHORAD) systems.

Revel notes that a robotized air force built around cheap, expendable loitering munitions and drone swarms can deny the PLA-AF’s air superiority on possible landing sites, threaten troopships and logistics transports and provide a force multiplier more capable than any crewed aircraft.

He also says that numerous SHORAD systems with sufficient stockpiles can attrite PLA-AF aircraft forced to fly at lower altitudes to conduct close air support (CAS) missions for landing troops.

Source

Mamang Vaiphei hid in the jungle for three nights after a mob attacked his village in Manipur, the remote Indian state where ethnic violence has reportedly killed at least 54 people.

About 23,000 people have fled the unrest that erupted last week in the hilly north-east state bordering Myanmar.

The latest clashes erupted between the majority Meitei people, who are mostly Hindu and live in and around the state capital, Imphal, and the mainly Christian Kuki tribe of the hills.

“The Meitei people first burned down 26 or 27 houses,” said Mamang, a father of five who is now sleeping out in the open in an army camp with about 900 others bringing similar horror stories.

“Then they came again and finished all 92 houses [in the village], ransacked the church, the school and whatever was left,” the 54-year-old said, surrounded by exhausted and traumatised men, women and children.

There have long been tensions in the far-flung states of north-east India sandwiched between Bangladesh, China and Myanmar.

The spark for the latest violence was a protest about plans to give the Meitei “scheduled tribe” status, in a form of affirmative action, guaranteeing them quotas of government jobs and college admissions.

Violence erupted in Imphal and elsewhere with protesters setting fire to vehicles and buildings and, according to villagers, Meitei mobs armed with guns and petrol cans then attacking Kuki settlements in the hills.

The military has deployed thousands of troops, issued “shoot-at-sight” orders in “extreme cases”, imposed curfews and cut the internet.

Mamang, spending his fifth night homeless on Sunday, is one of around 23,000 people that the military says it has brought to safety.

He said that on 4 May he fled his village of Kamuching, which had a population of more than 500 people before the unrest, when a large crowd starting attacking.

“Everything was on fire ... We ran away, all of us ran to the jungle and we try to survive,” he said.

Mostly people only managed to grab a small bag with a few personal belongings, an extra pair of clothes or their smartphones. Internet access has been shut down in the state.

“Every one of us here, we’re nervous, we’re afraid of death,” said Alun Vaiphei, 50, a Kuki tribal villager from Gotangkot.

“To save our lives, we contacted Assam Rifles, so that they rescued us from our place of hiding,” he said.

In and around Imphal on Sunday, life had come to a standstill, with businesses shut and deserted roads still littered with charred cars.

The violence has eased but Brig Sandeep Kapoor from the Indian army said on Sunday they still received 50 to 60 calls for help.

His teams had rescued about 2,000 people – Kukis and some Meitis – in the last 48 hours, he said.

The army said that bringing people to safety was not easy given the polarisation and complete breakdown of dialogue between the communities.

“We can’t move them in the open as there are chances that if members of the other community see them, when we cross their villages along the highway, they may get aggressive,” said another Indian army officer.

A few men, infants, older women and young girls were huddled inside three military trucks, including Leh Haokip, 35, from Gotangkot village.

He told AFP he saw the “looting of my home, the stealing of my cattle and the fire” from a distance.

“There was no police or state help and now we don’t know what to do or where to go,” he said.

Source

The United States Food and Drug Administration has authorized gene-edited pigs entrance into the food chain for human consumption—as German-style sausages.

Gene-editing can make changes in an organism’s DNA that could occur in nature or through selective breeding but would take much longer without a tool like CRISPR.

The FDA authorization is investigational, and limited to these particular pigs, but shows that gene-editing livestock to quickly produce desirable traits for improved food production is a viable strategy for helping feed the planet’s growing population.

“It’s important for a university to set the precedent by working with federal regulators to get these animals introduced into the food supply,” says Jon Oatley, a professor in the School of Molecular Biosciences in Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “If we don’t go through that process, all of the research we’re doing is for naught because it will never make it out into the public.”

Oatley uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to improve genetic traits in livestock and is working toward an FDA approval for a line of gene-edited pigs. He undertook the investigational food use authorization process for five gene-edited pigs to demonstrate that food made from the animals is safe to eat and that it is possible for an academic institution to achieve this type of FDA authorization.

The two-year-old pigs were processed at the university’s Meat Lab, and the US Department of Agriculture inspected the meat, as it does with all meat products. Working with the Meat Lab, meat scientist Blake Foraker made some of the pork into sausages, which will be used in catering services that raise travel funds for the student members of the university’s Meat Judging team.

The pigs were originally gene-edited in a way that would enable researchers to use them to sire offspring with traits from another male pig.

Known as surrogate sires, this technology first gene-edits male animals to be sterile by knocking out a gene called NANOS2 that is specific to male fertility. These animals can then be implanted with another male’s stem cells that create sperm with that male’s desired traits to be passed on to the next generation.

Essentially a high-tech form of selective breeding, surrogate sire technology can greatly expand dissemination of valuable genetics in livestock. It has the potential to not just improve meat quality but also the health and resilience of livestock in the face of changing environmental conditions, a critical goal for increasing protein sources in developing nations.

The surrogate sires’ progeny, which are themselves not gene-edited, have not yet been reviewed by the FDA for possible inclusion in the food chain. Securing the investigational approval for these five pigs required clearing a number of hurdles. The FDA waives some fees for nonprofits like universities, but by the time the process was completed, Oatley’s team had spent two years and approximately $200,000 collecting data for this authorization.

“The original intent in making these animals was to try to improve the way that we feed people,” he says. “And we can’t do that unless we can work with the FDA system to get these animals actually into the food chain.”

Only one other organization, a company by the name of Acceligen, has had a gene-edited animal receive the FDA ok to enter the food supply. In 2020, the FDA made a low-risk determination for products made from “Slick-Haired Cattle,” which are gene-edited to have coats that increase the animals’ resilience to higher temperatures.

Other companies have had genetically modified animals approved by the FDA, but the approach was transgenic which is a different technology involving inserting DNA from outside species into the genome of an organism. Gene-editing is a modern, cutting-edge technology that works only within a species’ DNA and can make changes that could come about naturally or through traditional breeding practices.

The public often holds many misconceptions about gene-editing, Oatley says. He hopes this example will help dispel misinformation and improve perceptions of this technology.

“There’s a trust that comes with university-based research,” he says. “We just want to make sure the research is valid, and the animals we produce are healthy.

Source

The number of people filing into the red-brick industrial-zone warehouse on some days now exceeds the worst periods of the pandemic economic crisis and in April it had the second highest monthly traffic since it opened in 1982, according to David Andre, the director.

His organization, like food banks across the country, has been flooded with requests for help since food-stamp recipients were hit with a double blow: the expiration of a temporary boost in benefits put in place during the pandemic and onerous grocery prices, which are running 24% above pre-COVID levels.

“It’s a hunger cliff — inflation and ending these emergency allotments,” Andre said. “People are really crashing.”

About 32 million Americans had their monthly food stamp benefits cut at the end of February, on average by about $90 per person — though some households experienced much deeper reductions.

The end of the emergency allotment for food stamps largely completes the unwinding of a series of coronavirus relief measures that staved off a wave of destitution during the crisis and even brought child poverty rates down to a 20-year low. Many more Americans now are going hungry than at the peak of the pandemic aid. Some 24.6 million adults didn’t have enough to eat in early April versus 16.7 million the same month two years ago, the Census Bureau estimates.

And Republicans are seeking new restrictions on food aid and cuts to safety-net programs as a price for raising the debt ceiling.

At the same time, food prices have soared more than any other major category of consumer costs except energy since the start of the pandemic, disproportionately burdening poor Americans who devote a larger share of their resources to such essential expenses. Since February 2020, the last month before the pandemic lockdown, grocery prices have surged half again as much as the 16% increase in overall consumer prices.

In the first quarter alone, global foodmaker Nestlé SA reported raising prices in North America 12.4% compared to last year. Unilever Plc raised prices 13.4% globally in its food division.

Melissa Lopes, a disabled 40-year-old in Boston with a kidney transplant and two children at home, has started going to the Red Cross food pantry once, sometimes twice a week since her benefits were cut. Yet she’s rationing chicken and whatever other meat she gets against adolescent appetites.

“They’re like ‘Mama, I want two pieces, I want three,’” Lopes said. “They’re boys. They’re big. They want more. They used to get seconds or more.”

Concerns are rising of a recession on the horizon, adding to the peril for households on edge. Morgan Stanley economists said the expiration of the pandemic food stamp benefit is already weighing on economic growth and project an annualized $50 billion hit to disposable income.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as food stamps are formally known, provides low-income families and individuals with benefits loaded onto a card that can be used to buy food and non-alcoholic beverages but not other items. The benefits account for about 12% of US food and beverage sales, making it an important source of revenue for supermarkets such as Kroger Co. and supercenters such as Walmart Inc. A Moody’s analysis forecasts supermarkets will more than make up for the loss of sales through price increases and consumers diverting spending from other retailers.

National figures for food banks aren’t yet available. But calls to local 211 community service help lines seeking referrals to food pantries jumped 9.8% March 1 through April 16 compared to the two months before the benefits reduction in affected states, according to an analysis by Washington University in St. Louis’s Health Communication Research Laboratory.

The Haymarket Regional Food Pantry in Gainesville, Virginia, an outer Washington suburb, added 55 new weekly intake appointments in April after a 90% increase in families seeking food. The Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, which supplies more than 1,100 local pantries around the rural Susquehanna Valley, faced 10% more demand in March. At Southern Colorado’s Care and Share Food Bank, which distributes to soup kitchens, pantries and emergency shelters across 29 mostly rural counties, requests for aid rose 20%.

Even with help from a local food pantry, Niccole Cervanyk, a 45-year-old discount-store manager and single mother in Pueblo, Colorado, said she has had to curtail snacks she used to provide her children for after-school sports practices and scrimp on dinner.

“You have to cut the proportions of food down,” said Cervanyk, whose food stamp benefits dropped $500 a month. “Having three teenage kids, that’s not good. They’re still hungry.”

Nathan Springer, a retired army colonel who is president and chief executive officer of the Colorado Springs-based Care and Share Food Bank, said his organization is seeing more requests for groceries from military families, teachers, nurses and even dual-income couples following the cut in assistance.

“We’ve seen young full-time employees who are for the first time facing hard decisions: Are we going to buy food or pay our utility bills?” Springer said.

The expiration of the SNAP pandemic aid affected residents of 32 states and Washington, D.C. The added benefits already had stopped in 18 states that acted on their own to drop COVID emergency declarations.

Still, even without the extra pandemic assistance, SNAP beneficiaries receive more food aid than they would have before the COVID outbreak, said Craig Gundersen, a Baylor University economics professor who studies food assistance programs and poverty.

The Biden administration permanently raised the average SNAP benefit by 27% in October 2021, the first increase beyond adjustments for inflation in more than 45 years, following a review of benefit levels Congress ordered in the 2018 Farm Bill.

The extra pandemic allotment also was a blunt tool designed for a temporary crisis that risked distorting work incentives if continued indefinitely, Gundersen said. Unlike normal SNAP benefits, they were structured in such as a way that in some cases recipients who earned extra money could lose more in benefits.

Overall, the average SNAP benefit per person climbed from $121 a month just before the pandemic to $256 in January, shortly before the emergency allotment ended.

Yet decades-high rates of food, energy and rent inflation place an extraordinary burden on many SNAP beneficiaries, Gundersen said. In most cases, food stamps only cover a portion of grocery costs. And families already on the financial edge may have depended on the extra food aid for years.

“We’re in for a big adjustment period these next months,” said Springer, the Colorado food bank director. For the families that his food pantries help feed, “a few hundred dollars less a month is a lot.”

Heather Thomas, a 48-year-old disabled mother of four in Centreville, Virginia, married to an unemployed Air Force veteran, said she suddenly lost almost $600 a month in benefits, unsettling her family. Her 13-year-old son grew moody, less attentive at school and started getting headaches.

“It’s because he was not eating like he was before,” she said, “because he was trying to not eat as much to stretch the benefits for his siblings.”

Source

Ramirez, 33, and his wife Angelica Castro-Calle really want a new, small SUV with a little space for camping and paddleboarding gear. But despite good jobs in finance and business contracting, the couple’s monthly loan payment would run around $700 for the $35,000 models they are looking at, before dealer markups.

So they plan to patch up the Nissan, which is paid off. He blames the manufacturers and dealers for charging so much for new cars.

“They’re going to price out a certain segment of the market and of the demographic,” Ramirez said. “But that’s something they’re probably okay with.”

Even as inflation is easing and global chip supply shortages are beginning to resolve, more Americans are being priced out of the nation’s new car market, industry and government data suggests. Spending on new cars by the lowest 20 percent of earners dropped to its lowest level in 11 years. Meanwhile, spending on new cars by the top 20 percent reached its highest level on record, going back to 1984, according to the most recent data from the 2021 Consumer Expenditure Survey, not adjusted for inflation.

“New vehicles were maybe never an everyman product in America,” Charles Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox Automotive, said at an automotive conference earlier this year. “We like to believe that they were, but they probably haven’t been for a long time. But certainly they are even less so today.”

The problems pushing new cars out of reach are twofold. On the demand side, rising interest rates have made car loans far more costly — the average monthly payment reached $686 in mid-2022, according to data from Edmunds. Last month, it hit $730.

But even if shoppers can snag a decent interest rate, the supply of cars available for purchase has been trending far more expensive, in part because manufacturers have been funneling resources into souped-up versions of pricey models and cutting back on cheaper options.

In late April, General Motors announced it would scrap production of its top-selling electric vehicle, the Chevy Bolt, wiping out one of the most affordable EVs in the United States by the end of the year. That continues a longtime trend. In 2017, for example, there were 11 models available on the U.S. market for less than $20,000, according to Cox data. By the end of 2022, there were four. Then, by March 2023, only 2.

The end result is a widening gap between those who can afford new cars and those who can’t. The average price of a new car in the United States hit $48,008 in March, up 30 percent from March 2020, according to Kelley Blue Book.

Automakers are selling fewer new vehicles in the United States than they did before the pandemic — about 13.9 million last year, versus 17 million in 2019. But their 2022 revenue were still $15 billion higher than in 2019, because the mix they are selling is more expensive, according to Cox Automotive.

Which electric vehicle is right for you? Check out our guide.

A big reason auto manufacturers have leaned heavily into pricier vehicles is the global chip shortage. The dearth of the tiny electronic components, caused by pandemic-related gyrations in supply and demand, forced automakers to slash output, sending prices for new and used vehicles up. The scarcity forced carmakers to ration their components, which they did by reserving them for their most profitable, high-end vehicles.

Automakers have also faced steeper production costs, thanks to factory closures in China during the pandemic and ongoing labor shortages. Some of those troubles are easing. But manufacturers have started holding more parts in inventory to guard against future shortages, a strategy that raises their costs, said Ambrose Conroy, an automotive expert at the consultancy Seraph.

Meanwhile, the auto industry is investing big money to overhaul factories to produce electric vehicles, a major expense that also contributes to rising prices, Conroy added.

Source

• House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, threatened enforcement action against Google that could include holding the company in contempt of Congress for failing to produce documents the committee subpoenaed.

• Jordan issued subpoenas to the CEOs of Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft in February.

• The subpoenas demanded that the companies hand over communication with the U.S. government to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, threatened enforcement action against Google that could include holding the company in contempt of Congress for failing to produce documents the committee subpoenaed to learn about tech company communications with the Biden administration.

In a letter to a lawyer for Google shared exclusively with CNBC, Jordan called the company’s compliance so far “insufficient” and demanded it hand over more information. If the company fails to comply fully by its new May 22 deadline, Jordan warned, “the Committee may be forced to consider the use of one or more enforcement mechanisms.”

Jordan issued subpoenas to the CEOs of Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft in February, demanding they hand over communication with the U.S. government to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.” Jordan requested the companies comply by March 23. He made the request after initially asking the companies to hand over the information voluntarily, but said they had not sufficiently complied.

While several other tech giants were subpoenaed in connection with the committee’s investigation, the other companies have so far appeared more responsive than Google to the demands, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Congress can hold individuals in contempt for refusing to provide information requested by a committee. Doing so requires a committee vote and then a floor vote, with a simple majority. Republicans currently hold the majority in the House 222-213.

Criminal contempt cases can be referred to the Justice Department, or Congress could seek a civil judgement from a federal court to try to enforce the subpoena, according to a 2017 paper from the Congressional Research Service.

The committee may also seek to take other actions against Google, like deposing the company’s management or trying to restrict federal dollars from going to Google in future legislation.

In the letter, Jordan laid out several ways Alphabet has failed to adequately comply with the committee’s demands.

He said that Alphabet “has frustrated the Committee’s review of the responsive material by unilaterally redacting key information necessary to understand the context and content of the material.”

Alphabet didn’t assert that those redactions included privileged information, according to Jordan, and the committee requires unredacted documents to be handed over.

The company has recently placed some documents in a “reading room,” Jordan said, “in a form and manner that prevents and frustrates the Committee’s understanding and use of those documents and fails to comply with the terms of the subpoena without the Committee’s consent.”

He wrote that Alphabet had produced 4,000 pages of documents in response to the subpoena. But those documents have yet to include an “appreciable volume” of several types of communications the committee assumes Google would have. Those include communications with other social media platforms about content moderation, documents from Alphabet’s other subsidiary companies, communications over messaging services other than email and communications between employees about any contact with the executive branch of the U.S. government.

“The release of the Twitter Files has shown just how extensively the Executive Branch communicated and coordinated with technology companies regarding content moderation,” Jordan wrote, referring to reports on internal documents that Twitter owner Elon Musk made available to a hand-selected group of journalists when he took over the company. “We are skeptical that Alphabet’s interactions with the federal government where pressure was applied were any less concerning than those of Twitter.”

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the company has been “producing relevant documents in response to the committee’s requests” since December and “will continue to work constructively with them.”

Source

Humans are inherently lazy – we can’t help it, it’s just that we evolved to conserve our energy. But one consequence is that we tend to revert to tried-and-tested thinking patterns. They’re low effort and usually reliable, but unfortunately, they also tend to be boring and predictable.

One way to jolt your brain out of such ruts is to mix up your routine. So, let’s say you’re used to brainstorming ideas on your keyboard at your desk in the afternoon. Instead, get out of the office early in the morning, go up to the top floor, or into the garden, or up a hill or by a river – somewhere that feels completely different – and take a voice memo or pencil and paper, and let your ideas flow.

Other tips to try include: reminding yourself of the creative challenge just before you go to bed at night and then coming back to it the next day (this will allow the problem to incubate and your unconscious processes to get to work); going for a brisk walk; brainstorming with someone who has a completely different background and perspective than you do; or try exploiting the creative power of relaxation – light some candles, run a bubble bath, close your eyes and see what your brain comes up with (just don’t fall asleep).

Source

The finding comes at a time when SNAP and similar benefits may decrease because of the expected end of the federal Public Health Emergency for COVID-19.

The survey study, published as a research letter in JAMA Pediatrics, compared rates of food insecurity—defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy life—20 years apart

Using data that follows the same families over time, lead author and U-M researcher Noura Insolera found that the rate of families reporting chronic food insecurity between 2015 and 2019 more than doubled compared to families surveyed in 1999 to 2003.

"There are varying levels of being food insecure. These range from people being anxious about not having enough food, to the most severe, such as skipping meals or having their children skip meals, actually going without food," said Insolera, a research investigator in the Survey Research Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research.

"It's not just that there are more instances of having one wave of families saying they didn't have enough to eat, but that it actually persists wave after wave."

Previous research has shown that children who face food insecurity were more likely to have anxiety, depression, poorer diet quality, higher rates of diabetes and obesity, and lower academic performance, Insolera said. Conversely, kids who had access to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and WIC (Women, Children & Infants) benefits were four times more likely to be food secure as adults compared to kids who had no access to those benefits.

In the study, Insolera looked at families who were surveyed in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal study that follows the same families over time. She drew data from three waves of surveys that families completed from 1999 to 2003, then again from 2015 to 2019.

Nearly half of the 12.1% of families that ever reported food insecurity from 1999 to 2003 experienced at least one additional wave of food insecurity. From 2015 to 2019, 4.5% of all families reported chronic food insecurity (reports of food insecurity in all three waves). This doubles the rate of families who reported chronic food insecurity in the previous time period. At that time, 2.1% of families reported food insecurity over all three waves.

More low-income families with children reported chronic food insecurity in 2015 to 2019 compared to the previous time period as well. Nearly 11% of low-income families with children reported chronic food insecurity from 2015 to 2019 compared to 4.5% of all families and 4.8% of families with children during the same time period. Between 1999 and 2003, 8.8% of low-income families with children reported chronic food insecurity, while 2.1% of all families and 3.7% of all families with children reported the same.

"What I define as chronic food insecurity is over that four-year period, every time we ask, they are reporting to us that they are food insecure," Insolera said. "It was previously thought that this is sort of a fleeting thing, an acute problem: Someone loses a job and at some point, they experience food insecurity. But this is something that families are experiencing over and over again in a persistent way."

Being able to capture a single family's experience of poverty and food insecurity is a strength of the PSID, according to Insolera, while other similar, larger studies are helpful in giving a national estimate of food insecurity in a single snapshot.

"This is hopefully the beginning of our ability to look deeper and see what mechanisms are behind this chronic food insecurity," Insolera said. "We can look over time at families in general, and see that they are doing worse—so why don't we help families so they can do better in the future?"

Source

to a new American Heart Association scientific statement published today in the Association's flagship, peer-reviewed journal Circulation.

While often considered as a single race and ethnic group for the purposes of scientific research and collecting health data, the differences in cardiovascular risk found among Asian Americans indicate data for individual subgroups is needed to better understand and manage health risks among Asian Americans. Acculturation level, which captures the degree to which people within the different subgroups have adopted some aspects of U.S. culture including lifestyle and diet or maintained the lifestyle linked to their ancestry, may also play a role.

These subgroups are broadly categorized by the geographic region of Asian descent and include South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal or Bhutan); East Asia (Japan, China or Korea); Southeast Asia (Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hmong); and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (Hawaii, Guam, Samoa or other Pacific islands).

It's estimated that Asian Americans make up 7.2% of the United States population and are the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S., according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data from 2010-2019. They may be recent immigrants or come from families who have lived in the United States for multiple generations.

"This scientific statement highlights the lack of subgroup data among Asian Americans," said Tak W. Kwan, M.D., FAHA, chair of the scientific statement writing committee, who is chief of cardiology at Lenox Health Greenwich Village and a clinical professor of medicine at Northwell Health, both in New York City. "Examining Asian subgroups separately is crucial to better understand the distinctions among them, how these differences translate into their risk of Type 2 diabetes and atherosclerotic disease, and how health care professionals may provide care and support in a culturally appropriate manner."

The new scientific statement is a follow-up to a 2010 American Heart Association Science Advisory call to action to seek data on the health disparities among Asian American subgroups, and a 2018 scientific statement addressing cardiovascular disease risk in South Asians (Asian Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Nepali or Bhutanese).

Varied rates for cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes

Together, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes are the leading causes of death and disease in Asian American adults. Data on the rates of coronary artery disease (plaque build-up in coronary arteries feeding the heart muscle) among Asian Americans overall indicate a prevalence of 8% in men and about 3% in women. However, data for Asian American subgroups indicate wide variations in prevalence:

•     The highest rate of coronary artery disease was among the Asian Indian American subgroup, with 13% for men and 4.4% for women.

•     Among Filipino Americans, the rate was about 9% in men and approximately 4% in women.

•     Among Chinese Americans, the rate was more than 6% for men and over 2% for women.

•     Among Japanese Americans, the rate was nearly 7% for men and about 3% for women.

•     Among Korean Americans, the rate was about 6% in men and nearly 2% in women.

•     Among Vietnamese Americans, almost 6% of men and nearly 4% of women had coronary artery disease.

Hypertension is a leading risk factor for heart disease among Asian subgroups, and the data indicate those born outside of the U.S. had a higher prevalence of high blood pressure. Data from a study in New York found the prevalence of self-reported hypertension was 22.2%-27.1% among non-U.S. born Asian adults, mean age of 49.5 years. The highest prevalence of 27.1% was among South Asian immigrants—Asian Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Nepali or Bhutanese—and the lowest prevalence of 22.2% was among Chinese immigrants.

Stroke risk, particularly the risk of bleeding strokes, is also higher in Asian American adults in comparison to non-Hispanic whites in the U.S., and the strokes tend to be more severe and disabling. The increased risk of stroke is thought to be due to the higher incidence of hypertension. However, stroke rates vary greatly by subgroup, with the highest risk found among Filipino and Vietnamese men, and Japanese and Vietnamese women.

Estimates of Type 2 diabetes among Asian American adults and subgroups have primarily been derived from health system data, a small number of group comparison studies, and a few state and national surveillance surveys. The existing data suggest a general pattern of varied prevalence and risk of Type 2 diabetes among Asian American subgroups. A study including Asian Americans in the state of California reported the following subgroup data on Type 2 diabetes prevalence:

•     Overall, Asian American adults had higher rates of Type 2 diabetes (range of 15.6%-34.5%) compared to non-Hispanic white adults (12.8%).

•     Among Chinese Americans, the rate was 15.8%.

•     Among Korean and Japanese Americans, rates were similar at about 18%.

•     Among Americans with Filipino ancestry, the rate was 31.9%.

Lifestyle contributors to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes risk

Diet. The statement divides Asian cuisines into three main regions: Southeastern Asian Diet, Southwestern Asian Diet and Northeastern Asian Diet. A chart details the dietary characteristics that may contribute to the increased risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes and offers suggestions to modify ingredients and/or cooking methods that may help to lower these risks. For example, coconut milk is a frequent ingredient in dishes in the Southeast Asian diet, resulting in a high intake of saturated fats; therefore, substituting low-fat coconut milk may be helpful. In other regions, the cultural foods are preserved or deep fried, which often means high levels of sodium and/or fat. White rice is a common staple in several Asian diets and may contribute to low fiber intake, therefore brown rice is a suggested option. Across Asia, foods are often cooked with palm or coconut oils, which are high in saturated fats, so non-tropical oils, such as olive, canola or other vegetable oils, are substitutions to consider.

Tobacco use. Tobacco use is a major modifiable risk factor for heart disease, and rates of tobacco smoking differ by Asian subgroup and acculturation level. For example, Filipino American adults have higher prevalence of tobacco use and obesity associated with higher acculturation level, but this is not the case with other Asian subgroups. There is limited data on which smoking cessation strategies may be most successful for specific Asian subgroups. Family characteristics, social networks and community resources are important considerations when developing culturally relevant smoking prevention and cessation programs.

Physical activity. Increasing the frequency of and time spent participating in moderate to vigorous physical activity may decrease the risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, however, there is limited information about the usual levels or types of physical activity by Asian subgroups. Asian Americans who are less acculturated tend to engage in lower levels of moderate to vigorous physical activity. Interventions aimed at increasing physical activity should include ways to reach non-English speaking Asian immigrants and recent immigrants.

Sleep. Adequate sleep is now recognized as an integral factor in cardiovascular health as part of the Association's Life's Essential 8, a list of health behaviors and health factors that support optimal cardiovascular health. Although there is limited information on sleep patterns among Asian Americans, the available research highlights the stress of adapting to a new culture as a contributor to sleep disturbance. Intervention programs aimed at decreasing the stress of acculturation for recent immigrants has the potential to decrease the impact of poor sleep.

Improving patient care

Even with the limited data available, some important differences among Asian American subgroups are clear:

• Existing cardiovascular disease risk calculators (which are based on data validated in non-Hispanic Black adults and non-Hispanic white adults and less extensively studied in Asian Americans) may underestimate the risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease in South Asian adults, those with lower socioeconomic status or those with chronic inflammatory diseases (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, HIV/AIDS). These tools may also overestimate the CVD risk among East Asians, those with higher socioeconomic status or those who are already participating in preventive health care services

• Nutritional counseling and education may be improved with an understanding of acculturation by Asian American subgroups, as well as cultural and dietary differences among the subgroups. Research to detail the different diets of each subgroup may lead to more tailored and meaningful suggestions for food choices and heart-healthy menu planning.

Filling the information and research gaps

The statement outlines areas to consider for strengthening the data about Asian American adults:

• Include disaggregated Asian American subgroups in clinical trials and government-sponsored studies.

• Standardize ways of collecting ethnic and subgroup data for Asian Americans for national health systems, surveys and registries. National surveillance surveys should also consider oversampling Asian Americans to increase representation for the various subgroups.

• Research that analyzes changes over time in body mass index (BMI), blood pressure and blood lipids is an important area for future investigation of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular risk prediction for Asian Americans. Most current data examine BMI cross-sectionally, or at a single point in time, rather than measuring long-term change patterns.

• There is little data about medication interventions for Asian American adults with Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Because of the high prevalence of Type 2 diabetes among Asian Americans, studies that assess medication efficacy and safety in Asian American subgroups are needed.

• In addition, there is limited research about complementary and alternative treatments that may be more common in some Asian subgroups, such as traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, yoga, reflexology, meditation or herbal medicines.

• Future research on cardiovascular risk needs to include enough Asian American subgroups and multigenerational participants to generate reliable findings for these populations.

"All of us—health care professionals, policymakers, community leaders and patients—must advocate for more health research funding for Asian Americans and demand inclusion of Asian American subgroup information in clinical trials and government-sponsored research," said Kwan.

"Having a platform to share and disseminate data on Asian Americans for the scientific and research community would also be an asset for the health care professionals who care for this population."

This scientific statement was prepared by the volunteer writing group on behalf of the American Heart Association's Council on Epidemiology and Prevention; the Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health; the Council on Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology; the Council on Clinical Cardiology; the Council on Cardiovascular and Stroke Nursing; and the Council on Genomic and Precision Medicine.

Co-authors are Vice Chair Latha Palaniappan, M.D., M.S.; Sally S. Wong, Ph.D., R.D., C.D.N., FAHA; Yuling Hong, M.D., Ph.D., FAHA; Alka Kanaya, M.D., FAHA; Sadiya S. Khan, M.D., M.Sc., FAHA; Laura L. Hayman, Ph.D., R.N., FAHA; Svati H. Shah, M.D., M.H.S., FAHA; Francine K. Welty, M.D., FAHA; Prakash C. Deedwania, M.D., FAHA; and Asma Khaliq, M.D.

Source

NEW YORK – While Chinese factories have installed 6,000 private 5G broadband networks to support AI applications in manufacturing, only a handful of large US manufacturers have done or are planning to do so.

General Motors, which sold more cars in China than in the US last year, was an early adopter, and machinery giant John Deere expects to have a 5G network operating sometime late in 2023. But there is no indication of widespread adoption as in China.

A key obstacle to 5G adoption in the United States is a cumbersome regulatory framework that makes it hard for private networks to gain access to wireless spectrum. “Spectrum supply is also a serious problem and part of why we haven’t seen more commitment to onshore, non-consumer 5G,” a US official told Asia Times on background.

C-Band, a mid-spectrum range of cellular broadband frequencies, would support private 5G networks well, but its deployment has been blocked by interagency wrangling. The Federal Aviation Administration claimed that C-Band might interfere with the avionics of commercial aircraft, a position disputed by wireless providers, who point out that C-Band is widely used in other countries and never has been associated with an airplane accident.

The US Defense Department meanwhile objected to commercializing another part of the wireless spectrum in the 3.1 to 3.45 Gigahertz range, claiming that it would cost $120 billion to relocate military equipment using those bands.

Because of these obstacles, one US official said, “It might well be more than five years before any spectrum designated for commercialization is brought to market, and probably another year before there’s significant service available.”

US industry has been slow to leverage the advantages of 5G. Image: Ericsson

There are a few published examples of private broadband networks installed at US manufacturing facilities, but they appear well behind China’s offerings. General Motors was the first to announce a private 5G network in 2022, for its Factory Zero plant in Hamtramck, Michigan.

But “GM, however, isn’t close to going completely wireless, a GM spokesman said in April. GM has been developing the system in partnership with Verizon for three years. The spokesman added that “the technology remains relatively new after decades of wired networks across the company’s operations.”

Ford announced its first industrial 5G network in partnership with AT&T in October 2021. And Mercedes’ Sindelfingen plant uses 5G/AI technology to detect manufacturing failures of bladed disks for jet engine turbines.

Huawei, by contrast, publicized its first fully-automated plant in August 2022.

Dow Chemical worked with Nokia and Microsoft to install a private 4G LTE network – a generation behind 5G – at its Freeport site, providing improved communications among 40 plants. LTE’s slow response time and limited data capacity can’t support Big Data/AI applications, which require the low latency and high capacity of 5G.

MdX, a manufacturing incubator supported by the Department of Defense, built an experimental 5G network at its test facility in Chicago in 2022 with support from the wireless infrastructure company Betacom.

“The goal is to test both approaches to 5G, and to allow manufacturing companies to come in and experiment with them, which is important because different 5G frequencies can perform differently on factory floors depending on local physical factors,” Networkworld reported last year.

A recent Nokia survey of 5G adopters showed modest results from the technology. Half of the companies surveyed showed a cost reduction of 6% or more from their 5G investment.

Manufacturing companies, according to an MdX spokesman, are still using outdated computer hardware that doesn’t support 5G. Cisco and Hewlett Packard have begun selling private 5G equipment, along with established telecom infrastructure providers Nokia and Ericsson.

But the hardware companies are still working the bugs out of their products, according to one industry expert. “They sent in 40 engineers who trip over each other and take forever to get anything done,” the expert said.

Two American football stadiums are installing private 5G networks, however.

Low latency and high capacity allow 5G networks to enhance factory automation. High-speed cameras upload thousands of pictures per minute to the Cloud, where AI algorithms identify defective parts, malfunctioning equipment or other manufacturing snags.

Huawei’s first fully automated factory began operations in August 2022 for the appliance manufacturer Midea. The suite of AI applications made possible by 5G doubled the factory’s shipping rate, Huawei claims.

5G-enabled lifts load containers from cargo ships with remotely controlled quay cranes. Photo: Huawei

The 6,000 networks that Huawei says already are installed haven’t reached that level of productivity by any means. Chinese manufacturers are adopting the technology because the government strongly encourages it, a Huawei representative said. But the adoption of this technology has already produced some impressive results.

In April, the top Chinese auto manufacturer BYD unveiled a compact electric vehicle with an $11,300 sticker price, well within the range of consumers in China and large parts of the Global South.

5G networks also multiply the productivity of ports and mines. Mining operations routinely damage communication cables, a problem solved by broadband.

5G broadband can link thousands of cameras in a coal mine, sending thousands of images per second to the Cloud, where AI algorithms identify potential problems before they cause damage, according to Huawei Technologies, the world’s largest provider of 5G hardware and applications.

Operators on the surface control giant tunneling machines and conveyor belts with a minimum of personnel underground.

At China’s Tianjin Port, a 5G/AI system has reduced the unloading time for a large container ship to 45 minutes from the previous eight hours. Automated cranes read bar codes on containers and place them rapidly onto autonomous trucks that bring them to automated warehouses.

Source

When old dogs with cognitive difficulties were monitored in sleep clinics, scientists found they experienced many of the same disruptions as people with Alzheimer's disease.

Our furry friends are also plagued by shallow, interrupted sleep in old age.

When researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and colleagues from Argentina and Hungary recorded the brain waves of 28 senior dogs during a two-hour nap, they noticed some intriguing sleep cycle activity.

Similar to people with Alzheimer's, male and female dogs with marked cognitive issues napped less and less deeply than those who did not show cognitive decline.

Woofus, a participant in the sleep study. (John Joyner/NC State)

Specifically, dogs with signs of dementia showed stronger beta wave activity while napping, which is tied to wakefulness.

NCSU veterinary neurologist Alejandra Mondino says this means that the dogs' brains aren't really sleeping – or, at least, not entirely.

What's more, dogs with signs of dementia seemed to experience a significant loss in slow-wave sleep.

"In people, slow brain oscillations are characteristic of SWS and linked to the activity of the so-called glymphatic system, a transport system that removes protein waste products from the cerebrospinal fluid," explains veterinary neurologist Natasha Olby from NCSU.

"The reduction in slow oscillations in people with Alzheimer's, and the associated reduced removal of these toxins, has been implicated in their poorer memory consolidation during deep sleep."

Perhaps the same goes for our pets. More research is needed to confirm that hunch, but gathering evidence suggests dogs may be a good model for research on Alzheimer's disease.

In 2002, scientists noticed that the daily sleep-wake pattern of a dog was "dramatically altered" in senior canines. Yet past studies like this one relied on surgically implanting electrodes into a dog's brain.

The current experiment established a non-invasive and ethical alternative, all while using the gold standard technique for sleep evaluation in humans.

This requires attaching an electroencephalogram (EEG) to a dog's head while it naps. The instrument then records brain waves from outside the skull.

Ultimately, the dogs that napped longer were also the ones that problem-solved better in a detour task. This task involved a barrier in front of a path to a goodie. Dogs were scored on how well they got around the barricade.

The findings confirm what dog owners have been noticing for years: Older pets with cognitive decline tend to suffer more from sleep difficulties and daytime sleepiness.

It could be that these sleep disturbances are triggering cognitive decline, but it could also be true that the cognitive decline is causing the sleep disturbances. In all probability, researchers suspect it's a bit of both.

Researchers now plan to monitor this vicious cycle in younger dogs as they age. That way, they can search for early markers of cognitive decline in pets that could also be relevant to their owners.

"Hopefully, therapeutic trials in dogs will help to direct our choices of treatment development for people," says Olby.

The study was published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science.

Source

During ongoing excavations and exploration of the temple, Kathleen Martinez of the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and colleagues uncovered the structure 13 meters (43 feet) below the ground. The 2-meter tall tunnel had been hewn through an incredible 1,305 meters (4,281 feet) of sandstone.

Its design, according to a November 2022 statement by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, is remarkably similar to the 1,036-meter Tunnel of Eupalinos – a 6th-century BCE aqueduct on the Greek island of Samos. Often referred to as a marvel of engineering, the conduit was unprecedented in design and construction in its day.

While the Taposiris Magna tunnel isn't without equal, its engineering is nonetheless just as impressive.

The tunnel resembles another, older tunnel from ancient Greece that was used to transport water. (Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)

Parts of the Taposiris Magna tunnel are submerged in water, though putting aside its resemblance to the Eupalinos Tunnel, its purpose is currently unknown.

Martinez, who has worked in Taposiris Magna since 2004 in search of the lost tomb of Cleopatra VII, believes that the tunnel could be a promising lead. Previously, the excavations have yielded clues that seem to point to the famous queen and the last of the Ptolemies.

Taposiris Magna was founded around 280 BCE by Ptolemy II, the son of Alexander the Great's renowned general and one of Cleopatra's forebears (she herself ruled from 51 BCE until her death by suicide in 30 BCE).

The temple, the team believes, was dedicated to the god Osiris and his queen, the goddess Isis – the deity with whom Cleopatra courted a strong association. Coins bearing the names and likenesses of Cleopatra and Alexander the Great have been found there, as well as figurines of Isis.

The tunnel is hewn from the Egyptian bedrock. (Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)

Burial shafts containing Greco-Roman burials have also been found in the temple. It's possible that – if they're to be found there at all – Cleopatra and her husband Mark Antony may have been interred in similar tombs.

Researchers weren't sure if the tunnel could lead to these long-lost tombs, but future work could yield more information.

The next stage will be exploring the nearby Mediterranean Sea. Between 320 and 1303 CE, a series of earthquakes hit the coast, causing part of the temple to collapse and be swallowed by the waves. In addition, excavations had previously revealed a network of tunnels stretching from Lake Mariout to the Mediterranean.

Alabaster heads were also found at the temple site. (Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)

Whether or not the tombs are found, a thorough excavation of these ruins could tell us more about the mysterious ancient city. The tunnel has already yielded some treasures: pieces of pottery and a rectangular block of limestone.

As the then-Minister for Antiquities Zahi Hawass said 13 years ago, "If we discover the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, it will be the most important discovery of the 21st century. If we did not discover the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, we made major discoveries here, inside the temple and outside the temple."

A version of this article was first published in November 2022.

Source

Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years.

Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long preserved by our ancient ancestors were suddenly 'spiced up' within a short evolutionary period of time.

Because we're the only species in which these regions have been rewritten so rapidly, they are called 'human accelerated regions' (or HARs).

What's more, scientists think at least some HARs could be behind many of the qualities that set humans apart from their close relatives, like chimpanzees and bonobos.

Led by computational biologist Katie Pollard, director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology in the US, a team of researchers identified HARs nearly two decades ago while comparing human and chimpanzee genomes.

In a new study, Pollard's team found the 3D folding of human DNA in the nucleus is a key factor in this pivotal moment for our species.

Imagine a length of DNA from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees as a long scarf wrapped around your neck, with stripes of various colors running across its weave down its entire length.

Now picture someone tried to make the exact same scarf, but they didn't quite follow the original pattern. Some of the stripes are narrower, some are wider, and some feature colors in a different order than the original.

When you wrap that new scarf around your neck in the same way as the original, the stripes that sit next to each other in the loop are no longer the same.

Like this scarf, a big difference between human and chimpanzee DNA is structural: large chunks of the DNA's building blocks have been inserted, deleted, or rearranged in the human genome. So human DNA folds differently in the nucleus compared with the DNA of other primates.

Pollard's team investigated whether these structural changes in human DNA, and its altered 3D folding, could have led to particular genes within HARs being 'hijacked', linking them to different protein-coding genes than they were originally applied to.

Many genes within HARs are linked to other genes, acting as enhancers (meaning they increase transcription of their linked gene/s).

How structural changes can lead to HAR enhancer hijacking. (Keough et al., Science, 2023)

"Enhancers can impact the activity of any gene that ends up close by, which can vary depending on how DNA is folded," Pollard said.

In a study published earlier this year, Pollard's team created a model suggesting the rapid variations appearing in HARs in early humans often opposed each other, turning the activity of an enhancer up and down in a kind of genetic fine-tuning – a model supported by their new research.

For their most recent study, the team compared the genomes of 241 mammal species using machine learning to cope with a large amount of data.

They identified 312 HARs and examined where they are located within the 3D 'neighborhoods' of folded DNA. Almost 30 percent of HARs were in the regions of DNA where structural variations had caused the genome to fold differently in humans compared to other primates.

The team also discovered neighborhoods containing HARs were rich with the genes that differentiate humans from our closest relatives, chimpanzees.

In an experiment that compared DNA within growing human and chimpanzee stem cells, one-third of identified HARs were transcribed specifically during the development of the human neocortex.

Many HARs play a role in embryo development, especially in forming neural pathways associated with intelligence, reading, social skills, memory, attention and focus – traits we know are distinctly different in humans than other animals.

In HARs, these enhancer genes, unchanged for millions of years, may have had to adapt to their different target genes and regulatory domains.

"Imagine you're an enhancer controlling blood hormone levels, and then the DNA folds in a new way and suddenly, you're sitting next to a neurotransmitter gene and need to regulate chemical levels in the brain instead of in the blood," Pollard said.

"Something big happens like this massive change in genome folding, and our cells have to quickly fix it to avoid an evolutionary disadvantage."

We don't yet understand exactly how these changes have impacted specific aspects of our brain development, and how they became an integral part of our species' DNA. Though Pollard and her team are already planning to delve into these questions.

But their research so far does show just how unique – and unlikely – the evolution of the human brain really is.

This study was published in Science.

Source

The study, published in PRX Energy on April 28, found links at the atomic level between photosynthesis and exciton condensates—a strange state of physics that allows energy to flow frictionlessly through a material. The finding is scientifically intriguing and may suggest new ways to think about designing electronics, the authors said.

"As far as we know, these areas have never been connected before, so we found this very compelling and exciting," said study co-author Prof. David Mazziotti.

Mazziotti's lab specializes in modeling the complicated interactions of atoms and molecules as they display interesting properties. There's no way to see these interactions with the naked eye, so computer modeling can give scientists a window into why the behavior happens—and can also provide a foundation for designing future technology.

In particular, Mazziotti and study co-authors Anna Schouten and LeeAnn Sager-Smith have been modeling what happens at the molecular level when photosynthesis occurs.

When a photon from the sun strikes a leaf, it sparks a change in a specially designed molecule. The energy knocks loose an electron. The electron, and the "hole" where it once was, can now travel around the leaf, carrying the energy of the sun to another area where it triggers a chemical reaction to make sugars for the plant.

Together, that traveling electron-and-hole-pair is referred to as an "exciton." When the team took a birds-eye view and modeled how multiple excitons move around, they noticed something odd. They saw patterns in the paths of the excitons that looked remarkably familiar.

In fact, it looked very much like the behavior in a material that is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, sometimes known as "the fifth state of matter." In this material, excitons can link up into the same quantum state—kind of like a set of bells all ringing perfectly in tune. This allows energy to move around the material with zero friction. (These sorts of strange behaviors intrigue scientists because they can be the seeds for remarkable technology—for example, a similar state called superconductivity is the basis for MRI machines).

According to the models created by Schouten, Sager-Smith and Mazziotti, the excitons in a leaf can sometimes link up in ways similar to exciton condensate behavior.

This was a huge surprise. Exciton condensates have only been seen when the material is cooled down significantly below room temperature. It'd be kind of like seeing ice cubes forming in a cup of hot coffee.

"Photosynthetic light harvesting is taking place in a system that is at room temperature and what's more, its structure is disordered—very unlike the pristine crystallized materials and cold temperatures that you use to make exciton condensates," explained Schouten.

This effect isn't total—it's more akin to "islands" of condensates forming, the scientists said. "But that's still enough to enhance energy transfer in the system," said Sager-Smith. In fact, their models suggest it can as much as double the efficiency.

This opens up some new possibilities for generating synthetic materials for future technology, Mazziotti said. "A perfect ideal exciton condensate is sensitive and requires a lot of special conditions, but for realistic applications, it's exciting to see something that boosts efficiency but can happen in ambient conditions."

Mazziotti said the finding also plays into a broader approach his team has been exploring for a decade.

The interactions between atoms and molecules in processes like photosynthesis are incredibly complex—difficult even for a supercomputer to handle—so scientists have traditionally had to simplify their models in order to get a handle on them. But Mazziotti thinks some parts need to be left in: "We think local correlation of electrons are essential to capturing how nature actually works."

Source

More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier.

The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage, including professors from Oxford University, King’s College London and Cardiff University resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.

Academics around the world have applauded what many hope is the start of a rebellion against the huge profit margins in academic publishing, which outstrip those made by Apple, Google and Amazon.

Neuroimage, the leading publication globally for brain-imaging research, is one of many journals that are now “open access” rather than sitting behind a subscription paywall. But its charges to authors reflect its prestige, and academics now pay over £2,700 for a research paper to be published. The former editors say this is “unethical” and bears no relation to the costs involved.

Professor Chris Chambers, head of brain stimulation at Cardiff University and one of the resigning team, said: “Elsevier preys on the academic community, claiming huge profits while adding little value to science.”

He has urged fellow scientists to turn their backs on the Elsevier journal and submit papers to a nonprofit open-access journal which the team is setting up instead.

He told the Observer: “All Elsevier cares about is money and this will cost them a lot of money. They just got too greedy. The academic community can withdraw our consent to be exploited at any time. That time is now.”

Elsevier, a Dutch company that claims to publish 25% of the world’s scientific papers, reported a 10% increase in its revenue to £2.9bn last year.

But it’s the profit margins, nearing 40%, according to its 2019 accounts, which anger academics most. The big scientific publishers keep costs low because academics write up their research – typically funded by charities and the public purse – for free. They “peer review” each other’s work to verify it is worth publishing for free, and academic editors collate it for free or for a small stipend. Academics are then often charged thousands of pounds to have their work published in open-access journals, or universities will pay very high subscription charges.

Stephen Smith, professor of biomedical engineering at Oxford University and formerly editor-in-chief at Neuroimage, said: “Academics really don’t like the way things are, but individuals feel powerless to get the huge publishers to start behaving more ethically.

Researchers put up with it because they want to publish in prestigious journals that will help their careers and ensure their work is widely read and cited.”

But he warned publishers, “Enough is enough. By taking the entire set of editors across to start the new journal, we are taking the reputation with us.”

A spokesperson for Elsevier said: “We value our editors very highly and are disappointed [with the resignations], especially as we have been engaging constructively with them over the last couple of years.”

He said the company was “committed to advancing open-access research” and its article publishing charges were “below the market average relative to quality. The fee for NeuroImage is below that of the nearest comparable journal in its field.”

Meanwhile, university libraries are angry about the cost of the online textbooks they say students now overwhelmingly want to read – often many times more expensive than their paper equivalent. Professor Chris Pressler, director of Manchester University Library, said: “We are facing a sustained onslaught of exploitative price models in both teaching and research.”

According to a spreadsheet of costs quoted to university librarians, Manchester University gave a recent example of being quoted £75 for a popular plant biology textbook in print, but £975 for a three-user ebook licence. Meanwhile Learning to Read Mathematics in the Secondary School, a textbook for trainee teachers published by Routledge, was £35.99 in print and £560 for a single user ebook.

A spokesperson for Taylor and Francis, which owns Routledge, said: “We strive to ensure that book prices are both affordable and a fair representation of their value.” He said a print book could be checked out for weeks at a time whereas ebooks could be checked in and out rapidly and had a much wider distribution.

He added: “Academic publishers provide services that are essential to a well-functioning research and scholarly communication ecosystem, and most researchers recognise this is a valuable service worth paying for. “

Caroline Ball, librarian at Derby University and co-founder of the academic campaign EbookSOS, said: “This is creating a digital hierarchy of haves and have-nots. There are institutions that just can’t afford these prices for texts.”

Source

Exact causes of autoimmune diseases, particularly whether these are genetically predisposed or driven by modifiable factors, also remain largely a mystery and is subject to much research. Because individual autoimmune diseases are rare, and because there are so many different types of autoimmune diseases, it has been very difficult to undertake sufficiently large studies and establish reliable estimates to answer these questions.

A consortium of experts in epidemiology, biostatistics, rheumatology, endocrinology, and immunology, from KU Leuven, University College London, the University of Glasgow, Imperial College London, Cardiff University, the University of Leicester, and the University of Oxford, have come together to answer some of these questions. Their study used a very large dataset of anonymized electronic health records from the UK from 22 million individuals to investigate 19 of the most common autoimmune diseases – and to examine if cases of autoimmune diseases are rising over time, who is most affected by these conditions and how different autoimmune diseases may co-exist with each other.

They found that, taken together, these 19 autoimmune diseases studied affect about 10% of the population –13% of women and 7% of men. This is higher than previous estimates, which often relied on smaller sample sizes and included fewer autoimmune conditions, and shows how important it is to study autoimmune diseases and to better understand their causes and treatments.

They also found evidence of socioeconomic, seasonal, and regional disparities among several autoimmune disorders. They suggest that such variations are unlikely to be attributable to genetic differences alone and may point to the involvement of potentially modifiable risk factors contributing to the development of some autoimmune diseases.

Finally, their research also confirmed that some autoimmune diseases tend to cluster together (for example, one person with a first autoimmune disease is more likely to develop a second autoimmune disease than someone without autoimmune disease), however at a much larger scale and for a much larger set of autoimmune diseases than previous studies. These findings reveal novel patterns that will likely inform the design of further research on possible common causes behind different autoimmune disease presentations.

First author of the paper Dr Nathalie Conrad, based at the KU Leuven in Belgium, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, said: “We observed that some autoimmune diseases tended to co-occur with one another more commonly than would be expected by chance or increased surveillance alone. This could mean that some autoimmune diseases share common risk factors, such as genetic predispositions or environmental triggers. This was particularly visible among rheumatic diseases and among endocrine diseases. But this phenomenon was not generalised across all autoimmune diseases - multiple sclerosis for example, stood out as having low rates of co-occurrence with other autoimmune diseases, suggesting a distinct pathophysiology.”

Co-author on the paper, Professor Iain McInnes, Vice-Principal of the University of Glasgow and Head of the College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, said: “This remarkable report documents changing patterns of immune diseases over two decades in the UK. These conditions pose a huge burden on individuals and upon wider society and currently represent an enormous unmet clinical need. This pioneering study provides invaluable insights that will inform improved understanding of immune diseases and their treatments going forward.”

Senior author of the paper, Prof Geraldine Cambridge, University College London said: “Our study highlights the considerable burden that autoimmune diseases bring upon individuals and the wider population and the complexity of disentangling commonalities and differences within this large and heterogenous set of conditions. There is a crucial need therefore for recognising the importance of increasing research efforts that might help to elucidate underlying pathophysiological mechanisms and support the development of targeted prevention measures such as those to reduce the contribution of environmental and social risk factors.”

The full study can be read here: “Incidence, prevalence, and co-occurrence of autoimmune disorders over time and by age, sex, and socioeconomic status: a population-based cohort study of 22 million individuals in the UK.”

Source

The record was set in the northern province of Thanh Hoa, where officials warned people to stay indoors during the hottest times of the day.

Other countries in the region have also been experiencing extremely hot weather.

Thailand reported a record-equalling 44.6C in its western Mak province.

Meanwhile Myanmar's media reported that a town in the east had recorded 43.8C, the highest temperature for a decade.

Both countries experience a hot period before the monsoon season but the intensity of the heat has broken previous records.

In Hanoi, climate change expert Nguyen Ngoc Huy told AFP that Vietnam's new record was "worrying" given the "context of climate change and global warming".

"I believe this record will be repeated many times," he said. "It confirms that extreme climate models are being proven to be true."

The world has already warmed by about 1.1C since the industrial era began and temperatures will keep rising unless governments make steep cuts to emissions.

In Vietnam's central city of Danang, farmer Nguyen Thi Lan told AFP the heat was forcing workers to start earlier than ever and finish by 10:00.

Vietnam's previous record temperature of 43.4C was set in central Ha Tinh province four years ago.

Further west, the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka recorded its highest temperature since the 1960s while Indian authorities said parts of the country were experiencing temperatures that were three or four degrees above normal.

In April, Spain recorded its hottest-ever temperature for that month, hitting 38.8C at Cordoba airport in the south of the country.

In March climate scientists said a key global temperature goal was likely to be missed.

Governments had previously agreed to act to avoid global temperature rises going above 1.5C. But the world has already warmed by 1.1C and now experts say that it is likely to breach 1.5C in the 2030s.

In its report, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said "every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards".

Source

European Space Agency's latest weather monitoring satellite, Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I1), has sent home its first image of the Earth. It was deployed in geostationary orbit at 22,000 miles above the earth's equator in December 2022 using the Ariane 5 rocket.

The satellite is designed to monitor weather conditions over the Europe and Africa regions. It captured the first view of Earth on March 18, 2023, using the Flexible Combined Imager onboard. The image shows much of Northern and Western Europe as well as Scandinavia covered in clouds, while the skies are relatively clear over the Western Balkans and Italy.

It displays a greater level of detail for cloud structures at high latitudes in the Nordic region. It also shows more details like the snow cover in the Alps, sediment in the water along the coast of Italy, and cloud vortices over the Canary Islands.

The level of detail revealed by the image was "unachievable over Europe and Africa from a geostationary orbit until now" and it "will give us a greater understanding of our planet and the weather systems that shape it," according to Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes.

The agency says that the instruments onboard the satellite can produce images with a much higher resolution and more frequently than second-generation Meteosat satellites. Its Flexible Combined Imager can scan the entire Earth disc in 10 minutes and deliver images over Europe in just 2.5 minutes.

MTG-I1 follows the legacy of European weather satellites that started in 1977 with the launch of Meteosat-1. It's the first of six third-generation Meteosat imagers the ESA has planned to launch and use to collect critical weather data for the next 20 years. Natural disasters like floods, heat waves, and storms have caused close to 145,000 fatalities across Europe in the last 40 years and resulted in economic losses of around €500 million.

ESA says that the MTG satellite is currently going through the commissioning phase where its data is being collected and calibrated. The data will be distributed to meteorological services in Europe and other regions by the end of this year, and soon making its way to weather apps. You can download the original quality version of the image from here (68.91MB).

New ESA weather satellite sends back its first image of Earth with remarkable detail

Monday, May 8

The first launch this week will be a Rocket Lab Electron rocket carrying two satellites as part of NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission. The two satellites, TROPICS 3 and 4 will be used to measure the temperature, moisture profiles, and precipitation in tropical systems “with unprecedented temporal frequency.” The mission is due for launch between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. UTC from New Zealand. You will find a stream on Rocket Lab’s website.

Tuesday, May 9

At 5:08 a.m. UTC, from Cape Canaveral, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 56 second-generation Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. It was reported earlier today that Starlink now has more than 1.5 million customers worldwide. The service is especially useful in more remote areas where a broadband connection isn’t feasible. By launching more satellites, SpaceX can expand the strength and coverage of Starlink. The launch will be shown on SpaceX’s website.

Wednesday, May 10

The first of Wednesday’s two launches is a Long March 7 rocket carrying the sixth cargo craft for China’s Heavenly Palace space station. It will be carrying around 7.4 tonnes of supplies, including 70 kg of fruit. The Long March 7 will take off at 1:23 p.m. UTC from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre in China.

The second mission takes place several hours later at 9:44 p.m. UTC from California. SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying 51 Starlink satellites to a polar low Earth orbit. Like the launch earlier in the week, you can catch this one on SpaceX’s website.

Recap

There was only one launch last week, that’s it, you guessed it, a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites. Fittingly, it took off on Star Wars Day, May 4.

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

TWIRL 113: Cargo mission soon to head to the Heavenly Palace space station

The long-awaited mission that could transform our understanding of Mars

Things are looking rosy for Moderna, as it reported unexpected first-quarter profits Thursday. But the company is not wavering in its plans to dramatically hike the price of its COVID-19 vaccines.

While financial analysts expected the company to post revenue of $1.18 billion and a loss of $1.77 per share in the first quarter, the company reported $1.86 billion in revenue with a small profit of 19 cents per share.

The company forecasts $5 billion in COVID vaccine sales for this year.

The plump profits haven't changed the company's plans for its COVID-19 vaccines. In an earnings call Thursday, Moderna Chief Commercial Officer Arpa Garay confirmed that the company is still proceeding with the 400 percent increase as the vaccines move from federal distribution to the commercial market later this year.

"In terms of pricing across the US market, we do anticipate our list price—when we have our updated vaccines—to be in the range of $110 to $130," Garay said.

In March, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel unabashedly defended the price hike to lawmakers in the face of biting criticism. Senators in the Congressional hearing emphasized that Moderna developed the vaccine in collaboration with government scientists at the National Institutes of Health, and the federal government spent roughly $10 billion to support clinical development and speed production of the shots in the early days of the pandemic.

"This vaccine would not exist without NIH's partnership and expertise and the substantial investment of the taxpayers of this country," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who led the hearing, said. "And here is the thank you that the taxpayers of this country received from Moderna for that huge investment: They are thanking the taxpayers of the United States by proposing to quadruple the price of the COVID vaccine."

According to a report from The Washington Post last week, Bancel has profited handsomely from the pandemic, which made him a billionaire. Last year, Moderna increased Bancel's salary by 50 percent to $1.5 million and increased his target cash bonus. He also exercised stock options worth nearly $393 million.

Moderna's pay and governance, in general, has raised eyebrows among financial analysts, the Post notes. Moderna board members' pay ranks in the top 25 percent of directors at America's top 500 largest publicly traded companies, with a member's average pay last year set at $475,000. That's well above rival pharmaceutical giants, including Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Merck.

Source

Habitats suitable for Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) across Asia have decreased by over 64% – equating to 3.3 million square kilometers (1.3 million square miles) of land – since the year 1700, estimates a study published in Scientific Reports. The authors suggest that habitat loss from 1700, after centuries of relative stability, coincides with the colonial-era use of land and subsequent agricultural intensification in South Asia.

Asian elephants live in a range of habitats including grasslands and rainforests, but with increasing human use of land and habitat loss, elephants can come into conflict with humans. To assess the historical distribution of elephant habitats and land-use change, data on elephants and environmental factors can be modeled to infer habitat suitability across an area and over time.

Animation tracking the loss of suitable habitat for Asian elephants (yellow) between 1700-2015. A study published in the journal Scientific Reports and led by the University of California, San Diego examining habitats across centuries reveals an urgent need for sustainable land use and conservation strategies to avoid dangers for wildlife and human communities. Credit: Ashley Weaver

Shermin de Silva and colleagues estimated the change in the spread and fragmentation of Asian elephant ecosystems in 13 countries between the years 850 and 2015 and calculated the change in suitable habitat from 1700 to 2015. Habitats were categorized as suitable if they exceeded a threshold defined and modeled according to ecological criteria including the percent of primary forests and pastures, non-forested vegetation, cropping and irrigation patterns, wood harvest rates and urbanization, amongst other factors.

The authors compared an area within 100km of the current range of elephants in Asia and found that in 1700, 100% of the area could have been considered suitable habitat but by 2015 less than half was considered suitable (48.6%). They suggest that mainland China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, and Sumatra have each lost more than half of their suitable elephant habitat range, with the greatest declines in China (around 94% of suitable habitat lost) and India (around 86% of suitable habitat lost). Estimates of land in Borneo suggest it has gained habitat that is suitable for elephants. The authors suggest that the decrease in suitable habitat for Asian elephants may drive potential conflict between elephants and people.

The authors conclude that it is important to consider the history of the landscape to understand the distribution of elephants in Asia and to help develop more sustainable land-use and conservation strategies to meet the needs of both elephants and people.

For more on this research, see The Alarming Decline of Elephant Ecosystems.

Source

A small-scale trial of rainforest restoration has met with success when performed using Amazonian dark earth (ADE), also known as terra preta, but failed using ordinary soil. A 1:4 mix of ADE and other soils saw some, but not all, species establish themselves.

Bringing back devastated forests is likely to be one of the key challenges of the 21st Century, and Amazonian natives from 1,600 years ago may be our best guides.

The vast Amazon basin is dotted with patches of rich dark soils where the trees most useful to humans flourish as if domesticated while maintaining the wider forest’s extraordinary diversity. These dark earths show an apparently miraculous capacity to store carbon and boost plant growth and were deposited while other human populations were devastating the lands in which they lived.

Terra preta has been promoted as the key to fighting climate change and restoring ecosystems, but evidence for these claims is greatly disputed. A new paper describes a more rigorous test of how well ADE performs under conditions closer to those typically faced in forest restoration efforts.

Amazonian dark earth over ordinary Amazonian soil (yellow). It might not look different from soils elsewhere, but the microorganism profile and the forests that grow in it are exceptional. Image Credit: Luís Felipe Guandalin Zagatto

The authors collected ADE from a research station in the heart of the Amazon, and soil used for growing crops at a school of agriculture in São Paulo state. They placed 36 pots filled with ADE, agricultural soil, or one part ADE to four parts soil in a greenhouse heated to 34°C (93°F). The temperature deliberately exceeds existing temperatures to allow for future global heating, of which deforestation is a major cause.

For realism, the authors planted the pots with palisade grass, which frequently grows in Brazilian areas deforested to raise beef cattle. The authors note that in Brazil alone, 189 hectares (467 acres) of forest were lost every hour in 2021, mostly for cattle pastures.

Once grown, the grass was cut, but the roots left untouched, mimicking what happens after grazing. Finally, pots were replanted with seeds from three rainforest species: Ambay pumpwood (Cecropia pachystachya), Peltophorum dubium, and cedro blanco (Cedrela fissilis). These were chosen because Ambay is usually one of the first Amazonian trees to return after damage, P. dubium is typical of the second generation of forest plants, and cedro blanco is a sign of a restored forest.

After 90 days, not a single Ambay pumpwood had grown in either the agricultural or mixed soils, but all were doing well in the pure ADE. The other two trees grew in all three media, but did between two and six times better where ADE was present. For these, the pure ADE outperformed the mixture, but modestly so. If the pumpwood was ignored, the lower cost of the mixture might be considered worth the small difference.

The pumpwood’s failure in ordinary soils is surprising given its usual recovery; the paper proposes it was particularly affected by the high temperatures.

Consistent with previous observations, the ADE soils were much richer in a wide array of nutrients – including 30 times more phosphorus – at the start of the study, and less acidic. Some of these nutrients were quickly taken up by the plants. A more neglected factor was the array of microorganisms that thrived in the ADE and mixed soils, but not the control, and may have helped the plants access the nutrients.

ADE is a mixture of charcoal from low-intensity fires, animal bones, compost, manure, and even pottery. Modern scientists have struggled to recreate the exact formula. It’s thought to have been laid down over more than a thousand years. Rapid replication to match the scale of the forests needing restoration, in South America and elsewhere, will not be an easy task, even with modern capacities.

“Our recommendations aren’t to utilize ADE itself, but rather to copy its characteristics, particularly its microorganisms, for use in future ecological restoration projects,” said senior author Professor Siu Mui Tsai of the University of São Paulo in a statement. 

The study is published in Frontiers in Soil Science.

Source

Torrents of charged particles continuously lift off the sun’s atmosphere and radiate outward at millions of kilometers per hour, yielding a solar wind so immense that its limit defines the outer edge of our solar system.

Despite the vast reach of this wind, its formation has long been a puzzle. Now a new analysis argues that the solar wind is powered by a collective set of intermittent, small-scale jetlike eruptions in the sun’s corona, or outer layer. “The idea is similar to how individual clapping sounds in an auditorium become a steady roar as an audience applauds,” said Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and a co-author of the study.

While scientists already knew that the corona was home to small jetlets that typically last for several minutes, they had previously discovered only a small number of them, mainly at the base of plumes emerging from cooler, less dense regions of the corona known as coronal holes.

The new study reveals that they’re ubiquitous. “Once you know how to find them, you see that they are everywhere in basically every structure in the corona all the time,” said co-author Dan Seaton, a solar physicist who is also at the Southwest Research Institute.

The team found that the jetlets, each between 1,000 and 3,000 kilometers wide, are present even during the solar minimum, the least active phase of the sun’s 11-year cycle—a result that’s consistent with the solar wind’s pervasive nature. “You can randomly pick any day and the jetlets are there, just like the solar wind,” said Nour Raouafi, a solar physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the study.

In the paper laying out the new findings, published earlier this year in the Astrophysical Journal, the team provides evidence that the jetlets are sparked by a process called magnetic reconnection, which heats and accelerates a plasma of charged particles. The researchers suggest that the jetlets then produce waves that heat the corona and enable the plasma to escape the sun’s gravity and coalesce to form the solar wind.

“The numbers come out looking promising and show it is really quite possible that jetlets could supply the mass lost by the sun to the solar wind,” said Charles Kankelborg, a solar physicist at Montana State University who was not involved with the study.

The Engine

The idea that small-scale, intermittent events could collectively drive the solar wind stems from the work of Eugene Parker, a pioneering solar physicist who died last year. In 1988, he suggested that a “swarm of nanoflares” driven by tiny bursts of magnetic reconnection could heat the corona enough to power the wind.

STARING AT THE SUN: The astrophotographers Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel created this image out of over 90,000 individual photographs taken through a custom-modified solar telescope. Credit: Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel.

However, finding evidence of this small-scale reconnection has proved to be elusive due to the low resolution of magnetic measurements.

For the new study, the researchers examined high-resolution images from a variety of sources, including NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, the GOES-R satellites—best known as weather satellites—and the Goode Solar Telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. They found that coronal regions that previously appeared devoid of magnetic flux were in fact filled with complex magnetic fields. The team was also able to link several jetlets to specific reconnection events. The researchers expect that even finer-scale magnetic field data could reveal higher reconnection and jetting rates.

The team went on to suggest that the jetlets create a specific kind of wave, called Alfvén waves, that heat the corona. Alfvén waves had been thought of as a competing mechanism that might explain the solar wind. But there is a growing view that these processes can work together.

“The global presence of these reconnection-driven jetlets provides a natural explanation for both reconnection and Alfvén waves powering the solar wind,” said Judith Karpen, a solar physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Researchers anticipate that upcoming efforts will reveal coronal processes in unprecedented detail. Their hope lies in newer telescopes, such as the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope at the National Solar Observatory, as well as the Solar Orbiter, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency that launched in 2020.

“It could turn out that the spectrum of jetting goes from relatively large events ending with Parker’s nanoflares on the smallest scales,” said Raouafi.

And jetlets could be involved with the large-scale events at the sun, such as flares and coronal mass ejections, said Jie Zhang, a solar physicist at George Mason University. “Small-scale eruptions may play a role in transforming magnetic configurations into more coherent large-scale structures that can store large amounts of energy prior to erupting,” he said.

For now, the new jetlet findings have validated the legacy of Parker and his contemporaries. “Here are some observations 30 years later saying they were probably right,” said Kankelborg.

This article was originally published on the  Quanta Abstractions blog.

Lead image: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured an ultraviolet image of an erupting flare. Credit: NASA

Source