HUMANS HAVE long used the ocean as a dumping zone. Piles of rubbish have accumulated in the sea and endangered marine life. But apart from plastic, oceans and their inhabitants also bear the brunt of human-made emissions and a warming planet. Oceans have soaked up about 90% of the excess heat caused by greenhouse-gas emissions in recent decades. One symptom of this has been a gradual increase in the temperature of surface waters, and this year’s rise has been particularly alarming. On April 1st, average global sea-surface temperatures reached 21.1°C (70.0°F). The new record is more than half a degree above the global average between 1982 and 2011 (see chart).

< View the graphics chart at the source page. >

Sea-surface temperatures are in fact measured about a metre below the surface by satellites, and the readings are confirmed by ships and buoys. Temperatures usually reach a high in March or early April, after summer in the southern hemisphere—where most of the Earth’s water is located—warms the seas. This year’s average sea-surface temperature started from a relatively high point compared with previous years, because 2022 was already a hot year for ocean-surface temperatures. But in 2023, unlike previous years, they have also risen for longer than usual.

There is a lot of head scratching going on among scientists as to what is causing the spike in sea-surface temperatures this year. It is difficult to attribute the changes to a specific effect, because sea-surface temperatures vary naturally, and the unusual nature of the spike is making many reluctant to diagnose its underlying cause.

That said, the biggest role in ocean-surface temperatures is played by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a natural phenomenon that influences weather patterns around the world. After an unusually long period of La Niña, one of ENSO’s two extreme phases, the Earth returned to its neutral phase at the beginning of March, according to America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal body. Global average air temperatures tend to be cooler when La Niña is active, in part because changing wind patterns mean more heat is stored in the deeper layers of the ocean. As a La Niña comes to an end, some of that heat gets released to the surface. The end of a three-year-long La Niña, therefore, may have contributed to the record-breaking sea-surface temperatures measured this year.

On top of this, an El Niño event, the warm stage of ENSO, may be on the horizon. The latest prediction by America’s National Weather Service gives a 62% chance of ENSO tipping into El Niño between May and July this year. Scientists at the Met Office, Britain’s weather service, also think the high sea-surface temperatures could mean a large El Niño event may occur. Even a weak El Niño will bring higher air temperatures in the short term and will be in stark contrast to previous years, when cool-trending La Niñas have masked the underlying warming caused by accumulating greenhouse-gas emissions.

In the long term, warmer ocean waters, both at the surface and deep down, have far-reaching consequences. They lead to more rapid melting of the ice sheets, coral bleaching, stronger storms and higher sea levels—owing to melting ice and also because water expands as it heats up. Hotter seas also absorb less heat and less carbon dioxide, which accelerates warming of the atmosphere. The consequences of warmer waters will be felt on land, too.

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Soy milk can raise the risk of breast cancer. Fat-free foods are healthier than high-fat foods. Vegans and vegetarians are deficient in protein. Some false ideas about nutrition seem to linger in American culture like a terrible song stuck in your head.

So to set the record straight, we asked 10 of the top nutrition experts in the United States a simple question: What is one nutrition myth you wish would go away — and why? Here’s what they said.

Myth No. 1: Fresh fruits and vegetables are always healthier than canned, frozen or dried varieties.

Despite the enduring belief that “fresh is best,” research has found that frozen, canned and dried fruits and vegetables can be just as nutritious as their fresh counterparts.

“They can also be a money saver and an easy way to make sure there are always fruits and vegetables available at home,” said Sara Bleich, the outgoing director of nutrition security and health equity at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a professor of public health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. One caveat: Some canned, frozen and dried varieties contain sneaky ingredients like added sugars, saturated fats and sodium, Dr. Bleich said, so be sure to read nutrition labels and opt for products that keep those ingredients to a minimum.

Myth No. 2: All fat is bad.

When studies published in the late 1940s found correlations between high-fat diets and high levels of cholesterol, experts reasoned that if you reduced the amount of total fats in your diet, your risk for heart disease would go down. By the 1980s, doctors, federal health experts, the food industry and the news media were reporting that a low-fat diet could benefit everyone, even though there was no solid evidence that doing so would prevent issues like heart disease or overweight and obesity.

Dr. Vijaya Surampudi, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Human Nutrition, said that as a result, the vilification of fats led many people — and food manufacturers — to replace calories from fat with calories from refined carbohydrates like white flour and added sugar. (Remember SnackWell’s?) “Instead of helping the country stay slim, the rates of overweight and obesity went up significantly,” she said.

In reality, Dr. Surampudi added, not all fats are bad. While certain types of fats, including saturated and trans fats, can increase your risk for conditions like heart disease or stroke, healthy fats — like monounsaturated fats (found in olive and other plant oils, avocados and certain nuts and seeds) and polyunsaturated fats (found in sunflower and other plant oils, walnuts, fish and flaxseeds) — actually help reduce your risk. Good fats are also important for supplying energy, producing important hormones, supporting cell function and aiding in the absorption of some nutrients.

If you see a product labeled “fat-free,” don’t automatically assume it is healthy, Dr. Surampudi said. Instead, prioritize products with simple ingredients and no added sugars.

Myth No. 3: ‘Calories in, calories out’ is the most important factor for long-term weight gain.

It’s true that if you consume more calories than you burn, you will probably gain weight. And if you burn more calories than you consume, you will probably lose weight — at least for the short term.

But the research does not suggest that eating more will cause sustained weight gain that results in becoming overweight or obese. “Rather, it’s the types of foods we eat that may be the long-term drivers” of those conditions, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor of nutrition and medicine at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Ultraprocessed foods — such as refined starchy snacks, cereals, crackers, energy bars, baked goods, sodas and sweets — can be particularly harmful for weight gain, as they are rapidly digested and flood the bloodstream with glucose, fructose and amino acids, which are converted to fat by the liver. Instead, what’s needed for maintaining a healthy weight is a shift from counting calories to prioritizing healthy eating overall — quality over quantity.

Myth No. 4: People with Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t eat fruit.

This myth stems from conflating fruit juices — which can raise blood sugar levels because of their high sugar and low fiber content — with whole fruits.

But research has found that this isn’t the case. Some studies show, for instance, that those who consume one serving of whole fruit per day — particularly blueberries, grapes and apples — have a lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. And other research suggests that if you already have Type 2 diabetes, eating whole fruits can help control your blood sugar.

It’s time to bust this myth, said Dr. Linda Shiue, an internist and the director of culinary medicine and lifestyle medicine at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, adding that everyone — including those with Type 2 diabetes — can benefit from the health-promoting nutrients in fruit like fiber, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.

Myth No. 5: Plant milk is healthier than dairy milk.

There’s a perception that plant-based milks, such as those made from oats, almonds, rice and hemp, are more nutritious than cow’s milk. “It’s just not true,” said Kathleen Merrigan, a professor of sustainable food systems at Arizona State University and a former U.S. deputy secretary of agriculture. Consider protein: Typically, cow’s milk has about eight grams of protein per cup, whereas almond milk typically has around one or two grams per cup, and oat milk usually has around two or three grams per cup. While the nutrition of plant-based beverages can vary, Dr. Merrigan said, many have more added ingredients — like sodium and added sugars, which can contribute to poor health — than cow’s milk.
Myth No. 6: White potatoes are bad for you.

Potatoes have often been vilified in the nutrition community because of their high glycemic index — which means they contain rapidly digestible carbohydrates that can spike your blood sugar. However, potatoes can actually be beneficial for health, said Daphene Altema-Johnson, a program officer of food communities and public health at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. They are rich in vitamin C, potassium, fiber and other nutrients, especially when consumed with the skin. They are also inexpensive and found year-round in grocery stores, making them more accessible. Healthier preparation methods include roasting, baking, boiling and air frying.

Myth No. 7: You should never feed peanut products to your children within their first few years of life.

For years, experts told new parents that the best way to prevent their children from developing food allergies was to avoid feeding them common allergenic foods, like peanuts or eggs, during their first few years of life. But now, allergy experts say, it’s better to introduce peanut products to your child early on.

If your baby does not have severe eczema or a known food allergy, you can start introducing peanut products (such as watered-down peanut butter, peanut puffs or peanut powders, but not whole peanuts) at around 4 to 6 months, when your baby is ready for solids. Start with two teaspoons of smooth peanut butter mixed with water, breast milk or formula, two to three times a week, said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, a professor of pediatrics and the director of the Center for Food Allergy & Asthma Research at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. If your baby has severe eczema, first ask your pediatrician or an allergist about starting peanut products around 4 months. “It is also important to feed your baby a diverse diet in their first year of life to prevent food allergies,” Dr. Gupta said.

Myth No. 8: The protein in plants is incomplete.

“

‘Where do you get your protein?’ is the No. 1 question vegetarians get asked,” said Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist and professor of medicine at Stanford University. “The myth is that plants are completely missing some amino acids,” also known as the building blocks of proteins, he said. But in reality, all plant-based foods contain all 20 amino acids, including all nine essential amino acids, Dr. Gardner said; the difference is that the proportion of these amino acids isn’t as ideal as the proportion of amino acids in animal-based foods. So, to get an adequate mix, you simply need to eat a variety of plant-based foods throughout the day — such as beans, grains and nuts — and eat enough total protein. Luckily, most Americans get more than enough protein each day. “It’s easier than most people think,” Dr. Gardner said.

Myth No. 9: Eating soy-based foods can increase the risk of breast cancer.

High doses of plant estrogens in soy called isoflavones have been found to stimulate breast tumor cell growth in animal studies. “However, this relationship has not been substantiated in human studies,” said Dr. Frank B. Hu, a professor and the chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. So far, the science does not indicate a link between soy intake and breast cancer risk in humans.

Instead, consuming soy-based foods and drinks — like tofu, tempeh, edamame, miso and soy milk — may even have a protective effect toward breast cancer risk and survival. “Soy foods are also a powerhouse of beneficial nutrients related to reduced heart disease risk, such as high-quality protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals,” Dr. Hu said. The research is clear: Feel confident incorporating soy foods into your diet.

Myth No. 10: Fundamental nutrition advice keeps changing — a lot.

This is not the case, said Dr. Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “In the 1950s, the first dietary recommendations for prevention of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and the like advised balancing calories and minimizing foods high in saturated fat, salt and sugar. The current U.S. Dietary Guidelines urge the same.” Yes, science evolves, but the bottom-line dietary guidance remains consistent. As author Michael Pollan distilled to seven simple words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That advice worked 70 years ago, and it still does today, Dr. Nestle said. And it leaves plenty of room for eating foods you love.

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Scientists say they have found more moons with oceans in the Solar System

WHO ends COVID emergency but warns threat is not over

Wheezing after getting on the treadmill. Gulping down air while doing chores. Breathlessness is one of the many scary and frustrating symptoms that can linger in Covid patients months after their initial infection. But while these symptoms were a mystery at the beginning of the pandemic, scientists are slowly unraveling their causes—moving us closer to finding a treatment.

In a paper recently published in the European Respiratory Journal, researchers at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom identified a probable culprit—immune cells known as monocytes. These squishy, blue-gray cells float through the bloodstream, looking for signs of trouble. When they encounter an invading pathogen, such as bacteria or a virus, they generate other crucial immune cells and alert the immune system to activate additional defenses. Monocytes are particularly important during lung injury. At the first sign of trouble, they move to the lungs, spawning various specialized macrophages—immune cells that eat pathogens—that become the first line of immunological defense against germs invading.

But it appears a Covid infection can really mess up how these immune cells work—meaning they “can respond abnormally to subsequent events,” says Laurence Pearmain, a clinical lecturer at the University of Manchester and coauthor of the paper. In Covid patients with lasting breathlessness after an infection, the researchers found monocytes with irregularities. Compared to healthy people, these patients had monocytes with different levels of proteins attached to them that are critical for directing the cells toward the lungs. These results, the scientists say, link abnormal monocytes with long Covid and lung injury—paving the way for potential therapies to correct the abnormalities or alleviate symptoms.

Pearmain and the team had good reason to suspect these cells. Other researchers had already found that SARS-CoV-2 affects monocytes. According to Judy Lieberman, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, in cases of severe Covid, monocytes infected with the virus often die in a way that releases lots of alarm molecules into the body, triggering large amounts of additional inflammation. “It’s like a feed-forward loop,” she says. “Once this gets going, it’s incredibly hard to control.” These results pointed to the potential role of dysfunctional monocytes in long Covid, as inflammation is known to contribute to some lasting symptoms.

Pearmain and the team decided to investigate. To figure out exactly what these cells were doing during Covid and long Covid, the scientists turned to blood sampling. Starting in the summer of 2020, across several hospitals in the UK, Pearmain and the team took blood from 71 patients during their hospital stays for Covid. Over the next few months, they also collected blood from 142 separate patients previously hospitalized for Covid, gathering samples during their follow-up visits.

The patients being followed up on had had Covid around six months earlier, and by this point after an infection, Pearmain says, you would expect any immune dysfunction caused by the virus to have settled down. Yet this wasn’t what the team was seeing. “It was obvious that a lot of people were still really struggling with breathlessness, fatigue, and a lot of the other long Covid symptoms,” he says. Specifically, 48 percent of the patients being followed up reported shortness of breath, 44 percent fatigue. The team had found a long Covid cohort to study—so it was time to take a closer look at their immune cells.

First, the team looked at monocytes gathered from the hospitalized Covid patients, or people with an active Covid infection. They found that overall, compared to healthy controls, these patients with acute Covid had monocytes with irregular amounts of proteins relating to movement and inflammation—showing that monocyte irregularity begins with the initial infection. And, once these patients were stratified into mild, moderate, and severe Covid levels, several of these markers differed in their expression between the three cohorts. This showed the scientists that there can be subtle differences in monocyte irregularity among patients infected with the same virus.

Armed with this information, the team then began to study their long Covid patients. Similar to the Covid-hospitalized patients, the long Covid group also had monocytes with abnormal amounts of proteins related to movement and inflammation. Many of the patients who had reported breathlessness and fatigue also displayed abnormalities on chest radiology scans, suggesting lung injury. When the team homed in on the subset of long Covid patients with breathlessness, they noted that one particular protein in the monocytes—a receptor called CXCR6—was increased, and that its expression was highest in those patients with abnormal scans.

According to Elizabeth Mann, an immunologist at the University of Manchester and one of the study leaders, this finding was interesting. CXCR6 is the receptor for a protein called CXCL16—the two bind together. CXCL16 is sometimes expressed in the lungs, and its levels have also been found to increase during acute and long Covid. The scientists hypothesized that, with Covid having increased CXCR6 in the monocytes, this then caused them to travel more readily toward the lungs to bind with the increased CXCL16. This, they say, may have contributed to prolonged inflammation or damage.

To test this hypothesis, the scientists took monocytes from the long Covid patients with breathlessness and placed them in the top layer of a special tissue culture plate. On the bottom of the plate, they added CXCL16. If the hypothesis was true, the scientists anticipated seeing the monocytes from long Covid patients with breathlessness moving more rapidly toward the CXCL16 on the bottom of the plate, in comparison with healthy controls. That was exactly what they saw. “This enhanced CXCR6 does actually correspond to increased migration of monocytes to the CXCL16,” Mann says.

For Mann, Pearmain, and the rest of the team, this finding gives some insight into what biologically might be contributing to long Covid symptoms like breathlessness. When the team looked at blood samples from patients who had recovered from RSV or flu, they didn’t find the increased CXCR6 on monocytes that was characteristic of long Covid patients. Mann thinks that this demonstrates how monocytes in long Covid become abnormal during the acute infection and don’t recover, meaning that they persist in being drawn into the lungs and cause inflammation. This could be what leads to something like breathlessness longer term. “You need monocyte migration to go and clear the infection,” Mann says. “Once you’ve recovered, you’d hope that it goes back to normal—but it doesn’t, it seems to just stay dysregulated.”

These findings “add more to the story that there’s this dysfunctional immune response that persists in people with Covid,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at the Scripps Research Institute who is unaffiliated with the study. It’s a sentiment shared by David Martinez, an immunologist at Yale University, who told WIRED that it will also be “important to validate these findings in independent and larger studies that include additional human populations, such as African American and Latin individuals, who also experience long Covid.” The patients used in Mann and Pearmain’s study were predominantly white.

The next step for the scientists will be to try to modulate some of the pathways identified in monocytes—for example, using drugs to lower CXCR6 in animal models and seeing if symptoms improve. This may well have an impact on breathlessness. However, it ultimately may take more than one drug or treatment to fully alleviate the diverse array of other long Covid symptoms that patients experience. “There appear to be different mechanisms for different symptoms,” Pearmain says. “So, I don’t think we’re going to get a magic bullet that cures long Covid by just going to one source of the problem.”

To Pearmain, their study highlights what a complex disease long Covid is—and how even between long Covid patients, there is quite a bit of variation in what people experience. Some of the patients had breathlessness while others had lingering fatigue. And alongside these symptoms, patients had different levels of lung damage and CXCR6 expression. “I think that it’s very clear from this study and others that you need to be targeting the right therapy to the right patient,” he says. “That’s where I think the future of long Covid treatments will be.”

The Long Covid Mystery Has a New Suspect

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Rocket Report: China selling reusable engines; can SpaceX still raise money?

Tesla Killer

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has some harsh words for Tesla. In a new interview, Wozniak argued that the Elon Musk-led company's self-driving efforts leave a lot to be desired — and are actively making Teslas incredibly unsafe to drive.

"And boy, if you want a study of AI gone wrong and taking a lot of claims and trying to kill you every chance it can, get a Tesla," Wozniak told CNN earlier this week during a televised interview, as quoted by Electrek.

While comparing the current AI chatbot discourse to the dangers of self-driving cars might sound a touch disingenuous, the Apple cofounder does make a compelling point: There do appear to be very real risks involved in allowing your Tesla to take over the wheel.

Autopilot Off

Wozniak has long been a critic of Tesla's Autopilot software, arguing that the reality falls far short of Tesla's lofty claims.

Last year, Wozniak recalled the "phantom breaking" issues that were plaguing him while driving his Model S in an interview with Stephen "Steve-O" Glover, causing him to slow down significantly while driving on the interstate.

"This is so dangerous!" he told Glover at the time. "It’s happened to us a hundred times, at least, because we drive so much."

Musk reportedly convinced Wozniak to buy a Model S back in 2013. At the time, Musk told him that the car "would drive itself across the country by the end of 2016," Wozniak told CNN.

"I actually believed those things, and it’s not even close to reality," he added, arguing that the software could end up killing the occupant.

Investigated

Wozniak's off-the-cuff remark does have some truth to it. We've seen numerous fatal collisions involving Tesla's Autopilot feature over the years.

Meanwhile, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced back in 2021 that it was investigating the EV maker over a series of accidents in which Teslas have smashed into pulled-over emergency response vehicles.

Then last year, news emerged that the Justice Department is also investigating more than a dozen crashes involving Autopilot, some fatal. The carmaker eventually confirmed the news to investors in January.

Despite Tesla's controversial marketing and Musk's repeated promises, its vehicles are not able to fully drive themselves in 2023 and require the driver to watch the road and take over at any time — and, as Wozniak has discovered first hand, there's a very good reason for that.

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“It’s the number of minutes people spend talking on a mobile that matter for heart health, with more minutes meaning greater risk,” said study author Professor Xianhui Qin of Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China. “Years of use or employing a hands-free set-up had no influence on the likelihood of developing high blood pressure. More studies are needed to confirm the findings.”

Almost three-quarters of the global population aged 10 and over own a mobile phone.2 Nearly 1.3 billion adults aged 30 to 79 years worldwide have high blood pressure (hypertension).3 Hypertension is a major risk factor for heart attack and stroke and a leading cause of premature death globally. Mobile phones emit low levels of radiofrequency energy, which has been linked with rises in blood pressure after short-term exposure. Results of previous studies on mobile phone use and blood pressure were inconsistent, potentially because they included calls, texts, gaming, and so on.

This study examined the relationship between making and receiving phone calls and new-onset hypertension. The study used data from the UK Biobank. A total of 212,046 adults aged 37 to 73 years without hypertension were included. Information on the use of a mobile phone to make and receive calls was collected through a self-reported touchscreen questionnaire at baseline, including years of use, hours per week, and using a hands-free device/speakerphone. Participants who used a mobile phone at least once a week to make or receive calls were defined as mobile phone users.

The researchers analysed the relationship between mobile phone usage and new-onset hypertension after adjusting for age, sex, body mass index, race, deprivation, family history of hypertension, education, smoking status, blood pressure, blood lipids, inflammation, blood glucose, kidney function and use of medications to lower cholesterol or blood glucose levels.

The average age of participants was 54 years, 62% were women and 88% were mobile phone users. During a median follow up of 12 years, 13,984 (7%) participants developed hypertension. Mobile phone users had a 7% higher risk of hypertension compared with non-users. Those who talked on their mobile for 30 minutes or more per week had a 12% greater likelihood of new-onset high blood pressure than participants who spent less than 30 minutes on phone calls. The results were similar for women and men.

Looking at the findings in more detail, compared to participants who spent less than 5 minutes per week making or receiving mobile phone calls, weekly usage time of 30-59 minutes, 1-3 hours, 4-6 hours and more than 6 hours was associated with an 8%, 13%, 16% and 25% raised risk of high blood pressure, respectively. Among mobile phone users, years of use and employing a hands-free device/speakerphone were not significantly related to the development of hypertension.

The researchers also examined the relationship between usage time (less than 30 minutes vs. 30 minutes or more) and new-onset hypertension according to whether participants had a low, intermediate or high genetic risk of developing hypertension. Genetic risk was determined using data in the UK Biobank. The analysis showed that the likelihood of developing high blood pressure was greatest in those with high genetic risk who spent at least 30 minutes a week talking on a mobile – they had a 33% higher likelihood of hypertension compared to those with low genetic risk who spent less than 30 minutes a week on the phone.

Professor Qin said: “Our findings suggest that talking on a mobile may not affect the risk of developing high blood pressure as long as weekly call time is kept below half an hour. More research is required to replicate the results, but until then it seems prudent to keep mobile phone calls to a minimum to preserve heart health.”

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The 31-year-old victim, whose identity remains unclear at this time, fell from the search engine's building at 111 Eighth Ave. around 11:30 p.m., cops said.

Officers responded to a report of an unconscious person lying on the ground near a building on West 15th Street, directly across from the headquarters.

He was rushed to NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, where he died.

Sources told the New York Post that handprints were found on the ledge of a 14th-floor open-air terrace, where the man is believed to have plummeted from in the suspected suicide.

Investigators reportedly discovered neither a note nor a video of the fatal fall.

The death follows the suspected suicide of Jacob Pratt, a 33-year-old Google employee who also worked at the Manhattan headquarters, in February.

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Mars has several advantages, not the least of which is proximity, eliminating the need to push people out of airlocks when the spacecraft is at capacity. It would also allow an advance team to set up basic infrastructure and to be the most efficient—the team should all be female.

Researchers from the Space Medicine Team, European Space Agency in Germany have conducted a study published in Scientific Reports that found female astronauts have lower water requirements for hydration, total energy expenditure, oxygen (O2) consumption, carbon dioxide (CO2) and metabolic heat production during space exploration missions compared to their male counterparts.

In the study, "Effects of body size and countermeasure exercise on estimates of life support resources during all-female crewed exploration missions," the team utilized an approach developed to estimate the effects of body "size" on life support requirements in male astronauts. For all parameters at all statures, estimates for females were lower than for comparable male astronauts.

When considering the limited space, energy, weight, and life support systems packed into a spacecraft on a long mission, the study finds that the female form is the most efficient body type for space exploration.

According to NASA, the cost of getting payloads to the International Space Station (ISS) is $93,400 per kg. The study found that on a 1080-day mission, a four-member all-female crew would require 1695 kg less food weight. With some simple arithmetic, the mission could save over $158 million and free up 2.3 m3 of space (food packaging), the equivalent of approximately 4% of the habitable volume (60 m3) of a "Gateway" HALO module in NASA's proposed lunar orbit space station. Both factors would be highly significant operationally, but there is more.

Compared to a previous study of theoretical male astronauts, the effect of body size on total energy expenditure was markedly less in females, with relative differences ranging from 5% to 29% lower. Compared at the 50th percentile stature for US females (1.6m), the reductions were even more significant at 11% to 41%. This translates into reduced use of oxygen, production of CO2, metabolic heat, and water use.

When exposed to the prolonged microgravity of space, bad things happen to astronaut bodies. Physiological changes induce muscle atrophy, bone loss, and reduced aerobic and sensorimotor capacity, potentially affecting crewmember health and ability to perform mission tasks.

Exercise in space is called "countermeasure exercise" as it is designed to counter the physiological effects of being weightless. During these exercises (two 30-min aerobic exercises, six days a week), astronauts have higher rates of O2 consumption, production of CO2, metabolic heat production, and require more water to rehydrate.

While body size alone correlates to energy metrics (smaller stature, less energy used), missions requiring countermeasure exercise increase this disparity as larger bodies use more energy, need more oxygen, produce more CO2 and create more heat. Additionally, the study found that females had 29% less water loss through sweating during a single bout of aerobic countermeasure exercise and so required less water to rehydrate.

The theoretical differences between female and male astronauts result from lower resting and exercising O2 requirements of female astronauts, who are lighter than male astronauts at equivalent statures and have lower relative VO2max (the rate at which the heart, lungs, and muscles can effectively use oxygen during exercise) values.

Aside from resource usage, there are also advantages in functional workspaces, especially when multiple astronauts are working in the same confined area, as often happens on the ISS. Aboard the ISS, the astronauts have just enough room to stand and work shoulder-to-shoulder or back-to-back when necessary. The spaces in the proposed NASA Gateway craft are tighter, creating a less ergonomic environment for multiple crew members to work together. Tighter spaces could operate just as efficiently with a smaller crew.

The study data, combined with the move towards smaller diameter habitat space for currently proposed mission modules, suggest that there may be several operational advantages to all-female crews during future human space exploration missions, with the most significant improvement coming from shorter females.

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Guided by ultrasound, surgeons from Boston Children's Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital in the US used a surgical technique called embolization to treat a rare prenatal condition. Called vein of Galen malformation, the vascular abnormality permits blood to flow dangerously fast through part of the brain after the child is born. The success of the procedure offers new hope for treating the condition before the risk of complications escalates.

Although this is just the first patient to be treated this way, the procedure appears to have been a resounding win.

"In our ongoing clinical trial, we are using ultrasound-guided transuterine embolization to address the vein of Galen malformation before birth, and in our first treated case, we were thrilled to see that the aggressive decline usually seen after birth simply did not appear," says Darren Orbach, a neurointerventional radiologist from Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

"We are pleased to report that at six weeks, the infant is progressing remarkably well, on no medications, eating normally, gaining weight and is back home. There are no signs of any negative effects on the brain."

Affecting around 1 in 60,000 infants, vein of Galen malformation is a rare type of vascular abnormality in the brain that causes arteries to connect directly with the veins rather than the capillaries, which would otherwise control the flow of blood. This means that the flow of blood into the veins is much higher than is safe, with a number of deleterious effects.

The condition places significant stress on the cardiovascular system, which can lead to heart failure. It can cause hypertension in the arteries in the lungs and heart. And because of the additional pressure in the brain, it can cause significant brain damage that results in neurological and cognitive impairment. It also has a high mortality rate.

It's usually treated after birth with embolization, a technique in which surgeons place specialized material in the vein to block it, such as a clotting agent that helps the blood to coagulate and thus prevent the blood from flowing.

But the condition can rapidly change for the worse after birth. The low resistance of the placenta helps regulate blood flow and blood pressure, giving the fetus some protection that it loses when it is born. Soon after birth, a small blood vessel that connects a lung artery to the aorta closes, which also adds to the pressure in the arteries of the lungs.

Scans of the infants brain showing the size of the anomaly as it shrinks, from left: before embolization, just after, and then just after the infant was born.

(Orbach et al., Stroke, 2023)

Orbach and his colleagues are therefore undertaking a clinical trial to gauge the possibility of treating the condition prior to birth. Their patient was a fetus at 34 weeks and 2 days gestation (full term is around 40 weeks), and they used ultrasound to guide them as they performed the embolization procedure.

The infant was subsequently induced two days later, since the procedure had resulted in the premature rupture of membranes in the uterus. However, once the baby was born, its cardiovascular system seemed to be working normally, and it required no additional support or surgery. Because the birth was premature, the infant had to remain in the hospital's NICU unit for several weeks, during which time the doctors continued to monitor its brain.

They saw no signs at all of neurological malfunction, fluid build-up or bleeding, and mother and babe were given the all-clear and sent home. 

Because this is the first patient in an ongoing clinical trial, the technique is nowhere near ready for widespread application. One successful case is not enough to establish a pattern of success. Future cases may not proceed so smoothly; whether the benefits outweigh the risks of the procedure is yet to be determined.

"As always, a number of these fetal cases will need to be performed and followed in order to establish a clear pattern of improvement in both neurologic and cardiovascular outcomes," says cardiologist Gary Satou of the UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital, who was not involved in the study. "Thus, the national clinical trial will be crucial in order to achieve adequate data and, hopefully, successful outcomes."

But the results are highly promising. At time of writing, the infant was continuing to thrive, suggesting that, for some patients at least, prenatal surgery could be a lifeline.

"While this is only our first treated patient and it is vital that we continue the trial to assess the safety and efficacy in other patients, this approach has the potential to mark a paradigm shift in managing vein of Galen malformation where we repair the malformation prior to birth and head off the heart failure before it occurs, rather than trying to reverse it after birth," Orbach says.

"This may markedly reduce the risk of long-term brain damage, disability or death among these infants."

The team's results have been published in Stroke.

Source

The US plans to ramp up production of its next-generation air-to-air beyond-visual-range (BVR) missile, a weapon it hopes will tip the balance of air power in the Pacific.

This month, The Warzone reported that the US Air Force is laying the groundwork for accelerated production of the next-generation AIM-260 air-to-air missile to arm its envisioned Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) fleet of highly-autonomous drones specialized for air-to-air combat.

The report notes that plans to ramp up AIM-260 production follows Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in response to a question on whether the US Air Force has enough missiles to arm its CCAs and other crewed aircraft.

Apart from the CCA, The Warzone notes that the upcoming Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter as well as the active service F-22, F-35, F-15EX II and F/A-18 E/F are among the crewed aircraft that will be armed with the AIM-260.

While details about the highly-classified AIM-260 are scant, The Warzone notes in a November 2021 article that it may feature a new type of dual-pulse solid fuel rocket motor to ensure consistent flight performance, a hit-to-kill or omnidirectional warhead,

multi-mode guidance systems featuring active electronically scanned array (AESA) and infrared seekers and the ability to receive guidance signals from third-party sources such as ground radar, other aircraft, drones and satellites.

Accelerated AIM-260 production comes amid reports that the US air-to-air missile arsenal needs to be updated more quickly to keep pace with US fighter aircraft technology advances.

For example, Sandboxx notes in a March 2023 article that the F-35 is currently undergoing a massive upgrade in computational power, known as Tech Refresh 3, a prelude to the Block IV series of upgrades that will give the F-35 a 75% increase in combat capability.

The report says that US next-generation fighters, such as the NGAD and F/A-XX, will need new weapons to leverage the full extent of their capabilities, especially in BVR combat.

In a 2019 article for the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Douglas Barrie notes that the US Air Force can exploit the low-observable characteristics of the F-22 and F-35 with the AIM-260’s performance to defeat enemy aircraft with notionally longer-ranged missiles.

Such an approach, Barrie mentions, is not suitable for older fourth-generation aircraft such as the F-15 and F-16. Conversely, newer US aircraft such as the NGAD, F/A-XX, F-22, and F-35 may be handicapped by the aging AIM-120 missile, the current US mainstay for BVR combat.

In a September 2021 article for Air & Space Forces Magazine, John Tirpak notes that while the 30-year-old AIM-120 design has been upgraded over the years, it may have already hit its upgrade potential.

Tirpak also notes that China’s People’s Liberation Army-Air Force (PLA-AF) has already fielded the PL-15 missile, which may outclass the AIM-120.

The USAF’s AIM-120 is apparently inferior to China’s PL-15. Image: Illustration

Barrie notes in a September 2022 article for IISS that the PL-15’s 200-kilometer range (compared to the 160-180 kilometers of the AIM-120D variant), Mach 5 flight speed, maneuverability and export potential to US adversaries make it a pacing threat for the US and its allies.

Although Barrie notes that the development of the latest AIM-120 variant, the AIM-120D3, was likely driven by the PL-15’s performance, the PL-15 may still win out when it comes to delivering a knockout punch to enemy aircraft.

Barrie mentions that the AIM-120D3 relies on trajectory shaping to achieve long-range. That’s been done, the writer says, through better software and processing capabilities for more efficient navigation, rather than any modifications to the missile’s rocket motor.

However, while that technique gives the AIM-120D3 greater range, delivering enough kinetic energy on the target is critical to ensure a kill.

Apart from possibly not having enough kinetic punch to kill enemy fighters outright, the AIM-120 may also be handicapped by the limitations of semi-active missile guidance.

Joseph Trevithick notes in a March 2023 article in The Warzone that the AIM-120 needs to be able to receive launch information from the aircraft before launch, with a datalink between the missile and aircraft necessary to guide the former over longer distances while the aircraft’s radar is tracking the target.

Upon closing onto the target, Trevithick says that the AIM-120’s onboard active radar would turn on, locking on and guiding the missile independently of the aircraft’s radar, giving fire-and-forget capability.

Dave Majumdar notes in an October 2015 article in The National Interest that AIM-120D missiles integrated with the F-22 may be vulnerable to digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) jammers developed by China and Russia, which can imitate friendly radar signals and send them back to the transmitter, thereby blinding semi-active radar missiles.

Majumdar says this situation has made it imperative for the US to develop new guidance techniques to defeat DRFM jammers, including through the combination of AESA radar and infrared guidance.

A F-22 firing an AIM-120 missile. Photo: Screengrab / Twitter / Military.com

While the introduction of the AIM-260 aims to preserve US air superiority in the Pacific, it is no high-tech silver bullet for the significant systemic challenges faced by US airpower.

Asia Times reported in September 2022 that the US suffers from an acute shortage of fighter jets and lags in pilot training, with the US Air Force having only 48 out of 60 fighter squadrons and only 11 out of 13 needed squadrons in the Pacific equipped with aging aircraft that are on average 28.8 years old.

In addition, US pilot training has declined since the 1991 Gulf War, with pilots getting only 9.7 flying hours a month now versus 22.3 hours then. Those numbers are far short of the 137 modernized, well-trained and well-equipped fighter squadrons envisioned to dissuade any rational opponent from picking an air fight with the US.

Source

IN THE NORTHERN Pacific Ocean, two sky-blue ships are sailing parallel to one another, several hundred meters apart. Pulled behind them is a giant U-shaped barrier, which almost looks like a fishing net. You could be forgiven for thinking they are trawlers. But they’re aiming to catch something else: plastic.

The Ocean Cleanup (TOC) is the world’s largest organization working to remove floating plastic from the ocean. Since 2021, the nonprofit has recovered 200 tons of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area between California and Hawaii that is notorious for its floating waste, which is concentrated there by ocean currents. In this area, which is roughly three times the size of France, at least 400 times the amount of plastic extracted by TOC remains, to which more is added every day as it is discarded from boats or flows into the sea from rivers.

To Boyan Slat, the founder of TOC, this cleanup work “signifies an age in which we’re starting to correct the problems we ourselves have created.” To TOC’s critics, the project is costly and inefficient—a distraction from the root of the problem, which is too much plastic being discarded and not enough preventing it from getting into the sea. But more recently, new charges have been laid at the door of TOC: that its cleanup efforts are capturing not only plastic but also sea creatures that live among it. That they are, essentially, disrupting a marine habitat.

According to a new study, floating marine life, known as “neuston,” often ends up in the same places as plastic. It’s not that the plastic is somehow creating an opportunity for life to emerge, says marine biologist and corresponding author Rebecca Helm, but rather that plastic debris and organisms tend to float up and clump together in water, like cereal in a bowl. Add to this wind and swirling ocean currents, which bring plastic and neuston in from afar, and “patches” form.

Back in 2019, a rare occurrence allowed Helm, who is an assistant professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, to study the contents of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A sailing crew accompanied long-distance swimmer Benoît Lecomte as he swam right through the patch. Behind them they towed a small net along the surface of the water every day to take samples of floating marine life and plastic debris. They did the same in the periphery and outside the patch for comparison. They then photographed 22 of these samples.

Working with colleagues at the University of Hull in the UK, Helm then set about analyzing them, using image-processing software to flag different kinds of neustonic species and plastic debris in the photos. The team found that concentrations of both plastic and neuston were higher inside the patch than outside. Jellyfish-like species known as by-the-wind sailors and blue buttons were particularly visible. So too were violet snails.

It was far from a perfect method. Twenty-two photos is not a lot, and an examination of the actual samples rather than pictures of them would have been more rigorous. Plus, using “surface tows” to sample the ocean’s contents “is an imperfect art,” says Helm.

Sometimes the net bounces above the waves, other times it goes below, missing some water and the plastic and organisms floating in it. But, she adds, it’s pretty clear from the photos that there’s a lot of neuston present in the garbage patch.

Helm has not shied away from publicly criticizing TOC, pointing out that the nets it uses to collect plastic could inadvertently trap neuston. Many species are not capable of swimming. By-the-wind sailors, for example, have a small stiff sail that sticks out of the water to catch the wind, while blue buttons and violet snails rely on currents to drift through the ocean. They are small creatures, but so are the meshes in the nets. And if neustonic species were killed in large numbers, it could have an impact on the turtles, fish, seabirds, and other animals that eat them.

TOC says it is well aware of the potential harm to marine life and that it has adapted the design of its plastic-catcher in recent years. The U-shaped barrier that guides the plastic into a retention zone at its far end has a net that is 3 meters deep below the surface, and it moves slowly through the water to allow mobile species to swim away. There are lights and acoustic deterrents, underwater cameras to detect protected species such as sea turtles, and escape hatches on the underside of the nets for animals that get caught. Before hoisting the nets aboard, the crew leaves them in the water for up to an hour to give animals time to escape. Nonetheless, fish, small sharks, mollusks, and sea turtles have been caught accidentally, although they make up a tiny fraction of the catch weight compared to plastic, TOC says.

In addition to collecting plastic, TOC conducts its own ocean research, as well as environmental impact assessments that determine and describe the potential damage of the cleanups. But as a private player operating in international waters where few rules apply, TOC is not required to publish these. “We do much more than just clean, which is difficult enough. We also actively contribute to the understanding of an ecosystem that we barely know,” says Matthias Egger, whose role is to conduct research that helps TOC engineers further develop and scale up its cleanup system. In recent years, neuston have become a particular focus.

Egger and his team have been sampling the surface water in front of and behind the cleanup system on a weekly basis to compare the composition of neuston, to understand which species to look out for, what effect the cleanup system has, and whether there are seasonal differences in how many neuston are present. The data is currently being evaluated and is due to be published this year. “But for the initial results, we are really happy to see very little impact,” says Egger.

Egger stresses that TOC wants to make sure its plastic-cleaning efforts are helping marine life, not harming it. But it’s more complicated than simply trying to minimize the amount of marine life taken out of the ocean along with plastic, he says. If crustaceans or sea anemones from other regions cling to plastic debris and hitch a ride to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they could feed on neuston there. Is it then right or wrong to remove these invaders, who may be disrupting the local ecosystem? “There is always marine life associated with the plastic,” says Egger. “But very often, it’s marine life that does not belong there, because the plastic does not belong there.”

A study published in mid-April offers some clues as to which traveling species could pose a problem. Researchers at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center examined 105 pieces of plastic debris they had obtained in frozen form from TOC. They found traces of species normally found in coastal waters that had used floating plastic as rafts and ended up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—in particular nets, ropes, buoys, boxes, and cylindrical eel traps from the fishing industry. Some species also appeared to reproduce in their new offshore home. For example, some shrimp-like amphipods were carrying eggs in their brood pouches.

This isn’t surprising, says Martin Thiel, a professor of marine biology at the Catholic University of the North in Chile. Marine organisms have been found colonizing all sorts of floating materials in the ocean, including volcanic pumice, seaweeds, and wood, at least until these items start to degrade and sink. Whether it’s organisms that settle on more durable plastic debris or that float at the surface next to it, Thiel says that they can’t simply be separated from plastic. “What’s out there, we better leave it in peace, because by removing it, we may do more harm,” he says.

Lanna Cheng, professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego, is somewhat less concerned. Sometimes neuston are floating among plastic, sometimes not. Some neuston are able to swim up and down. And storms can come along and mix things up. Because neuston aggregations appear to be so patchy, accidental catches would likely not significantly affect their populations, she says. And because TOC invests so much time and resources in offshore trips, she welcomes the organization’s contribution to science by offering marine biologists like her opportunities to collect samples. “The surface community [of marine life] is a community that was hardly studied until plastic pollution became a problem. Part of the reason was that there was very little economic value,” she says. Cheng herself has spent her career studying insects that have evolved to literally walk on the open ocean and survive.

Helm, however, remains critical, in part because she believes that studies should first show that there is no impact on neuston, before cleanups are carried out. “If they really do the work and demonstrate that their efforts have no impact on ocean surface life, then I will be excited to see that they took the criticism and made changes,” she says. One change crucial to neustonic species was made recently. In May 2023, TOC more than doubled the length of its net barrier, which now extends to 1,750 meters. As part of the upgrade, the mesh size of the nets in the retention zone, where plastic is held before being hoisted onto the ships, has been increased from 10 to 50 millimeters square. This should allow very small creatures like blue buttons and violet snails to pass through the nets, but by-the-wind sailors, for example, can grow larger than this. However, increase the mesh size any more than this, and pieces of debris could start to seep through.

The two sky-blue ships are currently cruising across the Great Pacific Garbage Patch again, testing the updated barrier in the hope that they can collect more plastic per trip. Ridding the open ocean of plastic remains a Sisyphean task. As more plastic enters the patch, and scientists learn more about the creatures living there, TOC still has many obstacles to overcome before it can scale up its operations. “Our purpose is to help those organisms out there, but you need to make sure that the way you help is actually helping them,” says Egger. “And that's what we're trying to figure out.”

Source

THE PLASTICS INDUSTRY has long hyped recycling, even though it is well aware that it’s been a failure. Worldwide, only 9 percent of plastic waste actually gets recycled. In the United States, the rate is now 5 percent. Most used plastic is landfilled, incinerated, or winds up drifting around the environment. 

Now, an alarming new study has found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller bits that contaminate the air and water. This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted down into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed several times, sloughing off microplastic particles—fragments smaller than 5 millimeters—into the plant’s wastewater. 

Because there were multiple washes, the researchers could sample the water at four separate points along the production line. (They are not disclosing the identity of the facility’s operator, who cooperated with their project.) This plant was actually in the process of installing filters that could snag particles larger than 50 microns (a micron is a millionth of a meter), so the team was able to calculate the microplastic concentrations in raw versus filtered discharge water—basically a before-and-after snapshot of how effective filtration is.

Their microplastics tally was astronomical. Even with filtering, they calculate that the total discharge from the different washes could produce up to 75 billion particles per cubic meter of wastewater. Depending on the recycling facility, that liquid would ultimately get flushed into city water systems or the environment. In other words, recyclers trying to solve the plastics crisis may in fact be accidentally exacerbating the microplastics crisis, which is coating every corner of the environment with synthetic particles. 

“It seems a bit backward, almost, that we do plastic recycling in order to protect the environment, and then end up increasing a different and potentially more harmful problem,” says plastics scientist Erina Brown, who led the research while at the University of Strathclyde. 

“It raises some very serious concerns,” agrees Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former US Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “And I also think this points to the fact that plastics are fundamentally not sustainable.”

The Association of Plastic Recyclers, an international group that represents the industry, did not respond to a request for comment.

The good news is that filtration makes a difference: Without it, the researchers calculated that this single recycling facility could emit up to 6.5 million pounds of microplastic per year. Filtration got it down to an estimated 3 million pounds. “So it definitely was making a big impact when they installed the filtration,” says Brown. “We found particularly high removal efficiency of particles over 40 microns.” 

But a critical caveat is that the team only tested for microplastics down to 1.6 microns. Plastic particles can get way smaller—like nanoplastics that are tiny enough to enter individual cells—and they grow much more numerous as they do. So this is likely a significant underestimate. And these researchers were finding a lot of particularly small particles. In two of the sample points, approximately 95 percent of the microplastics were under 10 microns, and 85 percent were under 5 microns. “It completely shocked me just how tiny the majority of them were,” says Brown. “But we easily could have found so many smaller than that.”

Depending on the recycling facility, that wastewater might next flow to a sewer system and eventually to a treatment plant that is not equipped to filter out such small particles before pumping the water into the environment. But, says Enck, “some of these facilities might be discharging directly into groundwater. They're not always connected to the public sewer system.” That means the plastics could end up in the water people use for drinking or irrigating crops.

The full extent of the problem isn’t yet clear, as this pilot study observed just one facility. But because it was brand-new, it was probably a best-case scenario, says Steve Allen, a microplastics researcher at the Ocean Frontiers Institute and coauthor of the new paper. “It is a state-of-the-art plant, so it doesn’t get any better,” he says. “If this is this bad, what are the others like?”

These researchers also found high levels of airborne microplastics inside the facility, ready for workers to inhale. Previous research has found that recycled pellets contain a number of toxic chemicals, including endocrine-disrupting ones. Plastic particles can be dangerous to human lung cells, and a previous study found that laborers who work with nylon, which is also made of plastic, suffer from a chronic disease known as flock worker’s lung. When plastics break down in water, they release “leachate”—a complex cocktail of chemicals, many of which are hazardous to life. 

Recycling a plastic bottle, then, isn’t just turning it into a new bottle. It’s deconstructing it and putting it back together again. “The recycling centers are potentially making things worse by actually creating microplastics faster and discharging them into both water and air,” says Deonie Allen, a coauthor of the paper and a microplastics researcher at the University of Birmingham. “I'm not sure we can technologically engineer our way out of that problem.”

Recycling is also a game of diminishing returns. A plastic bottle is easy enough to process, but you can only do that a few times before the material degrades too much to be recycled again. And as plastic products have gotten more complex—multilayered pouches for baby food, for instance—they’ve gotten harder to recycle. The industry’s literal dirty secret is that mountains of plastic waste are being shipped to economically developing countries, where the stuff is often burned in open pits, poisoning surrounding communities and sending still more microplastics and chemicals into the atmosphere. If recycling was actually effective in its current form, the industry wouldn’t have to keep producing exponentially more plastic—it’s now churning out a trillion pounds a year.  

Still, researchers like Brown don’t think that we should abandon recycling. This new research shows that while filters can’t stop all the microplastics from leaving a recycling facility, they at least help substantially. “I really don't want it to suggest to people that we shouldn't recycle, and to give it a completely negative reputation,” she says. “What it really highlights is that we just really need to consider the impacts of the solutions.” 

Scientists and anti-pollution groups agree that the ultimate solution isn’t relying on recycling or trying to pull trash out of the ocean, but massively cutting plastic production. “I just think this illustrates that plastics recycling in its traditional form has some pretty serious problems,” says Enck. “This is yet another reason to do everything humanly possible to avoid purchasing plastics.”

Source

A new COVID variant XBB.1.16, or “Arcturus”, has now been identified in at least 34 countries including the UK.

Arcturus is a subvariant of omicron and was first detected in India in January 2023.

As of April 17, the latest date up to which the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has reported data on this variant in the UK, 105 cases of Arcturus had been sequenced across England. Five Britons who tested positive for Arcturus have died.

It’s important to note that only a small portion of COVID infections undergo genetic sequencing, so it’s likely there are many more cases of Arcturus. The UKHSA recently reported that the variant is making up 2.3 percent of sequences in the UK.

Meanwhile, Arcturus has been steadily rising in the US in recent weeks, accounting for more than 10 percent of new confirmed COVID cases as of the end of April.

But the variant has been most dominant in India, which had recorded 61 percent of global sequences of Arcturus as of mid-April. It has driven a huge increase in cases in India over the past month. The country was recording more than 10,000 COVID cases each day with Arcturus making up about two-thirds of all cases. Fortunately this wave now appears to be on the decline.

Nonetheless, Arcturus has been classified as a variant of interest by the World Health Organization. So what do we know about this variant, and should we be worried?

Where did Arcturus come from?

XBB.1.16 is a descendant of XBB, a recombinant omicron strain, meaning it contains genetic material from two different variants. Specifically, XBB is a mixture of two BA.2 sublineages: BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75.

XBB has shown increased transmissibility relative to earlier variants, probably because it appears to be better at evading existing immunity from vaccination and prior infections.

Arcturus is very closely related to XBB.1.5, also known as Kraken.

Compared with its parent strain XBB, Arcturus has three additional mutations in the spike protein: E180V, F486P and K478R. This is a protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) which allows it to bind to and infect our cells.

Arcturus is understood to be the most contagious subvariant yet, and these additional mutations might explain why.

COVID is still with us. Image credit: Anna Tryhub/Shutterstock.com

The typical symptoms of COVID include fever, cough, runny nose and loss of sense of taste or smell. However, doctors in India have reported conjunctivitis symptoms in children infected with Arcturus, which has not generally been seen in earlier COVID waves.

What about vaccine protection?

COVID vaccines target the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. As such, mutations in the spike protein may affect how well the vaccines work.

There is no data yet on vaccine efficacy against Arcturus. However, a recent study found that among people who had been vaccinated or previously infected, the antibody responses generated against closely related strains XBB and XBB.1 were significantly lower than against other variants.

So XBB subvariants could threaten current COVID vaccines and therapeutics. But importantly, it’s likely vaccines still offer good protection against severe disease.

While further studies are needed to confirm how Arcturus responds to vaccines, scientists are continuing work on new vaccines that could offer stronger protection against emerging variants.

The continued evolution of omicron

Although omicron was first detected in late 2021 it continues to evolve resulting in new subvariants. Arcturus is one of some 600 detected to date.

This is to be expected in a highly vaccinated population. New variants naturally evolve to evade existing defences. Those strains with a competitive advantage – namely greater transmissibility and capacity to escape our immune response – will dominate.

Arcturus may yet fuel a rise in cases in the UK and elsewhere.

However, there is no great cause for concern. While scientists will continue to monitor Arcturus, there’s no evidence at this stage to suggest it’s more severe than previous variants. In addition, we have good protection now from vaccines and natural infection.

That said, the continued evolution of COVID and the emergence of new strains such as Arcturus is a reminder that the virus is still with us. For those eligible for further boosters, it’s important to keep these up to date.

Manal Mohammed, Senior Lecturer, Medical Microbiology, University of Westminster

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

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A year and a half alone in a cave might sound like a nightmare to a lot of people, but Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini emerged with a cheerful grin and said she thought she had more time to finish her book.

She had almost no contact with the outside world during her impressive feat of human endurance. For 500 days, she documented her experiences to help scientists understand the effects of extreme isolation.

One of the first things that became apparent on April 12 2023 when she emerged from the cave was how fluid time is, shaped more by your personality traits and the people around you than a ticking clock.

When talking to reporters about her experiences, Flamini explained she rapidly lost her sense of time. The loss of time was so profound that, when her support team came to retrieve her, she was surprised that her time was up, instead believing she had only been there for 160-170 days.

Why did she lose her sense of time?

Our actions, emotions and changes in our environment can have powerful effects on the way in which our minds process time.

For most people, the rising and setting of the sun mark the passing of days, and work and social routines mark the passing of hours. In the darkness of an underground cave, without the company of others, many signals of passing of time will have disappeared. So Flamini may have become more reliant on psychological processes to monitor time.

One way in which we keep track of the passage of time is memory. If we don’t know how long we have been doing something for, we use the number of memories formed during the event as an index to the amount of time that has passed. The more memories we form in an event or era, the longer we perceive it to have lasted.

Busy days and weeks filled with lots of novel and exciting events are typically remembered as longer than more monotonous ones where nothing noteworthy happens.

For Flamini, the absence of social interaction combined with a lack of information about family and current affairs (the war in Ukraine, the reopening of society after COVID lockdowns), may have significantly reduced the number of memories she formed during her isolation. Flamini herself noted: “I’m still stuck on November 21, 2021. I don’t know anything about the world.”

The loss of time may also reflect the reduced importance of time in cave life. In the outside world, the busyness of modern life, and social pressure to avoid wasting time, mean many of us live in a perpetual state of time stress. For us, the clock is a gauge of how productive and successful we are as adults.

A common thread

Flamini is not the first to experience a change in her experience of time after a change in environment. Similar experiences were reported by French scientist Michel Siffre during his two- to six-month-long cave expeditions in the 1960s and 70s.

A loss of sense of time was consistently reported by adults and children who spent prolonged periods isolated in nuclear bunkers (for research purposes) at the height of the cold war. It is also frequently reported by people serving prison sentences and was widely experienced by the general public during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Caves, nuclear bunkers, prisons and global pandemics share two features which seem to create an altered sense of time. They isolate us from the wider world and involve confined spaces.

Flamini, however, lived with an empty schedule stretching out into her future. No work meetings to prepare for, no appointments to hurry to and no social diary to manage.

She led a self-paced existence, where she could eat, sleep, and read as and when she liked. She occupied herself painting, exercising and documenting her experiences. This may have made the passage of time irrelevant.

As the biological rhythms of sleep, thirst and digestion took over from the ticking hands of the clock, Flamini may have simply paid less and less attention to the passage of time, causing her to eventually lose track of it.

Flamini’s ability to let go of time may have been enhanced by her strong desire to achieve her 500-day goal. After all, she decided to go into the cave and she could leave if she wanted to.

For people who become confined against their will, time can become a prison itself. Prisoners of war and people serving prison sentences often report that monitoring the passage of time can become an obsession. It would seem that we are only able to really let go of time when we are in control of it.

Flamini’s freedom may make leaving civilisation behind for the caves look like an appealing prospect. However, life underground is not for the fainthearted. Survival depends upon your ability to maintain a high level of mental resilience.

If you have the ability to remain calm and composed when things get tough, a strong belief that you are in control of your own behaviours, known as an internal locus of control, and become easily absorbed in your own thoughts, you made have the fortitude to succeed. However, you might find it simpler to switch off your notifications, clear the calendar and get lost in a bit of me time.

Ruth Ogden, Reader in Experimental Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University

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

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Microplastics are everywhere, causing disruption to hormones, crossing the blood-brain barrier in mice, and even being found inside the stomachs of the largest creatures on Earth. There's estimated to be 171 trillion bits of plastic pollution in the world's oceans.

Even in remote locations microplastics persist in these extreme environments, and new research has learnt that microplastics have even been found inside algae growing under the sea ice in the Arctic.

Melosira arctica is a type of ice algae found growing under the sea ice in the Arctic, from the Canada Basin across to northeastern Greenland. This is an important keystone species and feeds many types of zooplankton near the surface of the water. In the summer months the algae, which can form long sticky nets and ropes around 3 meters (9.8 feet) long, either floats freely or sinks to the ocean floor, where it provides food for seabed-dwelling creatures such as sea cucumbers and brittlestars.  

Microplastics have been found in very high levels within the Arctic sea ice and the team wanted to see if the microplastics were ending up within the algae, and therefore spreading into the food chain when the ice melted and from the surrounding sea. 

Samples were collected from within the Arctic circle from three locations in 2021. The samples were taken from M. arctica that were free-floating among the sea ice, and a sample was also taken of the surrounding seawater.

After analyzing the samples using Raman and fluorescence microscopy, the team found that all of them contained microplastics in concentrations ranging from 13,000 to 57,000 microplastics per cubic meter within the ice algae. In the seawater that was also sampled, the concentrations were from 1,400 to 4,500 microplastics per cubic meter. The algae had around ten times more microplastic particles than the surrounding seawater. Of the total microplastic particles that were found, 94 percent of them were 10 micrometers or smaller in size. 

“The filamentous algae have a slimy, sticky texture, so it potentially collects microplastic from the atmospheric deposition on the sea, the sea water itself, from the surrounding ice and any other source that it passes. Once entrapped in the algal slime they travel as if in an elevator to the seafloor, or are eaten by marine animals,” explains Deonie Allen of the University of Canterbury and Birmingham University, who is part of the research team, in a statement.

Unfortunately the team believes that M. arctica is acting as a sink for microplastics. Given that these ice algae are fed upon by many creatures, both on the surface of the water and when the algae sinks to the seafloor, this indicates that the algae are a key vector in the transport of these microplastics to other organisms in the Arctic ecosystem.

The study is published in Environmental Science and Technology.

Source

Jamie beard was worried. She was at the wheel of a black Toyota Prius, multitasking at 80 mph down the Hardy Toll Road out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Just before picking me up, she had been interviewed for a national TV news show. Now, swerving through lanes, she was running through various shit scenarios: What if something she said pisses off one of the oil and gas executives she had come to adore, or one of her fellow climate activists? 

As she was ruminating and driving, a Ford F-150 with tires higher than the Prius is tall squeezed by us in the fast lane, so close that Jamie gripped the wheel tight to keep the little car steady. One side of her hair was buzz-cut; the other was a bob. It, like the rest of her, was steady and roiling at the same time. “Welcome to Texas,” she hollered. A grin spread across the small oval face that makes her look more 24 than 44, and she turned her attention to our destination: “Just wait until you see the Woodlands. The cops patrol the streets on white horses!”

The Woodlands is a self-described master-planned destination about 30 miles north of downtown Houston, developed in the 1970s by George Mitchell. A Texas legend. He’s the guy who made it financially viable to fracture rock and extract natural gas from shale. Now, nearly 50 years on, the suburb is a bonanza of luxury homes, hotels, woods, condominiums, and fountains with musical water shows—and offices of some of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world. Big Oil Palooza. As we sped closer to our hotel, home base for this whirlwind trip, Jamie started rolling through our tightly packed schedule of meetings with current and former oil industry folks: drillers, startup founders, geologists, CEOs at multinational corporations. When she took a breath, I asked her about the new Earth-piercing technologies that she was excited about. And I asked her about fracking. Then she remembered her worries. And got anxious again.

The anxious energy, the worries, they were because Jamie—an energy lawyer and entrepreneur and lifelong environmentalist (“the kind that would have chained myself to a tree”)—was desperate not to screw up the delicate plans she’d been orchestrating for the past six years. They’re big. Too big, and she knew it. But she was certain that if she could put in all the days and hours and minutes she could possibly spare, and if she could get the right people talking to each other and help raise the money for a bunch of startups and better tech, she might, just might, just maybe help harness all those people to actually, fabulously, fairly cleanly solve the world’s energy needs. Yeah.

So Jamie talked fast. She didn’t waste time. As we walked to dinner near the Woodlands Waterway Marriott, her sentences piled up: “We can’t sit around and twiddle thumbs and try to have working groups and retreats with environmental organizations and oil and gas. There’s just no time for that shit. It’s going to have to get on an exponential curve now. Now.” The word came out as if shot from a cannon: Now!

I met Jamie at a TED conference in August 2021, where she gave a talk called “The Untapped Energy Source That Could Power the Planet.” As she paced the stage, her sentences, tinged with a gentle Southern drawl, rose up, then softened, then lifted again with enthusiasm: “What we’re talking about here is a pivot from hydrocarbons to heat,” she said. She talked about this awesome abundant green resource, and how we (right now!) have this mighty industry that knows how to get it. She was also, for sure, making some people in the room squirm at the thought of sleeping with the enemy. She seemed undaunted: “If we want to turn the ship, we recruit the sailors.”

After the conference, we talked, then started emailing, her energy ricocheting out of my inbox. Ping! She invited me to meet her in Texas. Come see! I was tempted. “I wish, but my life is too complicated,” I told her. Husband, cancer, medical appointments. He and I were on year four of what we’d been told might just be two.

Within minutes she responded, “My life is complicated too.” She attached a picture of herself lying on a floor, reading a book to her young son. He looked like he was in a hospital gown. “I hear you,” she wrote.

So there I was in Texas—while my husband was at home sorting his morning and nighttime meds. And Jamie was racing through the world with the relentless intensity of a person whose life, the minute they slow down, will be consumed with personal trauma, and the only viable thing to do was to run fast at something that matters enough to dull the existential ache inside. For Jamie, that meant harnessing the heat from below the Earth’s surface in the form of geothermal energy. And she was hell-bent to start in the heart of the hydrocarbon industry, the kingdom of crude, Texas.

If you’re not one of the half million people on an airplane or 10 astronauts in space at this very moment, you are standing on a giant nuclear ball. There’s a truly monstrous source of heat below our feet. For a long time, people have been gathering that heat and using it to warm nearby buildings or turn turbines that generate electricity. Iceland gets about two-thirds of its energy—and nearly 100 percent of its heat—from geothermal sources. The city of Boise, Idaho, uses geothermal to warm some downtown buildings, and it has for more than a century. The first geothermal power plants built in the United States, put online in 1960, can send about 835 megawatts of electricity onto the California grid in a place called the Geysers. That kind of geothermal power—which a lot of engineers call hydrothermal, and which the folks in Texas call “your grandma’s geothermal”—is harvested in places where tectonic plates have left fissures. Those fissures offer easy pathways for steam to rise to the Earth’s surface. This easy energy, grandma’s, is only a tiny fraction of what’s possible.

What Jamie was aiming to do is the hard part: create geothermal everywhere. That meant figuring out how to corral the heat from all of the dry rock below ground. That heat could provide a reliable, abundant, always flowing source of power. No need for the sun to shine or the wind to blow. No need for batteries to store it all. And it wouldn’t be geopolitically volatile, subject to complicated supply chain disruptions.

There were, of course, hurdles. Big hurdles. Just a few: (1) Investment. Like most big energy projects, geothermal demands huge up-front funding, but the federal government hasn’t provided consistent support like it did with solar, wind, even fossil fuels. And private markets didn’t want to touch it. (2) Information, even the basics. We don’t know enough about the conditions below the surface—exactly what kind of rock is where, how hot it is, what kind of pressure it’s under—and what drilling methods to use. (3) Salability. Given the costs of the tech and construction for a geothermal power plant, it isn’t yet obvious that an operator could sell the electricity at a reasonable price.

This is to say, the financials have been driving stakes into the heart of geothermal projects for years. “Early return on investment is miserable—half of the investors would be dead before they made money on it,” Tony Pink, a VP at a drilling company, told me.

Add to all that, a lot of the people who are in powerful enough positions and care deeply about the health of the planet might have to get on board with something else: hydraulic fracturing. Fracking? Forcing cracks into subterranean rocks to get at the heat inside. Forget it. The word brings worries about contamination from chemicals pushed into and out of the Earth (lead, salt, acid, more) and “seismicity,” or earthquakes. Then, talk about geothermal with lawyers and bureaucrats and all they can think of are the regulations you need to write, legal issues to parse.

But Jamie was living in a crisis already. She was not deterred. To her, there are problems in everything big. Being afraid of them helps nobody, and the climate doesn’t have time.

the words that pour from Jamie form their own little electrical charges: enthusiasm, exclamation, expletive. (“Have you heard this whole narrative about oil rig electrification? That’s fucking greenwashing. Don’t give me that shit. Right?”) She was born in Georgia, raised in southern Alabama. In undergrad at Appalachian State University, she got a degree in industrial technology, focusing on alternative energy. By 2004, after chapters as a climate activist and rock-climbing instructor, she was living in Massachusetts, getting a law degree at Boston University. After that, she took a job at a giant law firm in the environment and energy department. She thought she’d be able to make a difference as an insider. Turns out, not so much. On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers and spilling 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Jamie watched the live feed of the spill for a week from her comfortable office. Big Oil hired companies like the one she was working at for its defense. She resigned.

Around the same time, Jamie met an engineer (“You know, crazy mad-scientist dude”) who’d invented a new kind of ultracapacitor—a device for storing and delivering energy, like a battery but with different guts. He was starting a company. She signed up. Early on, the idea was to use ultracapacitors in electric vehicles. Theirs also happened to work well in extreme conditions—like when a hulking drill is boring into intense heat, pressure, and violence underground. Jamie started spending a lot of time on oil and gas rigs in Canada, Denver, West Texas.

One day, while reading about green energy technologies, she came across a report from MIT and the US Department of Energy called The Future of Geothermal Energy. It made the case that we could vastly expand our use of heat from the core of the Earth. She was riveted: You could power the entire country 2,000 times over. Wow. But something else really stuck for her, she says. “This is a set of engineering problems? And then energy is solved? Holy shit, we should do this.”

“It was a little bit pie-in-the-sky,” she admits, “pretty moonshot.” She kept working with the ultracapacitor, getting out in the oil field. And she moved to Texas. It just so happened that the industry was in the thick of the shale boom, and engineers were working to quickly iterate. Jamie saw engineers refine, say, directional drilling technology that could shave thousands of dollars off every foot to grind. She realized she was now alongside the very people who could make geothermal everywhere happen. “I was like, dude, it’s going to need to be the oil and gas industry.” So Jamie quit the ultracapacitor.

She was also excited because she was pregnant.

She convinced the University of Texas at Austin to hire her into a role as the director of an entrepreneurship center. She went after a $1 million grant from the Department of Energy for the school to start a program focused on geothermal—and got it. She called it the Geothermal Entrepreneurship Organization, or GEO. Her aim was to build a thriving geothermal ecosystem within the oil and gas industry. Texans already had all the skills: They were engineers, geologists, rig operators, oil-field roughnecks.

The future seemed so possible.

when her son was a few weeks old, Jamie knew something was very wrong. He cried for days. He would quiet for an hour, then cry again. She just sensed he was in pain. For two years, doctors handed her a litany of possible diagnoses, including that it was in her head. Finally, she found a neurologist who—maybe just to get this intense single mother out of the office—offered to do a genetic test.

Her son had a metabolic disorder called mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS) type II, or Hunter syndrome. That meant he was missing a snippet of DNA that codes for an enzyme necessary to break down cellular waste. He’d inherited the deletion from her. “His cells just get progressively damaged,” she told me over dinner, glancing away. “They’re not able to take the trash out.” His organs were being slowly destroyed. Her son’s version of the disease was both rare and severe. “Maybe one in a million,” she said. She found out he probably had about 10 years to live.

When she managed to calm her boy, get him to sleep, or have a nanny help out, Jamie started interviewing doctors and reading everything she could about MPS. Then she came across a paper out of Japan, a study of stem cell transplants on MPS II kids. Doctors had rebuilt the children’s immune systems. “Kill your blood factory, replace it with a new one,” Jamie explained. Duke University was doing a related study.

By the time her son was 3, the damage done to his organs was profound. He was never going to be verbal; his development essentially stopped somewhere around 18 months, and then started declining. The transplant, docs explained, had a 10 or 15 percent fatality rate. Step one was basically destroying the patient’s entire immune system with chemotherapy. Jamie’s choices were excruciating: Go for the fences and do a science experiment, or watch him die for 10 years. Jamie went for the fences. She packed up her things in Texas. Her son became one of the first MPS II kids in the US to undergo the transplant.

For every detail Jamie told me, I could see pain. But she also spoke in technical, clinical terms—language I recognized from my husband’s years in and out of hospitals. During the six months Jamie and her son lived in the Duke hospital, she became habituated to speaking in crisis terms and moving at crisis velocity.

In the between moments—between doctor appointments, treatments, finding food her son would eat—Jamie kept her mind from spiraling into despair by calling anyone in Texas who would talk to her about a geothermal future. She’d met the former CTO of Halliburton at a conference. She called him. He told her to call Lance Cook, a former VP of technology and chief scientist at Shell. Geothermal sparked Lance’s curiosity. Jamie kept calling. The kind of geothermal she was after was spectacularly expensive. He got used to saying to Jamie, “That’ll never work.” Each time she hung up, she’d go read more, talk to more Texans. Then she’d call Lance again.

After a while, after talking to so many people, she ran up against a roadblock: The folks in oil and gas didn’t want to be the first to talk about geothermal; they were nervous about jumping in. So to get them talking to one another, and publicly, Jamie turned her energy to planning a five-day virtual conference, and she invited everyone, including experts from grandma’s geothermal. She put a lot of different people on panels together. She called it Pivot2020: Kicking Off the Geothermal Decade. She hoped 1,000 people would log in; 4,000 showed up. A year later she did it again. 14,000 people. Folks were now talking, publicly.

For our second night in Texas, Jamie invited a bunch of former oil guys to meet us at the Baja Cantina and Fiesta, perched above a man-made waterway in the Woodlands. We ordered piles of nachos and quesadillas and wings and beers. As the guys (yeah, they were all guys) showed up, it became clear they had met at the Pivot conference. Now they were working in geothermal startups. Jamie was helping them however she could: advice, chasing grants and other funding sources, contacts, data, information.

As the beers arrived, I asked the engineers and scientists, why geothermal? For climate change, sure. For other reasons too. Spencer Bohlander, a former deep-water drilling engineer and a company man (who designs wells), expanded: “Our entire world is about heat. Bring heat up. Use it. Power something.” He added, “It’s a no-brainer.” (Jamie yelled from the far end of the table: “Don’t burn shit to make heat. Just use heat for heat.”)

The guys chimed in to lay out the two hefty ideas the industry was chasing: “closed loop” and “enhanced geothermal systems” (EGS in the vernacular).

Spencer explained: Closed loop pretty much means drilling pipes straight into hot, dry rocks, then circulating fluid down and up the pipes. The rocks heat the pipes, and the liquid absorbs the heat from the pipes. (And no fracking!)

Simon Todd, a baby-faced, curly-haired Irishman and geologist who’d been at BP for 25 years, worked at a company called Causeway GT that was pursuing closed-loop systems for perhaps the most obvious idea: direct-use heating. His company aimed to tap right into the hot rock below large industrial buildings or regions—a big data center, a military base—to heat and cool those spaces. (Kind of like massive, available-anywhere versions of the geothermal heat pumps that some people use to heat their homes.)

Nice. And these systems are straightforward enough to build. But models and tests were showing that wellbores generally didn’t have enough surface area to collect the necessary heat. Which could mean deeper, longer drills. Deeper rocks, though, can be dauntingly hard, and the intense temperatures down there will melt a lot of stuff. You could end up drilling as slowly as 6 feet a day, and you might be going tens of thousands of feet deep—even 60,000. At the high end, that could cost $40,000 or more a foot.

That leaves us with EGS. The method depends on fracking: You bore a hole (first down, then usually horizontally too) and force pressurized fluid into the rock. The rock cracks, creating fissures. Then you fill the fissures with more fluid, which picks up heat from the rock. Now, when you switch your pumps on, your system is circulating liquid through a much bigger surface area—not a loop, but a reservoir. But again, fracking means environmental and political resistance, and no one yet knows if EGS can work commercially.

So what would it take? “Money,” Spencer said. “And not just money but guaranteed money.” Jamie nodded vigorously. The others backed him up. Money to get through the hurdles, to test and fine-tune the tech, to build the power plants. To get things going so the costs can come down. Leon Vanstone, a British scientist whose company was trying to improve drilling into hard rock, added, “Money and certainty.”

In her relentlessness to get this industry off the ground, Jamie had been beating on the doors of multinational oil-field-services companies like Nabors and Baker Hughes—the very companies that had been improving hydraulic fracturing—to get them to help. They had started to throw funding at some of these projects. But considering the massive up-front costs, it wasn’t yet enough.

As the beers drained and the nachos got soggy, the guys, now kind of deflated, reinforced the point: Without the promise of, say, government investment to absorb the riskier startup costs, it was hard to see a thriving future.

On our walk along the waterway back to the hotel, Jamie told me how, back in the ’70s and ’80s, the feds had maddeningly started and stopped research in geothermal—even creating demonstration projects just outside of Houston. “The federal government R&D for geothermal is in total maybe $100 to $200 million,” she said. “Solar and wind get billions.” You had people fighting for crumbs. “And venture capital won’t engage.” Now agitated, she added: “You have fucking fusion startups that have been doing the same thing for 10 years and getting a billion dollars. If you had a billion for geothermal, you’d have so much. Then you’d get on a learning curve. From there it’s a snowball.”

Jamie understood that the budding industry was making decisions from a place where the baseline was bad. But failure wasn’t in her lexicon. “To really cut into world energy demand by 2050 means there can’t be friction points,” she says. “There can’t be frack bans. There can’t be lawsuits. There can’t be half-assed geothermal projects. It literally needs to just go.”

Before Jamie’s son had the stem cell transplant, the doctors warned her how vulnerable he’d be as he recovered. Any infection could be dire, deadly. Not long after the treatment, in the hospital, a problem with his feeding tube caused an infection. Then his chemotherapy left him with serious respiratory issues. For weeks he struggled to breathe, so much so that instructions for how to resuscitate him were taped to his crib. To push her fears from her mind, Jamie, lying on an air mattress beside the crib, would pencil out drawings for how she thought an enhanced geothermal system might work.

One day she sent Lance Cook some of the sketches. One of them looked like a whisk. Another was drawn on a postcard promoting a program for kids with cancer. By now, Lance had been pretty used to, well, accommodating Jamie. (“It was that or Tiger King,” he joked, “and she wasn’t annoying.”) But that day, when he looked at the lateral lines and loops she had sketched, he saw something else. With all other EGS proposals he’d seen, the idea was to build two wells, one to pump fluid in and the other to get it out, with an expanse of hot rock in between. The drawing got Lance thinking about how, with geothermal, heat could be gathered from all around a wellbore. A bunch of loops through the rock, all emerging from and converging back to the same place. (The fracked reservoir is a whisk-ish shape.) This meant you might be able to do it with just one well. And that would change everything about the price tag. Lance looked at the drawing and realized, “Holy shit. We can do this.”

As he thought about it all, he called an old Shell colleague, Lev Ring. At the time, the Russian-born physicist and engineer was running a software company. Lev told me the call went like this (please imagine this with an elegant, discernible Russian accent): “Lance said, ‘Who cares about your software company, OK? I met this lady. You really need to talk to her.’” So Lev did. And the two guys decided to start a company.

Jamie, ecstatic, added them to the list of new geothermal enthusiasts she was hell-bound to support. Her first quest: help them raise money. Venture capital wasn’t interested. Wall Street wasn’t interested. She went after climate philanthropy. Chris Anderson, of TED, leaped in with support from Virya, his climate impact fund. Nabors, the multinational drilling company, gave Lance and Lev a cheap lease for office space and $9 million. Now the two needed the right engineer, someone with a lot of drilling experience. They needed Cindy Taff.

Cindy is an unprepossessing, unflappable mechanical engineer who was born near Dallas and grew up moving around oil country. Her dad was a geophysicist with Mobil Oil, and when she was about 10, the family settled in New Orleans. She stayed local for college—Louisiana State. She got a job at Shell and as a young drilling engineer ended up working for Lance. She loved it. She stayed at Shell for more than three decades, the last seven years as VP of “unconventionals.” Cindy also happened to have managed the drilling of wells all across a region that was super promising for geothermal: southern Texas. When Lance and Lev asked her to come work with them, she lined up her retirement paperwork.

As soon as that was done, the trio set about building the company. They often hopped on the phone with Jamie. They also often heard strange noises in the background. From time to time, someone would ask her where she was. Jamie finally let slip that she was at a hospital, and she told them a little bit about her son. Cindy, Lance, and Lev happened to be in search of a name for their new company. Now, it was obvious to them: It had to be her son’s name.

Jamie protested. Then she cried. And she was scared. She slipped into her energetic anxieties: What if someone thought she was on the payroll? Or playing favorites? She sent them a list of other names. She felt she had to remain neutral in her support for all her geothermal projects. She was also frightened for a more superstitious reason: “What if they fail?”

Right, right. We hear you. But the trio was adamant. The new company would be named Sage, Sage Geosystems.

the gulf coast of Texas has, for a very long time, been dotted with oil and gas wells. That means we actually know a lot about the conditions below the surface there. In the ’70s, when the feds were exploring geothermal resources, they ran a bunch of programs along the state’s southern border. They shuttered them in 1992, but the reports that came from those projects left behind a pile of data. It pointed at two counties—Hidalgo and Starr, down in the very tip of Texas—as damn promising. The subsurface conditions, sedimentary rock (so not that hard) with a good amount of heat, were ripe for geothermal, the report said. Which is why, early on a Friday afternoon, Jamie and I left Houston on an hour-long flight toward the Rio Grande and disembarked at McAllen International Airport, 5 miles from the Mexican border.

Back when Cindy was at Shell, she’d helped build a gas well 19,000 feet deep on the Rancho Santa Fe, a truly sprawling windswept property where prized Akaushi beef cattle roam. The well was one of the deepest around. (“They found gas, but it was too expensive to bring it up, so they dumped the project,” she tells me. “They probably spent $10 million.”) Cindy knew Rancho Santa Fe was a perfect location to see whether their ideas about doing EGS with a single well could actually work.

Saturday morning, Jamie and I followed Cindy, Lance, and Lev in Cindy’s F-150 (her other car is a Prius) out of McAllen, about 45 minutes along flat, flat, flat roads past miles (and miles) of massive wind turbines. When we turned in to the ranch, a guy at the gates made us promise to drive under 10 mph to avoid hitting the prized cattle. About a mile along, towering over all the sagebrush around, was a tall black rig, thumping out a consistent, clanging beat.

By then, drillers, derrick men, and roustabouts working for Sage Geosystems had dropped new pipes down to 11,200 feet. The team took me on a walk around the site, hard hats and steel-toe boots and fireproof coveralls on, a light rain falling. If their plans worked, Cindy and Lev said, wells like this could be drilled in a lot of places, without a very big footprint. Their aim was to build a system and plant that could supply, at first, 3 megawatts of power—enough to power about 3,100 typical homes for a year. Once they made sure it worked, they’d go for 50 megawatts.

A few weeks later, the engineers pumped fluid down into the wells to try to get a big enough, workable reservoir. When I called Cindy to see how it went, she was nearly giddy. The frack had been a success. It created a reservoir “10 times what we expected,” Cindy said, laughing. The team ran fluid through the fracture to confirm it was all connected. (It was.) And their seismic monitors held steady; no earthquakes. It was super good news—not just for Sage, but for a small constellation of people who were deeply, emotionally invested in geothermal in this tip of Texas.

because of the promising conditions in Starr and Hidalgo Counties, Jamie had been helping a handful of people there. The Sage team, of course. The public utility manager for the city of McAllen, who desperately wants to build a geothermal plant for his city. She’d been talking to Dario Guerra, a local water engineer who had been preaching the gospel of geothermal for years. One person she hadn’t met, though, was James McAllen.

So, late in the afternoon, Jamie and I headed about an hour northwest from the city of McAllen to the 50,000-acre San Juanito Ranch, widely known as McAllen Ranch. We were buzzed through an inconspicuous gate, and James—thin, tall, with an ivory cowboy hat on his head—strode up to meet us, a big smile on his face. We made our way to the ranch headquarters: the Rock House, a low-slung stone building that’s more than a century old. Yep. James’ great-great-grandfather gave the town its name. The ranch has worked cattle and horses since before Texas was a state. But, he explained, there’s no more profit in cattle.

“My job is to see how we can get this ranch down the road for the next 100 years,” he said. “And we aren’t going to do that with livestock.” Instead the family looks to every single resource, “from the sun to the wind to the grass to the dirt to the gravel.” About five years ago, James and a partner installed an array of solar panels. The ranch happens to share a property line with an energy substation, and they now sell power back to the electric company. He was planning to build four more solar arrays.

But one of his nephews, who was studying at UT Austin, had recently called him up. “Hey, you know, Uncle Jim,” the kid said, “I just had a class about geothermal. And McAllen Ranch was all over it.” Turns out, in the late ’70s, when the government was looking for places to test out geothermal, they had approached James’ dad to see whether he wanted to work with them on a demonstration plant. “It was kind of science fiction technology,” James explained. So, no.

After his nephew’s call, James got to thinking. He talked to the utility company he sells solar to; they were excited by the prospect of buying geothermal energy, because it’s a baseload—always available—source. So he called his friend Dario Guerra (the very same), and Dario told James about the Sage crew and their work nearby. Pretty soon, Cindy and Lev and Lance showed up for dinner with bottles of tequila. Within a few weeks, James signed a joint-venture agreement with the team: He’d work on raising the $27 million or so they’d need, and Sage would begin planning for wells on the ranch.

Jamie had been sitting a bit quiet, for her, on the far side of the table as James told us this whole story. But during a pause, she busted in with enthusiasm. “Wait. Is your nephew in petroleum engineering?” she asked. “That class exists because of GEO!” she exclaimed—GEO being the program she had started at the university. “I feel like I’m in a simulation,” she said. The kid’s professor was the first instructor Jamie had recruited to UT.

On our last morning in Texas, I found Jamie in the dining room of the hotel, some cereal and yogurt on the table in front of her. She was watching a video of her boy. Tears on her cheeks. She handed me her phone so I could see Sage. He was at a table eating breakfast. He’s a gorgeous child: wide smile, fabulous curly dark hair. He communicates via sweet grunts and laughs. She missed him. But she was also crying because she was exhausted and overwhelmed. That’s because after seeing how far Sage Geosystems had come, and meeting James McAllen, it was sinking in that after all the hours and days and minutes she’d spent pushing this project along, the quest for geothermal had taken on a life of its own.

When I got home from the Texas trip, my husband and I had to face new test results, and horrible conversations with our doctors. Then he had the first of two major surgeries. In the moments between ER visits and desperate phone calls, I filled up as much space in my mind as I could to keep my thoughts off of the inconceivable. But as the scaffolding of the life we had built began to shudder, facing the simple requirements of getting through a day became hard. Then harder still.

When Jamie got home, she left the GEO program at the university. It didn’t need her anymore. She’d been living back in Boston for a while now, closer to her parents, but Sage wasn’t doing too well. He’d had multiple brain surgeries. He would only eat a few things. She moved across town to get him into a school where he (and she) might get better support.

When Sage was sleeping or at school, or when a nanny was giving her a break, Jamie threw even more of herself at geothermal everywhere. She scrapped for more climate philanthropy and launched a program called Project InnerSpace—to chase missing subsurface data and more accurate maps, to start a competition to focus engineers on the lingering tech problems, to spread geothermal globally. And she turned to publishing a huge report about the state of geothermal in Texas.

Then, things took a strange turn: When the Inflation Reduction Act was signed in August 2022, it finally—finally—offered good tax-based incentives for geothermal projects. Companies could now get a 30 percent tax credit for their projects, maybe even more. If the equipment were made in the US, they could add another 10 percent. Great, amazing! But the law wasn’t really set up for geothermal; it was built much more for solar and wind. Which meant it had terrific incentives for the holy grail of solar and wind—energy storage.

It also happened that for many months, Cindy and Lev and Lance had been wondering whether the reservoirs they were creating underground could be, essentially, pressurized storage tanks. Use the excess energy from the grid to fill it up with fluid; when you release the fluid, turbines turn. “Same well design, and same power plants,” Cindy said. Months later, she added, test results showed that they could, in some scenarios, rival the cost of lithium-ion batteries. Sage was diversifying.

Right, nothing happens in a straight line. But there was one conversation I kept remembering from the trip in Texas that seems worth mentioning. Over Italian food, Cindy and Lance and Lev started talking about their kids, all adults now. Their children, they said, were finally proud of them, proud of their work. Lance’s kids joked that they could, for the first time, tell people what their father did for a living. Cindy said her 23-year-old daughter knew there was no future in oil and gas. In fact, Cindy’s daughter is now a mechanical engineer working at Sage, using technology that was born out of her mother’s and grandfather’s industry for wind and solar storage, and for a geothermal future.

of course it’s delicious to think the industry that’s been at the heart of such a massive problem, a massive accomplice, could be transformed into a massive solution. No one is that naive; Wall Street is too powerful.

But things are certainly different than when Jamie started. For sure, the thing that she glimpsed when she was at the ultracapacitor startup was coming true: The oil field had accomplished so much that could get us closer to geothermal everywhere. Some big oil companies—Chevron, Shell, Ecopetrol—started in-house programs. And the feds doubled their funding to leverage tech and workforce from the oil and gas industry to expand geothermal. The report Jamie was working on, a 15-chapter, 350-page collaboration between five Texas universities, the International Energy Agency, and a bunch of other organizations, laid out a hopeful picture of how to scale geothermal in coming years. All of it was, in part, because of every hour she put in, every call she made, every dollar she raised.

Jamie is, of course, just one of a group of evangelists, people who don’t have clear job titles like CEO or director, but who—while they can—are on relentless missions to try to make something better, something livable happen. At that Italian dinner in Texas, when she left the table for a moment, Dario Guerra told me, “Four years ago, when I tried to push this, there wasn’t a Jamie. Four years makes a huge difference.”

Cindy added, “There’d be none of this without Jamie.”

This past fall, Jamie came through San Francisco, trying to raise more money. On a dark, wet night, we met for dinner before she got on a red-eye back across the country—she wanted to be home to take Sage to school. She seemed more exhausted than ever. Tears came easy. The new school district wasn’t working out too well. Sage had never been around other kids. He was struggling. His needs were so intricate that even the complex care department at Boston Children’s Hospital would soon tell her Sage was too complicated for them.

By then, my husband’s cancer had taken the turn I’d dreaded for four years. I lost him. Finding strength to just get through a few hours or a day, much less do any work at all, became excruciating. From that vantage, as I watched Jamie move through the night, I worried about what seemed true: Maybe it was going to take the kind of driving, roiling energy she uses to be able to breathe in a heartbreaking world to do the really big things. The things that really need to be done.

Before she got into a taxi, she told me once more that she thinks Sage’s illness is probably still terminal. I understand, deeply. We need to temper hope in the face of a scary and maybe inevitable future. And we need the energy of that fear, too. 

Jamie Beard’s hair and makeup by Pepper Pastor. This article appears in the June 2023 issue. Subscribe now.

Where to Find the Energy to Save the World

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Giraffes, despite a relatively small brain, can handle statistics

BLAKE RUSSELL WAS still asleep when he got an alert on his phone. His mare was giving birth. He sprang out of bed and headed to the barn, about 50 yards from his house in Gainesville, Texas.

Russell is used to getting woken up for a late-night delivery. But this foal was special. It was a clone of a rare Przewalski’s horse, a now-endangered species that once roamed the grasslands of central Asia. Crouched in the corner of the barn stall, Russell waited for its birth with anticipation. “When I saw toes and nose, I thought, ‘Whew, this is going as planned,’” he recalls.

You might be surprised that cloned animals exist—they do, but the procedure is mostly used for domesticated animals. Russell’s company, ViaGen Pets, clones around 100 horses a year, as well as cats and dogs.

Yet the technology has rarely been used for endangered animals. Up until that moment, cloning had only successfully produced a single animal of any such species. The new Przewalski’s horse, born in February and still unnamed, is the second of his kind. He’s a genetic copy of the world's first cloned Przewalski’s horse, Kurt, who was born in August 2020. Both were made from cells frozen more than 40 years ago at the San Diego Zoo. The scientists behind the effort say this second birth is evidence that cloning could be a viable strategy for saving endangered species.

“It’s certainly a milestone in conservation,” says Oliver Ryder, director of conservation genetics at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, which worked with ViaGen and the nonprofit Revive & Restore to clone the foal. “It offers a new chance for reducing extinction risk and preserving the genetic diversity of species.”

Sandy-colored and with large heads, Przewalski’s horses are shorter and stockier than their domesticated relatives. After centuries of hunting and habitat disruption, the horses became extinct in the wild in the 1960s. Luckily, many were still living in zoos.

Starting in the 1990s, captive-born Przewalski’s horses were reintroduced into the wild to establish herds in Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan. Today, there are about 1,900 left. Nearly all of them are descended from just 12 animals captured from native habitats between 1910 and 1960.

As a species’ numbers dwindle, so does its genetic diversity—the range of inherited characteristics within its population. Generally, the more diverse the gene pool, the longer animals live and the more offspring they have, boosting their chances of survival.

But once their population has dramatically shrunk, even if the species rebounds, genetic variation does not. “About half of the gene pool of the wild horses had been lost,” Ryder says. So scientists took matters into their own hands.

The idea of breeding livestock for desirable traits is nothing new—and for the past few decades, some ranchers have turned to cloning their most prized cattle, pigs, and sheep. The team chose the Przewalski’s horse partly because of ViaGen’s experience with cloning domestic horses, and partly because they already know a lot about how horses reproduce and how to care for foals. And perhaps most importantly, the San Diego Zoo already had stored cells from a Przewalski’s horse that was genetically different from the horses living today. Introducing that DNA into the current population could help restore lost genetic variation. “We were looking for a species that had gone through a bottleneck and could use a boost,” says Ben Novak, lead scientist at Revive & Restore.

TYPICALLY, CLONING STARTS by removing a small piece of tissue—usually a skin sample—from a living animal and isolating cells from it in the lab. For the Przewalski’s horse clones, scientists used cells that had been collected from a stallion in 1980 and then cryopreserved.

Taking one of these donor cells, the scientists transferred its nucleus, where the DNA resides, into an egg from a surrogate mother that had been hollowed out to remove its own genetic material. The egg and donor cell joined together, and the embryo grew in a test tube until it matured enough to be transferred to the surrogate mother’s womb. (Domestic horses were used to carry the pregnancies for both Kurt and the new foal.) None of the animal’s genes changed in the process, so the resulting foal is an identical twin of the original horse—just born at a later time.

The birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996 was a breakthrough for cloning technology. Dolly was the first mammal cloned from a mature cell—in this case, from a donor sheep’s mammary gland. Previously, cloned animals had only been produced using cells from embryos. But this was a big limitation, because it required knowing which animals you'd want to clone, and obtaining embryos from them in advance. The ability to use mature cells meant that cloning was suddenly possible using any cell from an animal at any age.

It also opened up the possibility of cloning as a way to preserve endangered species. Collecting embryos from endangered species could waste precious genetic material if the cloning attempt failed. Collecting mature cells, which are available throughout an animal’s lifetime, is much less risky.

And cloning has a notoriously low success rate. Most cloned embryos never result in live births. Embryos may die in the lab, or fail to implant in the uterus of the surrogate, or develop abnormally. In Dolly’s case, it took 29 embryo transfers into surrogate ewes to get a successful pregnancy.

Cloning can also give rise to health issues: large birth size, organ defects, and premature aging. Researchers think the procedure may create random errors in how genes are expressed. Many of the first clones of endangered animals died young. In 2001, scientists cloned the first member of an endangered species, a type of wild cattle called a guar. But the animal died soon after birth from an infection. In 2003, a pair of endangered banteng calves—a species of wild cattle in Asia—were born at the San Diego Zoo, but one had to be euthanized shortly after birth due to health problems. The surviving banteng was later put on display at the zoo.

The cloning process has gotten more efficient since the days of Dolly, but it still doesn’t work all the time. ViaGen scientists created and transferred seven embryos into as many mares to create the new foal. Four of them had pregnancies that advanced into the first trimester, but three miscarried. Russell says that’s in line with the company’s typical success rate for producing cloned domestic horses.

Because of this history, Novak says scientists waited to announce this latest horse’s birth until he survived infancy. Even now, they’ll have to monitor his health for the rest of his life. As for Kurt, he’s in “great health,” Novak says. He now lives at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park with a female Przewalski’s horse, Holly.

Even if the two clones remain healthy, they won’t be released into the wild—but their children or grandchildren will. Novak says they will become breeding stallions when they reach maturity at age 3 or 4. “Their purpose in life is to breed as much as possible, so we want them to live as long as possible,” he says. The team also plans to continue cloning more Przewalski’s horses.

NOT EVERY ENDANGERED species is suitable for cloning. The technology relies on having cell samples from animals, which aren’t always easy to obtain. (And to take it a step further, the lack of a complete genome is one of the reasons why efforts aimed at the “de-extinction” of long-ago animals like the woolly mammoth aren’t using cloning, but are instead aiming to edit the DNA of a related species, like the Asian elephant, to create a hybrid.)

Plus, a domestic species often needs to serve as a surrogate—this ameliorates the risks of taking an endangered species out of its natural habitat and putting it through the surrogacy procedure. But for many endangered species, there are no domestic animals that are genetically similar enough to carry a successful pregnancy.

David Jachowski, associate professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, says cloning alone won’t save endangered species. “As a scientist, it’s intriguing. We’re going from science fiction to reality,” he says. “But the reality is, if we don't address the threat the species faces in the wild, making more of them to release in the wild isn't going to move the needle on their recovery.”

The real problems that threaten most species, he says, are environmental, and cloning can’t fix those. Jachowski previously worked at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, where he helped coordinate the recovery of the black-footed ferret, an endangered North American animal. The species was close to extinction after its main food source—prairie dogs—were decimated by disease, habitat loss, and poisoning campaigns.

In 2020, the same team behind the horse clones collaborated with the agency to clone a black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann. But so far, that effort has only produced a single animal, and she has not reproduced. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s broader efforts have focused on more conventional conservation techniques, like restoring prairie dog populations while releasing captive-born black-footed ferrets into the wild.

Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, doesn’t think cloning will be a major part of endangered species recovery because of its limitations. He thinks more traditional strategies, like addressing habitat loss and competition from invasive species, will remain the most effective tactics. He sees it as a last-ditch effort: “For the species that really are down to such a small number of individuals, it’s a possible way to increase the gene pool,” he says.

For the Przewalski’s horse, at least, cloning offers hope for future survival of the species. The team that created the new foal didn’t say what kind of animal they’ll clone next, but there are plenty of options. The San Diego Zoo’s frozen repository contains cell lines from more than 1,100 species and subspecies—some of them critically endangered. Russell is looking forward to the next conservation project. “Hopefully they have more animals in their bank that they allow us to produce in the future,” he says.

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A trial of a new drug to combat Alzheimer’s disease has produced encouraging results, slowing clinical decline by 35 percent and leading to a 40-percent reduction in patients losing the ability to carry out everyday tasks. Pharma giant Eli Lilly and Company is now moving towards securing regulatory approval for the drug, called donanemab.

It’s been a big couple of years in Alzheimer’s disease research. In 2021, the FDA approved the first drug in 18 years to treat the condition. Although there were still question marks over the drug’s ability to slow memory decline in patients, it was a welcome step forward. Since then, another drug, lecanemab, entered clinical trials with great fanfare; but news of a handful of deaths linked to the trial raised concerns about safety.

The latest drug, donanemab, targets the same pathological protein as these other agents: amyloid-beta. The field of Alzheimer’s research remains divided as to whether amyloid-beta or another pathological protein, phosphorylated tau, is the main driver of the disease. Current guidelines require clinicians to establish the presence of both amyloid plaques and tau tangles, as well as evidence of neuronal loss, in the brain before an Alzheimer’s diagnosis can be given.

A previous virtual clinical trial tested donanemab against the already approved aducanumab, and found that while both were efficient at clearing amyloid plaques, donanemab appeared to be slightly better at slowing cognitive decline.

Now, Lilly has released a statement detailing the results of a Phase 3 clinical trial in 1,182 Alzheimer’s patients.

After one year, 47 percent of the participants treated with donanemab showed no worsening of their disease, compared with 29 percent of participants taking a placebo. Those treated with the drug also showed 40 percent less decline in their ability to carry out daily tasks after 18 months, and had a 39 percent reduced risk of progressing to the next clinical stage of the disease.

“We are extremely pleased that donanemab yielded positive clinical results with compelling statistical significance for people with Alzheimer's disease in this trial,” said Lilly’s chief scientific and medical officer, Daniel Skovronsky. “This is the first Phase 3 trial of any investigational medicine for Alzheimer's disease to deliver 35% slowing of clinical and functional decline.”

Significantly fewer amyloid plaques could be observed in the brains of trial participants after taking the drug for only six months. “This study's topline results provide compelling support for the relationship between amyloid plaque removal and a clinical benefit in people with this disease,” said Dr Eric Reiman, CEO of Banner Research, which was one of the research sites for the trial.

A second population of 552 people with more advanced disease – illustrated by higher levels of pathological tau protein – was also recruited for the trial. When these patients were combined with the original trial population, the results still showed a significant slowing of cognitive decline, although it’s likely these drugs will provide the most benefit for patients in the early stages of the disease.

As with all medical treatments, there is a risk of side effects. For Alzheimer’s treatments targeting amyloid plaques, a condition called amyloid-related imaging abnormalities (ARIA) can occur. There are two subtypes of ARIA, causing either areas of swelling or micro-bleeds in the brain. Thankfully, most cases in the trial were described as “mild to moderate”, but two participants in the trial died as a direct result of ARIA, as well as a third following a case of ARIA.

According to the president of the British Neuroscience Association Professor Tara Spires-Jones of the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the trial, the results sound “very promising”. But, she cautioned, “It is important to note that there were rare serious side effects of the treatment with brain swelling and small strokes that seem to have contributed to the death of 3 of the participants in the trial. Regulators will have to decide whether the benefits of treatment outweigh these risks.”

There’s no indication yet of how long the approval process may take, but Lilly says they will “work with the FDA and other global regulators to achieve the fastest path to traditional approvals.”

For now, though, the global Alzheimer’s research community is awaiting the complete dataset from the trial.

“The future for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease is looking increasingly promising,” commented Professor Perminder Sachdev of UNSW Sydney, who was not involved in the trial. “Of course, we need the full data to evaluate it, and the rate of adverse effects is a concern, but I am heartened by the news."

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Disease detectives gathered at CDC event—a COVID outbreak erupted

The evangelical right is always waiting for the Apocalypse, counting the days, charting signs and wonders, making calculations as to the time and hour of the end times. One would think that in 2020, when the world was faced with a global catastrophe and a complete breakdown in the normal order of things, they would seize on Covid-19 as a sure sign that those days had come. But for the most part, they chose to deny rather than embrace the coronavirus: Their president and their pastors downplayed its severity and its impact, claimed numbers of deaths were exaggerated, and ridiculed those taking it seriously. Rather than embrace the end of days, they demanded a return to the way things were.

Perhaps this has to do with the realization that many of us faced in those early months of 2020: that we were suddenly and radically living on the virus’s terms, not our own. Instead of a grand battle of good and evil with humans at the center of the action, we were obligated to learn and adapt our behavior to a nonhuman organism whose motives and purpose were incomprehensible to us. How was it possible, in such an ordeal, to maintain the supposed truth of Genesis 1:26, that God intended humanity to have dominion over livestock and all of nature? Perhaps the coronavirus had dominion over us, and we were the livestock?

Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues takes this idea as its inspiration, asking us to rethink our relationship to the bacteria and viruses that drive pandemics. Perhaps, Kennedy suggests, we are not the grand protagonists to our story; perhaps we are just bit players in a larger drama. He retells the story of human civilization from its earliest prehistoric roots to the current decade, not from the perspective of its Great Men so much as its Great Diseases—the bacteria and viruses that have dogged us since Homo sapiens emerged as a species. For Kennedy, it is smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria that matter far more than Charlemagne, Cortes, or Napoleon; he argues not only that “humans have a far less significant place in the world than we used to think” but also that “microbes play a much more important role than we would have believed just a few years ago.”

Quoting Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote that “on any possible, reasonable, or fair criterion, bacteria are—and always have been—the dominant form of life on earth,” Kennedy argues that we are as much a product of disease as we are of any conscious decisions. “Outbreaks of infectious diseases have destroyed millions of lives and decimated whole civilizations,” he writes in his introduction, “but the devastation has created opportunities for new societies and ideas to emerge and thrive. In this way, pathogens have been the protagonists in many of the most important social, political, and economic transformations in history.” A radical thought: What if we, for all our hopes, dreams, and best laid plans, are nothing more than the raw material used by bacteria and viruses to shape the world in their image?

Kennedy lays this argument out through reframing well-known historical events in terms of the diseases and epidemics that led to them. The rise and fall of empires, the brutal conquests of colonial powers, the map as we now know it—all this has depended far more on disease than we may have thought. Some of this may sound familiar: for example, the fact that European settlers in North America, both intentionally and unintentionally, used smallpox to wipe out Indigenous populations, to make the work of colonizing easier. Entirely new to North America, smallpox “raced ahead of the Spanish,” in Kennedy’s words, devastating whole communities. The disease proved decisive: “Without the help of Old World pathogens,” he argues, “early efforts to colonize the American mainland foundered.” Take, for example, the Spanish conquistadors’ attempts to take Tenochtitlan. The first try failed, but a second expeditionary force arriving a year later brought with it smallpox, which devastated the city and brought the Spanish victory.

The rise and fall of empires, the brutal conquests of colonial powers, the map as we now know it—all this has depended far more on disease than we may have thought.

More subtle was the arrival of the Puritans and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. Earlier attempts to build colonies in New England had faced fierce resistance from the Indigenous peoples already living there. The Popham Colony in southern Maine failed after 14 months; the French trading post near Cape Cod also fell to Native attacks. But these earlier attempts laid the groundwork for the Puritans by spreading disease; when the Pilgrims got there, they found abandoned villages with grain and beans that they used to get through their first winter, the remnants of Native communities destroyed by smallpox. While these Europeans claimed this food as “God’s good providence,” Kennedy suggests instead that “their gratitude at Thanksgiving should be directed to the Old World pathogens that made the settlement of Plymouth Colony possible.” The rest, unfortunately, is history—crucially, in Kennedy’s version of events, the real colonizer of the Americas was the variola virus, with the Spanish and English as merely its unwitting hosts.

Other examples that Kennedy invokes may be more surprising. Despite the Roman Empire’s vaunted aqueduct and sewer systems, he explains, Romans’ lack of any understanding of germ theory meant that their water infrastructure festered with disease, hastening the empire’s downfall. Citing Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome, Kennedy argues that “pandemics caused immense damage and played a crucial role in weakening the Roman Empire,” far more so, he claims, than the “Barbarians” at the gates.

Pathogenesis also convincingly argues that the birth of the nation of Haiti, and perhaps even the rise of the United States in its current shape, can be traced to yellow fever and the humble mosquito, Aedes aegypti, its primary host. In 1802, about a decade after the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon sent an expeditionary force of some 30,000 troops to its former colony Saint-Domingue, hoping to retake the land and reimpose slavery. The freed Haitians, however, defeated them not with military might but with disease. As the rebels’ commander, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, told his troops in March 1802, “The whites from France cannot hold out against us here in Saint-Domingue. They will fight well at first, but soon they will fall sick and die like flies.” Dessalines’s army used the island’s yellow fever against the invading French: It avoided a straightforward conflict when Napoleon’s troops first arrived in spring, drawing them into a quagmire that lasted until summer, when the rains came. With the rains came standing water, the perfect breeding ground for Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carried yellow fever and proved a crucial ally against the French. According to one historian’s estimate, of the 65,000 French soldiers sent to recapture the colony, more than 50,000 died, overwhelmingly from yellow fever.

Unable to maintain their Caribbean outpost, the French ultimately sold the sprawling Louisiana territory to the United States; a fact that leads to Kennedy’s conclusion that the U.S. as it exists today owes a great debt of gratitude to Haiti’s mosquito population.

Again and again, Pathogenesis suggests that the course of history has less to do with our own volition and more to do with the ways in which different diseases fared in different climates. In places where Europeans were less susceptible to disease, such as North America, colonizers brought families and established settlements that eventually became wealthy democracies. In places were Europeans were more susceptible to pathogens, such as sub-Saharan Africa, they built rapacious, extractive industries meant to maximize profit with minimal exposure to the environment, men plundering all they could before returning to their families in Europe healthy and wealthy. What they left behind were landscapes ripped of natural resources and countries that, decades later, still struggle to achieve any kind of remote economic parity with former colonial powers.

At times, the thesis seems stretched a little thin—Kennedy argues that the rise of Christianity over Roman pagan religions can be traced to its version of the afterlife, an afterlife that became attractive in the face of repeated plagues and pandemics. But it would seem that if the issue here is simply mortality, the Roman Empire’s ceaseless warfare might drive soldiers into embracing Christianity’s afterlife as well. At other times, Kennedy’s desire to offer pandemics as the key behind all of human history means Pathogenesis can veer into the same territory as the kinds of books he critiques—Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, among them—books that offer “this one weird trick” to explain all of human history.

But this quibble doesn’t detract from the main idea that drives Pathogenesis. What the book reveals is the plain fact that humans are often not the only actors on the great stage of history that we assume we are, and that we may not even be the most important. We have used and been used by diseases so repeatedly that, by the end of Kennedy’s book, one begins to wonder if we may exist primarily to spread and promulgate microscopic organisms and viruses. And if that isn’t our main purpose, it certainly remains something we are exceedingly good at—a true calling, you could say.

Our diseases, ourselves. For pathogens need us as much as we need them; the story here is of the interdependence of us and the microbes inside us. Rather than showing how insignificant humans are in the grand scheme of the universe, the true effect of Kennedy’s Pathogenesis may be to invite us to further rethink our long held binary that attempts to separate the human from the rest of the living organisms on this planet.

It also helps to put the last few years in greater context. If one sees human history as more or less constantly engaged in a complicated dynamic with microbes, creating and responding to pandemics, then the Covid-19 outbreak is less of an apocalyptic interruption in the world, heralding the end times, and instead the latest way in which humans have played hosts to yet another player on the world stage.

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A sea lion slumps on its back, belly and neck exposed. A wildlife worker swabs another’s nose; curled into a comma, the emaciated animal screeches in protest. In another shot of Reuters B-roll, humans in hazmat suits shovel a shoreline grave under colorless skies, sprinkling a red mass of carcasses with chemical powder before sealing the burial with dark wet sand.

The numbers are as bleak as the footage: More than 3,400 sea lions sickened and dead of the H5N1 variant of avian influenza in Peru this winter and spring. With the animal weighing, on average, about 770 pounds, each of those infected corpses threatens to further pulse the pathogen along the Peruvian coastline, according to researchers there.

Scenes this stark are harder to ignore than slower forms of species demise quietly spread out over time and space: Here is a riverbank littered with lifeless mussel shells, the plains where 200,000 antelope dropped dead, corals stripped of sea urchins, a continent across which bush fires killed or displaced three billion animals. Die-offs like these jolt us even as tens of thousands of species steadily twinkle off into extinction in the Anthropocene. “They really feel biblical in their proportions,” Sam Fey, an associate professor of biology at Reed College, told me.

Their scale—that of carnage—seems to speak to our modern ecological anxiety, rage, and grief; mass mortality events are material evidence of anthropogenic apocalypse, an unignorable and immediate tally of the ravages we’ve sown. And they will likely become more common as heat waves, droughts, disease outbreaks, storms, fires, and other environmental disturbances grow more frequent and deadlier. News coverage of die-offs, however, fails to acknowledge all we don’t understand about mass death. In reality, we’re nowhere close to grasping the repercussions these cascades of death have on ecosystems. “We’re still a far way away from having a firm view,” Fey said. “As a field we know very little about these events.”

Each year, millions of salmon spawn, stop eating, rot alive, and dissolve away. When billions of cicadas emerge from the ground, their remains fertilize that same soil a few weeks later. A masting beech tree can carpet a square meter with 500 seeds, almost none of which will get the chance to sprout and take life. Nature is full of episodes of mass death; not all are devastating mass mortality events.

The kind of mass mortality events worrying scientists are anomalous punctuations—they are not an evolved and recurring dynamic in a creature’s life history (as the examples above are). They also, for the most part, don’t discriminate. “It’s everything: top of the food chain all the way down,” University of Arkansas biologist Simon Tye told me. “It’s just a full-on decimation of the population.” Most characteristically, these occurrences are dramatic. Experts have described them as single events that wipe out huge chunks of a population, kill more than a billion individuals, or leave behind 700 million tons of dead tissue (a mass equivalent to one million Christ the Redeemer statues).

In the last decade or so, mass mortality events worldwide have included the loss of 450-plus elephants in Botswana, 18,000-plus migratory birds in India’s Sambhar Lake, 350 Magellanic penguins in Argentina, hundreds of emaciated gray whales along the Pacific coast, and 99.9 percent  of Spain’s fan mussels. Five thousand dead red-wing blackbirds rained down in Arkansas, and 45,000 flying foxes hung from trees and piled on the ground in Australia. Lightning struck down a huddle of 300 Norwegian reindeer. Billions of starfish melted into goop.

“It truly feels like a war zone out there.”

In 2022 alone, many die-offs made themselves known by washing ashore: 2,500 endangered seals on the Caspian Sea’s Russian shores, hundreds of seabirds on ice and shoreline in Newfoundland, more than 2,250 trout and salmon along Ireland’s Glenagannon River, thousands of crabs and lobsters along England’s River Tees, 60 dolphins on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast.

For some, the culprit was clear. Microscopic algae smothered aquatic life to death in the San Francisco Bay. Drought killed 512 wildebeests, 430 zebras, 205 elephants, 51 buffaloes, and 12 giraffes in Kenya. Starvation wasted away the hundreds of flightless little blue penguins that washed up on New Zealand beaches at half their typical weight.

Compressed and compiled, these death tolls collapse into senselessness; it’s a familiar feeling to the modern writer or reader. “While statistical shock and awe is abundant, we are often unable to grasp the true meaning of such figures—stymied by basic innumeracy, the incomprehensible scale of our present crises, and the profound mismatch between hard data and human feeling,” Eleanor Cummins wrote of Covid-19 for this magazine in 2020. But a careful look at any mass mortality event can restore its contours. Take the hundreds of Cape fur seal carcasses that washed up on Namibia’s coastline early last year. On a single February day, more than 400 appeared along the water’s edge. In one photograph taken by biologists during the aftermath, a dark, wet seal pup lies as flat as a slipper near a tape measure indicating it never grew to be longer than 75 centimeters long; in another, 14 dead seals are spread on the beach in a lonely colony of dark, lifeless curves. “It’s been mentally and emotionally taxing,” a conservationist said at the time. “It truly feels like a war zone out there.”

Unfortunately, experts say it’s fair to categorize mass mortality events as a phenomenon on the historic upswing. “They’re happening more often, and more individuals are dying each time they happen,” Tye said. In 2015, Fey and his colleagues reviewed more than 7,000 mass mortality events since 1940 and found that reported die-offs have, indeed, become more common for birds, fish, and marine invertebrates. The scientists attributed one in four mass mortality events to disease (like the avian flu), one in five to human perturbation (like contamination), and about one in six to biotoxicity (like harmful algae blooms). One in four, they found, was directly influenced by climate: weather, heat stress, oxygen stress, starvation. Other research on North American freshwater lakes and the Mediterranean Sea demonstrates a link between rising environmental temperatures, extreme heat events, and die-offs.

Often during mass mortality events, a tangle of stressors will ensnare a vulnerable species in crisis, experts say. Warming waters, for example, combined with nitrogen pulses from wastewater pollution or stormwater runoff can fuel harmful algal blooms, which asphyxiate and suffocate life. Heat waves and droughts set the stage together for wildfires, which can then leave a landscape vulnerable to flooding. Warmer conditions can abet pathogenic spread or upset delicate microorganism-host relationships.

It’s this cascading effect that has some scientists worried. “One catastrophe makes it more likely that you’ll suffer a second or third,” said Christopher Harley, a University of British Columbia zoologist. And every devastation leaves an ecosystem more vulnerable for the next. “It might take years to get back up from that loss.”

Welcome to the necrobiome, the ecosystem of carcasses. In the necrobiome, dead matter is not inert—it is a base unit of life: Carrion beetles pilfer, maggots feast, seeds scatter, raccoons scavenge, vultures peck, and microbes bloom.  “If you zoom in to the microbial level, life is exploding. It’s multiplying, it’s diversifying,” Jeffery Tomberlin, a professor in entomology at Texas A&M, told me. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

“It’s hard to be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment.”

But our understanding of decomposition largely comes from single-carcass studies. Those fundamental dynamics, experts warn, might collapse under the sudden appearance of a thousand times more carrion than an ecosystem is designed to recycle—as in the case of a mass mortality event. That could lead to carcasses mummifying instead of breaking down, pathogens seeping into an ecosystem’s soil and water, and oxygen-starved dead zones. Hypothetically, not certainly. When it comes to mass mortality events, Harley said, “there’s a lot of blank areas on our ecological map.”

With good reason: Die-offs can be surprisingly cryptic in nature and exquisitely onerous to analyze in practice.

Because mass mortality events are inherently unpredictable in time and space, we often lack a given site’s baseline demography from before it’s wiped out. (You can’t, after all, monitor an area anticipating catastrophe.) So we struggle to accurately capture the exact extent of devastation. An event’s suddenness also challenges researchers to assemble as quickly as possible to gather postmortem data. “It’s hard to be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment,” Tye said. What’s more, some die-offs are impossible to detect at all. In oceans, dead organisms sink to depths beyond observation; in the tropics, they more speedily decompose out of sight.

Elsewhere, scientists might try to understand a phenomenon by replicating it and observing it in a controlled setting. “At no point are you ever going to do that” for mass die-offs of wild animals, Tomberlin said. “It’s just not on the table.” Slaughtering and studying domesticated livestock—arguably, a more practical approach—would fail to shed an accurate light on natural decomposition processes, given the industrial antibiotic regimens that fundamentally alter the animals’ microbiomes, and therefore their necrobiomes.

Some researchers have found workarounds. In 2016, for example, a team of wildlife biologists at Mississippi State University acquired 6,000 pounds of invasive feral swine carcasses from the Department of Agriculture and other state and federal agencies with removal programs. They left the carrion in forest plots to rot and observed the dramatic metamorphosis that ensued. A writhing, six-inch-deep, 30-foot-long stream of blowfly maggots flooded the carcasses, carrying away scientific equipment and heralding the arrival of thousands of flies, beetles, spiders, hornets, armadillos, lizards, and vultures. To collect microbial data during decomposition, researchers waded through a “muck and soup and slime” of corpse wax. The soil’s new chemistry—weighted with excesses of nitrogen, gases, and acidic body fluids—killed off grasses and trees, opening up the forest canopy and shedding more sunlight on its floor.

“If you push a system, it ultimately will collapse or kick back.”

In 2019, the MSU team dumped nearly 15 tons—30,000 pounds, or about 200 bodies—of donated feral hog carcasses in Oklahoma prairie grasslands. They discovered that grasses in sites where they left a single hog seemed to bounce back, fueled by the carcass’s recycled nutrients. But in plots where scientists discarded 10 or more cadavers at once, the effect was poisonous: Flora stayed brown and dead for months. The soil microbiome lost key fungal and bacterial species; in some patches, surrounding trees died off.

“If you push a system, it ultimately will collapse or kick back,” said Richard Kock, a retired professor of wildlife health and emerging disease at the Royal Veterinary College in London. But which one will happen is impossible to predict.

The summer of 2021 was a morbid one across North America’s western coast, as temperatures rose above 100 degrees (and up to a record-breaking 121 degrees in British Columbia). More than a thousand people died. Crops roasted and withered. Wildfires raged, and glaciers melted.

In Seattle, juvenile terns tried to flee rooftop nests for cooler cover and died, plunging to the burning asphalt pavement below. Along the shoreline, billions of marine invertebrates—barnacles, mussels, oysters, clams, gastropods, crabs, sea stars—cooked alive. On a single, 100-meter stretch of shoreline, the heat struck one million bay mussels dead; on another, it killed 10 million barnacles. “It was so insufferably hot that things couldn’t handle it,” Harley said. “Anyone who lived near the coast knew something was going wrong because the breeze off the shore was awful.”

For more than a month, Harley and his colleagues functioned as coroners, documenting and assessing the heat dome’s aquatic victims, many of which remained for weeks physically attached to the shore where they had (until their deaths) provided housing for crabs, sea cucumbers, and worms. It was supremely bleak work, he said.

But today, photographs document what happened to the landscape after the grizzly die-off receded: Tens of thousands of new mussels and barnacles have sprung up in the void. “They’re back already,” Harley said. And by carefully studying the mass mortality event’s scale and scope, scientists hope to bolster the shoreline’s survivability. They’ve concluded that marine protected environments should prioritize north-facing and complex rock faces as well as organisms like mussels and seaweeds, all of which could provide protective shade for sensitive species in future heat waves.

Kazakhstan’s saiga offer another tale of resilience in the face of massive mortality. During an uncommonly hot and humid May, more than 200,000 of the critically endangered antelope—about 60 percent of the world’s population—dropped dead all at once. The soupy weather conditions had turned a microbe in the animal’s snout, the normally co-habitating bacterium Pasteurella multocida, virulent and deadly. But in studying the saiga fatalities, researchers discovered some remaining healthy herds outside the killing’s envelope; they’ve surpassed a population of one million in the eight years since the die-off. “That small population has reestablished itself,” said Kock, who studied the mass mortality event and its fallout. “There is resilience.”

And yet any resilience, in the context of mass death, feels like a paltry consolation prize. “Everything’s just kind of hitting the fan at once,” Tye told me. “I’m honestly just kind of ashamed that we’ve gotten to this point.”

About 70 percent of Americans are worried about climate change, according to a 2021 Yale and George Mason University survey. Photos and stories of die-offs confirm that that anxiety is well founded—and tempt news writers with a tangible, legible manifestation of the biological loss looming all around us.

We see the same dynamic with the loss of human life; sudden catastrophes like wildfires and earthquakes get far more coverage than equally deadly threats that are harder to capture in a single image or headline, like the seven million lives lost each year to air pollution. How, for example, would we effectively convey that the banalities of modernity—motor vehicles, industrial output, urban smog, and indoor smoke—have forced 99 percent of the global population to breathe in air that dangerously exceeds international guidelines for pollutants? The threat is too abstract for imagination alone to grasp.

When it comes to biodiversity, animal mass mortality events offer us the regalement of war stories in our narrative stalemate with climate change. That’s useful, perhaps—but we lose nuance as a result. Stories about die-offs, as Tye pointed out, usually hyperfocus on the gore of specific events. “I wish more [mass mortality event] articles talked about how everything is crumbling,” he told me.

News coverage of die-offs often focuses entirely on what’s disappeared, and how dramatically. But mass mortality can be as much about germination as about demise. These events ask us to consider the difference, if any, between what is overwhelming to an ecosystem and what is overwhelming to us. And they force us to confront how little we know about the world in crisis around us. Without understanding how life goes on with so much death around, we can’t begin to fathom what tomorrow’s climate-changed world may look like—to the planet’s and our own peril.

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