A new trial has shown that inhalation of plastic at moderate levels could impact sex hormones, with exposure to micro- and nanoparticles (MNPs) of nylon having a significant disruptive effect in female rats. The study indicates that it is not necessarily newer additives that could be disrupting hormone levels, but in fact the plastics themselves, and paints a concerning picture of the level of exposure humans have to such chemicals. 

Microplastics are everywhere. A sad reality of the use of plastics in almost every single aspect of daily life, microplastics and nanoplastics are being found in animals across the globe and have even been discovered in the human placenta, indicating that there may be nowhere left to hide from them.  

Such particles can enter the human body through drinking water from plastic bottles and food packaging, and it is estimated that 90,000 plastic particles can enter a single human drinking bottled water each year. 

One of the most popular plastics is polyamide, more commonly referred to as nylon. Used in clothes, industrial packaging, car tires, and many more, exposure to polyamide is almost unavoidable and researchers have become increasingly concerned about the quantities in which humans may be inhaling it. 

Despite the concern, there is limited knowledge of how MNPs from polyamide affect our health. To understand any potential health effects of inhalation of polyamide and MNPs, researchers from Rutgers University used polyamide powder to expose rats to a single inhalation of plastic and analyzed their vitals afterwards. 

The researchers had to get nifty to aerosolize the plastics, as most studies simply inject the microplastics to insert them into the body. To do so, they took a food-grade nylon powder and placed it on a bass speaker, which then vibrated to release the smallest particles into the air. Then, airflow carried the particles into an area with a group of female rats in heat, and they stayed there for 24 hours. 

The results showed that post-inhalation, the rats had increased blood pressure and impaired blood vessel dilation, and the amount of reproductive hormone 17 beta-estradiol was decreased, suggesting that the MNPs were disrupting endocrine function. There was also systemic inflammation across the rats’ bodies. While the team expected there to be lung problems, no difference in lung function was observed.  

It is therefore possible that our reliance on plastics may be contributing to declining fertility rates across the world, and the team’s previous research has found microplastics could also contribute to increasing obesity. The team hope that their new method of aerosolizing plastics can be used in future studies to further illuminate health problems associated with MNPs. 

“Unfortunately, there’s very little that people can do to reduce exposure at the moment,” said Phoebe Stapleton, senior author of the study, in a statement. 

“You can be aware of your flooring, wear natural fibers and avoid storing food in plastic containers, but invisibly small plastic particles are likely in nearly every breath we take.” 

The study is published in Particle and Fibre Toxicology.

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Sitting completely undisturbed until as recently as 2009, Hang Son Doong cave in Vietnam dates back to the Pliocene or late Miocene some 2 to 5 million years ago. The 5-kilometer (3-mile) long cave system boasts 200-meter (656-foot) high ceilings, making it by far the largest cave ever discovered on Earth.

The cave is so large, in fact, it measures roughly five times larger than the previous “world’s largest cave” title holder, Malaysia’s Deer Cave. But despite its size, the entrance was first discovered by local man Hồ Khanh in 1991 and wasn’t able to be found again for the next 18 years.

Eventually managing to uncover the cave’s overgrown entrance in 2009, a team from the British Cave Research Association was finally able to document its impressive size.

Located in Phong Nha-Ke Bang park on the coast of Vietnam, the park boasts more than 150 limestone caves and grottos, with many remaining unexplored. Most of the park’s cave systems are connected, and together they would form a total length of 200 kilometers (124 miles).

Son Doong’s passages have a volume of 38.4 million cubic meters (1.35 trillion cubic feet), a length of 9 kilometers (5.5 miles), and a width of 198 meters (650 feet) – wide enough, in fact, that a Boeing 747 would be able to fly straight though. Despite being heavily shrouded in the forest’s foliage, even the entrance to the cave stands an impressive 50 meters (164 feet) tall.

Inside runs a fast-flowing river that caused the formation of the cave over hundreds of thousands of years. During the rainy season this river floods and fills the vast system, making it inaccessible. 

The cave is also home to some impressive stalagmites, including the world’s largest which stands 70 meters (229 feet) high and is called the “Hand of Dog”.

Adding to the cave’s otherworldly atmosphere, two large sinkholes have opened up skylights along the otherwise pitch-black passages that allow the forest above to spread down into the depths of the cave. The smaller of the two, called “Watch Out for Dinosaurs”, is believed to have formed in the last 500,000 years as a result of the forest floor becoming too dense and collapsing.

The larger doline, “The Garden of Edam”, stretches 163 meters (534 feet) and has a much thicker forest floor. Trees in this sinkhole grow to over 30 meters tall and can often cause those exploring the cave to get lost and disorientated amongst the thick undergrowth. 

Birds, monkeys, and snakes have all been found inside these sinkholes. As many of the species in the area are on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, it’s expected that the caves could hold hope for these populations and perhaps some yet-to-be-discovered species.

The lower passages of the caves have already been found to be the home of at least one new species of woodlouse and one new species of fish. 

One untouched passage doesn’t experience that same rainy season flooding as the rest of the cave, and that leaves it filled with perfectly preserved 400-million-year-old fossils.

The full glory of this diverse cave was mapped by National Geographic in 2010 and a full virtual tour is available online. It’s believed, however, that we’ve only explored just 30 percent of the cave’s full system.

In 2019, a team of British divers set out to explore the underwater passages of the cave. Some 120 meters (393 feet) underwater they discovered another tunnel that connects to the cave, and which runs for 1 kilometer (0.62 miles). This finding adds another 1.6 million cubic meters (56.5 million cubic feet) in volume to this already enormous cave.

Experts are still trying to establish where the innermost water flows from, leading some researchers to believe it connects to an even larger, undiscovered cave.

Very little is known about the cave today; it’s had even fewer visitors than Mount Everest and visitor numbers are strictly limited to 1,000 people per season, with a hefty price tag of almost $3,000 per visitor.

The somewhat inaccessibility of the cave has led the Vietnamese government to propose the installation of a 10.6-kilometer (6.6-mile) cable car system to run through the cave. This proposal has been met with objection from environmental organizations, who fear the cave’s undisturbed natural beauty may be affected.

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Fathers drinking alcohol prior to conception could be linked to brain and facial defects in their offspring, new research suggests, putting the onus not just on mothers to quell their alcohol consumption but on fathers too. The findings suggest that research needs to examine fathers’ roles in fetal alcohol syndrome as opposed to just mothers', which has been the focus of most studies to this point. 

Surprisingly, the team actually found that when it comes to certain craniofacial differences, paternal exposure to alcohol has a stronger effect than maternal exposure. 

“We found that male exposures actually drive certain craniofacial differences much stronger than maternal exposures do, so this programming effect that’s coming through sperm has a profound effect on the organization of the face and the growth and proportion of different facial features,” said Dr. Michael Golding, an associate professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences’ Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology and lead author of the study, in a statement.  

“When it was the dad drinking, we saw a profound shift in the organization of the face.” 

Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is a condition characterized by lower body weight, central nervous system problems, hyperactivity, and physical development difficulties. It is difficult to diagnose but is typically identified after doctors confirm the fetus was exposed to alcohol through the mother drinking while pregnant. However, this can pose a number of challenges, and mothers will often deny alcohol consumption in healthcare consultations – now, this research suggests some could be telling the truth. 

“When doctors suspect a child has FAS, they sit down with the mother to confirm the diagnosis by discussing her drinking habits during pregnancy,” Golding said. “It’s not uncommon for the mother to deny consuming alcohol while pregnant. When they do, there’s this stigma or this notion that women are lying about their alcohol use.” 

So, if not the mother, then who? Golding and colleagues believe the father could be contributing more than previously thought. 

The team used mouse models to compare the results of when the mother, father, and both parents consume alcohol before conception. They discovered craniofacial defects in the offspring when each parent drank alcohol that was similar to those found in human children, but they found the defects were greater when it was the father drinking.  

This challenges existing ideas over how FAS develops, and could mean that prospective parents should look to stem their alcohol use prior to conception and that both parents should be incredibly careful of their consumption to have the least possible risk. Being an animal model, it is possible that these results do not translate to humans, but it offers a plausible explanation for many people who are stumped as to the origin of FAS in their children. 

Together with recent research outlining the impact of pre-conception alcohol use, Golding now hopes the new research can impact current alcohol policy.  

“Change the alcohol warning label to remove the maternal emphasis and put it on both parents to say, ‘The decision to consume this beverage can have significant, life-changing consequences to a future child,’” Golding explains. 

“Right now, the warning label only conveys part of the story. We must get that message out into the world as quickly as possible.” 

The research was outlined in a letter to the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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The rope slipped and she plummeted down to the rocks below. Image Credit: Photobac/Shutterstock.com

On social media, television or in the music we listen to, we typically picture happiness as excitement, enthusiasm and energisation. From that perspective, solitude is often mistaken for loneliness. In psychology, researchers define loneliness as a distressed feeling that we experience when we don’t have, or are unable to get, the kind of social connections or relationships we hope for. Solitude is different.

While people’s definitions of solitude might vary, what is interesting is that for many, being solitary doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no one else around. Instead, many people can, and do, find solitude in public spaces, whether this be sitting with a cup of tea in a busy cafe or reading a book in a park. And my research suggests that taking some time for yourself could have a positive impact on your daily mood.

Many of us have had days when there are troubles at work, when things don’t go as expected, or when we take on too much and feel overwhelmed. What I’ve found is that learning to take a little time for yourself, a moment of solitude, could help you deal with these feelings.

What can we gain from solitude?

In a series of experiments, I brought undergraduate students into a room to sit quietly with themselves. In some studies, I took away the students’ backpacks and devices and asked them to sit with their thoughts; at other times, the students stayed in the room with books or their phones.

After just 15 minutes of solitude, I found that any strong emotions the participants might have been feeling, such as anxiety or excitement, dropped. I concluded that solitude has the capacity to bring down people’s arousal levels, meaning it can be useful in situations where we feel frustrated, agitated or angry.

Spending time alone doesn’t have to be a downer. Solitude can boost mood and dampen anxiety. (© fizkes – stock.adobe.com)

Many people might assume that only introverts would enjoy solitude. But while it is true that introverts might prefer to be alone, they are not the only people who can reap the benefits from solitude.

In a survey of more than 18,000 adults around the world, more than half voted for solitude as one of the key activities they engage in for rest. So, if you are an extrovert, don’t let this stop you from taking time for solitude to calm down.

Sitting with your thoughts can be difficult

The challenging part about spending time alone is that it can be boring and lonely sometimes.

Many people find that sitting with their thoughts can be difficult, and prefer having something to do. Indeed, forcing yourself to sit and do nothing can lead to you finding time alone less enjoyable. So you might prefer to have some sort of activity during your moment of solitude.

In my study, I gave participants the choice to do nothing or spend their time sorting hundreds and hundreds of golf pencils into boxes. After being asked to be alone for ten minutes, most participants chose to sort the pencils. This is the sort of activity I thought most people would find boring. However, the choice to do the boring task stems from the desire to keep busy when other people are not around to occupy our mental space.

So, if you find yourself scrolling on your device every time you have a few moments of solitude, this is quite common. Don’t be hard on yourself. Many people scroll to cope with stress and boredom. Some people also prefer spending their time alone doing daily chores, such as going grocery shopping or doing laundry. This is valid solitary time.

Engaging in fun activities alone

It is interesting, however, that many people shy away from engaging in fun activities alone, like going to the cinema or dining at a restaurant. This might be because we tend to think of them as activities we do with friends and close ones, so doing them alone can make us feel judged and self-conscious. Travelling alone is another activity that can be intimidating, particularly for women.

But a key benefit of going solo is the opportunity to find calm, and having the freedom to choose what to do and how to do it.

In my time studying solitude, I have challenged myself to take on some of these fun activities in my moments of solitude, and I have found the experience rather liberating. Other women have similar experiences, especially when travelling, which has left them feeling empowered and freed.

To overcome our fear of solitude, we need to recognize its benefits and see it as a positive choice – not something that happens to us. While taking a solo trip might be a bit much for you right now, taking time out of your busy schedule for small doses of solitude might well be just what you need.

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Founded in 2014, Blossom Finance was first intended for Muslim entrepreneurs in the United States. The microfinancing platform connects investors with small businesses using mudarabah, a shariah-compliant profit-sharing agreement. But founder Matthew Joseph Martin soon realized that the startup, backed by investors like Boost VC and Tim Draper, was serving a relatively niche market in the States. So he started researching markets with large populations of Muslim people. Indonesia emerged as the best choice.

Southeast Asia is already home to a thriving fintech scene, where Grab, GoTo and Sea have built super apps that encompass financial services, and startups like Xendit, Akulaku and Dana (to name a few) have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for payments, banking services and other financial tools. Indonesia and Malaysia, in the heart of Southeast Asia, are among the countries with the largest Muslim populations in the world.

These factors are proving fertile ground for establishing and growing fintechs that focus exclusively on Islamic finance, offering products and services that follow shariah law. Among other things, this forbids accruing interest, speculation and financing non-halal products like pork, tobacco and alcohol.

According to the World Bank, Indonesia has the most Islamic fintech companies in the world – perhaps fitting, since it’s also the most populous Muslim-majority country in the world with about 231 million Muslims.

Some notable Islamic fintech companies include peer-to-peer lending platform and digital bank Hijra (formerly known as Alami), online bank Bank Aladin, LinkAja, which is backed by Telkomsel and Bank Mandri, the largest bank in Indonesia in terms of asset loans and deposits.

Gojek’s GoPay is also partnered with the Indonesia mosque council to allow users to make zakat, or obligatory alms giving, online.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, where 61.3% out of its 33.6 million inhabitants practice Islam, fintech companies that focus on Islamic finance include crowdfunding platform Ethis Ventures and investment platform Wahed, which is the only shariah-compliant robo-advisory platform in the country. Funding Societies, the SoftBank Vision Fund II-backed SME digital lending platform, recently launched a shariah-compliant financing product there, and now offers it as the default product to all its Malaysian customers.

Shariah law calls for a different approach to financial services, and conventional banks are also launching products for Muslim customers. Along with the growing number of Islamic fintech startups digitizing the process, Islamic-compliant services are becoming accessible to more people.

Profit sharing instead of debt

The seed of Blossom Finance was planted when Martin was running a project in the U.S. enabling people to buy Bitcoin. He ran into a receivables problem, and the usual way to finance cash receivables is to get line of credit or receivables financing from a bank. As a practicing Muslim, however, Martin couldn’t use conventional loans. But he also couldn’t find any other options in the U.S.

“Quite naively, I thought there are plenty of Muslims who own businesses, surely they face the same problem,” he said. “They must have a solution. So what is the solution?”

After learning more about the principles of Islamic finance, Martin launched Blossom Finance, a platform that connects investors with microbanks, which in turn disburse shariah-compliant financing to microbusinesses. Headquartered in Delaware, Blossom Finance hosts investors from primarily the United States and Europe, but all of the microbusinesses it serves are in Indonesia.

After initially soft-launching in the U.S., the Blossom Finance team realized that the market there for Islamic finance was very small, said Martin. They started looking for a bigger market, and landed on Indonesia because of the financial inclusion challenges facing micro and small businesses.

Other reasons Blossom Finance chose Indonesia over other countries with large Muslim populations included its relative political stability, Martin said. It also has a strong baseline infrastructure for operating businesses with primarily foreign capital.

“There’s already been over the past two decades prior to us arriving tons of amazing work,” Martin said. “A lot of the groundwork was already there and we were able to come in and operate as a connector where there are inefficiencies, and a lack of capital. We were able to bridge that lack of capital using a technology solution. All that underlying infrastructure for the last mile of serving the microbusinesses was already there and we were able to tap into it.”

Investors on Blossom Finance’s platform pool their money into funds, or cooperatives, which are then managed by microbanks. The microbanks disburse the financing to microbusinesses to purchase inventory and other things they need. All losses and profits are shared pro rata, Martin explained. If an investor’s capital is 1% of a fund, they can expect to receive 1% of its profits, or absorb losses at the same rate.

What makes Blossom Finance’s microfinance platform shariah-compliant is its use of murabaha contracts instead of traditional interest-charging loans. For example, when a microbusiness, like a corner store, needs to buy inventory like beverages or snacks, they go to one of the cooperatives for financing. Martin explains that the basis of the financing is not the capital, but the commodity that needs to be purchased. The cooperative purchases it at wholesale prices and provides it to the business at a markup instead of charging interest. They then share the profit with investors. Martin said cooperatives can often connect microbusinesses with wholesalers that they didn’t previously know, and also benefit from economies of scale, which also helps microbusinesses.

An Indonesian warung, or small store selling snacks, drinks and daily use items (Gratsias Adhi Hermawan/Getty)

Cooperatives don’t set prices, and instead mudarabah agreements are based on current market prices, which microbusinesses agree to. To make sure microbusinesses get fair agreements from microbanks, cost of funding for microbusinesses is one of the things Blossom Finance takes into consideration when deciding whether to work with a cooperative/microbank.

“Let’s say you’re the bank and I want to buy chickens. You agree to buy me 100 chickens. Let’s say it costs $1,000. We will agree that your profit will be 20%, so I have to pay you $1,200 over the course of, say, 12 months. So you as the financier have that 20% profit,” Martin said.

The advantage of working with cooperatives instead of commercial banks is that they provide more flexible payment terms and financing tenure, which is helpful if a business runs into financial difficulty, Martin added.

Martin said there is discussion among Islamic scholars about whether or not profit-sharing is inherently better than debt. But, he asks, “if equity and debt are equal, why is it that the Prophet Muhammed prayed for protection from debt? I think we all inherently know the answer to that question, because debt can trap the poor in a cycle of poverty that they cannot escape. Equity, on the other hand, involves the concept of risk participation. Investors hopefully have a better upside, and the reason they get that better upside is because they’re participating equally with the entrepreneur in terms of risk.”

Fostering financial inclusion

A 2022 report by research firm DinarStandard and fintech Ellipses estimates that the market size of Islamic fintech in the Organisation of Islamic Coorporation (OIC) countries was $79 billion in 2021, making up 0.83% of global fintech transaction volume. While Islamic fintech’s market size is still small, it is expected to reach $179 billion at a 17.9% CAGR by 2026, outpacing traditional fintech’s 13.5% CAGR growth over the same period.

DinarStandard and Ellipses also found that there are 375 Islamic fintech companies around the world. Most are in the P2P financing space, and Indonesia is one of the top markets in transaction volume.

Islamic fintech startups in Malaysia and Indonesia have the support of government policies. For example, Indonesia’s National Islamic Finance Committee is focused on developing Islamic finance and the country’s Islamic economy.

And in Malaysia, Bank Negara’s Investments Accounts Platform is the first Islamic P2P initiative established by a central bank, while the government-owned Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation connects investors with halal business owners. In 2019, the Malaysian government also issued its Shared Prosperity Vision 2030, a 10-year framework for restructuring its economy that includes building an Islamic fintech hub as a key part of its strategy.

The World Bank has said that the growth of Islamic fintech can foster financial inclusion by giving unbanked people access to financial services.

For example, one group of people it can reach are those who avoid bank accounts because their terms are not shariah-compliant, and want usury-free financial transactions based on risk-sharing. Islamic fintech can also help resolve issues that unbanked people face, like lack of money, lack of proper documentation and being located far away from conventional Islamic banks.

Golden Gate Ventures partner Justin Hall, an investor in Hijra and Funding Societies, believes that Islamic fintech makes Islamic financial services accessible to more people.

“Islamic banks are extraordinarily conservative, not only with how they operate, but the cost of financing, who they can lend to, etc.,” he said. “Having companies that differentiate from that and provide a nice consumer experience on the digital banking side, but within the framework of an Islamic bank, there’s an opportunity there.”

The World Bank also says the Islamic microfinancing, or short-term financing with terms of less than 12 months, can play an important role in alleviating poverty in OIC countries since they work with customers who are often underserved by traditional banks.

One example of a fintech company creating shariah-compliant products for underserved customers is Funding Societies, which is headquartered in Singapore with operations in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand and Vietnam.

Kien Poon Chai, the country manager of Funding Societies Malaysia, said its shariah-compliant financing product was launched in 2022 to serve relatively new micro- and small businesses, which are usually overlooked by banks when seeking working capital.

Chai said the impetus for launching shariah-compliant financing products was because Malaysia has a large Muslim population and the company was seeing demand from lenders and SMEs looking for financing products in line with their faith.

Funding Societies underwrites its shariah-compliant financing product in the same way as its conventional financing counterparts, but there are several nuances it has to pay close attention to. For example, financing cannot be used for non-halal businesses, including ones that sell alcohol, pork, tobacco or massage houses.

Financial offers also have to be backed by underlying assets, so for every disbursement Funding Societies makes through its shariah-compliant product, it has to purchase underlying commodities through exchanges.

Fee disclosures and charges also have to be shariah-compliant. There cannot be uncertainty in financing products, so all fees and charges must be clearly defined and outlined. For example, penalizing people for early repayment with prepayment fees is forbidden.

Peer-to-peer lending without interest

Another Islamic startup focused on financial inclusion is P2P lending platform and neobank Hijra. Founded in 2018, Hijra has raised $30 million in equity from investors like Quona Capital, Golden Gate Ventures and EV Growth. It first started as an aggregator of traditional Islamic banks serving SMEs, but co-founder and CEO Dima Djani told TechCrunch that after about 9 months, the team realized that the Islamic banking industry in Indonesia couldn’t keep up with the growth of fintech.

As a result, Hijra got licensed by Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority (OJK) in 2019 to operate as a digital lending platform. Then retail lenders began asking for more comprehensive financial services, so Hijra, then known as Alami (which is still the name of its P2P lending platform) acquired a small Islamic bank last year and launched a new digital bank with savings accounts and money transfers.

The main reason Djani wanted to launch an Islamic finance platform is because Indonesia has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, but the penetration of Islamic finance was still very low, at about 6% to 7% of total banking assets, compared to about 30% penetration in Malaysia. Djani attributes this to low consumer awareness of Islamic finance, but says a new wave of religious teachers, who gain followers on social media, has given rise to a strong halal economy over the last 10 years and also spurred interest among millennial and Gen Z Muslims in adopting services that are tailored to their faith.

In Indonesia, the guidelines for Islamic finance are determined by three authorities, said researcher Fahmi Ali Hadaefi. These are the Financial Services Authority (OJK), which regulates and supervises the financial services sector, Bank Indonesia, which oversees banks, and the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (National Sharia Board-MUI), or the country’s leading Islamic scholars body.

The MUI has published at least two fatwas on fintech. The first, issued in 2017, is about Islamic perspectives on practices related to e-money. The second one, issued a year later with the Financial Services Authority, covers Islamic fundamentals for P2P lending.

Since Muslims are prohibited from interest-bearing transactions, Hijra’s team wanted to provide an alternative for users in need of working capital financing. Like Blossom Finance, it uses a profit-sharing model to avoid interest.

The way it handles P2P loans between lenders and farmers is one example. When a fish farmer needs to buy feed, they don’t take out a loan with interest from a lender. Instead, their lender buys fish feed and sells it at a profit to the farmer, with markups based on current market rates. Instead of paying for the feed immediately, farmers pay it off after harvesting fish in about three to four months.

Islamic finance is meant to create a transparent and fair financial service for everyone,” said Djani. “For example, we view interest or usury as an unfair instrument on its mechanics. In addition, we also view that speculation and gambling as unfair, as they do not commensurate the effort and return evenly.”

Harvesting fish on Ganga Island, North Sulawesi, Indonesia (Giordano Cipriani/Getty)

Hijra’s digital banking app, which it was able to launch after acquiring the small Islamic bank in Jakarta, doesn’t give any yield to depositors at the moment, but it also doesn’t charge them any fees. In the future, Hijra is planning to launch more sharia-compliant financial solutions, like rent-to-own, payments and community-driven savings for groups of people who have a common goal, like saving money for a trip to Mecca.

Building a halal payment gateway

Another example of a company founded to get more Muslims participating in digital financial services is PayHalal, which was created to provide a shariah-compliant online payment gateway.

Co-founder Pat Salam Thevarajah told TechCrunch that he and fellow PayHalal co-founders realized in 2016 that if they wanted to get more people in the Muslim community to adopt online payments, they would have to build their entire tech stack from the ground up, instead of going to a white-label provider like Ayden. Thevarajah said that 55% of the Malaysian population is unbanked primarily because they fear riba, or interest.

“We built it because of the pure necessity to create end-to-end compliance into the transaction. That’s how PayHalal came about. The primary objective is to keep payment free from riba and gharar, or speculation, so that Muslims are able to perform electronic payments in person or e-commerce without any form of non-compliance.”

One of PayHalal’s goals is to create a network like Visa or Mastercard that stays true to Islamic finance principles. One key difference is the lack of interest.

Conventional payment gateways treat money as a commodity, which means it can be sold at a price higher than face value or lent out with interest. PayHalal does not treat money as a commodity, instead only using it to purchase goods and services, and makes profit on the trading of goods or services. PayHalal makes sure its services are shariah-compliant with the help of two team members, scholar Dr. Daud Bakar and co-founder Indrawathi Selvarajah, who was a corporate lawyer before she became a shariah fintech specialist.

Right now, when an instrument comes from a conventional financial institution, PayHalal feeds it into its AI-based non-shariah compliance screening tool. The tool then suggests treatment based on the amount of non-compliance factor, and PayHalal says that it takes the fee it earns on the transaction, writes it off and contributes it to social work, like feeding poor people or building mosques, as part of a process called purification.

Thevarajah said the process is auditable because Islamic financial institutions have internal shariah compliance departments, which in turn undergo regular audits by external shariah supervisory boards. The process of identifying non-compliant transactions, writing off profits and donating fees is documented and reviewed by internal and external auditors for accuracy.

Some examples of shariah non-compliant transactions include ones that involve the sale of forbidden items like alcohol, tobacco and pork. Transactions that involve riba or gharar are also considered non-compliant, and these can include interest charged on late payments or uncertain terms used in sales contracts.

“There is no guarantee that we can keep riba away, unless it’s a closed-loop Islamic transaction,” said Thevarajah. “If it becomes an open-loop transaction, we are then required to do purification.”

Cases of non-compliant transactions it tries to avoid include the exchange of goods for consumption that aren’t made with halal ingredients. Another is in cases of salaam contracts, where a buyer pays immediately for something that will be delivered at a later date. When that kind of transaction is handled by PayHalal, it mitigates chargebacks by making sure customers get their goods at the agreed upon time.

“Transparency is fundamental with Islamic transactions,” Thevarajah said.

One of PayHalal’s goals is to build a super app with different shariah-compliant financial services, like insurance products and saving accounts for pilgrimages to Mecca. It recently took a step toward expanding its product portfolio by launching a shariah-compliant buy now, pay later service with Atome. The BNPL program is interest-free and has no annual and servicing fees. It is currently onboarding merchants who offer halal and shariah-compliant services and products.

Mecca during the Hajj pilgrimage (Reptile8488/Getty)

Thevarajah explains that if a customer defaults beyond the three-month term of the loan, PayHalal can’t charge interest. Instead, it has to underwrite the entire transaction. “Our contract with the merchant would be active participation where we buy the product and we resell it to the consumer for the consideration of a fee,” he said, adding “The contract changes the entire structure of how an Islamic buy now, pay later operates.”

Thevarajah added that transactions are structured as deferred payment sales, which means PayHalal, acting as the seller, buys the product for a supplier and then sells it to a customer at a profit margin. The customer than pays off the total price of the product in installments over a predetermined period of time. The transaction is asset-based, which means that it is secured against the product being sold, not the buyer’s creditworthiness.

Still early days

The rise of Islamic fintech in markets like Indonesia and Malaysia is tied to the growth of Islamic finance in Southeast Asia. According to a S&P report published last year, Southeast Asia’s $290 billion Islamic banking market is expected to continue growing at a CAGR of about 8%. In Malaysia, Islamic banks will make up 45% of the overall commercial banking loan book by the end of 2025, and in Indonesia, Islamic finance’s market share is expected to grow to 10% by the end of 2026, at a faster rate than conventional banks.

But Islamic fintech still makes up a very small percentage of the total market. As stated earlier, DinarStandard and Ellipses estimate that the market size of Islamic fintech in was OIC countries was $79 billion in 2021, or just 0.83% of global fintech transaction volume. But that’s not stopping Hijra from making international expansion plans—the team already has an eye on Malaysia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Golden Gate’s Justin Hall, also an investor in Hijra and Funding Societies, believes Indonesia is uniquely positioned to be a starting ground for Islamic banks to expand to other markets around the world.

“Indonesia is the only country today that has a confluence of operators that understand Islamic banking, as well as serial entrepreneurs, institutional LPs that are willing to capitalize companies that are doing that, and a very, very large domestic market. It’s very rare to find a model unique to Southeast Asia that can go global and I actually don’t know of any but Islamic fintech.”

As Muslim fintechs create a more inclusive market landscape for Muslim users, they are also working on their own inclusivity issues, such as getting more women into the field of financial technology businesses.

Djani said the rate of women working in Muslim fintech is still comparatively low, though some have promoted women to leadership roles, including Hijra’s chief financial officer Febriny Rimenta.

One of the co-founders of PayHalal, Selvarajah, is a woman and Thevarajah said Muslim fintech startups can take several steps to get more women into the space, including building a gender-inclusive workplace based on Islamic values, providing flexible working arrangements, mentorship and promoting transparency to build trust with women employees.

He added that Muslim fintech startups can design products, including savings and investment platforms, to increase women’s financial empowerment.

Martin said the cooperatives Blossom Finance works with typically have a high representation of women, with one that is staffed completely by women.

Barriers exist in other aspects of the space, too. On the fundraising front, Martin said one of the main obstacles he faced in the U.S. was educating investors.

“First you have to explain what does Islam say and why is this even a problem, and then you explain your situation. So that was a challenge.

However, I would say for VCs who were able to connect the dots and understand it was a genuine problem—there were some that did say, ok, maybe this is too niche and they passed—but for those who were able to take the time to understand the problem, we didn’t face any barriers.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the most pushback he got was from other Muslims.

“Where we did face barriers was within Muslims living as a minority in America. They pushed back against: ‘why are you calling this Muslim? Why are you focused on Islam?’” he said. “Very interestingly, the venture capital investors [who did back us] were like, this makes sense. This is an important niche. I think that goes back to being a minority and post-9/11, and being defensive. There is that resistance versus going to a Muslim-majority [market], where it’s like “well of course you’re doing Muslim finance, why wouldn’t you?”

For Islamic fintechs, finding investors can also mean doing their own due diligence.

PayHalal, which has received $4.5 million in seed funding from Asad Capital, Q Cap, Effective Shields and Crescent Capital, is now in the process of raising a $5 million Series A round at a valuation of $33.5 million. Thevarajah said part of fundraising means assessing potential investors to ensure both they and their fund management is done in alignment with shariah principles.

“Investor interest in the Islamic fintech sector for PayHalal was very high due to its potential in a fast-growing Muslim population worldwide,” Thevarajah said. “While some investors viewed it as a captive market due to the religious beliefs of the Muslim community regarding halal food and transactions, we still had to ensure that potential investors fell within the fit and proper category for Islamic financial services.”

Founders in countries with large Muslim populations say they also had to educate investors, but that is changing. The $30 million Hijra has raised in equity so far is almost all from non-Muslim countries. Djani said several of its investors already had a strong interest in Islamic financial services because it is a growing niche that is able to provide differentiation for fintech players.

“We will need to do education on what we are offering, but dramatically less so over the past few years as Islamic finance has become more mainstream and widely accepted in Muslim-majority countries, like Indonesia,” he said.

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• U.S. cyber intelligence staff is vastly outnumbered by Chinese hackers, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray told Congress as he pleaded for more money for the agency.

• Wray said the country has “a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations—big or small—combined.”

• The agency is requesting about $63 million to help it beef up its cyber staff with 192 new positions.

U.S. cyber intelligence staff is vastly outnumbered by Chinese hackers, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray told Congress as he pleaded for more money for the agency.

“To give you a sense of what we’re up against, if each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intel analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, Chinese hackers would still outnumber FBI Cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1,” Wray said in prepared remarks for a budget hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Thursday.

The disclosure highlights the massive scale of cyber threats the U.S. is facing, particularly from China. Wray said the country has “a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations—big or small—combined.”

Even so, Wray said countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea also pose significant cybersecurity concerns, on top of non-state criminal actors. The FBI is currently investigating more than 100 “ransomware variants” with “scores of victims” for each.

The agency is requesting about $63 million to help it beef up its cyber staff with 192 new positions. Wray said this would also help the FBI put more cyber staff in field offices to be closer to where victims of cyber crimes actually are.

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To call what’s happening in the oceans right now an anomaly is a bit of an understatement. Since March, average sea surface temperatures have been climbing to record highs, as shown in the dark line in the graph below.

Illustration: Sean Birkel/University of Maine

Since this record-keeping began in the early 1980s—the other squiggly lines are previous years—the global average for the world’s ocean surfaces has oscillated seasonally between 19.7 and 21 degrees Celsius (67.5 and 69.8 Fahrenheit). Toward the end of March, the average shot above the 21-degree mark and stayed there for a month. (The most recent reading, for April 26, was just a hair under 21 degrees.) This temperature spike is not just unprecedented, but extreme.

“It’s surprising to me that we’re this far off the trajectory,” says Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that gathers climate data. “Usually when you have a particular warming event, we’re beating the previous record by a little bit. Right now we’re sitting well above the past records for this time of year, for a considerable period of time.”

Rhode points out that temperatures this week were just under two-tenths of a degree warmer than the previous record. “Two-tenths doesn’t sound like a lot—but in ocean terms two-tenths is actually a lot because it doesn’t warm as quickly as the land,” he says.

As you can see from the chart’s record of past years, March is normally when average sea surface temperatures start declining. That’s because the Southern Hemisphere has transitioned from summer to autumn—and that hemisphere has more ocean covering it than the Northern Hemisphere, which has more bulky land masses. As southern oceans cool, they bring down the average global sea surface temperature.

But at the moment, temperature anomalies are widespread around the world’s oceans. (That near-real-time data comes from a network of satellites, buoys, and other ocean instruments.) “It’s above-average temperatures nearly everywhere,” says Rohde. “And there’s a significant heat wave in the North Pacific, which has been going on for many months.”

Warming in the Atlantic may be contributing to the extreme heat that’s hitting Spain right now, and it shows the broader problem caused by high ocean temperatures: What happens in the sea doesn’t stay in the sea. The oceans have absorbed something like 90 percent of the excess heat humans have put into the atmosphere, but the oceans are also capable of handing that heat back to the atmosphere, which in turn heats the land. “Both the atmosphere and oceans are becoming warmer and warmer,” says Boyin Huang, a physical scientist and oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If the atmosphere pushes the ocean, then the ocean will push back into the atmosphere.”

Last year, researchers reported that climate change has made extreme heat events in the ocean the new normal. Thanks to historical data collected from ships all over the world, they determined the highest surface temperatures between the years 1870 to 1919—essentially setting a baseline for extremes. They found that in the 19th century, 2 percent of the ocean was hitting these extremes, but because of climate change it’s now 57 percent. In other words, extreme heat events in the ocean are now typical. (These differ from an overall increase in heat, in that temperatures come down from extreme peaks, but the general upward trend isn’t reversing itself.)

Illustration: MBARI

Scientists haven’t yet worked out what contribution climate change has made to the current surface temperature anomaly. But they can say that the longer-term trend since the early 1900s, averaged globally, shows a rise in the intensity of sea surface temperature anomalies, as you can see in the graph above.

That warmer water is already causing problems across the world’s oceans. Not only are higher ocean temperatures rapidly eating away at Antarctica’s massive ice shelves, but hotter water actually expands to take up more space, raising sea levels.

Illustration: MBARI

The dark red areas on the map above show that the Pacific waters off of South America are currently very warm. This is an unusual “coastal El Niño” that is not linked to the larger El Niño with global climate implications, says biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. A classical El Niño is a band of warm water that develops across the Pacific. That’s in contrast to the La Niña we’ve had the past few years, which is a band of cold water in the Pacific.

Models suggest there’s a 62 percent chance of a classical El Niño developing by June or July, with a four in 10 chance of a strong El Niño. But it’s not a sure thing because El Niño is a consequence of complex atmospheric dynamics—basically, wind blowing warm water over from Asia. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty,” says Chavez. “Forecasting the real El Niño is difficult because the atmosphere is chaotic.”

Whenever El Niño does arrive, it’ll have consequences. On the upside, there tends to be less hurricane activity over in the Atlantic when El Niño is active in the Pacific. But the outcomes for precipitation are mixed: For Peru, El Niño tends to create more rainfall, but to the east in the Amazon rainforest, it can lead to devastating drought. And all that extra heat in the Pacific could significantly raise global temperatures. “There’s a chance for 2023 to be the record warmest year,” says Rohde. “If an El Niño develops, as we now think is likely, 2024 will probably be warmer than 2023.”

In the ocean itself, warmer waters—due to El Niño or just overall long-term heating—can become less biologically productive. Some organisms that reach their thermal limit can migrate to colder waters, transforming both the ecosystems they leave and the new ones where they take shelter. But others, like corals, are stuck in place. These animals are particularly sensitive to heat, and bleach in response, releasing their symbiotic algae that provide them energy.

The ocean food chain also depends on the natural circulation of water, which is influenced in part by temperature. When cold water in the depths upwells to the surface, it brings up nutrients that fertilize phytoplankton. These microscopic plants grow in the sunlight, becoming a critical food source for tiny animals called zooplankton. But when water heats up at the surface, it stratifies, turning into a sort of cap that sits on top of colder waters below. “The bigger the cap, the harder it is to break. By heating the ocean, you’re going to basically decrease the amount of nutrients that come up,” says Chavez. “A longer-term concern is: How much is this overall heating going to change the natural fertilization processes, like upwelling? Will the ocean become more of a desert over time?”

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In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation.

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

Time traveling to the near future is easy: you’re doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change.

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time’s flow depends on how fast you’re moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity also affects clocks: the more forceful the gravity nearby, the slower time goes.

“Near massive bodies—near the surface of neutron stars or even at the surface of the Earth, although it’s a tiny effect—time runs slower than it does far away,” says Dave Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University.

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole, where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read [about closed timelike curves] and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

Just as importantly, though, they investigated the problems with time travel. What if, for instance, you tossed a billiard ball into a time machine, and it traveled to the past and then collided with its past self in a way that meant its present self could never enter the time machine? “That looks like a paradox,” Costa says.

Since the 1990s, he says, there’s been on-and-off interest in the topic yet no big breakthrough. The field isn’t very active today, in part because every proposed model of a time machine has problems. “It has some attractive features, possibly some potential, but then when one starts to sort of unravel the details, there ends up being some kind of a roadblock,” says Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island.

For instance, most time travel models require negative mass—and hence negative energy because, as Albert Einstein revealed when he discovered E = mc2, mass and energy are one and the same. In theory, at least, just as an electric charge can be positive or negative, so can mass—though no one’s ever found an example of negative mass. Why does time travel depend on such exotic matter? In many cases, it is needed to hold open a wormhole—a tunnel in spacetime predicted by general relativity that connects one point in the cosmos to another.

Without negative mass, gravity would cause this tunnel to collapse. “You can think of it as counteracting the positive mass or energy that wants to traverse the wormhole,” Goldberg says.

Khanna and Goldberg concur that it’s unlikely matter with negative mass even exists, although Khanna notes that some quantum phenomena show promise, for instance, for negative energy on very small scales. But that would be “nowhere close to the scale that would be needed” for a realistic time machine, he says.

These challenges explain why Khanna initially discouraged Caroline Mallary, then his graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from doing a time travel project. Mallary and Khanna went forward anyway and came up with a theoretical time machine that didn’t require negative mass. In its simplistic form, Mallary’s idea involves two parallel cars, each made of regular matter. If you leave one parked and zoom the other with extreme acceleration, a closed timelike curve will form between them.

Easy, right? But while Mallary’s model gets rid of the need for negative matter, it adds another hurdle: it requires infinite density inside the cars for them to affect spacetime in a way that would be useful for time travel. Infinite density can be found inside a black hole, where gravity is so intense that it squishes matter into a mind-bogglingly small space called a singularity. In the model, each of the cars needs to contain such a singularity. “One of the reasons that there's not a lot of active research on this sort of thing is because of these constraints,” Mallary says.

Other researchers have created models of time travel that involve a wormhole, or a tunnel in spacetime from one point in the cosmos to another.

“It's sort of a shortcut through the universe,” Goldberg says. Imagine accelerating one end of the wormhole to near the speed of light and then sending it back to where it came from. “Those two sides are no longer synced,” he says. “One is in the past; one is in the future.” Walk between them, and you’re time traveling.

You could accomplish something similar by moving one end of the wormhole near a big gravitational field—such as a black hole—while keeping the other end near a smaller gravitational force. In that way, time would slow down on the big gravity side, essentially allowing a particle or some other chunk of mass to reside in the past relative to the other side of the wormhole.

Making a wormhole requires pesky negative mass and energy, however. A wormhole created from normal mass would collapse because of gravity. “Most designs tend to have some similar sorts of issues,” Goldberg says. They’re theoretically possible, but there’s currently no feasible way to make them, kind of like a good-tasting pizza with no calories.

And maybe the problem is not just that we don’t know how to make time travel machines but also that it’s not possible to do so except on microscopic scales—a belief held by the late physicist Stephen Hawking. He proposed the chronology protection conjecture: The universe doesn’t allow time travel because it doesn’t allow alterations to the past. “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians,” Hawking wrote in a 1992 paper in Physical Review D.

Part of his reasoning involved the paradoxes time travel would create such as the aforementioned situation with a billiard ball and its more famous counterpart, the grandfather paradox: If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has children, you can’t be born, and therefore you can’t time travel, and therefore you couldn’t have killed your grandfather. And yet there you are.

Those complications are what interests Massachusetts Institute of Technology philosopher Agustin Rayo, however, because the paradoxes don’t just call causality and chronology into question. They also make free will seem suspect. If physics says you can go back in time, then why can’t you kill your grandfather? “What stops you?” he says. Are you not free?

Rayo suspects that time travel is consistent with free will, though. “What’s past is past,” he says. “So if, in fact, my grandfather survived long enough to have children, traveling back in time isn’t going to change that. Why will I fail if I try? I don’t know because I don’t have enough information about the past. What I do know is that I’ll fail somehow.”

If you went to kill your grandfather, in other words, you’d perhaps slip on a banana en route or miss the bus. “It's not like you would find some special force compelling you not to do it,” Costa says. “You would fail to do it for perfectly mundane reasons.”

In 2020 Costa worked with Germain Tobar, then his undergraduate student at the University of Queensland in Australia, on the math that would underlie a similar idea: that time travel is possible without paradoxes and with freedom of choice.

Goldberg agrees with them in a way. “I definitely fall into the category of [thinking that] if there is time travel, it will be constructed in such a way that it produces one self-consistent view of history,” he says. “Because that seems to be the way that all the rest of our physical laws are constructed.”

No one knows what the future of time travel to the past will hold. And so far, no time travelers have come to tell us about it.

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A lack of empathy in healthcare can be disastrous. In the UK, between 2005 and 2009, hundreds of avoidable deaths occurred at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. The Francis report, which investigated the causes of the failings, concluded that a lack of empathy contributed to the catastrophe.

More recently, dozens of tragic, unnecessary infant and maternal deaths occurred at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals. The Ockenden Report, which investigated the causes of these deaths, stated that lack of empathy exacerbated the problem.

Meanwhile, research suggests empathy in doctors may even reduce premature death in patients with type 2 diabetes.

Empathy is a core skill that medical students require. The General Medical Council, which sets the standards and outcomes for medical student education and training in the UK, says that empathy is central to their strategy.

However, a "hidden curriculum" in medical school can reduce medical student empathy. A new study, published in BMC Medical Education, is the first to systematically demonstrate why empathy declines during medical training and raises important questions about the priorities of current medical education.

Empathy is known to reduce patient pain and improve their satisfaction with care, and protects against doctor burnout. It's also cost-effective according to a study that compared longer, empathic consultations with standard consultations.

Based on its importance, you might hope that empathy increases throughout medical school. Yet levels of empathy in medical students often decline as their training progresses.

In a recently published systematic review, my colleagues and I analyzed data from 16 qualitative studies and 771 medical students. Our review included any qualitative study that investigated why empathy might change during medical school.

We found that when medical students transition from the first phase of medical school which is mostly lecture-based, to the second phase of medical school which is more clinical and patient-facing, they are met with a "hidden" informal curriculum.

This curriculum includes subtle, non-formal influences over students. For example, there is often an unbalanced focus on the biomedical model of disease, which focuses on the body as a machine, over the "biopsychosocial" model of disease, which includes biological, psychological, and social factors.

But also the way that the curriculum is structured to create a stressful workload, and to promote the influence of role models (who may show little empathy themselves) has an effect.

Students, who are likely to have little experience of what being a patient is like, often adapt to this hidden curriculum by developing cynicism and becoming emotionally distanced and desensitized. This, in turn, lowers empathy.

Like all studies, our review has some limitations. The studies included in the review were small, very few were from outside Europe or North America, and many were of limited quality. However, the remarkable consistency of the identified themes warrants rigorous efforts to reverse the empathy decline.

How to fix the problem

By bringing the cause of empathy decline to light, our study paves the way for educational programs that foster, maintain and even enhance empathy in medical students. These interventions are described briefly below.

1. Having students "walk a mile in patients' shoes", for example by having them spend the night in the emergency room, or wearing age simulation suits. Providing students with the experience of what it is like to be a patient will provide them with a more empathic perspective.
2. Balancing the focus on the biomedical model with education on the more holistic biopsychosocial model of disease. Patients are increasingly complex and come to see their doctors with intertwined physical, psychological and social problems. The biopsychosocial model is better suited to understand and treat these patients.
3. Getting real patients into the classroom when students are learning facts about the body. By combining patient stories with facts about the human body, their subsequent transition from the lecture theatre to clinical placements is less of a shock.
4. Evidence-based and effective empathic communication training. While all medical schools teach communication skills, the effectiveness of the training varies. Empathic communication skills have been shown to be effective and include expressing understanding, non-verbal behavior (nodding, leaning forward) and optimism.
5. Role-model training and peer support. Role models are known to have a strong influence on medical student behavior, yet the extent to which doctors display empathy varies. Enhancing the empathy of the doctors that students meet will therefore promote medical students' empathy.

Implementing these empathy interventions is difficult given the pressures on the tightly packed medical school curriculum. But it is possible. The Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare at the University of Leicester is currently developing and piloting all of them.

Empathy benefits patients and practitioners, yet it declines throughout medical school. Now that we have identified the causes of its deterioration, medical schools can focus on curriculum interventions that enhance it.

Jeremy Howick, Professor and Director of the Stoneygate Centre for Excellence in Empathic Healthcare, University of Leicester

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

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CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ALREADY know that the East Coast of the United States could see around a foot of sea-level rise by 2050, which will be catastrophic on its own. But they are just beginning to thoroughly measure a “hidden vulnerability” that will make matters far worse: The coastline is also sinking. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and it’s poised to make the rising ocean all the more dangerous, both for people and coastal ecosystems.

New research published in the journal Nature Communications finds that the Atlantic Coast—home to more than a third of the US population—is dropping by several millimeters per year. In Charleston, South Carolina, and the Chesapeake Bay, it’s up to 5 millimeters (a fifth of an inch). In some areas of Delaware, it’s as much as twice that. 

Five millimeters of annual sea-level rise along a stretch of coastline, plus 5 millimeters of subsidence there, is effectively 10 millimeters of relative sea-level rise. Atlantic coastal cities are already suffering from persistent flooding, and the deluge will only get worse as they sink while seas rise. Yet high-resolution subsidence data like this isn’t yet taken into account for coastal hazard assessments. “What we want to do here is to really bring awareness about this missing component, that based on our analysis actually makes the near-future vulnerability a lot worse than what you would expect from sea-level rise alone,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and coauthor of the new paper.

The primary cause of dramatic land subsidence is over-extracting groundwater from it, which makes the terrain collapse like an empty water bottle. In San Jose, California, this has lowered the elevation by as much as 12 feet. The combination of sea-level rise and subsidence could inundate up to 165 square miles of Bay Area coastline by 2100, according to Shirzaei’s previous research. Parts of Jakarta are sinking 10 inches a year, forcing Indonesia to move its capital elsewhere. Extracting oil also causes subsidence, a particularly acute problem in the Houston-Galveston area. And landfill or sediments along coastlines can also settle over time. 

While scientists have been aware that US coastlines are sinking, they haven’t had much data to show local differences in rates. Subsidence varies significantly even over short distances, given variations in the underlying geology and nearby human activity. For this new paper, Shirzaei and lead author Leonard Ohenhen, also an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech, used data from a highly sensitive satellite that fired radar signals at the Earth, then analyzed what bounced back to determine coastal deformation. They did this for the years between 2007 and 2020, along 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) of the Atlantic coast. 

The researchers found particularly intense subsidence in agricultural areas, where groundwater is extracted to feed crops—which in turn will be more vulnerable to flooding as the elevation drops. They also found that most Atlantic coastal cities are seeing over 3 millimeters of subsidence a year, including Boston and New York City. As the elevation falls, it destabilizes above-ground infrastructure like buildings and roads, as well as buried pipes and cables. 

“Three millimeters a year seems like a really tiny number,” says Ohenhen, but what really matters is “the cumulative effect of how much sinking will occur over the years.” And it could get worse, he predicts. “The East Coast is one of the fastest-growing areas for the US in terms of population. When you have more population, it means people will use more water, and that will increase how fast the land is sinking.”

People are also already destroying the wetlands that mitigate sea-level rise along the East Coast, in order to develop over them. Wetlands absorb storm surges, keeping seawater from reaching farther inland. As sea levels have naturally gone up and down over the millennia, wetlands have moved inland and back in response. “But now we have put a hard stop by building a ‘fence’—our buildings and whatever—so wetlands can no longer migrate landward,” says Ohenhen. They’re hemmed in, dooming them to drown in rising seas. Humans only make matters worse by damming rivers, thus preventing sediment from flowing to the coast, which would normally add elevation to delta wetland. Instead, these ecosystems continue subsiding.

Rising seas and subsidence are also conspiring to create “ghost forests” along the Atlantic Coast. Saltwater infiltrates fresh groundwater, killing off trees whose roots would normally hold soil together. “It causes more subsidence in these areas, and you can have more intrusion of saltwater,” says Ohenhen. “It’s just a rapid expansion of ghost forests.” 

Coastal ecosystems are vital stores of carbon: As plants grow, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and spit out oxygen. If saltwater is killing off biomass, it’s killing off a carbon sink, meaning more CO2 can remain in the atmosphere to cause more warming—and further drive up sea levels.

The good news is that subsidence can be halted, first by stopping the overextraction of groundwater, then ideally by pumping water back into the ground. But if the human population keeps growing, there will be more demand for water, especially if certain regions receive less rainfall due to climate change. This groundwater is also threatened by seawater intrusion. Restoring the coastal ecosystems that naturally buffer against storm surges and rising sea levels could help keep that water supply drinkable.

“Number one is just ensuring as much as we can that our wetlands stay healthy,” says Natalie Snider, associate vice president of the Climate Resilient Coasts and Watersheds program at the Environmental Defense Fund, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. 

Precise satellite data like this will also help scientists and policymakers better understand subsidence—not just where it’s happening, but at what rate—and what can actually be done about it. “The more accurate and more detailed we can get in the data that we have available,” says Snider, “the better the solutions we’re going to develop.”

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Researchers have developed an AI-powered early warning system for tsunamis that uses acoustic technology and hydrophones to measure and classify underwater earthquakes in real-time, allowing for faster and more accurate risk assessments.

Tsunamis are incredibly destructive waves that can destroy coastal infrastructure and cause loss of life. Early warnings for such natural disasters are difficult because the risk of a tsunami is highly dependent on the features of the underwater earthquake that triggers it.

In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Cardiff University in the U.K. developed an early warning system that combines state-of-the-art acoustic technology with artificial intelligence to immediately classify earthquakes and determine potential tsunami risk.

Underwater earthquakes can trigger tsunamis if a large amount of water is displaced, so determining the type of earthquake is critical to assessing the tsunami risk.

“Tectonic events with a strong vertical slip element are more likely to raise or lower the water column compared to horizontal slip elements,” said co-author Bernabe Gomez. “Thus, knowing the slip type at the early stages of the assessment can reduce false alarms and enhance the reliability of the warning systems through independent cross-validation.”

This study investigates four different past earthquake scenarios associated with tsunami events. The red and yellow rectangles represent the projected earthquake dimensions, locations, and orientations retrieved by the proposed inverse model for acoustic radiation. The analyzed earthquakes are: a) Sept. 29, 2009, Mw 8.1, SSW of Matavai, Samoa; b) Dec. 21, 2010, Mw 7.4, Bonin Islands, Japan region; c) March 14, 2012, Mw 6.9, SSE of Kushiro, Japan; and d) Oct. 25, 2013, Mw 7.1, off the east coast of Honshu, Japan. The model delivers two potential fault orientations for each earthquake scenario, which are numerically modeled and compared. Credit: Bernabe Gomez and Usama Kadri

 

In these cases, time is of the essence, and relying on deep ocean wave buoys to measure water levels often leaves insufficient evacuation time. Instead, the researchers propose measuring the acoustic radiation (sound) produced by the earthquake, which carries information about the tectonic event and travels significantly faster than tsunami waves. Underwater microphones, called hydrophones, record the acoustic waves and monitor tectonic activity in real-time.

“Acoustic radiation travels through the water column much faster than tsunami waves. It carries information about the originating source and its pressure field can be recorded at distant locations, even thousands of kilometers away from the source. The derivation of analytical solutions for the pressure field is a key factor in the real-time analysis,” co-author Usama Kadri said.

The computational model triangulates the source of the earthquake from the hydrophones and AI algorithms classify its slip type and magnitude. It then calculates important properties like effective length and width, uplift speed, and duration, which dictate the size of the tsunami.

The authors tested their model with available hydrophone data and discovered that it almost instantaneously and successfully described the earthquake parameters with low computational demand. They are improving the model by factoring in more information to increase the tsunami characterization’s accuracy.

Their work predicting tsunami risk is part of a larger project to enhance hazard warning systems. The tsunami classification is a back-end aspect of a software that can improve the safety of offshore platforms and ships.

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Scientists have used data from ESA’s CryoSat satellite to reveal that global glaciers shrunk by 2%, losing 2720 Gigatonnes of ice from 2010 to 2020, with 89% of the loss due to higher air temperatures. This glacier reduction, which threatens freshwater supply and contributes more to sea-level rise than the ice loss from polar ice sheets, was presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Austria.

When one thinks of the damage that climate change is doing, it’s probable that what comes to mind is a vision of huge lumps of ice dropping off one of the polar ice sheets and crashing into the ocean. While Greenland and Antarctica are losing masses of ice, so to are most of the glaciers around the world, but it’s tricky to measure how much ice they are shedding.

Thanks to ESA’s CryoSat satellite and a breakthrough way of using its data, scientists have discovered that glaciers worldwide have shrunk by a total of 2% in just 10 years, and it’s because of higher air temperatures.

A paper, published on April 26, 2023, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, describes how scientists have used a particular technique of processing CryoSat data to reveal that glaciers lost a whopping 2720 Gigatonnes of ice between 2010 and 2020.

Their research also demonstrates that higher air temperatures are responsible for 89% of this ice loss.

Thanks to ESA’s CryoSat satellite and a breakthrough way of using its data, scientists have discovered that glaciers worldwide have shrunk by a total of 2% in just 10 years, and it’s because of higher air temperatures. Credit: ESA/Planetary Visions

Glaciers are found on all continents except Australia. They provide an essential source of freshwater. For example, glaciers in high-mountain Asia alone provide water for over 1.3 billion people. Glaciers are also important for industries such as hydropower.

The demise of glaciers around the world is, therefore, set to cause serious problems for local populations and those relying on outflow water further downstream.

In addition, ice being lost from glaciers is contributing more to sea-level rise than the ice being lost from either of the giant ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.

Despite mountain glaciers being key indicators of climate change and being important to society, estimates of global glacier mass loss have remained limited to a few scientific studies. This is because there are numerous practical challenges in mapping and monitoring glaciers, which tend to lie in complex rugged terrain, and because there isn’t a specific satellite mission dedicated to doing this.

ESA’s Earth Explorer CryoSat mission is dedicated to precise monitoring of changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar oceans and variations in the thickness of the vast ice sheets that blanket Greenland and Antarctica. Credit: ESA/AOES Medialab

 

Noel Gourmelen, from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, said, “I’m sure most people have seen photographs taken at different times that show how a glacier terminus has retreated over time. And we can see this from satellite images too.

“But we need to measure how a glacier’s volume is changing to really make sense of what is happening.”

The research team turned to ESA’s CryoSat satellite, which carries a radar altimeter to measure the height of ice surfaces. This works well for measuring sea level and the height of sea ice, which is used to work out how ice thickness changes, and for measuring vast polar ice sheets.

However, the footprint of this type of instrument is too coarse to measure and monitor mountain glaciers.

“Some years ago, we developed a technique of processing CryoSat data, called swath processing, which has revolutionized the use of CryoSat data over complex icy terrains. It unveils a wealth of new detail on glaciers,” noted Dr Gourmelen.

Livia Jakob, from Earthwave in the UK, explained, “We’ve been able to use this technique to study glaciers all over the world and we can report that, in total, mountain glaciers lost 2% of their volume between 2010 and 2020.

“That adds up to 2720 Gigatonnes in all. This can be imagined as a giant ice cube, bigger than Europe’s highest mountain, which is quite shocking. Importantly, we also found that air temperature, which causes the ice surface to melt, accounts for 89% of this ice loss.”

While warmer air temperatures are responsible for this decreasing ‘surface mass balance’, the research team found that something called ‘ice discharge’ was responsible for the other 11% of ice lost.

This is associated with glaciers that terminate at the coast, where warmer ocean waters are largely responsible for thinning the front of the ice flow.

Dr. Gourmelen said, “The relative contribution of decreasing surface mass balance and increasing ice discharge to sea-level change is well known for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Now we know more about how the atmosphere and ocean are teaming up to melt glaciers. There is still plenty of work to do to refine these numbers, and to incorporate this knowledge into our glacier projections.”

Stephen Plummer from ESA explains, “The innovative work using CryoSat in swath altimetry mode demonstrates the value of its altimeter for monitoring glaciers, thus achieving one of the mission’s secondary objectives.

“This work laid the basis for the Glacier Mass Balance intercomparison Exercise, Glambie, to reconcile the different estimates of glacier mass balance from a multitude of satellite and in-situ methods. It also helps in guiding the design of the Copernicus Sentinel Expansion CRISTAL mission for monitoring land ice, ensuring continuity in monitoring glaciers globally.”

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The link between physical inactivity and lingering symptoms of COVID-19 is becoming increasingly evident. A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and published in Scientific Reports shows that individuals who have survived COVID-19 and still experience at least one persistent symptom are 57% more likely to lead a sedentary lifestyle. Furthermore, the study found that if a person has five or more ongoing effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection, their odds of being physically inactive increase by 138%.

“Although this was a cross-sectional study, the findings underscore the importance of discussing and encouraging physical activity at all times, including during the pandemic,” said Hamilton Roschel, last author of the study and one of the coordinators of USP’s Applied Physiology and Nutrition Research Group.

The study, which was funded by FAPESP, is one of the first in evaluating the impact of physical activity on the condition known as long COVID. Long COVID is characterized by symptoms that persist for a minimum of two months after the resolution of the coronavirus infection and cannot be attributed to any other health issues.

According to a December 2020 editorial in Nature Medicine, early reports indicated that around three out of every four patients hospitalized because of COVID-19 had at least one persistent symptom six months after discharge.

Methods

In the study, the researchers analyzed data collected by the HCFMUSP COVID-19 Study Group at Hospital das Clínicas (HC), the hospital complex run by USP’s Medical School (FM-USP). A total of 614 survivors of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 with an average age of 56 were included in the investigation.

The patients were hospitalized between March and August 2020, and a follow-up protocol was implemented between October 2020 and April 2021 (6-11 months after discharge). They were examined and interviewed to find out how physically active they were and to assess other lifestyle items. They were also asked to report whether they had ten symptoms associated with long COVID, such as fatigue, breathlessness, severe muscle pain, taste and smell loss, and memory impairment, among others.

Participants were classified as physically inactive if they reported less than 150 minutes of at least moderately intense exercise per week, in accordance with World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. “In our case, exercise included housework and walking, as well as sports,” Roschel said.

The more symptoms, the more sedentarism

The researchers performed a number of statistical analyses in search of correlations between symptoms of long COVID and physical inactivity.

Sixty percent of the participants were considered physically inactive, a higher proportion than those found for most regions by the Brazilian Health Ministry in a nationwide survey (Vigitel) conducted in 2020.

Comorbidities were also significant: 37% were smokers, 58% had high blood pressure, 35% had diabetes and 17% were obese. “These are risk factors for severe COVID-19. They were expected to be frequent in the study because all the participants had been hospitalized,” Roschel said, adding that 55% had required intensive care and 37% had been intubated.

When they adjusted the results for confounding factors (variables that may affect others in a way that produces spurious or distorted associations), the researchers still found that the presence of at least one persistent symptom was associated with 57% higher odds of sedentarism. “The more symptoms, the higher the likelihood of physical inactivity,” Roschel said. When five or more symptoms were reported, the odds of physical activity rose 138%.

Certain sequelae associated with long COVID correlated very closely with physical inactivity, he added. In the adjusted statistical models, the highest correlations were with breathlessness (132%) and fatigue (101%).

“It makes sense to assume that people with this condition experience more difficulty to maintain an active routine,” he said. “But it’s also plausible that people with a sedentary lifestyle are more subject to these long-term symptoms after recovering from an acute infection. Our study doesn’t allow us to infer causality.”

Associations and hypotheses

In the article, the authors say physical inactivity “itself may be considered a persistent symptom among COVID-19 survivors”. This hypothesis has also been raised by other research groups. A Dutch paper cited in the article describes a study in which 239 recovering patients reported walking significantly less six months after the onset of symptoms than before they contracted the disease.

Roschel also believes, based on other research, that sedentarism may theoretically heighten the risk of long COVID. A study conducted in 2021 and also led by him found that hospitalized COVID-19 patients with more muscle strength and mass (hence probably less sedentary) tended to stay in the hospital for less time.

In a later study, the same researchers found that patients who lost more muscle mass during hospitalization for COVID-19 were more likely to develop persistent symptoms of the disease, while also pointing to a probable correlation with higher post-acute COVID healthcare costs.

A study conducted in the United States in 2020 analyzed the prior history of physical activity for 48,440 COVID-19 patients and found the risk of hospitalization, admission to the ICU, and death to be highest among those who were consistently inactive.

“Our latest study added information by describing specific correlations between physical inactivity and persistent symptoms of COVID-19. Future research should investigate this association in order to understand the underlying causes,” Roschel said.

The connection may be a two-way street in which sedentarism favors long COVID and people with long COVID tend to avoid exercise.

“From a practical standpoint, the importance of physical activity during the pandemic is clearly demonstrated,” Roschel said. There are cases in which people who have recovered from the disease should follow medical advice as to the precautions required when undertaking physical exercise, but an active lifestyle should be encouraged as a matter of public health, he stressed. Sedentarism accounts for 9% of all-cause deaths worldwide.

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A new study by investigators from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai suggests long COVID-19 might be caused by a dysfunction of the immune system.

The study, published in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases, found that after people with long COVID-19 received the COVID-19 vaccine, they produced antibodies against the virus that causes COVID-19 for months longer than expected.

When a person has an infection, the immune system typically responds by making antibodies that block germs from entering cells. Vaccines imitate an infection so that the body’s immune system knows to release certain antibodies when it comes across a virus.

In both cases, the immune system eventually stops creating antibodies when the suspected infection is gone.

“There’s general consensus that some level of aberrant immune response happens in long COVID-19, and this study adds to the evidence to suggest this is true,” said Catherine Le, MD, co-director of the Cedars-Sinai COVID-19 Recovery Program and a senior author of the study.

Long COVID-19, a condition in which people experience COVID-19-related symptoms three months or more after initial infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, is estimated to affect 65 million people worldwide. Common symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive dysfunction such as confusion and forgetfulness. Some symptoms can have debilitating effects.

To study the immune response of people with long COVID-19, investigators analyzed blood samples from 245 people diagnosed with long COVID-19 and 86 people who had COVID-19 and fully recovered. All the study participants had received either one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine regimen.

“We examined one part of the immune system response, the production of antibodies, which is mediated by immune cells called B-cells,” Le explained.

Specifically, the investigators looked at two types of antibodies that attack the virus that causes COVID-19. One of these is called the spike protein antibody, which attacks a protein on the exterior of the virus. The other is the nucleocapsid antibody, which attacks the part of the virus that allows it to replicate.

The investigators found that people who were diagnosed with long COVID-19 produced higher levels of spike protein and nucleocapsid antibodies than people without long COVID-19. Eight weeks after receiving a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, antibody levels in people without long COVID-19 began to decrease, as was expected. People with long COVID-19, however, continued to have elevated antibody levels, especially of nucleocapsid antibodies.

“What you would expect after getting a COVID-19 vaccination is a jump in your spike protein antibody levels, but you wouldn’t expect a significant increase in nucleocapsid antibody levels,” said Susan Cheng, MD, MPH, the Erika J. Glazer Chair in Women’s Cardiovascular Health and Population Science, director of the Institute for Research on Healthy Aging in the Department of Cardiology at the Smidt Heart Institute, and a senior author of the study. “You would also expect these levels to eventually decrease and not persist for so long after vaccination.”

Although this study shows that long COVID-19 affects the immune system, it’s too soon to draw firm conclusions from these findings, according to the study’s authors.

“Theoretically, the production of these antibodies could mean that people are more protected from infection,” Le said. “We also need to investigate if the elevated immune response corresponds with severity or number of long COVID-19 symptoms.”

Investigators are continuing to study blood samples from people with long COVID-19. They are hoping to identify a measurable molecule that could be used to diagnose long COVID-19 and better understand the biological processes that cause it.

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One promising method is musical training, which is widely accessible to the majority of people. Not only does musical training provide a fulfilling and aesthetically pleasing experience, but it also offers potential cognitive benefits, particularly for the elderly.

In a study published as a cover story in Science Advances, a research team led by Dr. Du Yi from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that long-term musical training could mitigate and even counteract age-related decline of audiovisual speech-in-noise perception in older listeners, through functional preservation of youth-like activity patterns in sensorimotor areas, supplemented by functional compensation in frontoparietal and default mode network (DMN) regions.

Older musicians, older non-musicians, and young non-musicians participated in this neuroimaging study.

The researchers found that older musicians outperformed older non-musicians and even equaled young non-musicians in identifying audiovisual syllables under noisy conditions. By analyzing their brain activity, the researchers revealed two mechanisms that old musicians adopt to counteract aging: functional preservation and functional compensation.

Specifically, older musicians retained neural specificity of speech representations in sensorimotor areas at a level similar to young non-musicians, while older non-musicians showed degraded neural representations. In the same region, older musicians showed higher neural alignment (i.e., higher pattern similarity) in comparison to young non-musicians than older non-musicians did, and this capacity was associated with the older musicians’ training intensity. Importantly, youth-like brain function predicted better audiovisual speech-in-noise perception performance in older adults.

In addition, the researchers found that older musicians, in comparison with older non-musicians, also showed greater activation in frontoparietal regions that support multiple tasks across domains and greater inhibition in task-irrelevant DMN regions that help avoid interference.

The greater DMN deactivation predicted better audiovisual speech-in-noise performance. Furthermore, these two mechanisms are interdependent, as greater frontoparietal activation and greater DMN inhibition contributed to more similar neural patterns in sensorimotor regions in older adults. In other words, functional compensation further supported functional preservation.

“Playing music makes older adults better listeners by preserving youthful neural patterns as well as recruiting additional compensatory brain regions. Our study provides empirical evidence to support that playing music keeps your brain sharp, young, and focused,” said Dr. Du, the corresponding author of this study.

This study provides insights into adaptive brain reorganization in aging populations and how lifelong musical training leads to “successful aging” in speech processing by preserving youthful brain characteristics and enhancing compensatory brain scaffolding.

The functional preservation of sensorimotor regions along with compensatory DMN deactivation also suggest avenues for more targeted training regimens to protect speech functions in the elderly.

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While the vehicle got off the ground, it seems federal agencies will be dealing with the explosive fallout of the mission for quite some time.

Federal agencies say the launch led to a 3.5-acre fire on state park land. The blaze was extinguished. Debris from the rocket, which SpaceX said it had to blow up in the sky for safety reasons after a separation failure, was found across hundreds of acres of land. “Although no debris was documented on refuge fee-owned lands, staff documented approximately 385 acres of debris on SpaceX’s facility and at Boca Chica State Park,” the Texas arm of the US Fish and Wildlife Service told Bloomberg.

The agency noted it hasn’t found evidence of dead wildlife as a result of the incident. Still, it’s working with the Federal Aviation Administration on a site assessment and post-launch recommendations, while ensuring compliance with the Endangered Species Act.

Soon after the launch and Starship’s explosion, the FAA said it was carrying out a mishap investigation. Starship is grounded for now and its return to flight depends on the agency “determining that any system, process or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety.”

Starship’s approved launch plan included an anomaly response process, which the FAA says was triggered after the spacecraft blew up. As such, SpaceX is required to remove debris from sensitive habitats, carry out a survey of wildlife and vegetation and send reports to several federal agencies. “The FAA will ensure SpaceX complies with all required mitigations,” the agency told Bloomberg.

Even if SpaceX can sate federal agencies' concerns swiftly, it may be quite some time until the next Starship launch. The super heavy-lift space launch vehicle destroyed its launch pad, sending chunks of debris into the air. Footage showed the shrapnel landing on a nearby beach and even hitting a van hundreds of yards from the launch site. Fortunately, no one was hurt, according to the FAA.

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•     Tech workers on anonymous networking site Blind debated whether the end of $500,000 salaries is here.

•     While the majority of users polled said it's the end of an era, others disagreed.

•     Insider previously reported that some companies were using layoffs to justify pay cuts for new hires.

Tech workers are concerned it might be the end of a very lucrative era in the industry.

Last week, a poll on the anonymous job site Blind garnered thousands of votes as users debated whether the tech industry could be doing away with $500,000 salaries.

In the post, a user who works for Oracle said that between 2019 and 2022, program managers were making $500,000 in total compensation, while the "average" software development engineer was making $350,000 and recruiters were taking home $200,000.

"Are those days over?" the user asked. "Will there be a rebalance to salaries back to 2015 levels where only directors with 100+ reports were clearing 500k."

Nearly 14,000 users weighed in on the poll, with a slight majority of 51.5% of votes agreeing that it was the end of an era.

Blind allows its users to post anonymously, but it requires people to verify their employer via their employee email address. Insider did not independently verify the employment of users cited in this story.

"Tech is still extraordinarily lucrative," one user who works at Amazon wrote in a post that generated 148 likes. "The salaries are here to stay, but ridiculous overpaying is over. I doubt we'll see Meta/Google/Doordash etc. throw 500k at someone who's making 200k currently."

Another user from Twitter said they've gotten "multiple offers" over $1.1 million in total compensation.

"With all these layoffs people start accepting lower pay and the trend will continue unless there is huge demand for tech," one user from the AI company Tractable wrote. "I think supply for devs is really high and so demand might go down. If you can get good (not great) talent for cheap, managers might adjust with that."

The Oracle employee was not the only one to question whether tech salaries are on a downward spiral.

"Do you think salaries like 250k- 500k, etc are sustainable in tech. Or we are hitting a bubble that soon will burst?" an employee of cloud computing company VMware wrote in a separate post.

Big Tech employees have long earned more than their counterparts at other firms.

The median take-home pay for a program manager in the US is $98,578, while a program manager at a major tech firm like Google may earn closer to $220,000 a year, per GlassDoor.

GlassDoor estimates the median annual earnings of a software development engineer and a tech recruiter are $130,887 and $75,489, respectively. Big tech companies are known to pay much more, with Glassdoor putting the total compensation range for Meta software development engineers between $187,000 and $283,000, and for Meta recruiters between $104,000 and $171,000.

Insider reported earlier this year that companies are using layoffs to cut the salaries of new hires, according to tech recruiters. Major tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Google have laid off thousands of staff in recent months.

Additional concerns are being raised over the growing abilities of AI, with dozens of tech workers taking to Blind to question whether their jobs will be replaced entirely.

"Face it, golden age is over," a Microsoft engineer wrote. "Software engineering is a dying profession. And since GPT is already great at writing its own prompts, you're up the creek without a paddle."

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Men’s reproductive capacity has fallen drastically in recent decades - and a new analysis of thousands of studies has revealed the factors that pose the biggest risk to sperm quality.

Sperm counts around the world have halved over the past 50 years, with the pace of decline more than doubling since 2000, according to recent research on male fertility.

Researchers at Semmelweis University in Hungary have dug deeper into the findings of nearly 27,000 studies to determine the biggest causes of deterioration of sperm cells, and found pollution, smoking, age, and certain health conditions to have the greatest effect.

Their findings were published in the journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology.

The functionality of sperm cells is tested by “DNA fragmentation analysis,” currently the only evidence-based test to make the determination, explained Dr Zsolt Kopa, head of the Andrology Centre at the Department of Urology at Semmelweis University.

"It examines their DNA content, namely the proportion of intact or fragmented genetic material in the sperm. The more fragmented the DNA, the less the sperm’s ability to fertilise; also, it can increase the risk of miscarriage," he said.

The research comes amid growing concern about the dramatic fall in male reproductive capacity. Research published late last year in the journal Human Reproduction Update showed that sperm counts worldwide have halved over the past five decades.

Professor Hagai Levine, one of the researchers behind that particular study, called it a "canary in a coal mine," adding that "we have a serious problem on our hands that, if not mitigated, could threaten mankind’s survival".

Age, pollution, lifestyle

The Semmelweis scientists searched three international databases for previously published studies, finding 26,901 articles, and using 190 for their meta-analysis. All were published between 2003 and 2021, mostly in Europe, the US, and Asia, with some in Africa and Australia.

Data of thousands of men treated in infertility clinics were compared - and some results surprised even the researchers.

"Based on previous research, we expected that the quality of sperm cells starts to deteriorate significantly after age 40, but our meta-analysis suggests that this age could be much higher," said Dr Anett Szabó, a PhD student and first author of the Semmelweis publication.

"But, of course, this is not to say that it’s worth waiting to start a family as other important parameters can also deteriorate with advancing age".

The researchers did find that the studies demonstrated smoking could increase DNA fragmentation by an average of 9.19 per cent compared to non-smokers.

Alcohol, and body weight, didn’t have a clinically significant role in the fragmentation of the genetic material. A tendency that more alcohol and higher body weight lead to more considerable fragmentation was detectable, however.

Pollution had a clear detrimental effect on sperm quality. Two of the studies reviewed showed the effect on sperm in a region in Italy with particularly high environmental pollution, while another showed similar effects on police officers directing traffic at a busy junction.

The meta-analysis found that various factors, such as air pollution, the exposure to pesticides or insecticides, increased sperm DNA fragmentation by an average of 9.68 per cent.

Underlying health problems

Certain health problems were also shown to be a factor. Varicocele, which is the dilation of the veins in the spermatic cord, was found to increase fragmentation by an average of 13.62 per cent while reduced glucose tolerance also affects it to a similar extent.

Tumours, meanwhile, can cause an 11.3 per cent increase in fragmentation.

Infections such as Chlamydia and HPV did not appear to impair sperm quality, but bacterial or other STIs did show a slight increase in fragmentation.

"In recent years, there has been an increasing demand to measure men’s fertility with functional, objective parameters, in addition to the classical quantitative and qualitative characteristics," said Kopa.

"DNA fragmentation can be of outstanding importance, and the test was officially included in the international guidelines in 2021. However, there are still no official standards on the values of infertility and fertility," he added.

"In clinical practice, we use only consensus values. Generally, a fragmentation below 25 per cent can be considered optimal; above this, the chance of spontaneous conception decreases. Beyond 50 per cent, the success rate of IVF is also lower".

The experts added that quitting smoking, getting enough exercise, or eating more healthily could be a good start for people who are planning to try for a child.

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For the first time, a team of researchers has discovered a hidden underground necropolis underneath the streets of Naples using muon tomography – essentially, cosmic ray particles.

In muon tomography, or muography, scientists use cosmic rays to map previously-inaccessible areas. Muon particles are negatively-charged particles produced by cosmic rays that collide with atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Around 10,000 muons reach Earth's surface per square meter per minute. Muography uses these scattered rays to construct three-dimensional models from the information revealed as the particles pass through varying densities of obstructive objects, like walls or floors. 

A team of international researchers from Italy and Japan used this technique to map the part of the remains of an ancient Greek city called Neapolis underneath Naples, largely inaccessible to archaeological excavations due to the high population density of the area.

"Remains of the ancient Neapolis with its buildings, streets, aqueducts and necropolis made by the Greeks starting from the second half of the first millennium BC are interred approximately ten meters below the current street level of the city of Naples," the team wrote in their paper.

The map produced by the team. Image credit: Tioukov et al., Scientific Reports 2023

Muography is a great way to see through obstructive objects and has been used to study all sorts, from volcanoes to 14th-century Chinese fortress walls to a hidden room in the Great Pyramid of Giza. 

A previous study looking at Neapolis, an ancient Hellenistic necropolis built by the Greeks in the fourth to third centuries BCE, hypothesized that there were more burial chambers to be found. The team was able to do so by using muon detectors 18 meters below street level inside an ancient cellar, which had been converted into a food cellar in the 19th century. 

"The first challenge was to design a compact muon detector with high angular resolution, transportable in a narrow place and without access to the electricity grid," Giovanni De Lellis of the Federico II University and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) of Naples said in a statement. 

"The detector we have developed is based on the technologies we use in the subnuclear physics experiments at CERN, and at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories, which study the properties of neutrinos and search for dark matter."

They were left for months, capturing around 10 million muons from which the team was able to produce a stereoscopic reconstruction.

"From the number of muons that arrive at the detector from different directions, it is possible to estimate the density of the material they have passed through," lead author Valeri Tioukov, a researcher at the INFN of Naples, said. "We found an excess in the data that can only be explained by the presence of a new burial chamber."

Fragments of nearby Greek burial chambers from ancient Neapolis. Image credit: Tioukov et al., Scientific Reports 2023

Similar necropolis chambers in the area contain ornate frescoes and sculptures left by wealthy Hellenistic families to honor their dead. The chamber has not yet been explored, other than by cosmic rays, of course.

The study was published in Scientific Reports.

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The part bots struggle with is not clicking the box. Image credit: In-Finity/shutterstock.com

In 2022, the first fully complete human genome with no gaps was revealed, marking a huge moment for human genetics. On release to the public, scientists described the painstaking work that goes into sequencing an over 6 billion base pair genome, with 200 million added in this new research. The new genome added 99 genes likely to code for proteins and 2,000 candidate genes that were previously unknown. Now, it’s available for all to view.

Many will be asking: "Wait, didn’t we already sequence the human genome?" In part, yes – in 2000, the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium published their first drafts of the human genome, results that subsequently paved the way for almost every facet of human genetics available today.

The most recent draft of the human genome has been used as a reference since 2013. But weighed down by impractical sequencing techniques, these drafts left out the most complex regions of our DNA, which make up around 8 percent of the total genome.

This is because these sequences are highly repetitive and contain many duplicated regions – attempting to put them together in the right places is like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are the same shape and have no image on the front.

Long gaps and underrepresentation of large, repeating sequences made it so that this genetic material has been excluded for the past 20 years. Scientists had to come up with more accurate methods of sequencing to illuminate the darkest corners of the genome. 

“These parts of the human genome that we haven’t been able to study for 20-plus years are important to our understanding of how the genome works, genetic diseases, and human diversity and evolution,” said Karen Miga, assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz, when the results were published in Science last year. 

Much like the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, the new reference genome (called T2T-CHM13) was produced by the Telomere-2-Telomere Consortium, a group of researchers dedicated to finally mapping each chromosome from one telomere to the other. T2T-CHM13 is now available on the UCSC Genome Browser for everyone to enjoy, complimenting the standard human reference genome, GRCh38. 

The new reference genome was created using two modern sequencing techniques, called Oxford Nanopore and PacBio HiFi ultra-long read sequencing, which massively increases the length of DNA that can be read while also improving the accuracy. Through this, they could sequence strings of DNA previously unreadable by more rudimentary techniques, alongside correcting some structural errors that existed in the previous reference genomes. 

Looking to the future, the consortium hopes to add even more reference genomes as part of the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium to improve diversity in human genetics, something sorely lacking at present. 

“We’re adding a second complete genome, and then there will be more,” said David Haussler, director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. 

“The next phase is to think about the reference for humanity’s genome as not being a single genome sequence. This is a profound transition, the harbinger of a new era in which we will eventually capture human diversity in an unbiased way.” 

An earlier version of this article was published in March 2022. 

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A new paper has explored the potential dangers of people having sex in space, suggesting that it may soon be necessary to have space tourists agree not to have sex whilst they are up there.

Right now, space tourism is the reserve of the super-wealthy, and there is little opportunity for having a little zero-g intercourse unless you don't mind doing it in very close proximity to Jeff Bezos and Captain Kirk. However, that might not be the case forever – and the new paper argues that as flights become longer,  the chances of space sex occurring increases.

"It is unrealistic to assume that all space tourism participants will abstain from sexual activities while exposed to microgravity and increased levels of ionising radiation during spaceflight," the team write in their report. "This raises the possibility of uncontrolled human conception in space, which poses a significant risk to the emerging space tourism sector." 

The main problem, which they say has been overlooked by the industry so far, is the effect it could have were somebody to conceive while outside of our planet's protective atmosphere.

"Our knowledge of the effects of these space environments on the early stage of human reproduction and the long-term consequence to human offspring is in its infancy," the team writes. "The possible detrimental outcomes include those of a biological nature – e.g. developmental abnormalities in human offspring, and those of a societal and commercial nature – e.g. litigation, reputational damage, and financial loss".

The team suggests that problems could linger post-flight, with effects of radiation on sperm potentially lasting up to three months.

In terms of mitigation, the team suggests that participants should be counselled as to the risks pre-flights, and asked to sign a legal waiver stating that "the participants are solely liable for the consequences if they do conceive during or shortly after space flight".

Additionally, contraception should be used, though they note that an "obvious concern is the lack of any studies or validation of the efficacy of human contraceptive approaches within a space environment."

The paper was published on Zenodo ahead of the Space Tourism Conference 2023.

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When it comes to zoonotic influenza – all the various flu viruses out there which originated in animal populations before jumping into humans – there are two big hitters: bird flu and swine flu. But with the publication of a new study out of China, scientists are warning that we may soon see the rise of another type of zoonotic flu – and this one might be coming to us via man’s best friend itself.

Researchers "systematically investigated the evolution of genetic and biological properties of [an] avian-origin virus during its circulation in dogs,” reads the paper, published this month. “We found that during the adaptation of H3N2 CIVs to dogs, H3N2 CIVs became able to recognize the human-like SAα2,6Gal receptor, showed gradually increased HA acid stability and replication ability in human airway epithelial cells, and had a 100 percent transmission rate via respiratory droplets in a ferret [model].”

Or to put it in other, more worrying words: “Our results revealed that dogs might serve as potential intermediate hosts for animal influenza viruses’ adaption to humans.”

What is “dog flu”?

Like so many of those zoonotic influenza viruses that infect humans, the illness now thought of as “dog flu” was originally a version of bird flu – H3N2, to be precise. It wasn’t known to infect dogs until around 2006 – but in the years since then, it has firmly established itself in canines, evolving into a fully-fledged mammalian form of avian influenza.

“The virus does not seem to pose particularly worrying health threats to dogs,” James Wood, head of the department of veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge, told The Telegraph – though he agreed that it’s “pretty clear” that the flu strain is now a dog-specific virus.

It’s a situation that has long worried experts. While avian flu strains can cause severe illnesses in humans, their spread is usually limited past the initial infected patient – the type of receptor molecule the virus is best equipped to infect simply doesn’t exist at high enough concentrations in human upper respiratory tracts, making it difficult for the virus to spread from person to person.

But a strain of bird flu mutating in a way that could help it survive and transmit between mammals – even species as unlike ourselves as dogs – would presumably be much better equipped to infect humans at a large scale. To put it bluntly: if this strain of flu really can infect humans, your beloved family pet may become patient zero for a pandemic.

“The changes in the canine virus apparently are making it better adapted to transmit within mammals, as you might expect after such a long period in dogs,” Wood told The Telegraph. “One might be more concerned about the longer term pandemic potential.”

How was the study conducted?

So, what’s the evidence for such a dramatic statement? It comes as the result of a huge analysis of more than 4,000 nasopharyngeal swabs from wheezy dogs across two years and nine provinces or municipalities of China.

Of those sick dogs, only around one in 20 tested positive for H3N2 – though the researchers noted that the incidences increased dramatically over the study period. More important than the raw numbers of infections, however, was what the team found when they sequenced the genome of the virus strain: “compared with ancestral avian influenza viruses,” they confirm in the paper, “H3N2 [viruses] that were initially introduced to dogs possessed several substitutions identical to human influenza viruses with high frequencies.”

The rate of those adaptations, they point out, seems to have sped up recently – with a big hike in human-friendly mutations turning up after 2016. “These results indicated that H3N2 [viruses] may have increased their adaptability to humans during their evolution in dogs,” the team concludes.

That may be a problem – since, as the researchers also discovered, human immune systems don’t appear to have any natural protection against the virus. “No H3N2 [virus] was recognized by antisera to H3N2 human seasonal influenza virus in […] assays,” they write.

“These results indicated that human populations lack immunity to [the] H3N2 [canine influenza virus],” they confirm, “and even pre-existing immunity derived from the present human seasonal influenza viruses cannot provide protection against H3N2.”

Combined with a second approach in which the team deliberately infected small groups of dogs and ferrets with the H3N2 canine and avian influenza viruses – with the result that certain clades spread very effectively among both mammalian species – and the data certainly “warrants attention,” Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading, told The Telegraph.

“It’s a data-rich paper that surely shows that the most recent viruses […] are more adapted to mammals than was the original virus that made the leap from an avian,” he said.

Of course, there’s no evidence of dog flu having infected humans as yet – but with the high number of mutations, Jones agreed, the study provides evidence that the virus is “creeping” towards being human-like.

Should we be worried?

Let’s face it: there’s nothing like talk of new pandemics to which humans have no existing immunity for getting people riled up. But how seriously should we be taking this possibility?

According to Jones, we shouldn’t be overreacting just yet. “At the moment I judge this data warrants attention,” he told The Telegraph, but "the case for a ‘threat’ is not clear.”

Despite the researchers’ contention that humans have no pre-existing immunity to the virus, Jones suggested the situation may not be as dire as it first seems. Even if human immune systems have no protection against infection, he said, there may yet be some protection against the disease itself.

While the increasing and accelerating number of mutations in the viral genome may seem concerning, he argued, “some of this is just the virus settling down in the dog, so inevitably becoming mammalian virus-like.”

Meanwhile, it bears repeating that there has been no evidence so far of any human cases of dog flu. That fact may paradoxically make those high numbers of human-infecting mutations a cause for optimism, Wood suggested: perhaps, he told The Telegraph, it implies the potential for human infection isn’t that high after all.

Of course, it’s not a guarantee – perhaps the canine influenza virus simply hasn’t reached the mutation threshold that would allow it to effectively infect humans. And should the virus spill over into humans, it could be virtually impossible to contain, Jones cautioned.

“In some countries dog control would be impossible and in others socially difficult,” he said. “I think the obvious thing is surveillance and an awareness in influenza reference centres of the dog adapted sequences so any human cases can be reported quickly.”

The study is published in the journal eLife.

All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.

The content of this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.   

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DNA sequences from over 30,000 previously unknown viruses have been discovered, thanks to a seriously powerful computer and some clever detective work. The team, led by Dr Christopher Bellas at the University of Innsbruck, was astounded when their study of a group of complex micro-organisms called protists came up with a whole lot more than they bargained for.

Genetic material left behind by viruses pops up surprisingly often in the genomes of lots of species, including humans. Called endogenous viral elements (EVEs), these are often characterized as viral “fossils” – they’re considered to be non-functional, mere relics of ancient viral infections. They certainly don’t appear to cause any harm to their host organisms, despite how very widespread they are.

“We were very surprised by how many viruses we found through this analysis,” said Bellas in a statement. “In some cases, up to 10% of a microbe's DNA turned out to consist of hidden viruses.”

Protists, the focus of this study, are single-celled, complex organisms that can happily live across many different environments on Earth, from oceans and lakes, to soil, and even inside other animals. Like other living things, protists are constantly subjected to viral infections. Some of these can be deadly; others might quietly insert themselves into the organism’s genetic code and then don’t appear to do very much of anything.

"Why so many viruses are found in the genomes of microbes is not yet clear," explained Bellas, but the researchers do have a theory: it could be that EVEs, far from being non-functional as many assume, are actually playing a protective role against other, more dangerous foes.

Protists are at risk from the suitably intimidating-sounding giant viruses, which can be as large as bacteria and are fatal to the organisms they infect. But there is some good news: the protists have a white knight in the form of virophages. Just as bacteriophages are viruses that kill bacteria, virophages are viruses that neutralize other viruses.

If a giant virus comes along and infects an organism that already has a resident virophage, the virophage will hijack the molecular machinery of the giant virus and cause it to create lots more virophage copies. This protects the original host cell from any damage by the giant virus and can save a population from destruction.

Bellas and the team noted that the tens of thousands of previously unknown EVEs they discovered seemed to have some similarities with virophage sequences, which is why they speculate that they may be having a protective effect.

The fact that so many new EVEs were discovered is an incredible achievement in itself. The study authors originally went hunting for the origins of a very specific group of viruses called Polinton-like viruses, which Bellas and a colleague discovered in the waters of an Austrian lake back in 2021. In order to do this, however, they needed to cast the net wide.

“We did not know which organisms are usually infected by these viruses. That's why we conducted a large-scale study to test all microbes whose DNA sequences are known," Bellas explained.

What resulted was a huge amount of DNA sequence data. Working through it all would be a daunting task, so the researchers enlisted the help of a super-powerful computer cluster called Leo, as well as some state-of-the-art lab techniques. They could never have hoped to find as many as 30,000 new EVEs, and future research can now focus more deeply on the potential roles they play. We might find that they’re not just “fossils” after all.

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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