There is only a star we are pretty sure we've got the right age for, and that is the Sun. Getting that value for every other star, from the very young to the very old, is a matter of clever modeling that tries to fit stars into a nice neat mold. And while it works often, it is far from perfect and is ultimately down to how much we know about the stars. Even when it comes to our own Sun, there is plenty we do not know.

But the age of stars is an important factor to know, and theoretically it is quite easy to work out what you need to look for. It’s in practice that it becomes difficult. 

For most of the lifetime of a star, it will be fusing hydrogen, and how long that lasts depends on the mass of the star – but not in an obvious way.

Massive stars have more fuel to burn, but they also radiate a lot more energy. To not collapse on themselves, they need to be fusing a lot more than a star like the Sun, so they will go through said fuel in a much shorter time. Smaller stars will instead take things more slowly, as they do not have to burn through their fuel as quickly to maintain their internal equilibrium.

Based on this, you can see there is a law that connects the age to the mass of a star. This is a useful way to get to some type of estimate. It is important to know that no matter the size, when a star begins to release energy due to internal nuclear fusion of hydrogen, it will belong to a group called the main sequence.

A schematic Hertzsprung–Russell diagram showing where the main sequence and other portions of stars exist in this classification. Image credit: gstraub/Shutterstock.com

The term comes from the distribution of these stars on the Hertzsprung–Russell (HR) diagram. On the vertical axis is the luminosity of these objects, and on the other the color index (or temperature, or stellar classification). The blue-white stars are the biggest and hottest, in the top left, and the red dwarfs are in the bottom right. The Sun is somewhere in the middle. When stars move off the main sequence they become red giants (and then supergiants), so their luminosity tends to stay the same but their color changes. All this can be useful when it comes to estimating their ages.

If you have a group of stars in a cluster, they likely formed at roughly the same time as each other. You will have a larger number of small stars than big ones, but at year zero you would expect to have them all in the main sequence. 

Now, if you go and check on them a certain time later, a certain number of them will have moved off the main sequence. By plotting them on the HR diagram you can find the turnoff point. If in this cluster that point was a star like the Sun, you’d guess that the cluster is about 10 billion years old, since that’s how long the Sun is expected to stay on the main sequence.

Obviously, this approach would not be useful if you had an individual star. To try and gain some idea, another technique can be helpful: asteroseismology. This approach looks at the oscillations within the stars to gain insights. Stars turn hydrogen into helium, so an older star is going to have more helium and sound waves will propagate differently. And from that, age can be assumed.

There are also methods that looked at the rotation of a star, and from that infer an age. This appears to work for the low-mass main sequence stars. For stars too young to be in the main sequence, it is possible to guess an age based on the presence of material around them, or their variability before they settle into a “calmer” main sequence phase.

These methods directly or indirectly rely on what we know of the Sun. The more we learn about our little yellow star, the better we will understand all the stars in the Universe.

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We love a good fluke treasure discovery here at IFLScience – and even better when it’s at the hands of somebody completely unexpected. A recent story out of Denmark is no exception, as a hoard of nearly 300 Viking coins has been discovered by a young girl using a metal detector in a cornfield last Autumn. 

Along with the ancient coinage, the trove contained a number of pieces of silver jewelry – likely broken up on purpose to act as payment by weight. Two of the items discovered are “particularly interesting,” noted experts at the local Historical Museum of Northern Jutland, where the items are being investigated: two ornately braided decorated balls on a small piece of cut silver rod – both clearly once part of the same unusually large silver ring pin.

It's so big and high-quality, in fact, that it was likely taken from a bishop or a king, the museum staff said – likely on a raiding expedition, and potentially from a high-society individual in Ireland, some 1200-plus nautical miles away from where the treasure was found. 

For the Vikings who originally plundered the treasure, however, it wasn’t the artistic merit of a piece that mattered, or even the authority that minted a currency – in fact, many of the coins are not Danish, but German or Arab in origin – it was all about the weight of the silver they could retrieve from it. 

One of the coins recovered at the site, showing Arabic text. Image credit: Nordjyske Museer

The treasure hails from more than 1,000 years ago – the Danish coins have been dated to the 970s or 980s CE, during the later period of the reign of Harald Blåtand, or “Bluetooth” (and yes, that is where we get the modern term “Bluetooth”). Researchers investigating the find are able to date it so accurately thanks to King Harald’s famous mid-life conversion to Christianity: the coins feature a cross on one side, which would not have been present before the mid-960s or so.

The sign of the cross allows archeologists to date the coin to after Harald Bluetooth's christianization of Scandinavia. Image credit: Nordjyske Museer

On top of that, the location of the discovery provides an upper limit on the potential dates. The silver was found tantalizingly close to what was once the Viking fortress of Fyrkat – a castle that was only in use for a short time around the year 980. While researchers aren’t sure exactly why it was abandoned, evidence from other sites suggests it may have been due to an intergenerational power struggle for the throne.

If that’s the case, it may explain why such an opulent collection was left in the first place. “Perhaps the castles were not given up entirely voluntarily, and perhaps it happened in connection with the final showdown between Harald Blåtand and his son Svend Tveskæg,” suggested Torben Trier Christiansen, an archaeologist and museum inspector at the Museum. 

“If there were disturbances at Fyrkat, it makes good sense that the local magnate here at Bramslev would choose to hide his valuables out of the way,” he added. 

A piece of the silver ring pin found at the site. Each piece weighed about 70g (2.5 oz). Image credit: Nordjyske Museer

Thanks to this upheaval – although much more thanks to the centuries of agriculture that followed it – the hoards of silverware were discovered not in the two (or more) separate collections they were originally deposited in but spread throughout a larger area. 

And while that makes it difficult for experts to say for certain which trove any individual item came from, it does come with an upside: a follow-up investigation, not just in the hopes of further riches, but in order to better understand where, and why, the items were buried in the first place.

“These two silver treasures constitute a fantastic story in themselves,” Treir Christiansen remarked. “But to find them abandoned in a settlement only eight kilometers from Harald Blåtand's Viking fortress Fyrkat is incredibly exciting.”

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The second-deepest blue hole in the world has been discovered in the bay of Chetumal in Mexico. With a depth of 274 meters (899 feet), this massive marine cavern has been named Taam ja', which means “deep water” in the Mayan language.

Scientists from the Colegio de la Frontera Sur first discovered the blue hole in September 2021, but they have recently released a study about the find. 

Using scuba dives, water samples, and eco-sound surveys, their work suggests the blue hole has a surface area of 13,690 square meters (147,357 square feet) and features very steep sides with 80-degree slopes. Its mouth is just under 5 meters (16 feet) below sea level, where the water changes significantly with temperature and salinity gradients. 

In terms of depth, it’s second only to one found in Sansha Yongle, China, which has a depth of 300 meters (984 feet). However, the new blue hole is notably deeper than the famous Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belize, which is 125 meters (410 feet) deep.

It was found off the southeastern coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the place where the notorious dinosaur-killing asteroid struck 66 million years ago. This is part of the corner that’s full of fascinating geology, like the world’s biggest underwater cave called Sistema Sac Actun.

The researchers who discovered Taam ja' say that follow-up studies should look to analyze the microbial diversity of the waters and understand what kind of life lives here. Studying the structure and geology of the blue hole could also shine some light on the environment and climate of the distant past. 

After all, blue holes like this were formed during the last Ice Age when sea levels were over 100 meters (330 feet) lower than the present-day. They would have started life as a limestone cave, but as the seawater rose, it flooded and the ceiling collapsed to form a marine cavern. 

Scientists have even discovered fossils of prehistoric creatures, like tortoises and crocodiles, embedded in similar blue holes. They are also known to be bustling habitats for living creatures too, including corals, sea turtles, and sharks, not to mention a wealth of unique microbial life. 

Who knows what wonders are held in Taam ja', but it’s sure to offer up some discoveries. Let’s just hope they don't find any plastic trash down there.

The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

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Initially performed by Joseph Woo, MD, professor and chair of cardiothoracic surgery, and his team in October, the technique has since been used in adult and pediatric patients five more times by surgeons at Stanford Medicine.

Stopping the heart before implantation can damage the cardiac tissue, so keeping it beating during transplantation avoids further injury to the organ.

"This can be revolutionary," said Woo, the senior author on a study describing the procedure that published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Techniques (JTCVS Techniques) in March. "It's an exciting time for our entire department. This is a big team of very creative individuals that are willing to push the limits of modern technology and health care."

Solving a cardiac conundrum

In a country where 3,500 people currently await a heart transplant, increasing the pool of healthy donated organs is essential.

Brain death donors have long made up the majority of heart transplants, because with those patients, who have been kept on life support before procurement, it's been easier to keep the organ stabilized and assure its health. But with demand outpacing supply, the medical world has been pushed to seek more novel approaches.

Recent technological advances have allowed for more successful heart transplantation from donors who died by what's known as cardiac or circulatory death, in which the heart has already stopped once, either naturally or because they were discontinued from life support. Such procedures increase the number of hearts available for transplant, but outcomes for the recipients are poorer.

These hearts have traditionally been stopped twice—first at death, then immediately before transplantation, after spending time hooked up to a machine that perfuses them with oxygenated blood.

"Stopping the heart a second time, just before transplanting, induces more injury," Woo said. "I asked, 'Why can't we sew it in while it is still beating?'"

The Stanford team believed that avoiding a second stoppage of the muscle would improve the quality of the donated heart, but figuring out how presented a challenge.

"It took a little boldness—because it's a challenging, technical thing to do," said Aravind Krishnan, MD, cardiothoracic surgery resident and the lead author on the paper describing the team's findings.

John MacArthur, MD, assistant professor of cardiothoracic surgery, and Brandon Guenthart, MD, clinical assistant professor of cardiothoracic surgery, have also used the technique on adults. Michael Ma, MD, assistant professor of cardiothoracic surgery, recently undertook the first pediatric case.

"By showing that it's translatable it means it can change the entire community," said Woo, the Norman E. Shumway Professor of cardiothoracic surgery.

Added Guenthart, "There's excitement around the clinical aspect of it. We're doing a lot of work in the lab to study it further and take it beyond what we're doing now."

From box to chest

In brain-death donor transplants, the heart is stopped, removed from the deceased donor and transported on ice to the transplantation center. Though it can take a prolonged amount of time to reawaken the heart within the recipient, it has been stopped only once.

Organs recovered from a donor after cardiac death, on the other hand, experience some degree of oxygen deprivation after the heart has stopped beating, before procurement can begin. And studies have shown that a prolonged period without blood circulation in the heart impairs its performance after transplantation and diminishes survival outcomes.

This is why those organs require the aid of a perfusion machine rather than being placed on ice. That organ preservation device—a relatively new invention known as a "heart in a box"—gets it pumping again and perfuses it with warm, oxygenated blood while it's being transferred.

The Stanford patients showed improved outcomes on the implantation end, leaving the hospital sooner than usual because the heart and its new host meshed more quickly.

"We thought that stopping the heart a second time was enough to weaken it," MacArthur said. "Keeping the heart beating really seems to make a difference in heart strength with less time spent on the heart-lung machine."

Ma, who used the procedure on the first pediatric patient earlier this month, said the gains on the front end—continuous function of the organ leading to a shorter time spent in the hospital by the recipient—are immediate. And improvement in long-term outcomes for the organ and its new host are inevitable.

"We won't be able to prove that for a long time, but there are enumerable benefits from this technique," he said. "I was beyond excited to use this procedure pioneered by Joe and his team. It was a really rewarding experience."

The beat goes on

The first beating heart transplant, carried out by Woo and surgical team members Chawannuch Ruaengsri, MD, clinical assistant professor of cardiothoracic surgery, along with Krishnan and Patpilai Kasinpila, MD, resident in cardiothoracic surgery, lasted four hours.

On that October day, the Stanford Health Care team was ready to receive a heart procured from a cardiac-death donor and transported via the heart in a box.

The team quickly transitioned the heart to a cardiopulmonary bypass machine already supporting the patient. The machine, which pumps blood and oxygen throughout the body, ensured the uninterrupted flow of warm blood. Woo then began the challenging process of sewing a beating heart into the recipient.

Krishnan said the team took comfort in knowing the machine was there as a backup if it proved too difficult. But it didn't, and the Stanford Health Care team looked on as the heart kept its rhythm.

"It was beating so well," Ruaengsri said.

All six patients are doing well. And the department is excited about continuing to push the boundaries of what's possible.

"In order to do this, we had to challenge dogma," said Woo, whose predecessor Norman E. Shumway performed the first adult heart transplant in the U.S. in 1968 at Stanford Hospital. "That's how innovations occur."

Added Guenthart, "We're looking into ways of never having to stop the heart—that's the next step."

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It is a food lift for bottom-dwelling animals in the deep sea: The alga Melosira arctica grows at a rapid pace under the sea ice during spring and summer months, and forms meter-long cell chains there. When the cells die and the ice to whose underside they adhere melts, they stick together to form clumps that can sink several thousand meters to the bottom of the deep sea within a single day. There they form an important food source for bottom-dwelling animals and bacteria.

In addition to food, however, these aggregates also transport a dubious cargo into the Arctic deep sea: microplastics. A research team led by biologist Dr. Melanie Bergmann from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) has now published their findings.

"We have finally found a plausible explanation for why we always measure the largest amounts of microplastics in the area of the ice edge, even in deep-sea sediment," Melanie Bergmann reports.

Until now, the researchers only knew from earlier measurements that microplastics concentrate in the ice during sea ice formation and are released into the surrounding water when it melts. "The speed at which the alga descends means that it falls almost in a straight line below the edge of the ice. Marine snow, on the other hand, is slower and gets pushed sideways by currents so sinks further away. With the Melosira taking microplastics directly to the bottom, it helps explain why we measure higher microplastic numbers under the ice edge," explains the AWI biologist.

On an expedition with the research vessel Polarstern in summer 2021, she and a research team collected samples of Melosira algae and the surrounding water from ice floes. The partners from Ocean Frontier Institute (OFI), Dalhousie University and the University of Canterbury then analyzed these in the laboratory for microplastic content. The surprising result: the clumps of algae contained an average of 31,000 ± 19,000 microplastic particles per cubic meter, about ten times the concentration of the surrounding water.

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

Since the ice algae are an important food source for many deep-sea dwellers, the microplastic could thus enter the food web there. But it is also an important food source at the sea surface and could explain why microplastics were particularly widespread among ice-associated zooplankton organisms, as an earlier study with AWI participation shows. In this way, it can also enter the food chain here when the zooplankton is eaten by fish such as polar cod and these are eaten by seabirds and seals and these in turn by polar bears.

The detailed analysis of plastic composition showed that a variety of different plastics are found in the Arctic, including polyethylene, polyester, polypropylene, nylon, acrylic and many more. In addition to various chemicals and dyes, this creates a mix of substances whose impact on the environment and living creatures is difficult to assess.

"People in the Arctic are particularly dependent on the marine food web for their protein supply, for example through hunting or fishing. This means that they are also exposed to the microplastics and chemicals contained in it. Microplastics have already been detected in human intestines, blood, veins, lungs, placenta and breast milk and can cause inflammatory reactions, but the overall consequences have hardly been researched so far," reports Melanie Bergmann.

"Micro and nano plastics have basically been detected in every place scientists have looked in the human body and within a plethora of other species. It is known to change behaviors, growth, fecundity and mortality rates in organisms and many plastic chemicals are known toxins to humans," says Steve Allen, OFI Dalhousie University, a research team member.

Moreover, the Arctic ecosystem is already threatened by the profound environmental upheavals caused by the climate crisis. If the organisms are now additionally exposed to microplastics and the chemicals they contain, it can weaken them further.

"So, we have a combination of planetary crises that we urgently need to address effectively. Scientific calculations have shown that the most effective way to reduce plastic pollution is to reduce the production of new plastic," says Melanie Bergmann, and adds, "This should therefore definitely be prioritized in the global plastics agreement that is currently being negotiated." That is why Bergmann is also accompanying the next round of negotiations, which will begin in Paris at the end of May.

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Walking after a meal, conventional wisdom says, helps clear your mind and aids in digestion. Scientists have also found that going for a 15-minute walk after a meal can reduce blood sugar levels, which can help ward off complications such as Type 2 diabetes. But, as it turns out, even just a few minutes of walking can activate these benefits.

In a meta-analysis, recently published in the journal Sports Medicine, researchers looked at the results of seven studies that compared the effects of sitting versus standing or walking on measures of heart health, including insulin and blood sugar levels. They found that light walking after a meal, in increments of as little as two to five minutes, had a significant impact in moderating blood sugar levels.

“Each small thing you do will have benefits, even if it is a small step,” said Dr. Kershaw Patel, a preventive cardiologist at Houston Methodist Hospital who was not involved in the study.

Very light walking reduces blood sugar levels.

In five of the studies that the paper evaluated, none of the participants had pre-diabetes or Type 2 diabetes. The remaining two studies looked at people with and without such illnesses. Participants were asked to either stand or walk for two to five minutes every 20 to 30 minutes over the course of a full day.

All seven studies showed that just a few minutes of light-intensity walking after a meal were enough to significantly improve blood sugar levels compared to, say, sitting at a desk or plopping down on the couch. When participants went for a short walk, their blood sugar levels rose and fell more gradually.

For people with diabetes, avoiding sharp fluctuations in blood sugar levels is a critical component in managing their illness. It’s also thought that sharp spikes and crashes in blood sugar levels can contribute to developing Type 2 diabetes.

Standing also helped lower blood sugar levels, although not to the degree that light walking did. “Standing did have a small benefit,” Aidan Buffey, a graduate student at the University of Limerick in Ireland and an author of the paper, said. Compared to sitting or standing, “light-intensity walking was a superior intervention,” he said.

That’s because light walking requires more active engagement of muscles than standing and uses the fuel from food at a time when there is a lot of it circulating in the bloodstream. “Your muscles will soak up some of that excess glucose,” said Jessie Inchauspé, author of the book “Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar.”

“You still had the same meal, but the impact on your body will be lessened,” she added.

Walking within 60 to 90 minutes after eating delivers the best results.

Although light walking at any time is good for your health, a short walk within 60 to 90 minutes of eating a meal can be especially useful in minimizing blood sugar spikes, as that is when blood sugar levels tend to peak.

Ms. Inchauspé also recommended getting up to do housework or finding other ways to move your body. This short amount of activity will also enhance other dietary changes that people may be making to help control their blood sugar levels.

“Moving even a little bit is worthwhile and can lead to measurable changes, as these studies showed, in your health markers,” Dr. Euan Ashley, a cardiologist at Stanford University who was not associated with the study, said.

Mini-walks are more practical during the workday.

Mr. Buffey, whose research focuses on physical activity interventions in workplace environments, noted that a mini-walk of two to three minutes is more practical during the workday. People “are not going to get up and run on a treadmill or run around the office,” he said, but they could get some coffee or even go for a stroll down the hallway.

For people working from home, he suggested a short walk around the block between Zoom meetings or after lunch. The more we normalize mini-walks during the workday, Mr. Buffey said, the more feasible they will be. “If you are in a rigid environment, that’s when the difficulties may come.”

If you cannot take those few minutes to take a walk, Dr. Ashley said, “standing will get you some of the way there.”

The benefits of physical activity are never all or nothing, Dr. Patel said, but instead exist on a continuum. “It’s a gradual effect of more activity, better health,” he said. “Each incremental step, each incremental stand or brisk walk appears to have a benefit.”

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In the 1950s, researchers from across the globe embarked on a sweeping and ambitious study. For decades, they scrutinized the diets and lifestyles of thousands of middle-aged men living in the United States, Europe and Japan and then examined how those characteristics affected their risks of developing cardiovascular disease.

The Seven Countries Study, as it later became known, famously found associations between saturated fats, cholesterol levels and coronary heart disease. But the researchers also reported another notable result: Those who lived in and around the Mediterranean — in countries like Italy, Greece and Croatia — had lower rates of cardiovascular disease than participants who lived elsewhere. Their diets, rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, lean proteins and healthy fats, seemed to have a protective effect.

Since then, the Mediterranean diet has become the bedrock of heart-healthy eating, with well-studied health benefits including lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and a reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes.

“It’s one of a small number of diets that has research to back it up,” said Dr. Sean Heffron, a preventive cardiologist at NYU Langone Health. “It isn’t a diet that was cooked up in the mind of some person to generate money. It’s something that was developed over time, by millions of people, because it actually tastes good. And it just happens to be healthy.”

Here are some of the most searched questions about the Mediterranean diet, answered by experts.

What exactly is the Mediterranean diet?

The Mediterranean diet isn’t as much a strict meal plan as it is a lifestyle, said Julia Zumpano, a registered dietitian who specializes in preventive cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. People who follow the Mediterranean diet tend to “eat foods their grandparents would recognize,” Dr. Heffron added: whole, unprocessed foods with few or no additives.

The diet prioritizes whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, herbs, spices and olive oil. Fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids, like salmon, sardines and tuna, are the preferred animal protein source. Other lean animal proteins, like chicken or turkey, are eaten to a lesser extent. And foods high in saturated fats, like red meat and butter, are eaten rarely. Eggs and dairy products like yogurt and cheese can also be part of the Mediterranean diet, but in moderation. And moderate alcohol consumption, like a glass of wine at dinner, is allowed.

Breakfast might be smashed avocado on whole-grain toast with a side of fresh fruit and a low-fat Greek yogurt, Dr. Heffron said. For lunch or dinner, a vegetable and grain dish cooked with olive oil and seasoned with herbs — roasted root vegetables, leafy greens, a side of hummus and small portions of pasta or whole grain bread, with a lean protein like grilled fish.

“It’s very easy to follow, very sustainable, very realistic,” Ms. Zumpano said.

What are the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet?

A number of rigorous studies have found that the Mediterranean diet contributes to better health, and in particular better heart health, in a variety of ways. In one study, published in 2018, researchers assessed nearly 26,000 women and found that those who followed the Mediterranean diet most closely for up to 12 years had about a 25 percent reduced risk of developing cardiovascular disease. This was mainly because of changes in blood sugar, inflammation and body mass index, the researchers reported. Other studies, in men and women, have reached similar conclusions.

Research has also found that the diet can protect against oxidative stress, which can cause DNA damage that contributes to chronic conditions like neurological disease and cancer. And some studies suggest it can help reduce the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

The diet may also have profound health benefits during pregnancy, said Dr. Anum Sohail Minhas, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In a recent study of nearly 7,800 women published in December, researchers found that those who followed the Mediterranean diet most closely around the time they conceived and during early pregnancy had about a 21 percent reduced risk of any pregnancy complications, such as pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes or preterm birth.

“There definitely seems to be a protective effect,” Dr. Minhas said.

On its own, though, the Mediterranean diet isn’t a panacea, Dr. Heffron said — it won’t eliminate your chances of developing cardiovascular disease, and it won’t cure a disease, either. It’s important that people also pay attention to other tenets of good heart health, like getting regular exercise and adequate sleep and not smoking.

Will the Mediterranean diet help with weight loss?

The diet can be conducive to weight loss, Ms. Zumpano said, but you’ll still need to pay attention to calories.

“Nutrient-rich foods aren’t necessarily low in calories,” said Dr. Heffron, who noted that the diet includes foods like olive oil and nuts, which are heart-healthy yet high in calories and can lead to weight gain if consumed in large portions. But if you’re changing your diet from one that is rich in calories, saturated fats and added sugars, for instance, with one that prioritizes vegetables, fruits and leaner proteins, that can result in some weight loss, he said.

The Mediterranean diet is not meant to be a hack for rapid weight loss, though. Rather, it should inspire a long-term shift in eating behavior. In one study of more than 30,000 people living in Italy, for instance, researchers found that those who followed the Mediterranean diet most closely for about 12 years were less likely to become overweight or obese than those who followed the diet less closely. A smaller study, published in 2020, enrolled 565 adults who had intentionally lost 10 percent or more of their body weight in the year prior. It found that those who reported adhering to the Mediterranean diet closely were twice as likely to maintain their weight loss as those who did not closely follow the diet.

How long do you need to follow the Mediterranean diet to gain benefits?

If you’re just starting to follow the Mediterranean diet, limited evidence suggests that you may notice some cognitive improvements — including in attention, alertness and contentment, according to one review of studies published in 2021 — within the first 10 days or so. But for there to be sustained, long-term payoffs in terms of heart health, people need to stick with it, Ms. Zumpano said, ideally for their whole lives.

That being said, she added, the diet allows for some flexibility; the occasional cake or steak won’t undo its overall benefits.

Are there any downsides to trying the Mediterranean diet?

The diet usually provides a balanced blend of nutrients and adequate protein, so typically there are no significant risks associated with following it, Dr. Heffron said.

But because the diet recommends minimizing or avoiding red meat, you may want to make sure that you are getting enough iron. Good sources of iron include nuts, tofu, legumes and dark leafy green vegetables like spinach and broccoli. Foods rich in vitamin C, like citrus, bell peppers, strawberries and tomatoes, can also help your body absorb iron. And because the diet minimizes dairy, you may want to speak with your doctor about whether you need to take a calcium supplement.

However for the average person, the benefits of the Mediterranean diet likely far outweigh any potential negatives, Dr. Minhas said. “These are things we can all try to incorporate into our lives.”

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“I laughed when I got this request,” said Dr. Robert Cima, a colorectal surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., in response to my asking if he would talk to me for this newsletter. “I was like, is this a punk call? The New York Times wants to know about hemorrhoids?”

Yes, I wanted to know about hemorrhoids. For a friend, of course. I’ll admit, however, that I should have thought twice about my decision to eat a brown lentil stew during some of my interviews.

Here’s what I learned about preventing and treating hemorrhoids after conversations with four physicians.

Understand the anatomy of hemorrhoids and look out for the symptoms.

I was surprised to learn that everyone is, in fact, born with hemorrhoidal tissue. Actually, these blood vessels that line the anus have a useful job: They help us sense what’s in the rectum, Dr. Cima said. They’re the reason that you can (usually) tell whether the pressure you’re feeling down below is gas or diarrhea or a normal bowel movement. Hemorrhoids also help to form a seal within the anus that keeps it closed, kind of like weather stripping on a door, Dr. Cima explained.

It’s only when hemorrhoids become engorged and inflamed that they cause unpleasant symptoms. Those symptoms can include itching, burning, bleeding and, sometimes, protrusion of the hemorrhoid outside of the body. Hemorrhoids get inflamed typically because of straining during bowel movements, which puts pressure on them, said Dr. Rahul Narang, a colorectal surgeon at N.Y.U. Langone Health.

Most hemorrhoids are called internal hemorrhoids, meaning that they develop inside the anus, even if they sometimes protrude. People can, more rarely, get external hemorrhoids, which affect blood vessels outside the anus. These tend to occur suddenly, and are acutely painful, Dr. Cima said — but usually go away by themselves within a week.

Even if you have hemorrhoid symptoms, you shouldn’t assume that you have hemorrhoids, said Dr. Karen Zaghiyan, a colorectal surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Symptoms such as rectal bleeding and pain can also be caused by other problems, including anal fissures (tears in the anus), anal fistulas (infected tunnels between the anus and the skin) and rectal cancer. Doctors should conduct a rectal exam with their finger to rule out other issues, she said. If yours doesn’t, consider seeking out a specialist, such as a gastroenterologist or colorectal surgeon, who might also order an endoscopic exam such as a colonoscopy to properly diagnose the problem, Dr. Cima said.

To prevent hemorrhoids, eat fiber, drink water and don’t sit too long.

When it comes to preventing hemorrhoids, eating a high-fiber diet will almost certainly help, said Dr. Neha Mathur, a gastroenterologist at Houston Methodist Hospital. She recommended consuming 20 to 30 grams of fiber a day. My lentil stew was a wise choice for my bowels, even if I was dining at an inopportune time.

Staying hydrated can make a big difference, too, Dr. Narang said. The fiber and water make it easier to pass bowel movements, which then reduces the chances hemorrhoids will become inflamed, he explained.

Activities that increase the risk that you could become dehydrated — such as drinking lots of coffee or alcohol or engaging in vigorous exercise — can worsen symptoms, Dr. Cima said. (He highlighted bicycle riding as a particular problem, since it puts lots of pressure on the perineum, the area between the anus and the scrotum or vulva.)

It may also help to sit on the toilet for less than five minutes at a time, Dr. Zaghiyan said. “If you feel like you’ve got more to go and it’s not coming, get up and go do something else, and come back again later when you feel the urge once again,” she suggested. How you sit on the toilet matters, too: Products like the Squatty Potty — a footstool placed under your feet while sitting on the toilet — change the angle at which you sit in a way that may reduce strain, Dr. Mathur added.

Sitting for long periods of time in general can worsen hemorrhoid symptoms as well, Dr. Cima said, as can lifting heavy weights with the upper body, as doing so strains the blood vessels around the anus. He said men often come to see him with painful hemorrhoids after becoming dehydrated while doing strenuous physical activity.

Women often develop hemorrhoid symptoms during pregnancy, too, in part because as the uterus grows, it puts additional pressure on the anal region, Dr. Mathur said. Hormonal changes and prenatal vitamins also increase the chance that pregnant women will become constipated, which worsens the problem by causing women to strain while on the toilet, she said.

Again, fiber, hydration and less time spent on the toilet may help, as could a stool softener. Dr. Mathur recommended that pregnant women with hemorrhoids talk to their physicians about safe treatment options.

For mild hemorrhoids, simple treatments may help.

Doctors categorize internal hemorrhoids in stages from one to four, depending on their physical characteristics and severity. For minor hemorrhoids — grade 1 hemorrhoids, which don’t protrude outside the anus at all, and grade 2 hemorrhoids, which may protrude but then go back in by themselves — people can often get relief by following the lifestyle recommendations mentioned above. They also may feel better after sitting in a sitz bath or an Epsom salt bath for 15 minutes, Dr. Narang said. These soaks soothe the tissue and reduce inflammation.

I was surprised to learn from Dr. Cima that over-the-counter hemorrhoid lotions and gels often do not help as much as people expect them to. They might briefly ease symptoms, he said, but they don’t resolve the underlying problem.

If your hemorrhoid symptoms don’t ease, an office-based procedure could help, Dr. Narang said. One popular treatment is rubber band ligation, in which a doctor uses a tool to place a rubber band around the base of the hemorrhoid, which stops blood flow to the inflamed tissue and causes it to die and fall off within one to four days. It is fast, relatively painless and requires very little downtime for the patient, Dr. Mathur said — some people can go right back to work after the procedure. But you may need to come back in for multiple treatments. Another less common office treatment is infrared photocoagulation, in which a physician uses infrared light to cut off blood supply to the bothersome tissue, causing it to shrink.

Serious hemorrhoids can be treated with surgery.

Grade 3 and 4 internal hemorrhoids — grade 3 means the hemorrhoid protrudes outside the anus but can be manually pushed back in, and grade 4 is when it’s constantly outside the anus — sometimes require surgery.

A handful of surgical options are available. One is an excisional hemorrhoidectomy, which is the surgical removal of the hemorrhoid, Dr. Narang explained. Another option is stapled anopexy (also called stapled hemorrhoidopexy), in which a doctor removes part of the hemorrhoid and then staples it back together, reducing it to a normal size, Dr. Cima said. Some doctors instead use Doppler-guided hemorrhoidal artery ligation, which is a good choice for hemorrhoids that bleed a lot, Dr. Narang said. In this procedure, a doctor ties off the main arteries feeding the hemorrhoid, causing it to wither and fall off.

Although surgical procedures often work, they aren’t without potential downsides, Dr. Mathur said. They can have painful and longer recoveries than the office procedures and can cause fecal incontinence. Also, even after surgery, hemorrhoids can return — some surgeries, such as the artery ligation, are associated with up to a 30 percent chance of recurrence, Dr. Narang said. That’s in part because these treatments remove or kill off a portion of the body’s hemorrhoidal tissue, but leave behind the rest, which can then become engorged and inflamed, Dr. Cima said. If people don’t address the lifestyle factors that cause hemorrhoids, they are more likely to see their hemorrhoids return.

I learned quite a lot about hemorrhoids this week, and although I didn’t love the images that came to mind (especially while eating my lunch), I’m grateful to know more about how to prevent and treat them. As Dr. Zaghiyan said to me when we spoke, hemorrhoids are “not a cocktail conversation” — but I am happy that our discussion has made it into The Times.

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Give roundworms some weed and they’ll get the munchies, study finds

According to the Department of Commerce's announcement on Wednesday, Seagate sold hard disk drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021. The export control laws restrict American companies from selling certain items to Huawei, which is currently placed on the U.S. trade blacklist.

Between August 2020 and September 2021, Seagate shipped over 7.4 million drives to Huawei and became the company's sole supplier of hard drives. The law took effect in 2020, but Seagate didn't stop its trade route to China for a while. The other two big hard disk suppliers of Huawei, Western Digital and Toshiba, immediately suspended their relations with the company, according to a 2021 report of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on Seagate.

Seagate will pay the $300 million penalty in $15 million installments per quarter over five years. The company will start paying in October, and it has also lost its export privileges for five years.

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

U.S. and China's technologic dispute

The United States is not taking any steps back against Huawei or China. Moreover, the U.S. government is also getting ready to issue a ban on TikTok, making it unavailable throughout the country. A recent bill empowered Washington to make it happen, supporting the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act.

Right now, several countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and a couple more European countries, have restricted using TikTok on governmental devices. Companies like BBC and Denmark's public service broadcaster have also banned TikTok from corporate devices. Western countries and companies take the spy war against China pretty seriously.

A recent report revealed that Huawei had to replace 13,000 parts in its products due to United States trade sanctions. Huawei continues its efforts on vertical integration but still uses old parts in some products.

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Meteors, or shooting stars, are small pieces of debris that burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere. There will be four meteor showers worth watching out for in 2023, according to Ben Burress, staff astronomer at Chabot Space and Science Center.

What are the meteor showers to watch for in 2023?

In 2023, there will be four meteor showers worth watching out for. They are as follows:

• Lyrids Meteor Shower
• Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower
• Perseids Meteor Shower
• Geminids Meteor Shower

Lyrids Meteor Shower

The Lyrids will peak on April 22, producing about 20 meteors an hour. With a moonless night, it's the perfect time for a light show.

Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower

On May 6, the Eta Aquarids will produce around 60 meteors per hour, but be aware that the full moon that night may impact visibility.

Perseids Meteor Shower

Occurring on August 12 and 13, the Perseids will produce 50 to 100 meteors per hour with a relatively new moon, meaning there won't be much moonlight to disrupt the view.

Geminids Meteor Shower

On December 13 and 14, the Geminids will produce up to 120 meteors per hour, with a moonless night making it worth watching out for.

How to watch meteor showers?

Finding a dark spot away from city lights is key to successful stargazing. Places like Henry W. Coe State Park in the South Bay, Skyline Boulevard in Oakland, and Mount Tamalpais and Point Reyes in Marin County are great options for optimal conditions.

Other national parks like Pinnacles National Park, Death Valley, and Yosemite also offer less light pollution. Joining a free telescope viewing at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland or joining an astronomy club can also enhance the experience.

It is recommended to watch the meteor showers of 2023 in a a dark spot away from city lights

Supermoons will gaze upon the skies on July

Supermoons appear slightly larger and brighter than a regular full moon, making them an awe-inspiring sight. There will be four supermoons to look out for in 2023, starting with the buck moon on July 3, followed by the sturgeon moon on August 1, the blue moon on August 31, and the harvest moon on September 29.

Annular solar eclipse

The annular solar eclipse on October 14, 2023, is a rare sight that shouldn't be missed. During the eclipse, the moon will be a little bit further away in its orbit than during a total solar eclipse, creating a "ring of fire" effect.

While the Bay Area won't be in the path of totality, we'll still see a partial eclipse where the sun will be notably dimmer outside. It's important to use solar-filtered eyewear designed for solar viewing when observing an eclipse.

Tips for photographers

For those interested in astrophotography, understanding which camera suits your needs is important. A basic SLR or mirrorless camera with a good wide-angle lens and the ability to take long exposure shots is ideal for high-quality images. Considering what the Xiaomi 13's camera can do, if you have a cell phone with a 2023 release date, you can capture every second of this visual feast like a professional photographer.

For those not ready to make an investment, most camera phones with night mode functions can take decent photos of the night sky. It's important to use a camera mount or tripod for long exposures, and timing matters when capturing certain events like the Milky Way or the Perseids.

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Researchers have confirmed the secret of lime plaster used by the Ancient Maya. The Mesoamerican people likely added a special ingredient to this construction material: tree bark extracts. And this made their lime plaster much more durable, something that might have important applications today.

The team worked with local Maya-descended masons at Copán in Honduras – which used to be a major Maya center before the Spanish colonization of Central America – to understand how the plaster was made. The approach involves adding the sap from the bark of local tree species, Chukum and Jiote, when the lime – the umbrella term for calcium oxides rather than the delicious fruit – is mixed with water, a process called slaking.

Comparative analysis of plaster and stucco from between 540 and 850 CE and those created by the team today show a strong resemblance. Sap-infused plaster was likely used by Maya masons for its increased durability, plasticity, and water resistance.

Plasters, cement, and concrete have been used since antiquity, some since prehistory. Many civilizations have used and improved these now ubiquitous building materials, and yet, the exact recipes used by our ancestors are not always passed on intact, as in this case. Sometimes, archaeologists must work hard to understand how these materials were made. Just a few months ago, researchers recreated the ancient Roman technique of hot mixing for remarkably durable and self-healing concrete.

These materials share a critical ingredient: lime mixed with water at the very least. Extra steps differentiate between these three materials, but ancient civilizations also realized that they could mix organic material to make plaster stronger.

“Our study helps to explain the improvement in the performance of lime mortars and plasters with natural organic additives developed not only by ancient Maya masons but also by other ancient civilizations (e.g., ancient Chinese sticky rice lime mortars),” the authors wrote in the paper.

And it is not just rice in ancient China. Romans added oil, but fruit juices, animal fats, beer, and even blood have been considered by different civilizations. To be fair, you can make bricks for the Moon and Mars out of blood, urine, and potatoes, so it’s not like that after thousands of years we are doing things in a radically different way.

The study is published in Science Advances.

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The wreck of a strange “experimental submarine” built over 100 years ago has been discovered on the murky seabed of Long Island Sound. While rumors of the location of the mysterious sub – said to be inspired by Jules Verne’s classic 1872 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – have been floating around for some time, it's final resting place has been revealed.

Discovered by Connecticut divers from Shoreline Diving Services, the 28-meter (92-foot) long vessel was built by “eccentric millionaire” and inventor Simon Lake and was quite the celebrity in its heyday in the early 1900s.

Lake was passionate about submarines. Over the course of his life, the obsessional engineer filed over 200 patents for submarine design and became known as “the father of the modern submarine.”

He built the Defender for the US Navy in 1907, but the contract was swiped at the last minute by a competitor. To give it a new lease on life, he refitted the vessel for underwater rescue missions, but it never received a buyer. 

There she is! Diver Steve Abbate inspects one of Defender’s propellers. Image courtesy of Joe Mazraani

However, it picked up some fanfare during its younger years and was even visited by the aviator Amelia Earhart in 1929. By 1946 its best days were behind it and the Defender was scuttled by the Army Corp of Engineers in the waters of Long Island Sound.

Richard Simon, vice president of Shoreline Diving Services, had long been fascinated by the work of Lake and the story of the Defender, so set out on a mission to discover its long-lost wreck. 

“Stories about Lake and his inventions fascinated me,” he said in a statement sent to IFLScience. “The secret to identifying this historical relic was to connect the available research to the stories. You could say Defender was hiding in plain sight all this time in a waterway I’ve traveled for years.”

It's a bit murky, but the team are certain it's the wreck of the Defender. Image courtesy of Joe Mazraani

Two surveys of the area, one by the NOAA and another by Eastern Search & Survey, detected the presence of an unidentified wreck in the Long Island Sound. After Simon noted that the size and location of the object appeared to be consistent with the Defender, he launched an effort to confirm his suspicions. 

On April 16, 2023. Simon oversaw deck operations while divers Steve Abbate and Joe Mazraani swam down to the wreckage. Just as they hoped, they found an intact submarine.

“It is such a thrill to finally put our hands on this important piece of maritime history,” said Abbate.

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The 1986 Chernobyl power plant accident was the world’s largest nuclear disaster. The subsequent fallout from the fires that burnt for ten days after the explosion released radioactive chemicals that spread through much of northeast Europe, across the continent, and even over into North America. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), a 2,600 square kilometer (1,615 square mile) area that was most affected by the disaster, has been uninhabited ever since – and now, scientists are looking at the impact of prolonged radiation exposure on the dogs that live there. 

The effects of radiation on frogs near Chernobyl have been looked at with some surprising results. However, mammals within the CEZ have been greatly unstudied. Directly following the explosion, populations would have significantly decreased. Some populations of animals thrive without human interference – for example, in Korea’s demilitarized zone, populations of animals are increasing. While some species around Chernobyl have recovered in the nearly 37 years since, many have not. 

Free-roaming domestic dogs now present within the CEZ are thought to be the potential descendants of pets left behind when the city was evacuated. While some dogs were culled at the time to help curb the spread of radioactive contamination, evidently some survived and were even fed and cared for by clean-up workers. Populations of dogs today are treated and fed by workers in some areas, and there is even The Chernobyl Dog Research Initiative that was formed in response to the increase in population size, which at one time numbered around 800 individuals. 

The researchers found that there are three different groups of dogs within these areas: one group living near Chernobyl City approximately, 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) from the power plant; one group living in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant area (CNPP) itself; and a third group living in Slavutych, a city of comparatively less contamination where people are still living around 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the site of the disaster. 

Using blood samples collected from the dogs in each of the three areas, the team could look at the DNA of each dog and compare them for relatedness as well as the effects of the radiation. They found that the CNPP population had the most genetic isolation, suggesting that these dogs most represent the population that was present before or immediately after the disaster. 

By comparing the DNA of the three groups of dogs in the areas to DNA from populations of dogs elsewhere in the world, the team was able to show evidence of a clear genetic difference. The team also found evidence of relatedness and kinship between these populations and that three discrete family groups exist. The dogs within the Chernobyl city area shared most DNA with pincher-related breeds, while dogs in the CNPP population had more in common with shepherd breeds. Unlike wild populations of wolves that form family groups with defined territories, these groups exist in relatively close proximity to each other. 

The team concluded by saying that these populations can be used as a model for informing how resources should be managed in these types of disaster situations and help us to understand how humans might survive in areas with extreme environmental conditions. Hopefully, this work will help scientists develop better ideas for living with the effects of radiation than ray cats.

The research is published in Science Advances.

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As the rocket performed the flips, it lost about 9 Km in altitude before going up in a fiery blaze, thus ending the mission. SpaceX has many failures like this but it usually does a good job of taking note of what happened and rectifying the issue – after all, it’s private money on the line and not an endless stream of tax revenue.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulated his team on the “exciting test launch of Starship” and said there will be another test launch in just another couple of months.

If you don’t normally follow this type of news, SpaceX wants to build a rocket that can ferry people back and forth to the Moon and Mars. In a trailer video from several years ago, Starship was also demonstrated as a fancy airplane that could transport people around the Earth in a much quicker time than any jet. It’s unclear if Earth-to-Earth transportation is still on the table in 2023, however.

Starship performs stunning launch before exploding at an altitude of 30 Km

NEW DELHI, April 20 (Reuters) - U.S. tech giant Apple <AAPL.O> could double or triple investments in India, along with exports, over the next few years, a minister said, as the company opened a second store in the world's biggest smartphone market after China.

Apple mainly assembles iPhones in India through Taiwan contract manufacturers but plans to expand into iPads and AirPods, as it looks to cut reliance on China.

Its iPhones made up more than half of total smartphones worth about $9 billion exported from India between April 2022 and February, data from the India Cellular and Electronics Association shows.

"I am very confident that this Apple-India partnership has a lot of headroom for investments, growth, exports and jobs - doubling and tripling over coming years," Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the deputy minister for information technology, told Reuters.

His comments came after a meeting on Wednesday with Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook in the capital, New Delhi.

Cook, who also met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said Apple was "committed to growing and investing across the country".

He inaugurated an Apple store in New Delhi on Thursday two days after opening its first outlet in Mumbai, the commercial capital.

"We've come here only to see Tim Cook," said Manika Mehta, 32, an Android phone user who queued at the Delhi store.

About 500 people had gathered for Cook's brief appearance, in which he spoke with fans and took selfies, as in Mumbai.

"My heart was skipping a beat," said Reeti Sahai, 45, after taking a selfie. "I'm an Apple addict. I'm drawn to Tim Cook, seeing the man he is and the journey."

Cook's visit has drawn extensive media coverage and he has been feted like a Bollywood star, with some people trying to touch his feet in a traditional gesture of respect, while others asked for his autograph.

Apple has previously faced hurdles in opening physical retail stores in the South Asian nation, but its products have been available on e-commerce websites, while its online store opened in 2020.

The new stores open as Indian consumers increasingly look to upgrade devices to glitzier models with richer feature sets, from budget versions that typically cost less than $120.

Still, Apple's pricey phones are affordable for only a few in India, where it has a market share of just 3%.

Apple has been trying to make India a bigger manufacturing base. Its products, including iPhones, are being assembled in India by contract electronics makers Foxconn (2317.TW), Wistron Corp (3231.TW) and Pegatron Corp (4938.TW).

In January, India's trade minister said Apple wanted the country to account for up to 25% of its production versus about 5% to 7% now.

(This story has been corrected to insert Reuters Instrument Code in paragraph 1)

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Currently, over 55 million people are living with dementia around the world, with that number set to increase to 78 million by 2030, and the focus on dementia research increasingly shifting towards prevention.

The online tool takes approximately 20 minutes to complete and provides a personalized dementia risk report that patients can discuss with their doctor.

Since developing the risk tool—known as CogDRisk—in 2022, the team has been evaluating the success of the tool, by trialing it on four existing datasets, with the results published recently in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease.

On their analysis, they found that CogDrisk is effective at predicting dementia.

"There's lots of information about the risk factors for dementia in the academic literature," says Professor Kaarin Anstey from UNSW's School of Psychology and NeuRA.

"But there's a gap between just knowing the risks and actually being able to assess whether or not you have the risk, and then knowing what to do about it. CogDrisk was developed to address this."

Collating the risk factors for dementia

Unsuccessful clinical trials for dementia treatment have led to urgent calls for dementia prevention.

"Prevention is now recognized by the World Health Organization as one of the key areas of research. Alzheimer's Disease International and most of the National Dementia action plans include dementia risk reduction," says Prof. Anstey.

But while there are a lot of different studies on risk factors for dementia across the world, there's not necessarily always agreement on what the risk factors are. To address this problem, the team used statistical methods to combine all the risk factors cited in the existing literature.

"So we did a systematic review, to get all the different risk factors for dementia—those which were robust, and those which were modifiable and could be assessed through a self-report instrument," says Prof. Anstey.

Some of the key modifiable risk factors that increase someone's risk of dementia include insufficient physical activity, obesity in middle age, high blood pressure in middle age, smoking, and poor diet. "That whole process took several years, we published the review, and then we had to develop the risk assessment tool itself."

Assessing the tool on different cohorts

Often risk assessment tools are developed on a single cohort and therefore fit a particular dataset and population, which doesn't work well when applied to other populations.

This study analyzed four different cohorts from existing medical studies, with varying demographics and a total of over 9500 participants.

The cohort data was matched against the key risk and protective factors assessed in the CogDrisk tool, including whether individuals have diabetes, depression and insomnia, information on their diet and eating habits and how much they engaged in physical activity.

The team were then able to match these to a record of dementia cases that developed within the same cohort.

"Our statistical analysis shows it's a very robust and generalisable tool," says Prof. Anstey. "It works across different countries and different data sets. And it's also quite comprehensive, it includes a lot of the newer risk factors that weren't previously included."

Challenge with predicting dementia and future uses of CogDrisk

Predicting dementia is more difficult than predicting some other diseases, partly because it progresses over two or three decades and there can be a strong genetic component.

"It's a multi-causal disease. But there are some modifiable risk factors. Most people want to know what their risk factors are and want to do something about them once they know," says Prof Anstey. The team who developed the tool are hoping that in can be used in healthcare settings to make it easier for GPs and patients to get information on risk reduction.

"Not only are there lots of risk factors, but dementia itself is very complex, and GPs are very busy. So we're trying to develop ways of making it easier for the public and GPs to get the right information."

Next, Prof. Anstey is looking to translate the online tool into different languages, so it's accessible to more people. "And we're also looking at developing a short form of the tool. So there's a lot of happening in the research translation, as well as language translation space that we're working on."

Provided by University of New South Wales

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Sometime in the fall of 2021, a man from Philadelphia came to meet Mazhar Hussain, a chef based in Lahore, Pakistan. Hussain was shown a video of a dish he hadn’t seen before: a hearty sandwich, with generous fillings of meat and cheese. The chef was asked if he could replicate it.

“Re-creating anything is never an issue, but I wanted to check if it was going to be popular,” says Hussain, standing in front of Philly’s Steak Sandwich, a small cafe in Lahore’s Johar Town, an area packed with schools, universities and hospitals. “I saw the amount of meat and cheese being put in it and knew instantaneously that it is going to be a hit.”

Hussain has worked at some of the most high-profile restaurants in Lahore — Monal, Tuscany Courtyard, Chaayé Khana and Café Aylanto, among others — covering a wide range of cuisines. His experience at Philly’s Steak Sandwich, though, has been unique. It’s a smaller restaurant than those, he says, and the guests come from all walks of life. The one thing that connects them: “The steak sandwich is extremely popular with everyone.”

Philly’s Steak Sandwich sits on a small highway apart from Johar Town’s main food centers, atop a hair salon. The shop fights for customers with a biryani restaurant across the street and buzzes all evening with motorbikes and cars jammed into the cramped parking spaces. The cheese­steak is especially popular among nearby students, who can enjoy it for PKR 579, or a little over two bucks.

While Philly’s Steak Sandwich offers a range of fast-food options, its specialty, the cheesesteak, comes in three flavors: pepper, jalapeño and fajita. Chef Hussain customized an eight-inch roll for the sandwich, which arrives on a paper plate. Early in the morning, the meat is marinated with local red chili powder and tikka masala spice to prepare for 4 p.m., when the restaurant takes its first orders.

A lot of the cafe’s customers are drive-in families and couples who just order their cheesesteaks from their cars. On a cold Saturday evening in January, Sana Batool, a schoolteacher, sat in her small Suzuki Alto as two chicken and two beef cheesesteaks perfumed the air. Her children love the sandwiches, she said: “This is their weekend treat.”

In the past year, Philly’s Steak Sandwich has been covered widely in both English and Urdu media. The shop’s general manager, Adil Mehmood — it was his relative from Philly who shared the video of the cheesesteak with the shop’s chef — has appeared on television, highlighting plans to expand the franchise to other parts of the 13-million-resident city.

“In my first meeting with the GM, it was decided that we’re going to add our unique spices to the steak sandwich. I believe a major factor behind its growing popularity is this merger of the flavors of Philadelphia and Lahore,” says Hussain.

Chef Mazhar Hussain, at Philly’s Steak Sandwich in Lahore, Pakistan

Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city and the capital of the historic Punjab region, is considered the country’s food hub (although citizens of Karachi loudly dispute that claim). Its location at the crossroads of the many empires to have ruled over the Indian subcontinent, from the Mughals to the British, has added multicultural layers to Lahori heritage and culture. This is reflected in the city’s food, which blends Persian and Afghan flavors, a combination we now deem synonymous with the cuisine of North India — which Lahore was an integral part of before the 1947 partition created what is today called Pakistan, in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent.

That Indic syncretism, which Lahore has oozed with for centuries, is today introducing a new cuisine to the city’s taste buds: Philadelphian. But while Philly’s Steak Sandwich might be the first to put our city’s renowned sandwich on local billboards, Lahore’s love-in with the cheesesteak is, in fact, decades old.

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Wishal Raheel, a digital marketing professional who used to serve as a food critic for two of the country’s largest media houses, Waqt and Dunya, remembers eating her first cheesesteak. It was at Lahore’s Coffee, Tea, & Company (CTC) in the 2000s, and in her words, it was “absolute heaven.” The combination of the melted cheese along with the soft meat, she recalls years later, was “wonderful.”

Raheel has turned vegetarian since then and hence no longer eats cheesesteaks, but she still has fond memories. She’s hoping one of the Lahore outlets will introduce a version with plant-based meat so she can experience it again. She has her first trip to the United States planned for later this year and hopes to try a veggie rendition while in the birthplace of the cheesesteak.

Pakistan’s fast-food boom of the 1990s and 2000s overlapped with a rise in Pakistanis traveling to the U.S. for study, work, business and immigration. As a result, many of the food establishments launched in Pakistan at the turn of the millennium were brimming with ideas that those visiting the U.S. brought back with them. The cheesesteak was one of these.

All three of Lahore’s oldest continental cafes — Café Zouk, Freddy’s and CTC — have cheesesteaks on their menus. (And, just like in Philly, each claims to have been the driving force behind the growing popularity of the sandwich.) The cheesesteak at CTC, which opened as a bakery-deli in 2003, was especially popular in the 2000s. Freddy’s, opened two years earlier, in 2001, has featured its Philly steak sandwich from the onset. But Café Zouk, launched in 1995, says it introduced the cheesesteak to Lahore.

“We have offered the steak sandwich since the first day, and it remains the hottest item on our menu,” says Faisal Ilyas, the cafe’s general manager. “We have had the same chef since our opening 28 years ago. We have had numerous cooks, but the same head chef. That’s why our Philly steak sandwich remains the most authentic in Lahore.”

The Philly’s Steak Sandwich outlet in Johar Town adds a desi twist to the sandwich, incorporating masalas and spices usually affiliated with Indo-Pak cuisine, and in turn has introduced the cheese-steak to a wider population. But the more high-end cafes, like Zouk, have looked to maintain a flavor as close as possible to the original, more in line with their exclusively upper-class customers. The difference is reflected in the pricing, with the cheese-steaks in these restaurants costing almost three times as much as the Philly’s Steak Sandwich version. Zouk, Freddy’s and CTC are situated on and around Lahore’s M.M. Alam Road, which has been the food hub for the city’s urban elite for the past couple of decades, showcasing some of the most famous cuisines from around the world and dominated by American-style cafes.

The growing popularity of American fast food across Pakistan in the 2000s came during a critical phase in Washington’s relations with Islamabad. After Pakistan officially allied with the U.S. in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, increased American interest in the region brought an influx of dollars. As a result, the 2000s saw economic prosperity, especially for that urban elite, under the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf.

The Musharraf years witnessed Pakistan’s simultaneous Americanization and Talibanization, and by the end of his tenure in 2008, Lahore was seeing terror attacks — and new American fast-food franchises — in pretty much every conceivable spot in the city. A few Lahoris would have watched the footage of the World Trade Center attacks while headed to Café Zouk on September 11, 2001; some would have read about the U.S. killing Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad on May 2, 2011, at CTC. In the decade separating the two events, anti-America protests and outlets selling cheesesteaks multiplied, and they continue to do so. But just as the tumultuous, security-centered U.S.-Pakistan ties can be traced back to the ’70s and ’80s, for some, so can cheesesteaks in Lahore.

Khurram Chaudhry, an IT professional, reveals that his family-owned restaurant, Sizzler, used to sell similar sandwiches in Lahore’s Iqbal Town area in the 1980s. “It wasn’t called a cheesesteak, but for me, it was a Philly cheesesteak that was being offered at the restaurant,” he recalls.

Chaudhry went to high school in New York City in the late 1980s; he lived with an aunt while his family remained in Lahore. It was in New York that he had his first cheesesteak, which was already being replicated back home when he visited during vacations. “Since my father owned Sizzler, a lot of [the restaurant’s] food was cooked at home, including a sandwich with peppers, steak slices and cheese. Gymkhana used to serve a similar sandwich as well,” he says, leading us to our next clue.

The Lahore Gymkhana Club was founded in 1878, when Lahore was under British rule. For the past century and a half, menus at the club reserved for the city’s top tier have offered dishes catering to those with Westernized palates, from senior British officers to Punjab’s richest families. A popular military legend in Pakistan is that in the 1965 war, the army thwarted Indian army officers’ plans to have drinks at Lahore Gymkhana. The occasion — and location — is so mythical that the country celebrates it with an annual Defense Day.

But even an establishment with a legacy such as Lahore Gymkhana’s needed to continue revamping itself and serve exclusive dishes for its high-end clientele. And the club, along with restaurants aspiring to serve continental food, was bolstered by a growing taste for a new ingredient in town: processed cheese. “Sandwiches gradually started becoming popular in the 1980s because of the [wider] availability of cheese and mushrooms,” says Chaudhry.

Until the 1980s, processed cheese was largely imported, and its use was limited to the rich, who would frequent establishments such as the Gymkhana. As Lahori taste buds adapted to and appreciated cheese, production was initiated locally. Demand for cheeseburgers and sandwiches skyrocketed in the 1990s, with a growing number of Pakistanis who’d traveled to the U.S. aspiring to re-create offerings from various popular American chains. One of these is exceptionally familiar. Even today, online food groups in Pakistan are peppered with people asking the community where they can find a cheese­steak in Lahore “like the one at Pat’s.” Many of them post images of the cheese­steaks from the original shop at 9th and Passyunk. There’s a big difference, though, in how these posts are received in Pakistan compared to in, say, South Philly. Many responses target those making the inquiries for eating food that isn’t halal.

The Islamic radicalization of the past two decades has significantly increased overt exhibits of religiosity in Pakistan. Many Pakistani Muslims traveling overseas aren’t as particular about looking for chicken or beef with halal labels (a significant percentage consume alcohol as well), but pork is still often a no-go for even non-devout, non-practicing Muslims. Admitting to defiance of Islamic codes can be perilous in Pakistan, and any perceived offense to Islam could prove fatal. This is a lesson embraced by, among others, Lahore’s cheese-steak aficionados.

When Mehmood, the Philly’s Steak Sandwich general manager, speaks of his inspiration for the sandwich in TV interviews, he cites Charleys Philly Steaks, which is extremely popular in Dubai. (We’ll forgive him for citing an Ohio-based company.) The United Arab Emirates, which remains one of the most frequently visited countries for Pakistanis due to its relatively relaxed visa policies, is often the first introduction to many Western franchises for Pakistani foodies. The fact that the UAE offers halal renditions of many dishes makes American brands such as Charleys even more accessible. And where the chain’s popularity made more Pakistanis want to eat cheesesteaks, it spurred many to learn how to cook them, too.

In 2016, Sidra Shahid, co-founder of the culinary academy Cooking 101 in Lahore’s Defence Housing Authority area — the most widespread of the numerous military-owned neighborhoods in Pakistan — was approached by a group that had just returned from Dubai. They wanted to learn how to make the cheesesteak they had had at Charleys.

“I initially told them I cannot copy someone’s dish, but I can give you my own interpretation. But they were like, ‘No, we want that similar taste; we were so in love with that dish,’” recalls Shahid, who along with her partner spent months researching and practicing the sandwich. “We got it tasted by people who had had the original cheese-steak to ensure that our recipe is up to the mark and does justice to the original Philly cheesesteak. Once we finalized it, there was no turning back.” The cheesesteak is now one of the most popular dishes in the academy’s Classics From Around the World course.

Ayesha Sarwar, co-founder of Cooking 101 and a member of Pakistan’s National Culinary Team, believes the cheesesteak has been in the subconscious of people in Pakistani cities due to the widespread consumption of American pop culture. “It popped up in movies, TV shows, and discussions with Americans,” she says. “People in Lahore are increasingly interested in trying new things.”

Some of Sarwar’s extended family members are based in the U.S., and she relies on them to help improve her cooking of American dishes, including the cheese-steak. “I have relatives in Florida, New Jersey and Maryland,” she says. “The wife of my maamu” — her maternal uncle — “is American and follows our Facebook page. After we introduced the cheesesteak course, she asked me: ‘Are you guys really making the cheesesteak in Lahore?’”

Then she adds, “They haven’t tasted our cheesesteak yet, but one day … ”

Source

TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t know Chase Nasca is dead.

More than a year after Nasca killed himself at age 16, his account remains active. Scroll through his For You feed, and you see an endless stream of clips about unrequited love, hopelessness, pain and what many posts glorify as the ultimate escape: suicide.

“Take the pain away. Death is a gift,” says one video pushed to the account this February, days before the first anniversary of Nasca’s death. In another, a male voice says, “I’m going to put a shotgun in my mouth and blow the brains out the back of my head,” and a female voice responds: “Cool.”

The feed looked much the same in the days before Nasca died. On Feb. 13, 2022, it surfaced a video of an oncoming train with the caption “went for a quick lil walk to clear my head.” Five days later, Nasca stopped at the Long Island Rail Road tracks that run through the hamlet of Bayport, New York, about half a mile from his house. He leaned his bike against a fence and stepped onto the track, at a blind curve his parents had warned him about since he was old enough to walk. He sent a message to a friend: “I’m sorry. I can’t take it anymore.” A train rounded the bend, and he was gone.

It’s impossible to know why Nasca ended his life. There are often multiple factors leading to suicide, and he left no note. But two weeks after his death, his mother, Michelle, started searching his social media accounts, desperate for answers. When she opened the TikTok app on his iPad, she found a library of more than 3,000 videos her son had bookmarked, liked, saved or tagged as a favorite. She could see the terms he’d searched for: Batman, basketball, weightlifting, motivational speeches. And she could see what the algorithm had brought him: many videos about depression, hopelessness and death.

Michelle and Dean Nasca at home with a photo of Chase.
Photographer: Kylie Corwin for Bloomberg Businessweek

Since TikTok exploded into popular culture in 2018, people have been trying to understand the short-form video platform and its impact on kids. Owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance Ltd., the app reached 1 billion downloads faster than any previous social media product. Its success stems from its stickiness. The algorithm underlying its recommendation engine delivers a carousel of riveting user-created content to keep people staring at their screens. TikTok has become so popular—used by 150 million Americans according to the company—that Silicon Valley rivals are trying to mimic it. And politicians are stoking fears that it could be used as a disinformation tool by the Chinese government. In March, the Biden administration threatened to ban the app—something the Trump administration also threatened to do—if ByteDance doesn’t sell its stake.

As the political debate carries on, researchers and child psychologists are watching with increasing alarm. Surveys of teens have revealed a correlation between social media and depression, self-harm and suicide. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show nearly 1 in 4 teens said they’d seriously considered killing themselves in 2021, nearly double the level a decade earlier. The American Psychological Association and other authorities pin the blame partly on social media.

At a congressional hearing in March, a representative brought up Nasca’s death, showing TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew some of the clips the app had sent the boy and asking if Chew would let his own children watch such content. That same month, Nasca’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit in New York state court against TikTok, ByteDance and the railroad.

Picture frame from the Nasca family home, showing school photos of Chase.
Photographer: Kylie Corwin for Bloomberg Businessweek

TikTok says it can’t comment on pending litigation, but a spokeswoman, Jamie Favazza, says the company is committed to the safety and well-being of its users, especially teens. “Our hearts break for any family that experiences a tragic loss,” she says. “We strive to provide a positive and enriching experience and will continue our significant investment in safeguarding our platform.”

TikTok’s original recommendation algorithm was designed by a team of engineers in China, working for ByteDance. But while the app was made in China, it’s used most everywhere except China. It can’t even be downloaded in its homeland. TikTok says its algorithm is now maintained by engineers around the world, with teams based in North America, Europe and Asia contributing. But more than a dozen former employees from the company’s trust and safety team who were interviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek say executives and engineers in Beijing still hold the keys.

Trust and safety designs features and policies to keep TikTok users safe. The team, which is based in the US, Ireland and Singapore, moderates the billions of videos uploaded to the platform every day and is responsible for safety issues such as content that sexualizes minors and viral challenges that encourage kids to take part in dangerous dares. Team members remove posts that violate standards and create tools to help users filter out harmful material. But the former employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements, say that they had little influence over the algorithm that drives the For You feed and that their requests for information about how it works were often ignored. They insist that they were set up to fail—asked to enhance the safety of an app whose underpinnings they couldn’t comprehend.

TikTok said in 2021 that it was testing ways to prevent its algorithm from sending multiple videos about topics like extreme dieting or sadness. But it didn’t announce any changes until this year, after Businessweek made inquiries and before Chew was grilled by Congress. The company said in a press release on March 16 that it had made 15 system updates in the past year, including breaking up repetitive themes within a set of recommended videos.

Screen recordings of Nasca’s account from April show that, at least in some cases, these efforts have fallen short. “I don’t understand why they keep sending him this stuff,” Michelle says. Every time she opens the account, she finds a steady stream of videos about depression, breakups, death and suicide.

She still recalls exactly what the first video she saw after gaining access to her son’s account said: “I’m caught in a life I didn’t ask to be in.” She watched Chase’s For You feed for more than an hour and couldn’t understand why there were no happy or funny videos, which is what she thought TikTok was about. She asked one of Chase’s two older brothers why he’d made his account so dark.

“Chase didn’t do that, Mom,” her son replied. “That’s coming from the algorithm.”

In a world of infinite information, algorithms are rules written into software that help sort out what might be meaningful to a user and what might not. TikTok’s algorithm is trained to track every swipe, like, comment, rewatch and follow and to use that information to select content to keep people engaged. Greater engagement, in turn, increases advertising revenue. The company has fine-tuned its recommendation system to such a degree that users sometimes speculate the app is reading their minds.

Other social media platforms employ similar recommendation engines. TikTok’s is distinguished by its reach, according to Guillaume Chaslot, a French data scientist who worked on YouTube’s algorithm and now consults with his country’s government on its efforts to regulate online platforms. His experience in the field suggests to him that TikTok’s algorithm controls a greater share of the content reaching a user’s feed than most other social media platforms’ do. And “when depressive content is good for engagement, it is actively promoted by the algorithm,” he says.

Concerns about TikTok’s recommendation engine have been raised internally since at least 2020. That’s when Charles Bahr, a former ad sales manager in TikTok’s office in Germany, says he warned his superiors the algorithm was sending Generation Z users endless streams of depressing and suicide-glorifying videos. Bahr spent a year and a half with the company, joining in July 2020, at age 18. He’d founded two tech startups as a teenager and was advising politicians and businesses on how to master TikTok when he was hired.

When he first started using the app, he says, his For You feed was amusing and fun. He loved the product and was proud to wear his TikTok T-shirt. Once he started posting videos identifying himself as an employee, though, many in his growing following began to forward him disturbing videos that violated TikTok’s rules, urging him to remove them. One of the first scary videos he remembers being sent was of a man shooting himself in the head. As Bahr watched clips like this, sometimes passing them to the trust and safety team for help, his feed began to warp. “More and more depression, suicide and self-harm content came on,” he says. Some days it led him to cry.

Bahr’s feed made selling ads tricky. He regularly held workshops with prospective clients, and many asked to see how the app worked. He couldn’t show his own For You page, he says, because he feared it would scare them off. “Every time I entered a workshop, I switched from my sad, dark account to a second demo account that had quite a normal feed,” he says. “It took me a long time to realize that maybe it’s not only me that has a feed that’s so extreme.”

When Bahr was invited to speak at an annual meeting of TikTok’s European communications team in November 2020, he saw it as an opportunity to raise the issue. In a PowerPoint presentation reviewed by Businessweek, he told the group that TikTok should make it a mission to listen to its users, especially those struggling with mental health issues. “Even though we inspire young people to be their most creative selves on TikTok, there is an endless community of young people not knowing where to go,” one of his slides said. He then showed three posts from young users struggling with depression. Bahr says he recommended that the app not censor such content but instead elevate more positive clips for younger users.

Seven months later, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation that had involved monitoring more than 100 automated accounts to track how TikTok’s algorithm works. Within 36 minutes, the newspaper reported, a bot programmed to engage with videos about depression was fed a stream of content that was 93% about sad topics. TikTok said at the time that the Journal’s bots were not representative of human behavior.

The Journal’s experiment prompted Bahr to conduct one of his own. He opened a new TikTok account and made a screen recording of himself as he engaged with sad content to see how long it would take for his feed to become negative. It took 17 minutes.

Bahr says he raised his concerns on an internal messaging system with the algorithm strategy team in Europe but got no response. A few months later he was fired for alleged expense account fraud and misuse of company tools. Bahr, who maintains his innocence, sued the company for wrongful dismissal. TikTok didn’t pursue its claims against Bahr and settled out of court. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment about Bahr’s 2020 presentation and said it couldn’t respond to his general criticisms or to the concerns he raised internally, which it said it “can’t validate.”

While practically all tech companies are secretive about their data, insiders who also had experience working for Google, Meta and Twitter cast TikTok as Fort Knox by comparison

The pandemic intensified the debate over the impact of algorithmic design on children, as parents worried about the isolation and anxiety brought on by lockdowns, school closures and increased social media use. In December 2021, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published a safety advisory about a looming youth mental health crisis, saying rising rates of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts among teens could be linked to both Covid-19 confinement and social media. Too many young people, he said, were being told on these platforms that they weren’t “good looking enough, popular enough, smart enough or rich enough.” He called for social media companies to design their algorithms in ways that would strengthen youth mental health, rather than weaken it.

Psychologists say it’s more difficult for teens to withstand the addictive properties of algorithms, because their prefrontal cortexes, responsible for decision-making, judgment and impulse control, aren’t fully developed. Two-thirds of American teens use TikTok every day, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, with 16% saying they’re on the platform almost constantly. A significant majority of those surveyed said that they had a positive experience on social media in general and that it gave them a sense of belonging. But almost half said they felt overwhelmed by the drama they found there, and more than a quarter said social media made them feel worse about their lives.

Social media is a fiercely competitive industry, dependent on a young and fickle audience. Companies rely on algorithms to keep their platforms cool in the eyes of teen users, and they protect this intellectual property fiercely. The lack of transparency has limited academic research and given rise to conflicting claims. On one hand, the platforms provide crucial opportunities for connection among teens. On the other, they encourage kids to compare themselves to others, to become addicted to the technology and to discover content that glamorizes harmful behavior.

ByteDance headquarters in Beijing.
Photographer: Greg Baker/Getty Images

Former members of TikTok’s trust and safety team say they feared their platform was having a negative impact on teens and didn’t understand why the company wasn’t hiring child psychologists to work on algorithm design. Many read the documents leaked in 2021 by Frances Haugen, then a data scientist at Facebook, which showed the company was aware its products were harming children. The former TikTok employees say they believed their app’s harms could be worse than Facebook’s but didn’t have the power to address the problem, or even to study it.

While practically all tech companies are secretive about their data, these insiders, who also had experience working for Google, Meta Platforms and Twitter, cast TikTok as Fort Knox by comparison. The secrecy was especially pronounced when it came to the algorithm. Former trust and safety members say that they were never privy to information about how it worked, how it was weighted and how it could be changed and that team leaders couldn’t get answers from the engineers who designed it. More than a dozen people, some of whom were still with TikTok as recently as last year, say they were stonewalled when they tried to access basic information about the algorithm. One safety leader in Europe says he asked the Beijing-based head of engineering to host a meeting with the broader trust and safety team so they could ask questions and better understand the recommendation engine. The leader says the request was ignored.

Several trust and safety workers say that some documents were written in Mandarin and that translations often didn’t include appendixes or links to original data sets, which made it hard to contextualize and analyze information effectively. Five former team members say they quit because secrecy prevented them from doing their job.

TikTok says that it takes concerns voiced by employees seriously, that members of the trust and safety team work directly with engineering and that anyone who left the company before 2021 wouldn’t be familiar with changes made since then. It also says that all important documents about algorithm changes and most important commentary accompanying its code are written in English, but that some notes in the code can contain other languages used by its engineers in Asia and elsewhere.

All social media platforms have been criticized for pumping addictive content to teens, for harming their mental health and for surreptitiously gathering data on them. But when a Chinese-owned company does these things, US lawmakers tend to paint it in a particularly sinister light.

Fears that China’s government could require TikTok to hand over its user data or to have the app’s recommendation engine favor Chinese interests have prompted the EU and the US, Canada and other countries to ban the app from government-issued devices. Some US college campuses have blocked it from their Wi-Fi networks, and in April, Montana’s legislature became the first to pass a bill blocking the app on all personal devices.

Chew testifying before Congress in March.
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

At the March congressional hearing, Chew, the CEO, was hammered with questions about TikTok’s connection to Beijing and its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. His attempts to parry the blows—“This is American data on American soil by an American company overseen by American personnel”—were received skeptically.

At one point, Florida Republican Gus Bilirakis introduced Chase Nasca’s parents, who were in the audience. “Mr. Chew, your company destroyed their lives,” Bilirakis said. “Would you share this content with your two children?” He then played a 30-second screen recording from Nasca’s TikTok account, after which he asked Chew whether he took responsibility for the app’s algorithm, yes or no. Chew started to answer, but Bilirakis cut him off. “Yes or no?” he demanded.

“We do provide resources for anyone who types in anything like suicide,” Chew said before Bilirakis interrupted again, declaring, “I see you’re not willing to answer the question or take any responsibility for your parent company, the technology and the harm it creates.”

One of the themes raised at the hearing was also a topic of interest for trust and safety: why TikTok couldn’t change its algorithm to be more like that of its sister platform, Douyin, which operates only in China and shares some of the same source code. Douyin’s algorithm is known to send teens positive content, such as educational posts about science experiments and museum exhibits. It also has a mandatory time limit of 40 minutes a day for children under 14.

TikTok didn’t respond to questions about what share of its app’s source code overlaps with Douyin’s; it did say Douyin is a “separate app governed by different regulatory policies and markets.” It also says it’s been working in recent months to remove some of the mystery around TikTok and updating the platform to make it safer for kids. In 2020 it made it possible for parents to check on what their children are doing while using TikTok. The following year it added stronger privacy measures on accounts of those under 16, setting them to private by default. Then, in February, it announced it would grant US researchers access to some data on accounts and content, though it requires them to send their findings to TikTok before publication. In March the company added a feature that notifies users under 18 when they’ve been on the platform for more than an hour and makes them enter a passcode to remain signed in. It also began allowing users to reset their For You recommendations as though they’d just signed up for a new account if they felt like the content they were seeing was too dark.

Ryn Linthicum, head of mental health policy at TikTok, says that the company forbids posts glorifying subjects like suicide and self-harm and that it trains its artificial intelligence systems and 40,000 human moderators to remove them. In the last quarter of 2022, according to company data, TikTok filtered out more than 97% of such content before other users saw it, among the more than 85 million videos it took down overall.

Moderation is an ongoing challenge, says Linthicum, who uses the pronoun “they” and has been in their role for a year. It’s hard to train an algorithm to distinguish between crying from sadness and crying from joy, or between a video that raises awareness of depression or anorexia and one that encourages those conditions. “This is an incredibly complex space,” Linthicum says. “What may be harmful or hurtful to one person is not necessarily what is going to be harmful or hurtful to another.”

In their view, some content shouldn’t be censored, because it can help vulnerable teens feel less stigmatized. “People go through ups and downs,” Linthicum says. “They have sad life experiences.”

“You could have a child and a parent in the same room, together watching TikTok on their phones, and they’d be seeing an entirely different product”

Videos of people saying they don’t want to live found their way into Nasca’s For You feed in late 2021, according to one of his friends, Brandon Maffei. Now a 17-year-old senior at Bayport-Blue Point High School, Maffei met Nasca in third grade. He was the new kid in school, and he gravitated toward Nasca, who was friendly, free-spirited and funny. When the pandemic shut their school, they, like many American teens, began spending more time on TikTok, sending each other silly videos late into the night. Toward the end of 2021, Maffei noticed that the ones Nasca shared were getting darker. One Nasca sent a few weeks before he died was about suicide. “I opened it up, and I was just like, ‘Damn. I don’t know why he’s sending this to me,’ ” Maffei says. He remembers the video clearly, because it made him cry. The music was depressing, and the on-screen caption read: “It’s not worth it anymore.”

Maffei started telling people, including Nasca, that the app showed too much distressing content and he wanted to delete it. “It’s really bad for mental health, because it pushes those sad depressing feelings onto you, even though you don’t feel them,” he says.

In February, Businessweek sent a nine-minute recording of Nasca’s For You feed to Jennifer Harriger, a psychology professor at Pepperdine University in California. Harriger has spent the past five years studying the impact social media can have on adolescents, especially when it comes to body-image satisfaction. Her experiments with hundreds of college students have shown that exposure to idealized body types on social media can lead to less satisfaction with one’s own appearance. Most recently, she’s focused on TikTok’s algorithm, but she says her research has been limited by the company’s lack of transparency. “There is no effective way to study it, because we don’t know how it works,” she says.

After a few minutes of watching on her phone, Harriger pauses the recording. “This is an onslaught of sad, depressing and hopeless content,” she says. Even for her, “it was very emotionally triggering, and I’m able to more logically process what I saw. When a teen that has a vulnerable brain is viewing this content, they will have a stronger response. And that’s very scary.” She says Nasca’s feed “is certainly not appropriate for a teenager.”

In a 2022 research paper, The Dangers of the Rabbit Hole, Harriger and three colleagues wrote that it’s “ultimately the responsibility of the social media corporations that create and implement the algorithms to protect their users from harm.” Some American lawmakers are trying to send just that message. Bills have been proposed at the state and federal levels to force tech companies to put children’s safety ahead of profit-driven interests. The US Supreme Court is also expected to rule this term on a case challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media companies from being sued for content posted on their sites.

More than 200 lawsuits have been filed against social media platforms since the start of 2022, many of them arguing that, even if the companies can’t be held liable for the content posted on their platforms, they should be accountable for harms built into their products. The suits include at least two dozen filed by school districts against some combination of Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube and their parent companies, alleging that they’re responsible for the country’s youth mental health crisis.

Many of the others have been filed by the Social Media Victims Law Center, the Seattle-based firm that’s representing the Nasca family. In more than 65 cases, the center alleges that social media products have caused sleep deprivation, eating disorders, drug addiction, depression and suicide. Laura Marquez-Garrett, one of the center’s attorneys, says the lawsuits against TikTok argue that its algorithm is designed to target vulnerabilities. “There’s a really dark side of TikTok that most adults don’t see,” she says. “You could have a child and a parent in the same room, together watching TikTok on their phones, and they’d be seeing an entirely different product.”

Among the center’s cases are ones filed on behalf of two teenage girls recovering from eating disorders: Nuala Mullen, who’s 18 and from New York state, and Katie, who’s 14 and from Virginia and who asked that her last name not be used so her anorexia issues don’t follow her for life. Both say they liked to watch silly dance videos and funny clips on TikTok, but in 2021 they noticed their For You feeds started featuring unsolicited videos about how to get skinnier legs and consume fewer calories in a day. “I do not remember searching any of that stuff at all, and then it was there,” Katie says.

They say they became obsessed with the app and, over time, grew isolated from their friends and family. “It felt super lonely, and TikTok was kinda just there,” says Katie. In January 2022, the day after her 13th birthday, she had to be hospitalized, her resting heart rate so low that her life was in danger. Mullen was hospitalized the same month, with the same symptoms. “That algorithm is designed to get kids to harm themselves in ways they don’t even know how,” says Mullen, whose suit also names Meta and Facebook. Both cases are ongoing.

“Our children are dying,” Marquez-Garrett says. “They are developing harmful dependencies on these products, and they are experiencing unprecedented rates of depression, anxiety and suicide. How many 16-year-olds killing themselves does it take for people to realize this is not OK?”

(From left) Michelle viewing Chase’s iPad; photos of Chase in the Nasca home.
Photographer: Kylie Corwin for Bloomberg Businessweek

“My life is f---ing miserable!” a man in a TikTok video yells. “I hate my f---ing life, I hate it,” he screams.

Michelle Nasca is sitting at the kitchen table of her family’s blue-shingled house on Long Island in February, watching videos from Chase’s TikTok feed on an iPad. “This is what I get every time I open his account,” she says, her cheeks wet with tears. The man onscreen continues his tirade. Michelle’s hands begin to shake. Her husband, Dean, watches over her shoulder, grimacing. “It’s sick, that’s what it is,” he says. “Where are the happy videos? There’s nothing happy here.”

Before Chase’s death, the Nasca family had an ordinary suburban life. Michelle, a flight attendant, and Dean, an accountant, lived in their five-bedroom home with their three boys. The kids spent their summers biking around town or boating to Fire Island. Chase was an overachiever. At 4, he would fill in the answers to an older brother’s math homework. As a teenager, he was an honors student, competed on the high school swim team and played for an Olympic development soccer team. “He never showed any signs of being depressed,” says his soccer coach, Kurt Kelley. “He was a good teammate, a good captain, a good friend.”

Nasca’s soccer jerseys outside the house.
Photographer: Kylie Corwin for Bloomberg Businessweek

He liked Harry Potter, steakhouses and social media. He would sit in the car on his way to soccer practice, headphones in, glued to the screen. His parents didn’t think much of it or ask to inspect his phone. He was keeping on top of his grades and training schedule, and they didn’t want to interfere with the little freedom he had.

They did use the phone to track his location, though. That was how his mother knew something was wrong that evening in February 2022. Just before 7 p.m., she checked Chase’s location to see when he’d be home. The small blue dot showed he’d left the gym, but it wasn’t moving. She refreshed the screen, zoomed in and saw he was at the railroad crossing. She called his phone, and it went straight to voicemail.

Michelle got in her car and drove toward the tracks. As she neared them, she saw a stationary train, its lights flashing. The conductor was outside and told her to stay back. She started running up and down the tracks, peering under the wheels, screaming Chase’s name.

A memorial to Nasca.
Photographer: Kylie Corwin for Bloomberg Businessweek

The first days after his death were a whirlwind of disbelief, grief and insomnia. When police returned his bike and his iPhone, Michelle switched the phone on and found that it still worked even though its screen was smashed from the train’s impact. But she didn’t have Chase’s six-digit passcode, and there were a million potential combinations. She kept trying to unlock the phone anyway—it gave her purpose and served as a welcome distraction.

She took the device to an Apple store, but the manager said he couldn’t unlock it for privacy reasons. A local IT specialist couldn’t get in, either. The police wouldn’t help, since Chase had died by suicide, not homicide. Finally, Michelle realized she could reset Chase’s TikTok and Snapchat passwords by selecting “forgotten password” and getting a link sent to his backup email address, which was actually her own. She doesn’t really know what she was looking for. But when she opened the TikTok account, she says, she found it. The app was “glorifying and normalizing suicide,” she says.

The Nasca family decided to sue TikTok after talking to the Social Media Victims Law Center. “People need to know about the dangers of social media,” Dean says. “Chase wasn’t bullied. He had a great group of friends, and he was excelling academically and athletically. He wasn’t doing drugs, he wasn’t drinking, so what was the variable that was introduced that put him over the edge? I can only conclude it’s this constant barrage of TikTok videos.”

Whatever role Nasca’s For You feed may have played in his death, excerpts from an exchange he had with someone on TikTok offer some insight into his frame of mind the day he died.

At 9:09 a.m., while in class, Nasca sent a private message to a user he followed who posted a lot of depression-related content. He’d never met the user and didn’t know his real name. Yet that day he sought solace from this stranger. Their conversation (excerpted here) lasted throughout the school day.

“Might not make it past today, I’m tired of thuggin’ it out,” Nasca wrote at one point.

“I know how you’re feeling 100%,” the other user replied. “I really hope you stay alive. It’s not worth leaving.”

“I’ve been telling myself that for so long. I no longer find enjoyment in anything. Any soccer practice I go to I’m anxious I’ll f---up, even going to the gym or playing video games is boring now.”

“It’s def hard to find joy and happiness in life and personally, I’m still searching. I get being at your limit, but not giving up is what makes you strong. Nobody has to know the shit you go through.”

“I’m ok with no one knowing. I think I like it better that way. When I think about my future, I just can’t envision myself being happy, I can’t envision myself having a gf/wife/family. I’ve just lost passion because of being depressed all the time.”

The conversation wrapped up as the school day finished. Then, at 6:29 p.m., about 10 minutes before his death, Nasca sent one final message.

“Hey bro, if I’m not here tomorrow, I ask that you remember me and forgive me.”

If you or someone you know needs help with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, a global list of help lines is available here.

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Three years in, the pandemic mania has settled to a rumbling hum. We’re back to sweating on each other in nightclubs, spluttering out birthday candles, and sharing firm handshakes. Covid-19, while still very much alive, has for most people diminished to an everyday threat, thanks to vaccines and treatments.

The same can’t be said of long Covid, the mysterious, life-limiting ailment that lingers on after an initial Covid infection. For the millions besieged by it, their situation has remained much the same. “We still have no established tools to help treat patients,” says Linda Geng, codirector of the Post-Acute Covid-19 Syndrome Clinic at Stanford University. Estimates of how many people have long Covid vary, but it’s been put as high as around 65 million—about the same as the population of France.

It’s only now, over three years into the pandemic, that a consensus on what long Covid is has started to solidify. And what it is, it turns out, is a whole bunch of things. Rather than a single disorder, it’s more likely a smorgasbord of diseases that fall under one big umbrella. That means there likely won’t be a one-size-fits-all treatment either.

What triggers long Covid for you may not be what sets it off for another. Perhaps your long Covid is caused by your immune system turning on you, attacking your body—a phenomenon called autoimmunity. So goes one theory. Or maybe it’s that splinters of the virus are hanging around your body long after the initial infection, keeping your immune system’s engine revved up to the point of exhaustion. Another theory is that SARS-CoV-2 causes long-lasting damage to certain organs or tissues. Maybe it’s that a Covid infection reawakens latent viruses your body has encountered before, such as the Epstein-Barr virus, which causes mononucleosis.

All these theories have some evidence to support them, and they may not be mutually exclusive; for some people, these things could be happening at the same time. The idea that long Covid has different causes could go some way toward explaining the sheer diversity of symptoms, which number up to 200.

Working off this basis, researchers are trying to hit two birds with one stone: trialing treatments that could alleviate long Covid while at the same time lending weight to certain hypotheses—and beginning to defog the mystifying condition. “The reality is that there’s such an urgency, we need to do these things in parallel,” says Geng. “It’s building the ship as we sail it—but we have to sail it because people need help.”

But the jumble of symptoms makes designing clinical trials much trickier. Not every person experiences every symptom, and those may vary in severity and duration. Plus, there’s no consensus on how to define long Covid, says Steven Deeks, a physician and infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “There’s no magic biomarker, there’s no x-ray, there’s no test.” Because of that, it’s tough to figure out who to put into a clinical trial. Right now, long Covid diagnoses work by exclusion: determining that symptoms can’t be explained away by another cause. Regardless, researchers are plowing ahead.

Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, is running a randomized controlled trial of 100 long Covid patients to investigate whether Pfizer’s antiviral drug, Paxlovid, designed to treat symptomatic Covid, could actually help treat long Covid—a theory that has anecdotal backing from patients. The rationale behind the trial is based on the viral reservoir hypothesis: that Paxlovid could eradicate any lingering remnants of SARS-CoV-2 that have managed to persist despite the body’s immune response.

Iwasaki already knows Paxlovid won’t help everyone, but the trial will shed light on who it could help. Because the trial is randomized, the team is hoping it will naturally include people whose long Covid is triggered by different biological mechanisms. Patients will be divided into groups, with one group receiving Paxlovid for 15 days and the other getting a placebo.

The researchers will be keeping an eye out for immune signatures that people with long Covid have been found to carry, like exhausted T cells or circulating SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. Iwasaki and her team plan to measure immunological biomarkers before, during, and after the treatment and look at which biomarkers were common between the people who ended up feeling better from the treatment. “It’s not just about what percentage of the people are going to benefit,” says Iwasaki. “It’s about finding out who benefits and why they might have benefited by doing some detective work.”

Other ongoing trials target alternative mechanisms. Some researchers are looking at low-dose naltrexone, a drug normally used to treat opioid addiction, which could treat long Covid by hampering inflammation in the body. In the UK, a trial called Stimulate-ICP is looking at using a blood thinner called rivaroxaban to treat microclots in the blood, as some contend that these cause long Covid by blocking oxygen delivery to tissues in the body.

According to Amitava Banerjee, a professor of clinical data science at University College London who is leading the Stimulate-ICP trial, the study is ongoing and has recruited about 500 people, although the researchers hope to recruit at least a couple of thousand. Banerjee says the drugs being tested are probably not tackling the underlying mechanisms of long Covid, but rather the mechanisms of the major symptoms—they’re treating the microclots, not what causes them.

Iwasaki is hopeful that if her team is successful, their research could shed light on other long-overlooked chronic illnesses. “If we can figure out something about long Covid, we might be able to help people with ME/CFS [chronic fatigue syndrome], and other diseases that are related,” says Iwasaki. It could be that they share mechanisms.

What’s crucial is that long Covid doesn’t meet the fate of many other chronic illnesses and end up being grossly neglected—often due in part to the sheer complexity of figuring out their root causes. While many people are returning to their normal lives, we can’t forget about long Covid, says Geng. “There’s still many, many, many people suffering, not able to work, not able to live their normal lives.”

The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn

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Building telescopes on the Moon is becoming an achievable goal

UC Riverside scientists have discovered a massive amount of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, being released from wildfires using a novel detection method. This raises concerns as this source of methane emission is not being monitored by state air quality authorities.

According to the researchers, methane has a warming effect on the planet that is 86 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Without considering this source of emissions, it will be challenging for the state to achieve its cleaner air and climate goals.

Wildfires emitting methane is not new. But the amount of methane from the top 20 fires in 2020 was more than seven times the average from wildfires in the previous 19 years, according to the new UCR study.

“Fires are getting bigger and more intense, and correspondingly, more emissions are coming from them,” said UCR environmental sciences professor and study co-author Francesca Hopkins. “The fires in 2020 emitted what would have been 14 percent of the state’s methane budget if it was being tracked.”

Researchers from UC Riverside and Los Alamos National Laboratory measuring wildfire emissions from a safe distance. Credit: Frausto-Vicencio/UCR

 

The state does not track natural sources of methane, like those that come from wildfires. But for 2020, wildfires would have been the third biggest source of methane in the state.

“Typically, these sources have been hard to measure, and it’s questionable whether they’re under our control. But we have to try,” Hopkins said. “They’re offsetting what we’re trying to reduce.”

Traditionally, scientists measure emissions by analyzing wildfire air samples obtained via aircraft. This older method is costly and complicated to deploy. To measure emissions from 2020’s Sequoia Lightning Fire Complex in the Sierra Nevadas, the UCR research team used a remote sensing technique, which is both safer for scientists and likely more accurate since it captures an integrated plume from the fire that includes different burning phases.

The technique, detailed in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, allowed the lead author, UCR environmental sciences Ph.D. student Isis Frausto-Vicencio to safely measure an entire plume of the Sequoia Lightning Fire Complex gas and debris from 40 miles away.

Portable solar spectrometers measuring alongside a higher resolution solar spectrometer. Researchers performed side-by-side measurements before and after field campaigns to ensure instrument stability and check data quality. Photo taken at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Credit: Frausto-Vicencio/UCR

 

“The plume, or atmospheric column, is like a mixed signal of the whole fire, capturing the active as well as the smoldering phases,” Hopkins said. “That makes these measurements unique.”

Rather than using a laser, as some instruments do, this technique uses the sun as a light source. Gases in the plume absorb and then emit the sun’s heat energy, allowing insight into the quantity of aerosols as well as carbon and methane that are present.

Using the remote technique, the researchers found nearly 20 gigagrams of methane emitted by the Sequoia Lightning Fire Complex. One gigagram is 1,000 metric tons. An elephant weighs around one metric ton. For context, the fire, therefore, contained roughly 20,000 elephants’ worth of the gas.

This data matches measurements that came from European space agency satellite data, which took a more sweeping, global view of the burned areas, but are not yet capable of measuring methane in these conditions.

If included in the California Air Resources Board methane budget, wildfires would be a bigger source than residential and commercial buildings, power generation, or transportation, but behind agriculture and industry. While 2020 was exceptional in terms of methane emissions, scientists expect more megafire years going forward with climate change.

In 2015, the state first established a target of a 40 percent reduction in methane, refrigerants, and other air pollutants contributing to global warming by 2030. The following year, in 2016, Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB 1383, codifying those reduction targets into law.

The reductions are meant to come from regulations that capture methane produced from manure on dairy farms, eliminate food waste in landfills, require oil and gas producers to minimize leaks, ban certain gases in new refrigerators and air conditioners, and other measures.

“California has been way ahead on this issue,” Hopkins said. ‘We’re really hoping the state can limit the methane emissions under our control to reduce short-term global warming and its worst effects, despite the extra emissions coming from these fires.”

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Media on global trade frequently puts forward the narrative that the US–China confrontation will divide the world in two.

But East Asian developing economies have a different view of supply chain decoupling since US–China merchandise exports and imports hit a record high in 2022 and East Asian production networks continue to move actively.

Quantifying the effect of supply chain decoupling is difficult. Trade controls, particularly export controls over high-tech products, became a major policy tool for decoupling in the United States and for some US allies, including Japan.

Items subject to export controls are specified in terms of traded goods, used technologies, export destination, importers and end-use. But the coverage is set very wide and only a small portion of exports are actually under strict control. Governments do not disclose information on products that are banned or under investigation.

They also do not disclose how long the investigation took, even ex-post. Private firms may refrain from exporting without seeking an official decision. The international trade commodity classification may not match sensitive export items such as high-end semiconductors.

According to my ongoing study with Mitsuyo Ando and Kazunobu Hayakawa, monthly international trade data at the industry level does not show any clear evidence of supply chain decoupling or a drastic reorganization of production networks until the end of 2022.

Yet the August 2020 US export controls that targeted Huawei substantially slowed down the company’s production in China and subsequently reduced Japanese exports to China, especially for parts and components used in Huawei’s wireless communication equipment assemblies.

Chinese telecom giant has been targeted by US sanctions. Image: Screengrab / CNBC

Regression analyses find a statistically significant reduction in Japanese exports to China since August 2020, particularly in semiconductor-intensive parts. The ongoing study estimates a 3.3% reduction in exports during this period compared to 2019 trade data. Supply chain decoupling is real, but the trade-reducing effect seems to be limited in scale so far.

Supply chain decoupling in the US–China confrontation came into a new phase when the Biden administration endorsed the CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022 and strengthened US export controls in October 2022. Though the implementation details of these policies have not been disclosed yet, they will likely further disrupt supply chains in terms of parts, materials, production machines and technologies used for supercomputers.

But supply chain decoupling will likely only be partial. International production networks have overall remained active, particularly in East Asia. Globalization has provided many private firms with global economic opportunities.

With the current heated geopolitical debate between the United States and its allies, the expansion of trade controls is inevitable. But the ‘rest’ of the economy outside of effective trade controls should not be neglected in this debate. The world must keep economic dynamism.

For middle powers such as Japan, the government can take several measures to ensure the health of the rest of the economy. The border between the economy, which is placed under strict trade controls, and the rest of the economy, which is not, must be delineated as clearly as possible.

It is important for civilians that military-use technologies do not get lumped in with regular technologies to avoid an adverse effect on the rest of the economy. If the border is not made clear, the private sector will face huge uncertainties that may shrink trade and investment.

It is not only middle powers that must mark clear borders between the economy under trade controls and the rest of the economy, but also the United States. Middle-power governments should communicate closely with the United States and provide relevant information to the private sector. The cost of a blurred border will punish small and medium enterprises as well as firms in developing countries.

Middle powers such as Japan must practice economic diplomacy for the Global South — especially ASEAN — by deepening economic and social relationships, rather than being forced to choose a side.

US President Joe Biden and ASEAN leaders attend the bloc’s summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photo: Pool / Agencies

The Global South is interested in promoting a new agenda on digital and green trade and investment. The negotiation over the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, for example, must enhance multilateral economic relationships, rather than just pushing an economic security agenda.

The rest of the economy must keep to the rules-based trading regime. While the G7 is failing to make national security policies consistent with existing trade norms, the voice from the Global South, particularly ASEAN, is crucial.

ASEAN’s engagement in international production networks has been profound and it must continue to support the rules-based trading regime. Together with the Global South, the rules-based trading regime must be retained as widely as possible.

Fukunari Kimura is Professor at the Faculty of Economics, Keio University, and Chief Economist of the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA).

This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished by Asia Times under a Creative Commons license.

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Astronomy and timekeeping were two of the Ancient Maya’s biggest loves, and new research may have finally revealed the intricate system that once connected these two pillars of Mesoamerican life. According to the study authors, the enigmatic Maya calendar can be used to track the movement of the planets across the night sky over a 45-year period, thus solving a long-standing riddle regarding the structure and function of the iconic pre-Hispanic almanac. 

Unlike our relatively simple system of days, months, and years, the Maya calendar made use of a complex series of interlocking cycles, such as the 260-day sacred count known as the Tzolk’in and the 365-day secular calendar, or Haab’. These two cycles became synchronized once every 52 years, giving rise to an overall calendric period called the Calendar Round.

However, inscriptions found at various Maya sites describe a further 819-day count. Analysis of these glyphic texts has revealed that each date in this cycle was associated with one of the four cardinal points, which means it took four rounds of 819 days – or about nine years – to complete the entire series.

Knowing the Maya, researchers have long suspected that this cycle might be related to the synodic period of the planets, which refers to the length of time it takes each planet to return to the same position in the sky as viewed from Earth. Mercury, for example, has a synodic period of 117 days, which fits perfectly into 819 when multiplied by seven.

However, none of the other planets’ synodic periods can be multiplied to give 819, leading to confusion as to how this strange calendric system functioned. In their new study, however, researchers point out that 20 rounds of 819 days give a total of 16,380 days (roughly 45 years), which can be neatly divided to match up with every planet’s synodic period.

For example, Saturn takes 378 days to return to the same spot in the sky. Thirteen of these cycles therefore gives 4,914 days, which is exactly six times 819. Seven returns of Venus, meanwhile, coincides perfectly with five 819-day counts, while 39 repetitions of Jupiter’s synodic period matches up with 19 cycles of 819.

Mars, meanwhile, has a 780-day synodic period. When multiplied by 21, this gives a number that is precisely equal to 20 819-day counts. The study authors therefore say that “an expansion of the standard 4 × 819-day cycle to 20 periods of 819 days does provide a larger calendar system with commensurations at its stations for the synodic periods of all the visible planets.”

Perhaps most importantly, 16,380 is also a multiple of 260, which means that 20 rounds of 819 days match up perfectly with the Tzolk’in.

“Rather than limit their focus to any one planet, the Maya astronomers who created the 819-day count envisioned it as a larger calendar system that could be used for predictions of all the visible planet’s synodic periods, as well as commensuration points with their cycles in the Tzolk’in and Calendar Round,” conclude the researchers.

The study is published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

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Microscopic analysis of wood suggests that Norse people in Greenland were using timber that came from North America over 700 years ago. The research is further evidence that Viking sailors were making contact with the east coast of North America long before Christopher Columbus “discovered the New World" in 1492 CE.

Archaeologist Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir from the University of Iceland examined the wood from five Norse sites across western Greenland that were occupied between 1000 and 1400 CE. Looking at the cellular structure of the wood, Guðmundsdóttir noted how some of the timber came from trees that aren’t native to Greenland or even Northern Europe, such as Jack pine that’s found east of the Rocky Mountains in Canada. 

“These findings highlight the fact that Norse Greenlanders had the means, knowledge, and appropriate vessels to cross the Davis Strait to the east coast of North America, at least up until the 14th century. As such, journeys were being made from Greenland to North America throughout the entirety of the period of Norse settlement in Greenland, and resources were being acquired by the Norse from North America for far longer than previously thought,” the study concludes. 

Some of the medieval timber samples that were analyzed in this new study. Image credit: L Guðmundsdóttir

With its Arctic climate and sparse landscape, Greenland was not exactly abundant in resources needed for a thriving medieval culture. According to a 13th-century Norwegian text called Konungsskuggsjá, “everything that is needed to improve the land must be purchased abroad, both iron and all the timber used in building houses.” 

Historical records have long suggested that medieval Norse Greenlandic society (985–1450 CE) imported timber from the Americas, but this is some of the first scientific evidence to back up the claim. This latest study on timber suggests that these epic journeys were perhaps made with the desire to hunt for resources. 

This is not the first evidence that Vikings traveled to or had contact with the Americas before Columbus though. Norwegian sagas, like Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, for example, describe journeys between Greenland to the North American east coast as early as 1000 CE. 

There is sturdy evidence to back up this idea. Texts from 14th-century Italy speak of Norsemen making direct contact with a place called Markland, thought to be part of the Labrador coast in Canada.

As for hard evidence of Norse settlements in North America, archeologists in the 1960s excavated a Viking village on the island of Newfoundland that dates to approximately 1,000 years ago. Known as the L'Anse aux Meadows, it's widely considered to be the earliest evidence of European presence in North America. Sorry, Columbus.

The study is published in the journal Antiquity.

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