A severe heatwave has swept across much of Asia, causing deaths and school closures in India and record-breaking temperatures in China.

Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian, described the unusually high temperatures as the “worst April heatwave in Asian history”.

In China, local media reported that record temperatures for April had been observed in many locations, including Chengdu, Zhejiang, Nanjing, Hangzhou and other areas of the Yangtze River delta region.

Unusually hot temperatures have also been reported in south-east Asia in recent days, including in Luang Prabang, Laos, which recorded 42.7C this week, the highest reliable temperature in its history, according to Herrera. Vientiane also recorded 41.4C, the hottest day ever for the capital, on Saturday. In Thailand, a government monitoring station in Tak in the north-west of the country recorded 45.4C on Saturday, breaking the previous high of 44.6C reached in Mae Hong Son on 28 April 2016. The record was not included in the government’s official summary statistics, however, which reported the temperature in Tak as 44.6C.

In Bangladesh, a country at the forefront of the climate crisis, temperatures soared above 40C in the capital, Dhaka, on Saturday, the hottest day in 58 years, causing road surfaces to melt. An official from the ministry of environment, forests and climate change said that if the heat did not abate, they would declare a temperature emergency in certain areas.

In recent years, India has become particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, and experts fear this year could be even worse. The April heatwave has battered some Indian states, with the meteorological department this week issuing an orange warning of a severe heatwave in parts of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, all states with a high proportion of rural workers and labourers who are forced to work outside even as temperatures and humidity soar.

A Royal Bengal tiger swims during a heatwave at Bangladesh national zoo in Dhaka.

Photograph: Syed Mahamudur Rahman/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

Six cities in north and east India recorded temperatures above 44C while the capital, Delhi, recorded 40.4C on Tuesday. The heatwave is expected to continue until at least Friday.

The India Meteorological Department said on Tuesday: “Heatwave conditions are likely to continue over West Bengal and parts of Bihar for next four days. Accordingly, we have issued an orange alert for the region in view of humidity and high temperatures. People should take precautionary measures. The region is likely to see thunderstorm activity from day five when heatwave conditions may abate.”

The high temperatures in India have prompted school closures in some states, while 13 people died and a further eight received medical treatment due to sunstroke after an award event that was held outdoors in Maharashtra state.

    (2) Asian Heat Wave/More records
    MYANMAR
    45.0C Nyaung-U/Bagan ties its hottest April day on records
    44.0C Shwebo all time record tied
    44.0C Kalewa monthly record tied

    LAOS
    41.6C Sayabouri all time record
    34.5C Pong Sa Ly all time record tied
    38.7C Oudomxay monthly record

    tbc pic.twitter.com/fIPE5d3apk

    — Extreme Temperatures Around The World (@extremetemps) April 19, 2023

West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, closed all schools in the state this week due to concerns over the severe heat, and urged private education institutions to take the same measures. Children had experienced health problems such as headaches due to the heat, she said, according to local media.

Schools have also been closed this week in Tripura and Odisha, while in Delhi schools will no longer conduct afternoon assemblies.

The unusually hot weather has also prompted health warnings in Thailand, where the health department warned of the risk of heatstroke, especially for people who exercise or work for long hours outside, such as construction workers and farmers.

There are fears that the high temperatures could continue in Thailand beyond the usual summer months, causing drought and potential crop failure.

“Hundreds of stations across more than a dozen countries are pulverising records”, said Herrera. They include Kalewa in north-west Myanmar, which hit 44C, a record for April, and Son La in north-west Vietnam, which reached 38C, a record for any month.

Temperatures rose above 30C in Japan, with Minamata in Kumamoto prefecture reaching 30.2C, an April record for the area. Highly unusual temperatures for this month have also been recorded in central Asia, including in Kazakhstan, where 33.6C was recorded at Taraz, a record for April, and in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

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Until last year, Robin Kyle Reeves lived an active life in Laurel Hill, Florida. She made lace gowns for children to wear during baptisms or family portraits. It was intricate work that requires precision, and Reeves’ glasses kept getting in the way. So her doctor recommended Lasik.

The procedure, which uses lasers to cut in and reshape a patient’s eye, was billed as simple and quick, usually done in under 30 minutes. “It was supposed to be zip, zap, and within a couple of weeks you’re healed and life goes on,” Reeves said. “But my life has stood still since July 12 of last year.”

According to Reeves, the procedure left debris behind her corneal flap, which ruined her eyesight and causes double vision, intense migraines and eye strain. She finds it impossible to stare at screens for an extended period of time, and can no longer enjoy her hobbies. She quit her job and had to repay deposits when she realized she could no longer focus on sewing.

“It puts a big dent on our household income,” Reeves said. “My head hurts all the time, and I can’t do normal activities. Simple things, like reading a box of mac and cheese, or putting on the same makeup I’ve applied for 40 years – I just can’t do that.”

Robin Kyle Reeves and her husband, Michael. Photograph: Robin Kyle Reeves

Reeves is one of the 500,000 Americans who undergo Lasik every year to correct their vision (about 100,000 people in the UK have the surgery annually). Surgeons who perform Lasik view it as routine, touting surveys promising a customer satisfaction rate of 90% to 95%. Surgeons who perform Lasik must have the standard board certification in ophthalmology and it is recommended that a patient choose one with a one-year accredited fellowship in refractive and cornea surgery. That extra step is not necessary to perform Lasik, but specialists who have it are more likely to get referrals from other generalists.

The American Refractive Surgery Council says the procedure’s complication rate is less than 1% (though 30% of people may see short-term side effects like dry eyes). Doctors also say that using new lasers significantly decreases complications, compared with the older-generation models that were used in the early 2000s.

But patient advocates and some experts say that is not the full picture. Dr Morris Waxler, a retired FDA adviser who voted to approve Lasik in the 1990s, is now one of its biggest critics. He says he regrets his role in bringing the procedure to the public.

According to his own analysis of industry data, the complication rate of Lasik falls between 10% and 30%. One investigation of an FDA database by the reporter Jace Larson found more than 700 complaints of severe pain, described as “worse than childbirth” or as if “their eyeballs would stick to their eyelids almost every night”.

Last year, the FDA released draft guidance telling doctors that prospective patients should be warned they might be left with double vision, dry eyes, difficulty driving at night, and persistent eye pain.

In one clinical trial from 2017, the FDA found that nearly half of participants reported experiencing “new visual symptoms” after undergoing surgery. Those effects can show up as the presence of glare, halos, or starbursts, especially at night.

A doctor performs laser eye surgery on a patient in Fairfax, Virginia. Photograph: Stephen Jaffe/EPA

The guidance is not final; a spokesperson for the FDA told the Guardian that the agency was currently in the process of considering hundreds of public comments submitted on the draft guidance. Those comments include strongly worded rebuttals from ophthalmologists who say the procedure changes lives for the better, and regretful patients who wish they had never gone through with it.

If the FDA ends up issuing this draft guidance as final, it will provide a recommendation – not enforced – on how surgeons should inform patients of potential risks.

According to the draft, doctors would be advised to share with their clients that their corneal nerves “may never fully recover, resulting in dry eyes and/or chronic pain”, and that there have been reports of some patients who have experienced depression or suicidality they believe to be a result of the fallout from Lasik. (The FDA notes that “a definitive causal link between Lasik and these reported psychological harms has not been established”.)

Paula Cofer, from Tampa, Florida, who testified in front of the FDA in 2008 and 2018, said her experience had started with visual symptoms.

Cofer paid about $1,000 in 2000 for the procedure, which she knew next to nothing about at the time, other than that it was her ticket to a life in which she no longer needed glasses.

But she started to notice complications almost immediately: the first night she went out and looked at the moon, Cofer saw eight overlapping circles smeared with a “ghastly” halo around it. “It looks like something out of a horror movie,” she said. Now, she lives with severe dry eye and bad night vision. She owns four pairs of glasses to make up for the eyesight she’s lost.

Cofer is one of the loudest critics of Lasik. She runs a Facebook support group with over 8,000 members who swap stories of their post-op ailments. “There is an epidemic of Lasik complications,” Cofer said. A number of people on the group claim Lasik has led to them having severe mental health issues.

In 2019, a Florida car dealership comptroller named Gloria McConnell asked her eye doctor for a new glasses prescription. According to her son Kingsly Alec McConnell, she had recently undergone Lasik surgery, which had fixed her problems seeing from a distance. But she still dealt with farsightedness, and thought a pair of readers might help. During the appointment, McConnell’s doctor talked her out of the idea, and she decided to try one more attempt at Lasik to fix everything.

Four years later, after experiencing debilitating complications from the procedure that left her unable to leave bed most days, McConnell died by suicide at the age of 60. Her son said that in a note she left to her family, McConnell wrote that the pain of the botched Lasik surgery had contributed her decision to end her life.

Kingsly describes his mother as fun and youthful before she had the surgeries.

The complications crept into McConnell’s life a few weeks after her surgery, but she tried to stay positive. Still, as things continued to grow worse, she became a shut-in, Kingsly said.

Her main issue was chronic dry eyes, to the point that she told people it felt like her lids were burning. She also suffered from corneal neuralgia, which is caused by damage to the nerves of the cornea. She had mites and ingrown hairs in her eyelashes and inflammation of her eyelids and spent most of her day lying in bed with her eyes closed.

“The pain affected her whole head,” her son said. “She did not take her life randomly or in the heat of the moment. In a way, it was a rational choice for her: why would you live a life so full of suffering?”

McConnell submitted a comment on the FDA’s draft guidance in November. “[Lasik] has destroyed my life,” she wrote. “My doctor told me I was the perfect candidate for Lasik and never talk[ed] at all about the risk … please help people like me.”

Gloria McConnell and her son Kingsly Alec McConnell. Photograph: Kingsly McConnell

Would a stronger warning from doctors help reduce complications from Lasik? Waxler, the former FDA adviser, thinks that the FDA’s proposed guidelines are “very mild”.

“After 30 years, the FDA has finally decided that maybe they should require refractive surgeons and manufacturers to tell their customers a little more about the downsides of Lasik,” he said. “If surgeons told people of all of the possibilities of getting complications, they wouldn’t have any customers.”

Dr Cynthia MacKay, a retired clinical professor of ophthalmology at Columbia University medical school, worked alongside Stephen Trokel, who was the first ophthalmologist to recognize the significance of the laser used in corneal refractive surgery.

“I thought it would never catch on,” MacKay said. “If you slice into the cornea to change its shape, you’re going to cut through all of the nerves that feed the cornea and keep it healthy, which will result in terrible pain,” she said.

Giving patients consent forms, as the FDA’s draft guidance recommends, is not enough for MacKay. She has worked as an expert witness in Lasik malpractice cases and has seen shady behavior from surgeons who give patients such forms right before their procedure, when they’re under anesthetic and trying to read the paperwork while their pupils are dilated.

“I think Lasik should be banned,” MacKay said. “It’s a public health hazard. There’s an epidemic of pain and blindness all over the world [because of this procedure].”

Most ophthalmologists who perform Lasik say that is simply not the case. The surgery is not without complications, but it is rare for any extreme issues to arise. One paper has found that the majority of Lasik recipients were happy with their results, with only 1.2% reporting dissatisfaction.

(But as the New York Times reported, most studies are written by surgeons who perform the procedure themselves and may be biased.)

“I had Lasik on my own eyes about 20 years ago and it was one of the best things I have ever done for myself,” said Dr Sidney Gicheru a spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology and medical director of LaserCare Eye Center in Dallas.

“A large majority of people who have had Lasik report being satisfied with their improved vision and the ease they now enjoy in their day-to-day lives,” Gicheru added.

All of which only adds to the confusion for prospective patients. Will Lasik change your life for the better, or worse? Concerned perspective patients may find themselves sifting through opposing data or online forums before making their decision.

Gicheru, who performs the procedure, said it helps to know whether or not a patient will be a “good candidate”. It is not for everyone. There are a few boxes you have to check: being over 18, with an eye prescription that has not changed in the last year. Patients who experience severe dry eye, corneal disease, advanced glaucoma, or diabetes that is not controlled well should seek other options. Those who live with astigmatism or are near or farsighted should also consult their ophthalmologists first, and may see better outcomes with other forms of surgery.

Dr Edward Manche, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University, recommends that patients seek out one or two opinions from surgeons before they decide to go through with the procedure and advised that patients stay away from clinics that overly advertise Lasik. “The vast majority of centers that do the surgery are extremely ethical and try to do the right thing,” he said. “But if a center feels like it’s giving you a sales pitch, and seems more like it’s doing business rather than looking out for your best interest, that’s a red flag.”

Reeves, one of the Facebook group members, no longer drives a car. When she needs to go somewhere, she enlists a family member to get behind the wheel. “I can’t take myself to do something as simple as getting bread, milk, cheese, or eggs,” she said.

Shortly after her botched surgery, Reeves returned to the clinic for an appointment to discuss her complications. The doctor told her he could try another round of Lasik, but she refused. Reeves still remembers sitting in the waiting room of the clinic, watching a revolving door of patients go in and out for their procedures.

“It took everything in my being to sit there, be quiet, and not tell them, ‘This is not an easy, in-and-out thing the way they make it out to be,’” Reeves said. “I wanted to say, ‘This could change your life for ever.’”

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Two Monash researchers are working on this question from different angles in an effort to find answers.

Jo Wrigglesworth is a Ph.D. candidate in Monash's School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, specializing in brain age. While working alongside Associate Professor Joanne Ryan, on research about epigenetics, she learned (in 2017) of a new method to predict aging based on neuroimaging data and machine learning.

She published a systematic review of research in 2021, then applied it to a group of healthy elderly Australians recruited from the ASPREE (ASPirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly) clinical trial, and found their brains looked younger than the norm (also defined as "decelerated brain aging").

But it could just as easily have shown aging, "atrophied" brains.

"It's a useful algorithm," she says, "and it did show that our group had what I'd call decelerated aging. The general concept is that it could provide a personalized measure of risk of cognitive decline, sooner than expected.

"While we know that brain atrophy tends to be associated with poorer outcomes—like cognitive decline—we're yet to overcome the diversity of aging in our population. Brain age is one approach to capturing our unique phenotypes."

Her research includes findings of an association between accelerated brain aging and poor cognitive function, and that older males had a faster rate of brain aging over a three-year period.

"However, there are other complexities where people do have atrophy, but they're still functionally fine, which is where the element of then understanding those people can be really important."

Wrigglesworth explored that notion in a new paper published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

"With all these things," she says, "you need to research it, test it, see the possibilities, and then if there's something there, hopefully get it into a clinical setting. But right now, we've still got a way to go."

She says this is new but "burgeoning" science.

"Brain age is relatively novel, and as such there's much more for us to explore before we can consider its clinical potential. For example, there's the possibility there may not be one universal brain age biomarker to address all situations. We need to consider multiple models, involving different brain features."

Brain injury a factor

At the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, and the Department of Neuroscience, Dr. Gershon Spitz, a research fellow, specializes in traumatic brain injury (TBI) and brain age.

In a paper published last year in Neuroimage: Clinical, he led research that found, for the first time, that a single traumatic brain injury can result in an "older-appearing" brain decades following the initial injury.

This "aging" is very particular, the paper says.

"We've recognized that a massive hit to the brain can lead to processes that interact with how you age with the environment you're in throughout your whole life," Dr. Spitz explains.

"It's a progressive process that lasts years, maybe even decades.

"This new way of viewing the injury has to do with the idea that traumatic brain injury initiates certain processes that can lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, maybe Parkinson's disease, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which we see in some athletes from the NFL and AFL."

The research studied people with a single moderate or severe TBI on average 22 years after their injury.

"We had a fantastic data set of a hundred-odd people with a brain injury, and a hundred people without. What we've shown is that compared to their chronological age, their brain age looks older than it should."

Researchers took those findings one step further: "It's good to find some signature of abnormality on an MRI, let's say, but it's even better to show that it has some clinical relevance," he says.

"So we actually went a step further and looked at the extent to which this brain age gap was associated with clinical outcomes. We found an association with the cognitive domain of verbal memory.

"So the bigger the deviation between your chronological age and your brain age, the worse your verbal memory can be."

Verbal memory is the ability to encode, acquire, and recall a list of words.

"It's one of the domains that shows early signs of impairment in age-related diseases. So there's a bit of this interesting signature of something that's chronic long-term," Dr. Spitz says, "and the more we're looking into it, the more we're thinking there's something there for some people."

A new world-first study, recruiting soon but using essentially the same cohort of people with a TBI and people without, will try to get closer to the nub of brain age in all this. Does brain age accelerate at a faster rate in people with a TBI who might also have signals towards a loss of verbal memory?

"Essentially, what we would hypothesize is individuals that present with certain signatures of pathology at this baseline should display steeper trajectories or steeper decline over the five years," Dr. Spitz says.

The magnitude of this change should also be associated with the change in their neuropsychological abilities.

"That's what I will suggest we would find. Do those individuals who are deemed to be high-risk actually show this change over time?"

More information: Jo Wrigglesworth et al, Health-related heterogeneity in brain aging and associations with longitudinal change in cognitive function, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.1063721

Journal information: NeuroImage: Clinical

Provided by Monash University

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The research, published April 19 in the journal Nature, could help explain some baffling phenomena, such as why anxiety makes some people want to pace back and forth; why stimulating the vagus nerve, which regulates internal organ functions such as digestion and heart rate, may alleviate depression; and why people who exercise regularly report a more positive outlook on life.

"People who meditate say that by calming your body with, say, breathing exercises, you also calm your mind," said first author Evan M. Gordon, Ph.D., an assistant professor of radiology at the School of Medicine's Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology. "Those sorts of practices can be really helpful for people with anxiety, for example, but so far, there hasn't been much scientific evidence for how it works. But now we've found a connection. We've found the place where the highly active, goal-oriented 'go, go, go' part of your mind connects to the parts of the brain that control breathing and heart rate. If you calm one down, it absolutely should have feedback effects on the other."

Gordon and senior author Nico Dosenbach, MD, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurology, did not set out to answer age-old philosophical questions about the relationship between the body and the mind. They set out to verify the long-established map of the areas of the brain that control movement, using modern brain-imaging techniques.

Three colored spots on each half of the brain illuminate special areas in the movement areas of the brain that connect to areas involved in thinking, planning and control of basic bodily functions such as heart rate. The hotter the color, the denser the connections. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis say that these sites represent a nexus between the body and the mind. Credit: Evan Gordon/Washington University

In the 1930s, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, MD, mapped such motor areas of the brain by applying small jolts of electricity to the exposed brains of people undergoing brain surgery, and noting their responses. He discovered that stimulating a narrow strip of tissue on each half of the brain causes specific body parts to twitch. Moreover, the control areas in the brain are arranged in the same order as the body parts they direct, with the toes at one end of each strip and the face at the other. Penfield's map of the motor regions of the brain—depicted as a homunculus, or "little man"—has become a staple of neuroscience textbooks.

Gordon, Dosenbach and colleagues set about replicating Penfield's work with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They recruited seven healthy adults to undergo hours of fMRI brain scanning while resting or performing tasks. From this high-density dataset, they built individualized brain maps for each participant. Then, they validated their results using three large, publicly available fMRI datasets—the Human Connectome Project, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study and the UK Biobank—which together contain brain scans from about 50,000 people.

To their surprise, they discovered that Penfield's map wasn't quite right. Control of the feet was in the spot Penfield had identified. Same for the hands and the face. But interspersed with those three key areas were another three areas that did not seem to be directly involved in movement at all, even though they lay in the brain's motor area.

Moreover, the nonmovement areas looked different than the movement areas. They appeared thinner and were strongly connected to each other and to other parts of the brain involved in thinking, planning, mental arousal, pain, and control of internal organs and functions such as blood pressure and heart rate. Further imaging experiments showed that while the nonmovement areas did not become active during movement, they did become active when the person thought about moving.

A link between body and mind is embedded in the structure of our brains, and expressed in our physiology, movements, behavior and thinking, as depicted in this artistic interpretation of a new study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The researchers discovered what they have named the Somato (body)-Cognitive (mind) Action Network, or SCAN. Credit: Sara Moser/Washington University

"All of these connections make sense if you think about what the brain is really for," Dosenbach said. "The brain is for successfully behaving in the environment so you can achieve your goals without hurting or killing yourself. You move your body for a reason. Of course, the motor areas must be connected to executive function and control of basic bodily processes, like blood pressure and pain. Pain is the most powerful feedback, right? You do something, and it hurts, and you think, 'I'm not doing that again.'"

Dosenbach and Gordon named their newly identified network the Somato (body)-Cognitive (mind) Action Network, or SCAN. To understand how the network developed and evolved, theyscanned the brains of a newborn, a 1-year-old and a 9-year-old. They also analyzed data that had been previously collected on nine monkeys. The network was not detectable in the newborn, but it was clearly evident in the 1-year-old and nearly adult-like in the 9-year-old. The monkeys had a smaller, more rudimentary system without the extensive connections seen in humans.

"This may have started as a simpler system to integrate movement with physiology so that we don't pass out, for example, when we stand up," Gordon said. "But as we evolved into organisms that do much more complex thinking and planning, the system has been upgraded to plug in a lot of very complex cognitive elements."

Clues to the existence of a mind-body network have been around for a long time, scattered in isolated papers and inexplicable observations.

"Penfield was brilliant, and his ideas have been dominant for 90 years, and it created a blind spot in the field," said Dosenbach, who is also an associate professor of biomedical engineering, of pediatrics, of occupational therapy, of radiology, and of psychological & brain sciences. "Once we started looking for it, we found lots of published data that didn't quite jibe with his ideas, and alternative interpretations that had been ignored. We pulled together a lot of different data in addition to our own observations, and zoomed out and synthesized it, and came up with a new way of thinking about how the body and the mind are tied together."

More information: Evan Gordon, A somato-cognitive action network alternates with effector regions in motor cortex, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05964-2. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05964-2

Journal information: Nature

Provided by Washington University School of Medicine

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As obesity and type 2 diabetes continue to be a growing epidemic in the U.S., many national health organizations, including the American Heart Association, recommend eating low- or nonfat dairy options, such as milk, cheese and yogurt, as part of a "heart healthy" diet. However, recent research suggests that—contrary to the messages the public often receives about dietary fat, weight gain and chronic disease—full-fat dairy products may be beneficial to blood glucose and fat metabolism.

The researchers studied a group of adult volunteers between the ages of 45 and 75. Most of the participants were diagnosed with prediabetes—one person had type 2 diabetes—with an average fasting blood glucose level of 101.1 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). Prediabetes, a condition in which blood sugar is elevated but has not yet reached the level of type 2 diabetes, is defined as a fasting blood glucose level between 100 and 125 mg/dL, explained Victoria Taormina, Ph.D. student and first author of the study.

In this crossover study, the volunteers participated in a three-week block when they ate three servings of plain, full-fat yogurt each day. The same volunteers ate three servings of fat-free yogurt daily during a different three-week span. The amount of yogurt consumed daily varied for each person based on their individual calorie and nutrient needs. However, based on a 2,000-calorie diet, this was 510 grams (approximately 17 ounces) of yogurt each day. While participants followed the full-fat diet, they consumed 17 grams of dairy fat per day.

The research team found that after the full-fat yogurt portion of the study, the participants' average fasting glucose levels dropped to 97.7 mg/dL, which is considered in the "normal" range.

"This research is part of a growing body of evidence that contradicts the current narrative in dietary recommendations of national and international health authorities to opt for low- or nonfat dairy, instead of full-fat dairy products," Taormina said. "We're hoping this pilot trial serves as an impetus for further research to truly clarify the relationship between dairy fat intake and blood glucose control."

Provided by American Physiological Society

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"Elderly patients or those with resistant hypertension or obesity don't always experience as much blood pressure benefit from exercise as other groups," said the study's first author Leandro Brito, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Oregon Health & Science University. "For these patients, finding a more beneficial time to exercise may reduce their need for medication or help it work better."

The study, which was conducted when Brito was a postdoctoral trainee at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, included 23 older adults with hypertension, all of whom were taking prescribed blood pressure medication for at least four months. The participants exercised three times a week for 10 weeks by cycling on a stationary bike. One group exercised only between 7 and 10 a.m. and the other group only exercised between 5 and 8 p.m.

The researchers found that although diastolic blood pressure decreased similarly in both groups, systolic blood pressure only decreased after evening exercise. The investigators also measured the autonomic functions—nervous system functions that regulate involuntary physiologic processes—that control blood pressure in each group. The results showed that an improvement in the neural responses to changes in blood pressure—known as the arterial tonus—was responsible for the greater blood pressure benefit from evening exercise.

"Although any exercise is always better than no exercise, people who need to achieve faster regularization of blood pressure or who don't see benefits from exercise might want to try working out in the evening," Brito said. "These findings replicate what we found in a previous study of middle-aged men with hypertension on blood pressure medicine, but now we understand the neural mechanisms that contribute."

Provided by American Physiological Society

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Leading up to cognitive decline, the brain loses its “plasticity,” as well as gray matter, which holds the neurons that keep the brain sharp. Once this decline starts, working memory is the hardest to maintain. This type of memory includes things like recalling a phone number long enough to jot it down on paper, or language translations. The researchers studied how practicing music could combat this degradation using 132 healthy older and retired adults between the ages of 62 and 78. Importantly, all of these participants never took musical lessons for more than six months in their lifetime.

‘‘We wanted people whose brains did not yet show any traces of plasticity linked to musical learning. Indeed, even a brief learning experience in the course of one’s life can leave imprints on the brain, which would have biased our results,’’ explains Damien Marie, first author of the study and a research associate at the CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging, the Faculty of Medicine and the Interfaculty Center for Affective Sciences (CISA) of UNIGE, and the Geneva School of Health Sciences, in a university release.

Study authors split the participants randomly into two classes, piano playing and musical awareness. For the latter, participants had to actively listen and focus on instrument recognition and analysis of musical properties across different musical styles. Both classes were an hour long and each class had 30 minutes of homework daily.

‘‘After six months, we found common effects for both interventions. Neuroimaging revealed an increase in grey matter in four brain regions involved in high-level cognitive functioning in all participants, including cerebellum areas involved in working memory. Their performance increased by 6% and this result was directly correlated to the plasticity of the cerebellum,’’ says study author Clara James, a lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of UNIGE and full professor at the Geneva School of Health Sciences.

Side view of a brain. In blue, the areas affected by the increase in grey matter in the elderly as a result of music practice. CREDIT: © UNIGE – Damien Marie

Further, sleep quality, the number of lessons followed over the intervention course, and the daily training quantity, all positively impacted the improvements noted. The team did note that the grey matter in the right primary auditory cortex — an area of the brain that processes sound — remained stable in pianists. In the active listening group, it went down.

‘‘In addition, a global brain pattern of atrophy was present in all participants. Therefore, we cannot conclude that musical interventions rejuvenate the brain. They only prevent ageing in specific regions,’’ says Marie.

Overall, the results show that listening and practicing music can preserve cognition. This is welcoming news, considering that so many people around the world enjoy music. The study authors now emphasize the inclusion of these activities in policy for healthy aging. Looking ahead, they plan to evaluate the potential of music in those with mild cognitive impairment, which is the grey area between normal aging and dementia.

The findings appear in the journal NeuroImage.

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It was only natural for Alexander Jones to feel thrilled when he saw a sixth-century palimpsest at the Ambrosiana library in Milan for the first time. It happened in 1984 when Jones was working on his dissertation using manuscripts in Italy. With the tools at his disposal, including a portable ultraviolet lamp and microfilm, he could only read a few lines. But Jones’ interest was piqued because there were pages of the text that no one had succeeded in reading.

Those pages remained unread until this year when a large part of the text was deciphered by Jones, a professor of history of the exact sciences in antiquity at New York University, who worked with Victor Gysembergh and Emanuel Zingg of the Paris-based Léon Robin Centre. The material they discovered appears to be a copy of Claudius Ptolemy’s treatise on a scientific instrument called the meteoroscope.

Finding Ptolemy

Ptolemy, who was born in 100 CE, was a renowned astronomer and mathematician who authored several important works, including Almagest and Geography. The treatise on the meteoroscope is a description of how to use the instrument for observations, as well as for doing astronomy calculations.

“The Meteoroscope (copy) was written in Greek on parchment sheets. Two centuries later, it was erased to write a manuscript in Latin called Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville. This kind of recycling was a pretty common practice in the Middle Ages as parchment was very expensive,” Jones said.

According to Gysembergh, the eighth-century Etymologiae manuscript runs into several hundred pages. “Thirty of these are recycled, the majority of which contain text from Ptolemy’s works. Of the 30 pages, 12 are dedicated to the Meteoroscope." The other pages of the manuscript contain text of another work of Ptolemy’s called On the Analemma, which was read in 1895 by the Danish scholar J.L. Heiberg.

The reuse of the parchment for the Latin manuscript meant there were faint remains of the previous text. Attempts to reveal the original text were made for the first time in the early 19th century. “Cardinal Angelo Mai, who discovered that the manuscript contained scientific text, applied chemicals hoping they would bring out the faint traces of ink. Now, those pages are big brown rectangles where you can hardly see anything. The new technology has done wonders to bring out the traces through the chemicals,” Jones said.

New tech meets old parchment

The technology that revealed the text consists of a multispectral camera and image-processing software. Gysembergh remembered being struck by its potential when the Archimedes palimpsest was decoded. “As a student back then, I was fascinated that cameras could be used to discover new texts,” he said.

It was during a chance meeting between Gysembergh and Jones in 2019 that the seed of their research project was sown. Gysembergh was looking for interesting ideas for research when Jones pointed out the palimpsest at the Ambrosiana library. The project was set in motion after receiving funding from Sorbonne University.

The multispectral imaging of the palimpsest was carried out in January 2020. This was done using a 240 million-pixel camera and processing software called Layer Amplification Method, both of which were developed by Pascal Cotte of Lumiere Technology.

The camera is equipped with 13 wavelength filters that allow the imaging of an object in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths ranging from 380 to 1,050 nanometers. The camera has a high dynamic range and can focus separately for each wavelength.

“We illuminated the palimpsest pages with ultraviolet and pure white light. Using the filters, we measured the interaction of the light at different depths inside the parchment. For each wavelength, this interaction was different. We took 1,650 images and processed them using LAM software to reveal the Greek text,” Cotte said.

Gysembergh said the images were additionally processed by a team from the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library.

After deciphering the text, the researchers could associate it with Ptolemy. “Being an expert on Ptolemy’s works, I was aware of his distinctive verbal mannerisms which were present in this text. While there are other items of evidence, the strongest was on a page where the writer mentions new names to angles in astronomy and describes what the old names were. This exactly matches a passage in another book of Ptolemy’s where the same terminology is used,” Jones said.

“Also, it was known that Ptolemy had invented and written on such a scientific instrument because he mentioned it in his book on map making,” he added.

Jones said the text describes how the instrument could be used to measure angular coordinates, determining the location of a planet in the night sky. This was done by turning the instrument's movable rings so that the planet could be sighted along the faces of certain rings. “Thereafter, the angles can be read on degree scales inscribed on the rings,” Jones said

“As a calculator, one could arrange rings according to known data such as the latitudes and longitudes of two cities and read an angle representing the length of the shortest possible path from one city to the other,” he added.

According to Jones, the aspect that makes this text stand out is the detailed explanation of how each instrument component is made. “It’s a kind of technical writing. It’s the first book of its kind on scientific instruments from ancient times with that level of detail,” he said.

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• Rice production for 2023 is set to log its largest shortfall in two decades, according to Fitch Solutions.

• “At the global level, the most evident impact of the global rice deficit has been, and still is, decade-high rice prices,” Fitch Solutions’ commodities analyst Charles Hart told CNBC.

• There’s a strained supply of rice as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as weather woes in rice-producing economies like China and Pakistan.

From China to the U.S. to the European Union, rice production is falling and driving up prices for more than 3.5 billion people across the globe, particularly in Asia-Pacific – which consumes 90% of the world’s rice.

The global rice market is set to log its largest shortfall in two decades in 2023, according to Fitch Solutions.

And a deficit of this magnitude for one of the world’s most cultivated grains will hurt major importers, analysts told CNBC.

“At the global level, the most evident impact of the global rice deficit has been, and still is, decade-high rice prices,” Fitch Solutions’ commodities analyst Charles Hart said.

Rice prices are expected to remain notched around current highs until 2024, stated a report by Fitch Solutions Country Risk & Industry Research dated April 4.

The price of rice averaged $17.30 per cwt through 2023 year-to-date, and will only ease to $14.50 per cwt in 2024, according to the report. Cwt is a unit of measurement for certain commodities such as rice.

Given that rice is the staple food commodity across multiple markets in Asia, prices are a major determinant of food price inflation and food security, particularly for the poorest households.

Charles Hart  commodities analyst, Fitch Solutions

“Given that rice is the staple food commodity across multiple markets in Asia, prices are a major determinant of food price inflation and food security, particularly for the poorest households,” Hart said.

The global shortfall for 2022/2023 would come in at 8.7 million tonnes, the report forecast.

That would mark the largest global rice deficit since 2003/2004, when the global rice markets generated a deficit of 18.6 million tonnes, said Hart.

Strained rice supplies

There’s a short supply of rice as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as bad weather in rice-producing economies like China and Pakistan.

In the second half of last year, swaths of farmland in the world’s largest rice producer China were plagued by heavy summer monsoon rains and floods.

The accumulated rainfall in the country’s Guangxi and Guangdong province, China’s major hubs of rice production, was the second highest in at least 20 years, according to agriculture analytics company Gro Intelligence.

Similarly, Pakistan — which represents 7.6% of global rice trade — saw annual production plunge 31% year-on-year due to severe flooding last year, said the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), labeling the impact as “even worse than initially expected.”

Workers cultivate rice seedlings at an agricultural service station in Hangzhou in east China’s Zhejiang province Sunday, April 16, 2023.

Future Publishing | Future Publishing | Getty Images

The shortfall is partly due to result of “an annual deterioration in the Mainland Chinese harvest caused by intense heat and drought as well as the impact of severe flooding in Pakistan,” Hart pointed out.

Rice is a vulnerable crop, and has the highest probability of simultaneous crop loss during an El Nino event, according to a scientific study.

In addition to tighter supply challenges, rice became an increasingly attractive alternative following the surge in price of other major grains since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hart added. The resulting rice substitution has driven up demand.

Whose rice bowls will be affected?

Lower year-on-year rice production in other countries like the U.S. and EU have also contributed to the deficit, said Oscar Tjakra, senior analyst at global food and agriculture bank Rabobank.

“The global rice production deficit situation will increase the cost of importing rice for major rice importers such as Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and African countries in 2023,” said Tjakra.

Many countries will also be forced to draw down their domestic stockpiles, said Kelly Goughary, senior research analyst at Gro Intelligence. She said countries most affected by the deficit would be those already suffering from high domestic food price inflation such as Pakistan, Turkey, Syria and some African countries.

China is the largest rice and wheat producer in the world and is currently experiencing the highest level of drought in its rice growing regions in over two decades.

Kelly Goughary  senior research analyst, Gro Intelligence

“The global rice export market, which is typically tighter than that of the other major grains ... has been affected by India’s export restriction,” said Fitch Solutions’ Hart.

India banned exports of broken rice in September, a move Hart said has been a “major price driver” for rice.

Surplus in the horizon

However, the shortage may soon be a thing of the past.

Fitch Solutions estimates that the global rice market will return to “an almost balanced position in 2023/24.”

That could lead to rice futures falling in year-on-year terms to below their 2022 level, but remain elevated at “more than one third above their pre-Covid (2015-2019) mean value, in part as inventories are replenished after a period of extensive drawdown.”

“We believe that the rice market will return to surplus in 2024/25 and then continue to loosen through the medium term.”

Fitch further projects that the prices of rice could drop almost 10% to $15.50 per hundredweight in 2024.

“It is our view that global rice production will stage a solid rebound in 2023/24, expecting total output to rise by 2.5% year on year,” Fitch’s report forecast, hinging on India being a “principal engine” of global rice output over the next five years.

A combine harvester cuts through a field during a wheat harvest at a farm in Karnal, Haryana, India, on Thursday, April 13, 2023.
Anindito Mukherjee | Bloomberg | Getty Images

However, rice production remains at the mercy of weather conditions.

While India’s Meteorological Department expects the country to receive “normal” monsoon rainfall, forecasts for intense heat and heat waves through the second and third quarters of 2023 continue to pose a threat to India’s wheat harvest, the report cautioned.

Other countries may not be spared either.

“China is the largest rice and wheat producer in the world and is currently experiencing the highest level of drought in its rice growing regions in over two decades,” said Goughary.

Major European rice-growing countries like France, Germany and the UK have also been afflicted with the highest level of drought in 20 years, she added.

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Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the date a judge tentatively approved the settlement.

(NEXSTAR) – A massive $725 million settlement involving Facebook’s parent company Meta was tentatively approved by a judge last month, paving the way for users of the social media platform to apply for a chunk of the payout.

Meta has agreed to the payment to settle a lawsuit claiming Facebook allowed users’ personal data to be shared with third parties, the most famous being Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that supported Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The firm harvested the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users, the Associated Press reported.

Final approval of the settlement isn’t expected until September, but Facebook users don’t need to wait to file their claim.

Who qualifies for a payment?

You don’t need to know if your data was accessed by a third-party app to get a piece of the settlement. Anyone who was a Facebook user between May 24, 2007, and Dec. 22, 2022, is eligible, per the settlement page.

That means a lot of people are eligible — Facebook reports 2 billion users globally, including about 200 million in the United States and Canada.

Only U.S. users are eligible for a payment.

How do I apply?

There are two ways to submit a claim: online or by mail.

To file online, you’ll need to click here, answer a few questions about yourself, and then decide how you’d like to be paid (prepaid gift card, direct deposit, PayPal, etc.).

To file by mail, you’ll need to print some forms and send them in to the settlement administrator in Philadelphia.

You need to submit the form by August 25 in order to qualify.

How much will I get?

As with many class action lawsuits, the size of each individual’s payout depends on how many claims come in. How long you were a Facebook user will also determine the size of your payment — the longer you had an active account, the larger your payment will be. (You need to disclose if you’ve deleted your Facebook account when submitting a claim.)

And before any money lands in your bank account, attorneys’ fees and administrative expenses will be deducted from the $725 million pot.
When will I get paid?

The final settlement hearing is set for Sept. 7, 2023, so any approved payments definitely wouldn’t be sent out before then. “Settlement payments will be distributed as soon as possible if the Court grants Final Approval of the Settlement and after any appeals are resolved,” the claim site’s FAQ explains.

The date of the hearing is also subject to change.

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India's population is expected to reach 1.4286 billion - 2.9 million more than its neighbour on 1.4257 billion.

The Asian nations have accounted for more than a third of the global population for over 70 years.

China's birth rate has plunged recently with its population shrinking last year for the first time since 1961.

India's population forecast provided in the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of World Population report is an estimate since there has been no census in the country since 2011.

After 140 years of uninterrupted census every 10 years, the 2021 census was cancelled because of Covid and postponed to 2022. Now it has been pushed back again to 2024.

In an interview with the BBC, the UN's Chief of Population Estimates and Projection, Patrick Gerland, says that any numbers about India's real population size are "naïve assumptions based on fragmental information".

"We don't have real official data coming out from India," he says.

Also, the UN says their estimate does not include the population of China's two Special Administrative Regions - Hong Kong and Macau, which together have more than 8 million people - or the island of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a breakaway province to be unified with the mainland one day. Taiwan sees itself as distinct from the Chinese mainland, with its own constitution and democratically-elected leaders.

In November, the global population crossed 8 billion. But experts say growth is not as rapid as it used to be and is now at its slowest rate since 1950.

Both India and China have seen declines in their fertility rates. This means in China, the population will start declining next year, despite the country abandoning its one-child policy in 2016 and introducing incentives for couples to have two or more children.

Soaring living costs and the growing number of women joining the workforce are among other factors being blamed for the slowdown in China.

In India, too, fertility rates have fallen substantially in recent decades from 5.7 births per woman in 1950 to 2.2 births per woman today.

A survey commissioned by the UNFPA had a majority of Indians saying their population was too large and fertility rates too high. Almost two in three respondents identified economic issues as top concerns when thinking about population growth.

Demographers, however, say India's population overtaking China's shouldn't be seen as a matter of concern and caution against giving into anxieties over the rising numbers.

"Instead, they should be seen as a symbol of progress, development, and aspirations if individual rights and choices are being upheld," the UN report says.

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COVID vaccines: FDA retires monovalent shots, offers spring boosters to some

According to a recently published Cochrane Review, spinal cord stimulation, a medical technology proposed as a treatment option for individuals suffering from chronic back pain, may not offer sustained relief and may even have harmful effects.

Spinal cord stimulation operates on the principle of inserting a device that emits electrical impulses to the spinal cord, thereby disrupting nerve signals before they reach the brain.

The study reviewed published clinical data on spinal cord stimulation. This included randomized controlled trials, considered to be the most robust method to measure the effectiveness of a treatment in medical research.

The researchers analyzed the results of 13 clinical trials, looking at data from 699 participants, comparing spinal cord stimulation treatment with placebo or no treatment for low back pain.

Cochrane reviews are trusted by researchers, medical professionals, and policymakers because they use robust methodologies to combine evidence from multiple sources, reducing the impact of bias and random error that can make individual studies less reliable.

The review concluded that spinal cord stimulation is no better than a placebo for treating low back pain, with probably little to no benefit for people with low back pain or improvement in their quality of life.

There was little to no clinical data regarding the long-term effectiveness of spinal cord stimulation.

The researchers also found that adverse side effects of the surgery were poorly documented overall, preventing them from concluding the level of risk involved. Harms from spinal cord stimulation could include nerve damage, infection, and the electrical leads moving, all of which may need repeated surgeries.

The review findings have been submitted to the Federal Department of Health and Aged Care prosthesis list review task force. The task force is reviewing the eligibility of current prostheses subsidized by Medicare.

In Australia, the devices’ long-term safety and performance are also being re-assessed by The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the country’s regulatory authority for therapeutic goods.

“Spinal cord stimulation is invasive and has a great financial cost to people who choose surgery as a last resort to alleviate their pain. Our review found that the long-term benefits and harms are essentially unknown,” said lead researcher Dr. Adrian Traeger from Sydney Musculoskeletal Health, an initiative of the University of Sydney, Sydney Local Health District, and Northern Sydney Local Health District.

“Our review of the clinical data suggests no sustained benefits to the surgery outweigh the costs and risks.

“Low back pain is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Our findings further emphasize the urgent need to review funding arrangements for chronic pain care to help patients in their search for relief. There are evidence-based physical and psychological therapies for back pain; ensuring access to these is essential.”

The review team found multiple gaps in clinical data.

There were no studies that investigated the long-term (more than 12 months) impact of spinal cord stimulation on low back pain. The longest was a single six-month trial.

The majority of clinical trials only looked at the immediate impact of the device, which is a time frame of less than a month.

The review team provided a list of recommendations, including that future spinal cord stimulation clinical trials be at least 12 months, clearly document the number of people who experience adverse events, and make comparisons with other pain treatment options.

Professor Chris Maher, Co-Director of Sydney Musculoskeletal Health, said:

“Our review found that the clinical benefit of adding spinal cord stimulation to treat low back pain remains unknown. When coupled with the reality that these devices are very expensive and often break down there is clearly a problem here that should be of concern to regulators.”

A separate Cochrane review, in which the researchers were not involved, examined the effect of spinal cord stimulation versus placebo in people with chronic pain. Similar to this review, it concluded there was a lack of evidence to suggest long-term benefits in treating chronic pain.

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The natural world is full of all kinds of strange phenomena, from spooky Brocken specters to  chocolate waterfalls. Now, we explain the optical illusion showing the lake that seemingly floats above the sea below. 

At the center of a rough triangle between the top of Scotland, the east coast of Iceland, and the west of Norway sits the Faroe Islands. This is a group of around 750 islands that make up a self-governing archipelago with 17 inhabited islands. Once belonging to Norway for hundreds of years, the islands are now part of the Kingdom of Denmark. These islands are between the North Atlantic Ocean and the Norwegian Sea, with no point on any of the islands being more than 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) to the coast. At the top of one of these islands is Lake Sørvágsvatn, which appears to hang above the swirling sea below it.

Lake Sørvágsvatn, also known as Leitisvatn or even "the lake above the ocean", is the largest lake in the Faroe Islands found on the island of Vágar. Lots of photographs of the lake are taken in such a way as to make it seem like the lake is hovering high above the ocean, creating an optical illusion-like effect. In actual fact, the lake sits only 30 meters (98 feet) above sea level and covers an area of 3.4 square kilometers (1.31 square miles). 

These photographs show just how much the perspective really matters since the lake can be made to look like it’s floating much higher than 30 meters above the ocean. Bøsdalafossur waterfall in the right image below forms part of the lake, allowing water to flow over the edge of the cliff and into the sea below. 

The island of Vágar held an important strategic point during World War II. During the British occupation of the Faroe Islands, an airfield was constructed to the west of the lake where the British could monitor for German warships. 

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Brain imaging just took a massive leap forward. After decades of work, scientists have managed to produce magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of a mouse brain that are a whopping 64 million times sharper than can currently be achieved. The unprecedented level of detail in these images could help us to visualize conditions affecting the brain in a whole new way.

The first MRI scan was described 50 years ago, in March 1973. It was a landmark moment in medical history. MRI scanning is used every day to help diagnose and assess patients with diseases in many different areas of the body, but the technique has almost become synonymous with research into brain disorders.

Clinical MRI is undeniably useful for the diagnosis of conditions like brain tumors, but it can only go so far. To be able to see the complex organization of brain tissue in microscopic detail, some serious improvements needed to be made.

The new images, the culmination of decades of research led by a team at the Center for In Vivo Microscopy at Duke University, are 64 million times sharper than clinical MRI scans. This was achieved by using a much more powerful magnet within the scanner – 9.4 Tesla, compared with the usual 1.5 to 3 Tesla – gradient coils that are 100 times stronger than those in a normal MRI machine, and a vast amount of computing power.

Just as a two-dimensional image can be divided up into single points called pixels, MRIs can be reduced to their constituent three-dimensional voxels. With the new technique, each voxel is 64 million times smaller than we’ve seen before, measuring only 5 micrometers.

It’s a little like comparing the 8-bit graphics of the 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System classic Super Mario Bros. with the computer animation of the 2023 Super Mario Bros. Movie. 

The study authors tried out the new technique on a mouse brain. After the MRI scan was completed, the tissue was also imaged using a complementary method called light sheet microscopy. Overlaying both of these images has allowed the team to visualize the internal wiring and connections within the brain in glorious, rainbow-colored detail.

But the images don’t just look amazing. Being able to see brain tissue in this way has the potential to revolutionize how we study the central nervous system. One example that the authors highlight is research into aging.

“It is something that is truly enabling. We can start looking at neurodegenerative diseases in an entirely different way,” said lead author G. Allen Johnson in a statement.

So far, one set of images has documented changes in the connectivity across the brain as the mouse ages, mapping how some regions change more than others. Another set of images, taken in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, illustrates the breakdown of neural networks.

If medical intervention can help animals to live longer, Johnson explained, having access to such detailed images will help us explore whether the brain can continue to support the aging body. 

"So, the question is, is their brain still intact during this extended lifespan? Could they still do crossword puzzles? Are they going to be able to do Sudoku even though they're living 25 percent longer? And we have the capacity now to look at it. And as we do so, we can translate that directly into the human condition."

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

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Imagine the upset: a gang of hairy houseflies arrive at your dinner without an invitation and take a seat on top of your favorite dish. They take a few steps, rub their grubby hands together, puke, then rudely leave. Is your food still safe to eat?

Generally speaking, the risk of falling sick is relatively low, but there are a few factors to consider when deciding whether a fly-landing means it's trash time for your lovingly prepared meal. 

Do flies vomit when they land?

No offense to Mother Nature, but houseflies are gross little creatures. The rumor is true that they throw up on your food when they land on it. Since flies don’t have teeth and jaws to chew food, they spit out some enzyme-rich saliva to partially dissolve the food and suck it up through their snout-like mouth.

They spend most of their short lives feeding on organic decaying material, which will include rotting vegetation, raw meat, and – of course – steaming piles of poop. Living this grimy lifestyle means they harbor a number of nasty germs that have the potential to make you sick. 

“House flies serve as bridges between clean and unclean environments, moving freely between contaminated materials such as waste to domestic and peridomestic environments, food and water sources,” a paper about houseflies from 2017 reads.

What germs are spread by flies?

One review managed to identify 130 pathogens from houseflies. These included fungi, viruses, parasites, and bacteria, some of which were “serious and life-threatening species.” 

In many parts of the world, the main threat is the risk of foodborne pathogens. These germs have the potential to cause a nasty bout of food poisoning, including vomiting, nausea, stomach pain, diarrhea, and fever.

A study from 2022 saw scientists collect over 100 houseflies from around a farm in New York and found they were loaded with an array of foodborne pathogens that affect human health, including Salmonella, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, and Bacillus subtilis. 

The question is whether these pathogens are abundant enough to make a healthy person ill. This is dependent on a few factors, namely how many flies have settled on the food and for how long.

If a single fly has brief contact on freshly cooked food, then most health experts would say it’s not a big deal and there’s no need to chuck the food. 

However, if a swarm of flies has been feasting on your meal for hours, then it’s best to use your common sense and discard the food. 

In parts of the world where tropical diseases are more prolific, it’s wise to note the threat level is higher. Houseflies can harbor pathogens from human waste and pass on deadlier diseases like cholera and shigellosis, a type of dysentery, for several days. The level of threat is not clear, but research has linked the density of housefly populations with increases in shigellosis among kids in Bangladesh.

Altogether, the health risk of a lone fly making brief contact with fresh food is relatively low, especially if you’ve got a relatively strong immune system. However, a risk is present and it can be higher depending on the situation. 

As ever, it’s not a bad idea to stick to the age-old mantra of “if in doubt, throw it out.”

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This month’s new Moon on April 20 is giving skywatchers plenty of reasons to look up this week. Not only is it instrumental in the rare once-in-a-decade type of eclipse happening on Thursday but it’s providing an exceptionally good opportunity to catch the phenomenon known as the Da Vinci Glow. Instead of just seeing the waning crescent Moon, you should be able to see the usually dark side of the lunar disk lit by a soft glow.

What is Da Vinci Glow?

Da Vinci Glow is also known as Earthshine and can technically be seen when any new Moon occurs, but it’s at its most intense in April.  

During the Moon’s crescent phase right before or after a New Moon – when the crescent is at its skinniest – the dark part of the Moon appears lit by a mysterious light, which historically was known as “the old Moon in the New Moon’s arms”, or “ashen glow”.

The phenomenon occurs when sunlight reflects off Earth’s surface and illuminates the unlit part of the New Moon when you can usually only see the crescent. When the Sun sets on the Moon it gets dark, but not completely dark – it still has a light source: Earth. If you were standing on the Moon, not only would Earth appear about four times larger than the Moon appears to us, but it would be around 50 times brighter than the Full Moon on Earth.

Sunlight reflected from our planet goes back out into space. Some of it passes the Moon, hits the lunar surface, and reflects back to our eyes, and some is absorbed by the dark lunar soil. Because the light is being reflected twice – once by Earth and once by the Moon – this light is much dimmer. Again, if you were standing on the Moon it would look like twilight. The bright crescent we see clearly from Earth, however, is lit by direct sunlight, which is why it’s brighter.

Why is Earthshine called Da Vinci Glow?

Post landing humans on the Moon, it may seem obvious what is happening, but back in the 1500s, no one had been to the Moon to look back at Earth and see how much it lit up the lunar surface. This mysterious "ashen glow" was considered a riddle – one that Leonardo da Vinci was determined to solve. 

Back then, people didn't know the Earth orbited the Sun. Copernicus wouldn't publish his Sun-centric theory of the Solar System until 24 years after da Vinci's death. So to work out what was happening, you needed a wild imagination, which of course da Vinci had.  

OK, he may have got a couple of things wrong, but he was the first person to correctly surmise that the bright crescent we see of a New Moon is lit directly by the Sun and the "ashen glow" is lit by reflected light from Earth. 

In his Codex Leicester, written around 1510, he included a chapter titled “Of the Moon: No Solid Body is Lighter than Air”. In it, he explained his belief that the "ghostly glow" was caused by sunlight bouncing off Earth's oceans and in turn hitting the Moon and reflecting back. The Moon was a fine reflector due to it being covered in oceans itself, he thought. Now, we know that Earth's clouds do most of the planet's reflecting and the closest the Moon has to an ocean is the Sea of Tranquility, which may have once been a large body of water and is where humans first landed on the Moon.   

How can I see Da Vinci Glow?

You can see Earthshine whenever there’s a crescent Moon on the horizon right after sunset or before sunrise.

The faintly lit side of the Moon should be visible for a few days before and up to five days after a new Moon. You don’t need any specialized equipment, you can see it with the naked eye, but after five days, you may need to dig out a telescope if you want to continue watching the Earthshine.

The new Moon is on Thursday, April 20, so depending on where (and when) you are, enjoy its offerings, from Earthshine to the hybrid eclipse. And don't forget to look up two days later when the Lyrids meteor shower is set to peak. 

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If we had a dime for how many times green lasers falling from the sky have been caught on camera in the last six months, well, we would have two dimes, which is not much but it is weird that it happened twice. Just a few months back we reported on a Matrix-like glitch that was caught over the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii. Now, footage from over Mount Fuji in Japan caught last year shows something similar.

The location is once again connected to a volcano but it is several thousand miles west. Footage of the green lasers was recorded by motion-detecting cameras set up by Daichi Fujii, an astronomer and museum curator based near Mount Fuji on September 16, 2022. The cameras were supposed to spot meteors but captured something else entirely: a satellite at work.

The satellite in question is NASA's ICESat-2, or Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation SATellite-2. While the acronym might not be the best, the science observations that it carries out are pretty awesome. It can shoot 10,000 laser pulses a second with about 20 trillion photons leaving the spacecraft. About a dozen come back but those are enough to measure the elevation of ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice in exquisite detail. ICESat-2 can also measure the heights of forests, lakes, urban areas, and cloud cover.

But the lasers are not really visible unless the right conditions take place. You might need a bit of cloud coverage to scatter the light but not too much otherwise it would be blocked. Due to the rhythmic nature of the lasers and a blinking object beyond the clouds, Fujii suspected a satellite and the path of ICESat-2 was consistent with the observations.

The ICESat-2 team found Fujii’s post on social media and went to check if it was indeed their satellite causing the lights. The glitch above Hawai’i back in February was at first attributed to ICES-at2 as well before the real culprit, the Chinese Daqi-1/AEMS satellite, was identified. Analyzing the data from the night in September last year, Tony Martino, ICESat-2 instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, saw that two thin layers of cloud were present over Japan, allowing for the light to become visible. With the precise location of the satellite, the beams, and the cloudy conditions, Martino confirmed it was ICESat-2.

“ICESat-2 appeared to be almost directly overhead of him [Fujii], with the beam hitting the low clouds at an angle,” Martino said in a statement. “To see the laser, you have to be in the exact right place, at the right time, and you have to have the right conditions.”

In fact, this is the first time the ICESat-2 team has actually seen footage of its lidar instrument in action. 

Don't worry, the laser light is not harmful at all. It travels so far that by the time it reaches the ground that it has roughly the same strength as a camera flash from 30 meters (100 feet) away.

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The Periodic Table, in all its glory. Image credit: Alejo Miranda/Shutterstock.com

The rightmost column on the table – noble gases – have the benefit of being chemically stable, but they are gasses, which would be pretty hard to keep in your wallet. 

On the left side of the table, you’ll see alkali metals such as lithium, potassium, and sodium. While these might be relatively common, they are highly reactive. Lithium, for instance, can spontaneously burst into flames if it’s exposed to air.

Sanat said you can easily exclude another 38 elements simply because they're too reactive. The bottom two rows can also be ruled out as they’re radioactive, which isn’t exactly ideal if you like living. 

From 118 elements, we’re now down to just 30 possible candidates. 

Kumar goes on to explain that it’s ideal to find a metal that’s rare, but not too rare. This leaves us with rhodium, palladium, platinum, silver, and gold. 

Since rhodium and palladium weren’t identified until the early 1800s, this means they wouldn’t have been known to most cultures until relatively recently. 

Platinum would be a decent option, but its melting point is 1,768°C (3214.4°F) so it would require an extremely hot furnace to meld and master. Early civilizations would not have been able to muster this heat, so they would have found it almost impossible to forge and turn into pocket-sized coins. 

That leaves us with silver and gold. Silver, of course, has also been widely used in coins as currency throughout history and it does have many properties that make it desirable. However, gold is arguably the top choice as it’s less prone to tarnishing, Kumar argues. 

"For the earth, with every parameter we have, gold is the sweet spot," he explains. "It would come out no other way."

The coastal town of Exmouth in Western Australia is due to experience one of the most spectacular astronomical phenomena on April 20 2023 – a total solar eclipse.

Eclipses have entranced us for millennia. But it turns out calculating exactly when and where we can watch an eclipse in its full glory can be surprisingly hard.

Watching the Sun and the Moon

Being so dominant in the sky, the Sun and the Moon were the most captivating celestial bodies for ancient cultures to observe. Naturally, they also tried to anticipate and predict their motions.

While the Sun’s movement is quite simple, the Moon moves across the sky with much more complexity. For one thing, it has phases; it also grows and shrinks in apparent size as it travels on an elliptical orbit around Earth.

On top of this, the Moon appears to rock and wobble quite haphazardly on its journey across the sky, making it extremely challenging to accurately describe its orbit. In fact, explaining the Moon’s motion was the only problem that made Isaac Newton’s head hurt.

Since eclipses are so startling to witness, many ancient peoples both noted their occurrence in writing and art, and discovered the repeating characteristics of such events.

During a lunar eclipse, where Earth blocks sunlight that would otherwise illuminate a full moon, the dimmed Moon takes on a bloody hue. Many cultures attached foreboding to such events (like the partial lunar eclipse seen during the Fall of Constantinople in 1453) and quite reasonably wondered when the next such event might occur.

A lunar eclipse visible in Miami, Florida in 2010. Image Credit: FloridaStock/Shutterstock.com

The not-so-mythical Saros cycle

Various cultures around the world have independently discovered eclipses seem to occur on an 18-year cycle. It was mentioned in written records by the Babylonians and Assyrians (of ancient Mesopotamia and modern Iraq), and oral tradition suggests the cycle was used for ceremonial purposes by Torres Strait Islanders in what is now Australia.

This 18-year cycle, which can persist as a sequence for over a thousand years, is now known as a Saros cycle. The word “Saros” was referenced in the 10th-century Byzantine Suda encyclopedia, and possibly has a Greek origin (“saro” meaning “sweep”, perhaps relating to how eclipses sweep across the sky).

The Saros cycle represents how long it takes for the Sun-Earth-Moon system to return to almost exactly the same triangular configuration. So, if you see a lunar eclipse, you can expect another one 18 years later, visible from most places on Earth.

If you were an ancient culture that happened to observe a total solar eclipse, you would have been very lucky indeed (they occur roughly every 375 years at a given region on Earth). But would you have seen a similar event 18 years later? Alas, no. While there probably was another total solar eclipse 18 years later, it would have been over a completely different part of the planet.

After 54 years – three Saros cycles – the eclipse region should have returned to roughly the same position on Earth. But only very roughly, as it could be thousands of kilometres away from the previous observation spot.

Worldwide, there is a total solar eclipse visible somewhere roughly every 18 months during one of two possible “eclipse seasons” per year. This is much more frequent than an 18-year Saros cycle, and is possible because multiple repeating Saros sequences overlap at once (roughly a dozen), each offset by at least six months. For example, the 2028 total solar eclipse that will be visible in Sydney is part of an entirely different Saros sequence than this year’s eclipse.

After about a thousand years, when one long-term Saros sequence ends, another will begin with slightly different timing.

From antiquity to modern day

So could our ancient ancestors actually predict eclipses? Yes, if we are talking about lunar eclipses, and perhaps even partial solar eclipses.

A famous predictive example is the Eclipse of Thales in 585 BCE, although the fact that a total solar eclipse happened over Greece was almost certainly more luck than science. That is, they wouldn’t have predicted that 18 years later (567 BCE) a total solar eclipse was visible in what is now the United States.

It is likely the famed Greek Antikythera Mechanism, an astoundingly complicated 2,000-year-old mechanical device that was used to predict the night sky, could calculate the 18-year Saros accurately. But significantly, it could not predict total solar eclipses at a precise place on Earth – just their timing.

The Saros period (marked with a red rectangle) is visible on a fragment of the ‘user manual’ of the Antikythera mechanism. Xmoussas/Wikimedia Commons, (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In summary, it is clear ancient people could predict timings for lunar eclipses and partial solar eclipses, but there is no convincing evidence of people predicting the times and locations of total solar eclipses.

The path of the eclipse as described by Halley in 1715. University of Cambridge, Institute of Astronomy Library (CC BY 4.0)

Entering the modern era of science, the first true prediction of a total solar eclipse (both in time and location) occurred in 1715. Edmond Halley (of comet fame) correctly predicted, to within four minutes and 20 miles, a total solar eclipse that rather conveniently passed over his own house in London. He did this by making full use of Isaac Newton’s new theories of gravity and orbital mechanics: the Principia.

Today, we don’t rely on calculating the orbits of the whole Solar System to predict eclipses. For example, NASA uses a highly advanced form of an ancient technique – pattern recognition. Using some 38,000 repeating mathematical terms, NASA can predict both solar and lunar eclipses for 1,000 years into the future. Beyond that, the Moon’s wobble and Earth’s changing rotation make eclipse prediction less accurate.

So for those of you lucky enough to witness a total solar eclipse this month, take a moment to think about what this shared experience has meant to humans around the world for thousands of years.

Trying to predict and explain this phenomenon has directly driven advancements in mathematics and orbital mechanics, and with its beauty we have been forced to embrace the limits of our scientific knowledge.

Aaron Robotham, Research Associate Professor & UWA Research Fellow, The University of Western Australia and Sabine Bellstedt, Research Fellow in Astronomy, The University of Western Australia

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The shroud of Turin is a large piece of linen cloth that was used to wrap the body of Jesus Christ, according to those who believe in it. The cloth contains a faint image, which people have claimed shows the face of Jesus of Nazareth himself, complete with a crown of thorns and stains which people believe to be blood.

As with other supposed relics relating to Jesus, its authenticity has been heavily disputed. The first historical record we have of it was in 1354, belonging to Knight Templar Geoffroi de Charnay. Thirty-five years later it went on exhibition, where it was labeled a fraud by the bishop of Troyes who called it “cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it". 

Nevertheless, popes through the years have believed in its authenticity and made pilgrimages to it as late as 2015. The shroud is rarely displayed today but has been submitted to scientific testing, in an attempt to determine precisely when and where it was made, and by who.

In the 1980s, the shroud was submitted to radiocarbon dating, along with three control samples, by three separate teams of scientists, each working independently. 

"The results of radiocarbon measurements at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich yield a calibrated calendar age range with at least 95 percent confidence for the linen of the Shroud of Turin of [CE] 1260-1390," a paper on the tests published in Nature concludes. 

"These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval."

This dates it roughly to around the time it appeared in historical records, near to the time when the bishop of Troyes declared it to be a cunning fraud. It has since been suggested, by those who likely want to believe in its authenticity, that the teams could have taken a sample from an area of the shroud which was repaired in the 12-1300s, or that the shroud was contaminated during a fire in Chambery, France, in 1532.

Clutching even more desperately at straws, others have suggested that the shroud became contaminated by carbon monoxide, throwing off the dating of the cloth by a thousand or so years. Subjecting other cloths to carbon monoxide as a test, however, has not shown any significant impact on radiocarbon dating. 

Other studies have focused on the patterns on the shroud itself. One team, using a mannequin and a volunteer, simulated wounds as shown on the shroud using real and synthetic blood. Blood was pumped around the mannequin, and released at the wound points supposedly shown on the shroud, which was then left to flow to show researchers what the resulting patterns would look like.

The team had been hoping to determine whether the patterns were consistent with a T-shaped crucifix or a Y-shaped crucifix, but concluded that they were not consistent with crucifixion at all. The body parts would have had to have been at different angles to produce the patterns seen on the shroud.

Though this analysis has also been questioned – by people saying it could have been altered if a body had been transported inside the linen, for example – the scientific evidence so far tells a simple story.

"The simplest, albeit the dullest, conclusion to reach," as one team put it, "is that the shroud's age is its historic age". At some point before the shroud entered historical records in the 1300s, it was forged.

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A four-week mission to explore the waters around the Galápagos islands has struck scientific gold almost immediately, with a reef lying 400-600 meters (1,300-2,000 feet) beneath the surface of the Galápagos Marine Reserve. The biology of the reef will take some time to explore, but may prove as distinctive as the islands above.

Since Darwin, the Galápagos Islands have drawn biologists keen to study the way the archipelago’s climatic diversity has birthed new species. The surrounding seas have been much less studied, with only 5 percent explored using modern techniques. It’s only two years ago that we learned why these waters are so nutrient-rich. Galápagos Deep 2023 aims to rectify this, bringing the deep-sea submersible Alvin to explore the waters at depths scuba divers can’t reach.

On one of the first dives, the international team conducting the exploration found a reef covering the crest and slopes of an underwater volcano. The islands were known to have coral reefs before, but these are shallow, and vulnerable to extreme weather conditions. Most were destroyed in the 1982-83 El Niño, when water temperatures spiked, and have not recovered. However, deep water reefs have previously been shown to be more resilient in the face of such events.

Anemone on rock with some Madrepora coral, thriving at depth. Image credit: L. Robinson (U. Bristol), D. Fornari (WHOI), M. Taylor (U. Essex), D. Wanless (Boise State U.) NSF/NERC/HOV Alvin/WHOI MISO Facility, 2023 ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Jose Antonio Dávalos, Ecuador’s Minister for the Environment, said in a statement: “This is encouraging news. It reaffirms our determination to establish new marine protected areas in Ecuador and to continue promoting the creation of a regional marine protected area in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. The richness of the yet explored depths of our ocean is another reason to strive towards achieving the commitments of the Global Ocean Alliance 30x30, which aims to protect at least 30% of the world's oceans by 2030”.

“The captivating thing about these reefs is that they are very old and essentially pristine, unlike those found in many other parts of the world’s oceans,” said Dr Stuart Banks of the Charles Darwin Foundation. Besides hopefully preserving many species that are endangered or extinct elsewhere, Banks noted the Galápagos reefs provide a baseline of a healthy reef that can be used to help restore damaged reefs.

Deep sea corals grow more slowly than those closer to the surface and can reach great ages. Like tree-rings, coral growth patterns can reveal historical climates, and the team hope to use old corals to fill in gaps in our knowledge of abrupt climate shifts.

Alvin’s manipulator arm collects samples from waters populated by cold water corals, squat lobsters, anemones, basket stars and deep-sea fish. Image credit: L. Robinson (U. Bristol), D. Fornari (WHOI), M. Taylor (U. Essex), D. Wanless (Boise State U.) NSF/NERC/HOV Alvin/WHOI MISO Facility, 2023 ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Deep sea reefs usually have much lower coverage with living coral than healthy reefs in shallow water, simply because so little sunlight penetrates down that far. The newly discovered reef is an exception. Dr Michelle Taylor of the University of Essex noted parts of it have 50-60 percent live coral coverage, compared to the 10-20 percent seen in reefs of similar depth elsewhere. The result is an abundance of fish and thriving invertebrate species.

The Galápagos Deep 2023 blog reports the collection of samples beginning on the first day of Alvin’s exploration, however, it’s too soon to know if any previously unknown species have been found.

Prior to the start of the mission Dr Samuel Mitchell of the University of Bristol stressed the interdisciplinary nature of the team. As an example of the questions the mission hopes to answer he said in a statement, “Do different lava flows on the seafloor control how and where corals grow? We honestly have no idea.” 

Having famously explored the Titanic, Alvin can go far deeper than the reef it has so far discovered, and there are plans to reach depths of 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) on this mission.

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The researchers evaluated their therapeutic benefit compared to existing standards of care, based on ratings from the national health technology assessment (HTA) organizations of Canada, France, and Germany. The team found that 27 of the 50 drugs received low added therapeutic benefit ratings from these agencies despite comprising 11 percent of net Medicare prescription drug spending. Results are published in JAMA.

"Unlike many industrialized countries, the U.S. has long had no national process for assessing the clinical benefits of drugs compared with existing treatment options and then negotiating prices based on the added therapeutic benefits they offer to patients," said first author Alexander C. Egilman, BA, of the Brigham Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics. "Therefore, our primary motivation was to understand the added benefits of high expenditure Medicare drugs according to foreign HTA organizations."

Most of the top-selling drugs were used to treat endocrine conditions including diabetes, cancer and respiratory diseases. Data from HTA organizations were available for 49 of the drugs.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will for the first time allow Medicare to negotiate the price of top-selling drugs. According to initial guidance released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, negotiations will be heavily influenced by a drug's comparative effectiveness against therapeutic alternatives. The new study found that seven of the ten drugs likely to be selected for negotiation this September had low overall added benefit.

"The new model of price negotiation under the Inflation Reduction Act provides a great opportunity for Medicare to stop paying excessively for top-selling drugs that do not offer meaningful clinical benefits over less expensive treatments," said corresponding author Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, of the Brigham Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics. "Our results suggest that Medicare has lots of bases on which to negotiate so top-selling drugs are, at a minimum, not priced higher than therapeutic alternatives."

Therapeutic benefits of each drug were determined based on the most favorable HTA rating, and ratings were not always available from all three countries. Extrapolating therapeutic ratings from foreign HTA agencies to the U.S. may not always be warranted, and the researchers suggested that the U.S. could benefit from establishing its own national HTA organization to determine therapeutic benefits.

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There's now a new type of rechargeable battery that could help in that department. Made from fully edible substances, it can dissolve safely in the stomach once it's done whatever it needs to do.

The prototype device outlined in a new study operates at a harmless 0.65 volts and provides a current of 48 microamperes for 12 minutes – within the range needed to give tiny electronics a power supply.

"Future potential uses range from edible circuits and sensors that can monitor health conditions to the powering of sensors for monitoring food storage conditions," says senior author Mario Caironi, a molecular electronics researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology.

"Moreover, given the level of safety of these batteries, they could be used in children's toys, where there is a high risk of ingestion."

Built from a varied list of ingredients, it's the first functional rechargeable battery that can be served as a snack. Its components include the vitamin riboflavin for the battery's anode (its 'negative' end), and the supplement quercetin as the cathode (the 'positive' end). The electrolyte (which generates the electrical charge) is made from a water-based solution, and the separator (which prevents short circuits) is made from nori, the seaweed you find at sushi restaurants.

The prototype in action. (Ilic et al., Advanced Materials, 2023)

Activated charcoal, often used to treat poisonings, is included to increase electrical conductivity, while the external contacts that transfer the electricity to another device are fashioned out of beeswax, connected to food-grade decorative gold.

Ok, nobody said it was a meal worthy of a Michelin star. But what it lacks in flavor it makes up for in potential.

The battery maintains its charge well over dozens of cycles, though it needs to be outside the body to be recharged. The prototype created here is around a square centimeter (0.155 square inches) in size, but the team is already working on making it smaller.

"Actually, we are already developing devices with greater capacity and reducing the overall size," says Caironi. "These developments will be tested in future also for powering edible soft robots."

If you've ever had a camera or other device threaded inside you, you'll know that these scans – while hugely important in detecting disease – aren't the most comfortable experiences. This is one area where this edible battery could help.

Another is in the field of food quality monitoring: devices could be used to check that foodstuffs were safe and up to the standards required while they're actually in the gut, before the monitoring device is digested along with the food.

All this is still some way off, but the researchers behind the prototype are hoping that their work leads to further developments in the field, with larger batteries used for energy storage and electric cars, for example.

"While our edible batteries won't power electric cars, they are proof that batteries can be made from safer materials than current Li-ion batteries," says one of the study's coauthors, Ivan Ilic, a sustainable energy storage scientist from the Italian Institute of Technology.

"We believe they will inspire other scientists to build safer batteries for a truly sustainable future."

The research has been published in Advanced Materials.

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• Congress failed to extend a key tax provision last year allowing companies to fully expense research & development costs in the year incurred, a blow to big corporations that had lobbied for it.

• But far greater pain is being felt by small businesses in the software development world, which have been blindsided by income tax bills that rose by as much as 400%, draining cash flow.

• Tech founders say many businesses will not survive for long and are already being forced to take out expensive loans, ask investors for more money in a miserable VC market, freeze hiring and consider staffing reductions.

Across the software development field, founders are experiencing an income tax season that has become an existential threat to their company’s survival. Software startups say they were blindsided by shocking tax bills as a result of a change in law related to research and development costs, and if Congress does not provide a retroactive fix, business failures will spread throughout the industry.

The root of the issue is the inability of lawmakers to extend a key tax provision that had bipartisan support at the end of last year that allows for full expensing of research and development costs under Section 174 of the tax code. That did not come out of nowhere, and was a big disappointment to major corporations that had lobbied for the measure. But for many small business owners who often wear multiple hats, don’t have lobbying arms or relationships with big four CPA firms, the change to require R&D amortization over a period of five years first became known this spring when accountants showed them the massive tax bills they owed the government. As word has spread throughout the software community, some owners remain too afraid to look at the full tax cost as they file for tax extensions and accountants revise their returns.

The pain is being felt from the smallest software developers of a dozen or less employees to large venture-backed companies sitting on pre-2022 frothy valuations, with tax bills rising to a level where cash flow is being drained, forcing painful financial decisions. Startups need to take out loans or extend lines of credit at a time of tighter bank lending and higher rates, ask VCs for more money during the worst fundraising environment in over a decade, freeze hiring and contemplate layoffs — if they have not started making them already within a sector leading the economy in job losses and running at a rate higher than the worst layoffs of the dotcom bubble. Many software firms will make it through this year, but if R&D full expensing treatment is not brought back, they say survival will become an issue.

The software development field is the starkest example of the fallout from the R&D tax change because its biggest expense is software development talent. Developers don’t come cheap, and until tax year 2022, these companies could fully expense those costs as R&D rather than having to amortize them over multiple years. Industry success relies on the contribution of software talent, but when that cost overwhelms cash flow and profits, it potentially makes the business model untenable.

“I’ve been involved in bootstrapped software for 20 years, and I have lots of connections, hundreds of others under $10 million in revenue, and everyone I have talked to had no idea this was coming,” said Ian Landsman, founder of New York-based customer support software maker HelpSpot.

How bad is it? According to Landon Bennett, co-founder of Georgia-based software firm Ad Reform, which provides automation technology for the advertising industry, his taxable income has gone up by 400%. “It’s been a tough year for the ad agencies, in the five or six toughest years we’ve ever had, so this is like a bomb on top of an already bad year,” he said.

Bennett has already forsaken his entire compensation for 2022 to pay the tax bill and said he considers himself fortunate to be able to put his entire pay towards it. But he added, “I can take that hit this year, but I can’t take it forever.”

He does not have to currently consider any staff changes, and says that is the last decision a software firm ever wants to make, with the cost of finding people and training them on code high, and building up the internal knowledge base among seasoned developers, critical to success and growth. But he did have to put annual profit sharing with employees on hold for now — a decision he recently explained to staff in a video call about the R&D tax issue — and he says the situation is dire for many other small companies and will get worse if no retroactive change is made to tax law.

“It’s very bad from a cash flow perspective,” Landsman said, who estimates an increase between $140,000-$160,00 in taxes this year. The longer it goes on, the bigger the annual tax bills become. “That’s a humongous change and one we were not expecting. We don’t just have a few million sitting around to write a check and not be too worried,” he said.

Landsman said he is able to tap lines of credit for now, but is paying 9% interest, and he says many other founders he knows don’t have that option. “They will have to mortgage their house ... others just wont pay and hope it gets fixed, or just not do taxes correctly,” he said. Landman is already being forced to make decisions that impede the business. Since a software developer left at the end of last year, the position has not been replaced. “Small software companies are just not set up to absorb the cost over five years,” he said. “Everything is structured around revenue in and a lot right back out to employees.”

The legislative effort hasn’t stopped on Capitol Hill, with a bill introduced last month by Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana and Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and bipartisan House legislation being introduced on Tuesday by Kansas Republican Ron Estes and Connecticut Democrat John Larson, with 60 co-sponsors, evenly split along party lines.

But the challenges haven’t changed, and there are more of them, highlighted by the debt ceiling negotiations which need to occur before any tax priorities move on the Hill. On Monday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy brought his message to the New York Stock Exchange, where he stressed the need to cut spending to get a one-year debt ceiling deal done, but conceded in an interview with CNBC he did not even have his own party on board yet for his plan. Negotiations between the GOP and Democrats over the size of any expanded child tax credit to match against the R&D expense price tag, which was the main snag last year, remain a moving target, though more GOP members have expressed openness to some form of the child tax credit and some Democrats’ are said to be willing to accept a lower amount, though there has been no formal offer made yet.

As the House legislation is introduced, a grassroots effort is gaining momentum among software developers, with nearly 600 small business owners including Landsman and Bennett signing a letter to the Hill desks of House Way and Means Committee chair Jason Smith (R-Missouri) and Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) on Tuesday morning, asking for “urgent relief” and warning that failure to bring back full R&D expensing may wipe out their companies.

“You will see damage in the short-term, but the much bigger red alert situation will be in the next 12-24 months,” said Bennett.

“We are now facing difficult choices because of the large, unexpected, and unprecedented tax liability that we face. Many of us have frozen hiring or suspended projects. Some of us are now considering laying off staff or reducing salaries. Others are borrowing to pay our taxes, either from credit cards, personal savings, or lines of credit,” states the letter from the ssballiance.org.

Congressman Estes believes that legislative odds have improved, for two reasons, even though the bipartisan legislation which had well over 100 co-sponsors last year failed to move. Even with the debt ceiling looming, he says there is more time this year to pursue the tax change compared to last year’s rushed effort during a lame duck session of Congress. And lawmakers are coming to understand the economic consequences of letting this tax issue go unresolved.

“It should have passed last year. Everyone liked it and wanted it to, and we ran out of time,” he said. “There is also a lesson learned out of last year by not having it done, and maybe people making the assumption it would be OK if we didn’t pass it. Now they sense this is a real cost and essential for short- term and long-term growth, and a little bit more of a recognition and willingness to focus.”

That’s a view that is also making small business trade groups that have been on top of the issue for longer than most more optimistic than they were at the end of last year. “Congress often acts when what we said would happen actually does and it all erupts once the impact becomes real and painful,” said Karen Kerrigan, president & CEO of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council. “Congress is beginning to hear from small business owners about the widespread and negative impact of these shocking tax bills, and what it means for innovation and their ability to compete. ... I do see a path for some type of fix, but it has to come pretty quickly for the many small businesses.”

While small business owners like Bennett and Landsman have never had a relationship with big companies on the issue, they recently met with PwC’s national tax services lead Rohit Kumar, a former top aide to Mitch McConnell, who found the grassroots movement on Twitter and reached out to make a connection. Kumar says all the same legislative hurdles remain that killed the effort last year, and on top of that the debt ceiling which must be dealt with first. But he said the “increasing loudness” from the small businesses that are affected and show up to express their view to lawmakers is a notable development. “It’s more persuasive and another reason why Congress can’t just twiddle its thumbs and let the opportunity go by,” he said. “It’s not just big companies writing big checks, where at the margins it means fewer R&D projects, less investment and fewer people hired. That’s an abstraction even if real economic consequence.”

Landsman says many small businesses “will scratch and get by this year,” but running up an expensive deficit into next year if this tax law is not fixed will lead to many small business failures. “You can only mortgage something or max a line of credit for so long,” he said.

For a business model built on software development talent, a cash flow drain that requires an owner to consider letting all developers go is an untenable position.

“I am super worried,” Landsman said. “Some won’t even make it through this year, and a lot not the next year or two. They are not going to come up with the money, and it doesn’t make sense to fire half your staff. So they will have to sell at a bad premium or just fold up,” he added.

Some small business owners are said to be contemplating incorporation overseas as a way to avoid the U.S. tax system in a worst-case scenario.

Bennett says the odds may be 50-50, but many software startup founders like him have no choice but to believe that Congress will act, because the alternative to not bringing back full expensing of R&D is non-existence. “I think it would be existential for the entire tech start-up community,” he said. “Kind of like the bank run, but for tech.”

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