This was known as Project Ozma, which relied on the "Big Ear" radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Greenbank, West Virginia, to look for signs of radio transmissions in Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Despite the many surveys conducted since then, no definitive evidence of technological activity (i.e., "technosignatures") has been found.

This naturally raises the all-important question: are we going about the business of SETI wrong? Instead of looking for technosignatures within our galaxy, as all previous SETI surveys have done, should we look for activity beyond our galaxy (from possible Type II and Type III civilizations)?

This premise was explored in a recent paper led by researchers from the National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. Using data from the largest SETI project to date, Breakthrough Listen, the team looked for potential radio technosignatures from extragalactic sources.

The research team was led by Yuri Uno, a Ph.D. physics student at the National Chung Hsing University (NCHU) in Taichung, Taiwan. She was joined by an international team of astronomers and astrophysicists from the National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Hsinchu, Taiwan; the Australian National University (ANU), and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).

The paper that describes their research and findings recently appeared in the Monthly Notices for the Royal Astronomical Society.

Kardashev Scale energy consumption estimates for three types of civilizations. (Indif/Gts-tg/CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons)

A key consideration for the team's study is the Kardashev Scale, the scheme for classifying extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) proposed by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. According to Kardashev, ETIs could be classified into three "types" based on the amount of energy they can harness.

•     Type I – "Planetary civilizations" capable of harnessing and storing all of their home planet's energy (4×1019 erg/sec).

•     Type II – "Stellar civilizations" capable of harnessing all the energy emitted by their star (4×1033 erg/sec)

•     Type III – "Galactic Civilizations" capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy (4×1044 erg/sec).

To date, the majority of SETI studies were focused (implicitly or explicitly) on activities consistent with a Type I civilization. Aside from limited speculation about transiting megastructures, like the mysterious dimming of KIC 8462852 (aka. Tabby's Star), attempts to look for possible Type II and Type III technosignatures has been very limited.

According to the Taiwanese team, this leaves SETI surveys very limited in terms of the search area and overlooks potential technosignatures that would be very luminous.

As Ono explained to Universe Today via email:

"Most SETI surveys have focused solely on stars within our galaxy and have primarily searched for radio signals, assuming that other civilizations are similar to ours and use radio communication.

"However, this approach is less efficient regarding the number of observable stars because observations are conducted one by one out of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Also, this approach may not be comprehensive enough to detect more advanced hypothetical civilizations that could handle strong radio signals in other galaxies."

To address these limitations, Ono and her team focused on expanding the search beyond our galaxy and considered the possibility of highly advanced civilizations. These civilizations would be capable of sending several orders of magnitude more information over much greater distances, greatly increasing the odds of detection.

According to Kardashev's original paper, a Type II civilization would be capable of transmitting 3×109 bits/sec within a 100,000 light-year radius from their star system, 3×105 bits/sec within a 1 million light-year radius, but nothing beyond that.

A Type III civilization would be capable of transmitting at a rate of 2.4×1015 to 2.4×1013 bits/sec within a 100,000 and 10 million light-year radius and 3×1010 bits/sec within a 10 billion light-years radius.

For their study, Uno and her team examined data obtained by Breakthrough Listen (BL) since it began in 2016. Specifically, they conducted a statistical analysis of the non-detection results reported by BL.

As Uno explained, the lack of detection allowed the BL team to establish upper limits on the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations based on the number of stars they observed:

"However, the radio telescopes' field of view was much larger than the apparent size of the target stars, allowing them to simultaneously observe other galaxies in the background. Therefore, we analyzed the number of stellar systems based on the background galaxies, assuming that advanced civilizations would have the capacity to send us signals from other galaxies. Our statistical analysis suggests that BL may have observed hundreds of trillions of stellar systems."

By taking into account background galaxies from previously-observed SETI fields, Uno and her colleagues found that the number of observed stars was much greater than previously reported.

In fact, they found that the total number was about ten orders of magnitude (n10) greater than previous studies that focused on individual stars in our galaxy. However, as Uno explained, their results indicated that the number of civilizations in our local Universe that we might have a shot of hearing from was staggeringly low:

"Our statistical method suggests that less than one in hundreds of trillions of extragalactic civilizations within 969 Mpc possess a radio transmitter above 7.7 x 1026 W of power, assuming one civilization per one-solar-mass stellar system. Additionally, we cross-matched the BL survey fields with the WISE SuperCOSMOS Photometric Redshift Catalog and compared [it] with the statistical method.

"Our result sets the strictest limits to date on the transmitter rate at such high power levels, emphasizing the high efficiency of searching for radio transmitters in galaxies and the rarity of technologically advanced civilizations in our Universe."

Granted, this latest statistical analysis might sound like bad news. But it's important to note that research that establishes limits on the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial civilizations is essential to SETI research.

This is what SETI forerunner Dr. Frank Drake attempted to capture with his famous Drake Equation, which established theoretical limits on the number of ETIs humanity could communicate within our galaxy. By extending those limits beyond the Milky Way, Uno and her colleagues have established theoretical constraints that are many orders of magnitude higher.

What's more, Uno stressed that this latest analysis only covers a fraction of the known Universe and is subject to significant limitations in frequency and duration. What's more, she says, it presents new opportunities for SETI research:

"[I]t is important to note that even though this was the largest SETI search ever conducted, it covered only a fraction of the sky (0.05 percent), a fraction of frequency (0.5 percent) and limited time duration (5 minutes). Moreover, there are other parameters to consider, such as timing and direction, and we cannot immediately conclude that we are alone in the universe.

"Previous works are limited by the small number of observed stars. In this paper, we demonstrated how efficient the extragalactic SETI search is in terms of the number of observable stars. Therefore, I believe that extra galaxies are the frontier of SETI research, and we must continue our SETI search to understand the possibility of other civilizations better."

Further reading: arXiv

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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To photographer Todd Salat, auroras are worth a patient wait in the cold night air. Yet early Saturday morning, near the city of Delta Junction, he caught sight of a meteorological phenomenon that was quite unlike anything he'd ever seen.

Against a stunning backdrop of rippling green light, a blue spiral blossomed from a bright light on the northern horizon, growing larger as it quickly moved across the sky.

A timelapse of the amazing view can be seen in the clip below, starting at around 1 minute 28 seconds on the video (timestamp of 0950 UT).

< Watch the video at the source page.>

"It was a beautiful piece of art in the sky," Salat told Annie Berman from Anchorage Daily News.

Thankfully Salat was prepared, capturing some stunning photographs of the spiral for all of us to appreciate.

As unusual as the sight might have been to Alaskan residents, it's far from the first time a glowing swirl has drawn the attention of beguiled skywatchers. And it has a pretty simple explanation.

A few hours prior to the spiral's appearance, half a continent away at California's Vandenberg Space Force Base, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket containing dozens of satellites as part of their Transporter-7 mission.

Minutes after launch, the first stage rocket dropped back to the surface and gently landed, available to be reused in future missions.

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9's upper stage continued into orbit where it completed its mission before descending back to Earth in a tumbling spiral.

Venting its leftover fuel in the upper atmosphere, water vapor in the gasses would have frozen into tiny, light-reflecting crystals.

Though we can only really speculate on the cause of this particular glowing whirl, sky spirals have appeared in connection with rocket launches for years, making it a sound bet that Salat snapped a space mission and not an invading cosmic jellyfish.

As stunning as the view is, however, not all enthusiasts of nature's beauty would be keen to see more like it.

Swarms of tiny satellites filling the night sky are becoming an astronomer's nightmare, streaking across star fields and polluting pristine views of the heavens.

With commercial space travel taking off and making orbiting technology cheaper, glowing space spirals are bound to become less mysterious. Meaning we'll be seeing more artworks like this blooming in the sky in the near future.

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The study, led by Oscar Woolnough, Ph.D., postdoctoral research fellow in the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, and Nitin Tandon, MD, professor and chair ad interim of the department in the medical school, was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"This study helps us better understand how distributed hubs in the brain's language network work together and interact to allow us to understand complex sentences," said Woolnough, first author on the study and member of the Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnologies (TIRN) at UTHealth Houston. "Our brains are remarkably interconnected, and for us to understand language requires a precise sequence of rapid, dynamic processes to occur in multiple sites all across our brain."

In order to identify the specific roles and interactions of the brain areas involved in reading, the research team performed recordings from the brains of patients with electrodes surgically placed to localize epilepsy. The neural activity of these patients was measured while reading three forms of sentences: regular sentences; "Jabberwocky" sentences (based on Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" poem), which use correct grammar and syntax but contain nonsense words, making them meaningless; and lists of words or nonsense words.

From these recordings, they identified two brain networks that play a key role in the reading process. One network involves a region of the brain's frontal lobe that sends signals to the temporal lobe, which shows progressive activation when a person is building up complex meaning along the length of a sentence.

The second network involves another region of the brain's temporal lobe that sends signals to an area of the frontal lobe, allowing understanding of the context of a sentence to enable easier comprehension and processing of each new word that is read.

"Implanted electrodes in the brain provide us an unparalleled insight into the inner workings of the human mind, especially for processes that are rapid, such as reading. Our work is making it clear that most processes—say comprehension or language generation—don't occur in a single region, but are best understood as very transient states that many separate areas of the brain achieve by very brief, yet critical, interactions," said Tandon, the study's senior author, who is also the Nancy, Clive and Pierce Runnels Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience of the Vivian L. Smith Center for Neurologic Research and the BCMS Distinguished Professor in Neurological Disorders and Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School.

Understanding the science behind the highly rapid, complex process of reading will allow the researchers to learn more about how the brain functions during dyslexia. Ultimately, they hope their findings will help guide treatment options for the reading disorder, which affects approximately 15% of people living in the U.S.

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Google’s chief executive has said concerns about artificial intelligence keep him awake at night and that the technology can be “very harmful” if deployed wrongly.

Sundar Pichai also called for a global regulatory framework for AI similar to the treaties used to regulate nuclear arms use, as he warned that the competition to produce advances in the technology could lead to concerns about safety being pushed aside.

In an interview on CBS’s 60 minutes programme, Pichai said the negative side to AI gave him restless nights. “It can be very harmful if deployed wrongly and we don’t have all the answers there yet – and the technology is moving fast. So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely,” he said.

Google’s parent, Alphabet, owns the UK-based AI company DeepMind and has launched an AI-powered chatbot, Bard, in response to ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by the US tech firm OpenAI, which has become a phenomenon since its release in November.

Pichai said governments would need to figure out global frameworks for regulating AI as it developed. Last month, thousands of artificial intelligence experts, researchers and backers – including the Twitter owner Elon Musk – signed a letter calling for a pause in the creation of “giant” AIs for at least six months, amid concerns that development of the technology could get out of control.

Asked if nuclear arms-style frameworks could be needed, Pichai said: “We would need that.”

The AI technology behind ChatGPT and Bard, known as a Large Language Model, is trained on a vast trove of data taken from the internet and is able to produce plausible responses to prompts from users in a range of formats, from poems to academic essays and software coding. The image-generating equivalent, in systems such as Dall-E and Midjourney, has also triggered a mixture of astonishment and alarm by producing realistic images such as the pope sporting a puffer jacket.

Pichai added that AI could cause harm through its ability to produce disinformation. “It will be possible with AI to create, you know, a video easily. Where it could be Scott [Pelley, the CBS interviewer] saying something, or me saying something, and we never said that. And it could look accurate. But you know, on a societal scale, you know, it can cause a lot of harm.”

The Google chief added that the version of its AI technology now available to the public, via the Bard chatbot, was safe. He added that Gooogle was being responsible by holding back more advanced versions of Bard for testing.

Pichai’s comments came as the New York Times reported on Sunday that Google was building a new AI-powered search engine in response to Microsoft’s rival service Bing, which has been integrated with the chatbot technology behind ChatGPT.

Pichai admitted that Google did not fully understand how its AI technology produced certain responses.

“There is an aspect of this which we call, all of us in the field call it as a ‘black box’. You know, you don’t fully understand. And you can’t quite tell why it said this, or why it got wrong.”

Asked by the CBS journalist Scott Pelley why Google had released Bard publicly when he didn’t fully understand how it worked, Pichai replied: “Let me put it this way. I don’t think we fully understand how a human mind works either.”

Pichai admitted that society did not appear to be ready for rapid advances in AI. He said there “seems to be a mismatch” between the pace at which society thinks and adapts to change compared with the pace at which AI was evolving. However, he added that at least people have become alert to its potential dangers more quickly.

“Compared to any other technology, I’ve seen more people worried about it earlier in its life cycle. So I feel optimistic,” he said.

Pichai said the economic impact of AI would be significant because it would impact everything. He added: “This is going to impact every product across every company and so that’s why I think it’s a very, very profound technology.”

Using a medical example, Pichai said in five to 10 years a radiologist could be working with an AI assistant to help prioritise cases. He added that “knowledge workers” such as writers, accountants, architects and software engineers would be affected.

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Most mornings in spring I listen for a sequence of birdsongs to know that my local area is in good heart, but also to reassure myself that the world is working largely as it should. The default soloist of my dawn in Buxton, Derbyshire, is a mistle thrush that delivers from the ash tree above our house.

As I listen to my soloist there is an added delight in knowing that, from Cape Wrath in northernmost Scotland to Kingsdown in Kent, his voice unites with tens of millions of other dawn birds. The blue and great tits of the inner cities, blackbirds and robins among the English villages, chaffinches and wrens through the remotest Scottish glens: it is a collective performance, free of charge, unfolding across all Britain to all people.

Have we time enough and opportunity, we can attune ourselves to one of the greatest events of every April morning on our planet, since birdsong unfolds across all Eurasia and North America as daylight processes over those lands too. Think of it as the Earth rejoicing at the sun’s cyclical return.

The global chorus may unite us in planetary ritual but increasingly, as underlined by a recent report, there are more and more gaps in the avian responses to this daily passage. Both in the long and short term, Britain’s birds are now shown to be on a dangerous downward trajectory.

The UK has lost 40m birds since 1970 and Europe as a whole has lost 600m birds since 1980. The British figures, especially for farmland species such as skylark and lapwing, have long been the worst of any country in the region. The North American continent, meanwhile, but especially the US, has seen avian populations fall by almost a third since 1970, losing a cumulative 3bn birds.

What is at stake is not simply some aesthetic thrill or existential reassurance which we have long vested in our avian neighbours, although the prospect of these losses alone is crushing. Aldous Huxley once suggested that if you took birds out of the English poetic canon you would have to lose half the nation’s verse.

We have yet truly to understand how much environmental loss is also cultural impoverishment, but the lesson is now among us. Imagine the arts without the following: music without Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, ballet without Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, poetry without Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, literature without JA Baker’s The Peregrine.

‘If you took birds out of the English poetic canon you would have to lose half the nation’s verse.’ Eurasian wren. Photograph: Arterra Picture Library/Alamy

In its 150-year history as a science, ecology has increasingly revealed how life functions as an infinitely complex yet always interconnecting process. Affect a single part of nature and we invariably see major, often unforeseen, even counterintuitive, consequences elsewhere. The best recent illustration of this was a study from Germany in 2017 known as the Krefeld report.

It showed what impacts had resulted from 60 years’ use of agricultural poison – the so-called pesticides that are a default instrument of intensive agriculture. And revealed that Germany’s insect biomass had declined by 75%. Most alarming was the fact that losses were recorded not among serried fields of chemically drenched maize, but inside the nation’s network of protected nature reserves. No arrangement of our affairs in our heads, or on paper, can gainsay life’s indivisible unity. In nature there is only one place. And it is everywhere, even in our towns and cities.

As the most charismatic component of our full wildlife spectrum, birds enjoy major, some would say disproportionate, concern and attention. Our largest wildlife charity is still the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, with 1.3 million members. Yet our so-called feathered friends perform an infallible service to other lifeforms that don’t enjoy the same levels of love such as insects, lichens and fungi.

Birds are the ultimate vertebrate life form arising in almost all environments, whether it is a kittiwake on a sea cliff, or a blue tit hunting for caterpillars in our garden, or a worm-probing curlew on high moorland, or a barn owl patrolling down the cornfield’s hedge border. Each is completely dependent upon the continued healthy functioning of all the other parts of life in their specific places: the bacteria, protists, tardigrades, nematodes, springtails, insects, arachnids, fungi, lichens, mosses, flowers, trees, molluscs, crustacea, fishes, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. If birds are in trouble, then we can be absolutely sure that the rest of the system is in crisis too.

Our own species shares a place at the top of this pyramid of life. If birds continue to decline then so too shall the very network on which the human project depends. And we depend on this network in its entirety.

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The "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" mark some of the most impressive structural achievements of their time in the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. While just one of the seven structures remains standing today, these fascinating feats of engineering provide a glimpse into the complex cultures of some of these ancient communities.

With an average age of 1,158 years, all seven of these structures were said to have existed just a short distance from one another throughout Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. In fact, you’d be able to visit all seven structures in just a 5,500-kilometer (3,500-mile) trip, which is equivalent to traveling from London to New York.

The Great Pyramid of Giza

Both the oldest and the largest of all seven structures is the Great Pyramid of Giza, located in Egypt. Standing at an initial height of 147 meters (482 feet) and dating back around 4,500 years, the pyramid is the only ancient wonder still left standing, although it’s now 8 meters (26 feet) shorter.

Built as a tomb for Pharaoh Khufu, the pyramid is believed to have taken over 20 years to build, and its 2.3 million stone bricks weigh a total of 5.75 million tonnes.

While the ancient Egyptian’s ability to build such gigantic structures is shrouded in conspiracy, we actually know a great deal about how the pyramids were built – spoiler, it doesn’t involve aliens.

The Great Pyramid of Giza. Image credit: WitR / Shutterstock

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Described as being filled with waterfalls and exotic fruit, with flowers and tropical plants hanging from its walls, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is the second oldest structure on the list, but many believe it never actually existed.

Believed to have been built around 2,600 years ago by the ruler of Babylonia, King Nebuchadnezzar II, for his wife Amytis, the gardens have been described by many but the site where it once stood has never been found. 

Thought to have been located in modern-day Iraq, some speculate the gardens were destroyed by an earthquake some 700 years after its construction, but there’s no archaeological evidence of the structure existing in the region.

How the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may have looked. Image credit: AstralManSigmaDelta / Shutterstock

The Temple of Artemis

Located in modern-day Turkey, the Temple of Artemis once stood in an ancient city called Ephesus around 2,500 years ago. The temple was the first all-marble temple ever built in Greece, and its 115-meter-long (377 feet) floorplan was said to feature 127 columns and a number of sculptures and paintings.

It was constructed as a place of worship for the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, and the temple’s beauty prompted Greek engineer and physicist Philo of Byzantium to claim it put all the other wonders “in the shade”.

While the temple went through phases of destruction and rebuilding, its final fate came some 200 years after final construction by a man named Herostratus, who set the structure alight in an effort to find fame by destroying this well-loved wonder. What was left of the temple was further destroyed 100 years later by an earthquake, but the remains have recently been dug up by archaeologists.

What the Temple of Artemis probably looked like. Image credit: Multipedia / Shutterstock

The Statue of Zeus

Around 2,400 years ago the Statue of Zeus was erected by Greek sculptor Phidias in Olympia, Western Greece. The 12-meter (40-foot) tall statue, made largely of ivory, showed the Greek god Zeus on a gold-encrusted throne covered in gemstones. In one hand the statue held an eagle topped scepter, and in the other, a statue of Nike, the goddess of victory.

While the exact destruction of the statue is unknown, it’s believed to have been destroyed sometime in the fifth century BCE. Some believe a fire or an earthquake caused the enormous statue to collapse, and others think it was destroyed by hand and pieces of it sent to different cities.

The Statue of Zeus. Image credit: garanga / Shutterstock

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

Halicarnassus, the capital of Caria, was once a thriving ancient city that now sits in modern-day Turkey. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus was erected over 2,300 years ago as an above-ground tomb for Mausolus, the King of Caria.

The term “mausoleum” – to mean a large above-ground tomb – was coined as a result of King Mausolus’s grand 45-meter (147-foot) tall resting place. The structure was described as being a pyramid shape with 63 columns at the top, with the interior covered in intricate carvings, art, and sculptures.

The mausoleum was ultimately believed to be destroyed by a number of earthquakes in the 12th and 15th centuries, but some remains of the structure do still stand today.

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Image credit: Multipedia / Shutterstock

The Colossus of Rhodes

Built over 2,300 years ago on the island of Rhodes in the eastern Aegean Sea, the Colossus of Rhodes was a statue by the sculptor Chares of Lindos of the Greek Sun god Helios. A victory monument, the statue was erected in honor of the island’s defeat of the invading army of Demetrius.

While nothing remains of the statue today, it was thought to have stood on a 15-meter (50-foot) tall three-tiered column, with the statue itself measuring 34 meters (110 feet) in height. 

The statue collapsed after an earthquake some 100 years after construction, but its remains stuck around for another 800 years after being toppled.

The Colossus of Rhodes. Image credit: ArtMari / Shutterstock

The Lighthouse of Alexandria

The marginally youngest of all the seven wonders is the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which was constructed some 2,300 years ago. Serving as a functioning lighthouse for the small island of Pharos in Egypt, this design was a little different from other lighthouses.

Standing at an estimated 122 meters (400 feet) tall, the structure was made from sandstone and limestone, and it was one of the world's tallest human-made structures for centuries. At the top, there was a mirror that reflected the Sun during the day and a fire that was lit at night.

The lighthouse later collapsed in the mid-14th century as a result of coastal erosion and earthquakes. Despite efforts to salvage the structure, what remains now lies underwater.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria. Image credit: garanga / Shutterstock

Where to find them

While the jury’s still out on the existence of some of these structures, the remains of many still stand today. They can be visited in their modern-day locations of Greece, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt.

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A Spanish mountain climber recently left a cave 70 meters (230 feet) underground where she spent the past 500 days isolated from the outside world. As she emerged, she seemed remarkably unfazed by her feat and simply asked who would be buying the celebratory round of beers.

Beatriz Flamini, a 50-year-old from Madrid, reportedly left the cave in southern Spain on April 14, 2023, after entering on November 21, 2021. Although it’s yet to be confirmed by the big dogs at Guinness World Records, this is widely thought to be a world record for the longest time spent underground. 

Technically, her stint of isolation lasted 508 days as she was forced to temporarily leave the cave for eight days due to a technical problem. However, throughout this eight days hiatus, she claimed to have still maintained isolation and stayed in a tent before returning to her cave.

She passed the time by reading, exercising, and knitting. She also kept busy with her two cameras that were used to chronicle her experiences for an upcoming documentary.

Being severed from the outside world, she was totally unaware of major news events from the past 500 days, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

"I'm still stuck on November 21, 2021. I don't know anything about the world," she said after exiting the cave, according to BBC News.

She was given a panic button just in case the feat become too overwhelming or if something went wrong. However, Flamini said she was never tempted to call for help and never considered leaving the cave. 

"Never. In fact, I didn't want to come out," she told reporters after leaving the cave. 

On some of the questions, Flamini struggled to reply and stumbled on her words – although that’s fairly understandable considering the extreme social isolation she has faced. 

“I’ve been a year and a half without talking, and I find it difficult,” she added.

Flamini calls herself an "elite extreme sportswoman" who appears to have undertaken the experience just for the thrill of the challenge, although her efforts were being closely monitored by a team of experts and scientists. According to Reuters, they were studying her to see how social isolation and disorientation impact a person’s sense of time and their sleeping patterns.

In 2021, a separate team of 15 people emerged from a cave after just 50 days inside. The aim was to see how extreme isolation and no outside reference to time affected their bodies and minds. Completely cut off from daylight and clocks, the group had to rely on their circadian rhythms – or body clocks – to decide when to eat and sleep. Meanwhile, scientists monitored their body temperatures, sleep patterns, social interactions, and behavioral and cognitive responses to their new environment. 

Flamini’s undertaking was even more extreme than this comparatively mild experiment in 2021, so scientists will no doubt be keen to probe her body and mind to see how this intense situation has affected her. 

Judging by her initial response to leaving the cave, however, she is certainly made of tough stuff. 

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Recent excavations at the Villa of the Quintilii uncovered the remains of a unique winery just outside Rome.

The mid-third-century CE building located along the Via Appia Antica portrays a sense of opulence and performance almost never found at an ancient production site.

This exciting complex illustrates how elite Romans fused utilitarian function with luxurious decoration and theatre to fashion their social and political status.

I was one of the specialist archaeologists studying this newly excavated site. The details of this discovery are outlined in our new article in Antiquity.

View of the excavated winery at the Villa of the Quintilii on the Via Appia Antica, Rome. S. Castellani. Image credit: S. Castellani, from Dodd et al. Antiquity, 2023

The Villa of the Quintilii

From names stamped on a lead water pipe, we know the 24 hectare ancient Roman villa complex was owned by the wealthy Quintilii brothers, who served as consuls in 151 CE.

The Roman emperor Commodus had the brothers killed in 182/3 CE.

He took possession of their properties, including this villa, initiating long-term imperial ownership.

The site has been long known for its decorative architecture, including coloured marble tiling, high-quality statuary recovered over the last 400 years, and a monumental bathing complex.

Less known is an enormous circus for chariot racing built during the reign of Commodus.

From 2017-18, during an attempt to discover the starting gates of the circus, the first traces of a unique winery were revealed.

A luxury Roman imperial winery

This large complex was built on top of the circus starting gates, which dates it after the reign of Commodus.

The complex possesses features commonly found in ancient Roman wineries: a grape treading area, two wine presses, a vat to collect grape must (the juice of the grapes along with their skins, seeds and stems) and a cellar with large clay jars for storage and fermentation sunk into the ground.

However, the decoration and arrangement of these features is almost completely unparalleled in the ancient world.

Aerial view of the excavated winery at the Villa of the Quintilii. Production areas are at the top (A–D), and the cellar (E) with adjacent dining rooms (F) in the lower half of the image. Image credit: M.C.M s.r.l and adaptation in Dodd et al. Antiquity 2023

Nearly all the production areas are clad in marble veneer tiling. Even the treading area, normally coated in waterproof cocciopesto plaster, is covered in red breccia marble. This luxurious material, combined with its impracticalities (it is very slippery when wet, unlike plaster), conveys the extreme sense of luxury.

Two immense mechanical lever presses sit either side of the treading area to press the already trodden grape pulp.

The size and scale of these presses working up and down in harmony would have contributed to the theatre of the production process.

The grape juice produced from treading and pressing flowed from these areas into a long rectangular vat, where an impression from a stamp named the short-reigning emperor Gordian (deposed 244 CE). This confirms a date of construction or renovation.

But it is here the real performance would have begun.

The liquid grape must poured like a striking fountain out of the vat and through a facade around one metre in height that closely resembles a Roman nymphaeum (a monumental decorated fountain).

While must flowed out of the three central niches, water flowed out of those on either end and was then channelled back underground through a system of lead pipes.

This niched facade was originally clad in a decorative veneer of brightly coloured white, black, grey and red marble. Some pieces remain attached and more were found loose in the excavated layers.

A system of thin open white marble channels conveyed the grape must from the facade into an open-air cellar area.

Here it was fed into 16 buried clay jars (dolia defossa) large enough for a person to fit inside. The remains of eight were uncovered during excavations.

The cellar with marble-lined distribution channels and eight buried clay jars reinstated in their original positions. Image credit: Dodd et al., Antiquity 2023

Three rooms paved in opulent geometric marble tiling, like those found in other areas of the villa, were arranged around the cellar.

We might imagine the emperor and his retinue reclining, eating and watching the spectacle of production and tasting freshly pressed must.

Theatrical vintage ritual in ancient Italy

The only other example like this facility can be found at Villa Magna, 50 kilometres to the south-east near Anagni.

This similarly opulent marble-clad winery was in use just before the Villa of the Quintilii, from the early second to early third century CE, with an area for dining that enabled a view of the production spaces.

In Marcus Aurelius’ letters to his tutor Fronto, we are given a rare glimpse into the activities of Villa Magna around 140-145 CE. He describes the imperial party banqueting while watching and listening to the workers treading grapes.

It is likely this formed part of a vintage ritual, tied to the ceremonial opening of the harvest. Perhaps this ritual also occurred at the slightly later Villa of the Quintilii facility.

Lavish marble-clad spaces marked areas fit for the imperial party and the winery was the “theatre” for this sacred performance.

One tantalising question remains unanswered: was the Roman emperor’s spectacular, ritual winery moved in the early third century CE from Villa Magna to the Villa of the Quintilii?

Emlyn Dodd, Lecturer in Classical Studies, Institute of Classical Studies, University of London; Assistant Director of Archaeology, British School at Rome; Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow, Macquarie University, Macquarie University

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

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This Thursday a hybrid eclipse will occur over parts of Australia, East Timor, and occupied West Papua. Mostly, however, it will be over ocean. It’s the first hybrid eclipse since 2013. As always with solar eclipses, people over a much larger area, in this case Australia and South-East Asia, will experience the dimming of a partial eclipse, and this one could be particularly worth viewing if skies are clear.

What is a hybrid eclipse?

The existence of a hybrid eclipses depends on a curious fact: the Sun and Moon take up almost exactly the same area of the sky. It wasn’t always like this – the Moon is getting steadily further away so it looked larger quite recently, and soon it will be noticeably smaller. Moreover, the Moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular, which affects its apparent size, giving us so-called “supermoons” when the Moon happens to be full near the closest part of its orbit. 

When closer, the Moon is large enough to create a total solar eclipse if it passes directly between a part of the Earth and the Sun. However, when the three bodies line up perfectly, but the Moon is further from us, it creates an annular eclipse, where a ring of the actual Sun (not just the corona) can briefly be seen encircling the Moon. The solar eclipse crossing parts of North and South America later this year will be annular, while next year’s North American event will be total.

A hybrid eclipse occurs when the Moon is close enough to produce a total eclipse over the nearest parts of the Earth, but when the eclipse path reaches areas made more distant by the curve of the Earth it becomes annular (Flat Earthers might want to think about this for a moment).

For this to happen the timing needs to be near-perfect, at the point of the Moon’s orbit where its full shadow reaches the nearest part of Earth, but only just.

Put like this, the amazing thing is not that hybrid eclipses happen only every decade or so, but that they are not a once-in-a-millennium thing. Nevertheless, this is the third of this century, and in 1986/87 two happened within six months.

Just because an eclipse is hybrid doesn’t mean most viewers will get to see both total and annular states. Solar eclipses occur over long, narrow stretches of the planet and for most of that distance the eclipse is either one thing or another. To see both you'd need to be in an aircraft racing with the Moon’s shadow.

On either side of this path observers see only a partial eclipse – it makes no difference to them whether they are nearer the total or annular part.

Thursday’s eclipse

The April 20 eclipse appears to have gone out of its way to make it hard for observers to see it. The line of totality touches Australia’s coast at the Exmouth Peninsula and passes over Barrow Island. Both are far from major population centers and could handle only a small number of tourists, even before last week’s major cyclone. From there it bends away from Indonesia’s more populated islands, passing over East Timor and West Papua before heading out to the Pacific. 

Some people undeterred by the COVID experience will be watching it from cruise ships off the Australian coast. 

For most of its path, including all the parts over land, the eclipse is total, only becoming annular at its very beginning and end in the southern and mid-Pacific Oceans, respectively.

On the plus side, hundreds of millions of people will get to see a partial eclipse if they have the right equipment, but outside Indonesia for most of them it will be very partial indeed. From Melbourne and Sydney around 20 percent will be obscured at maximum, and a thin sliver of south-eastern China will witness just a small percentage of the Sun being hidden.

Paltry as these are, there is some compensation. The Sun is currently so active there are likely to be abundant sunspots visible on the non-obscured parts of the Sun.

Never look directly at the Sun, particularly during an eclipse, unless wearing eclipse glasses from a reputable source. If using a telescope or binoculars, either project the Sun’s image onto a blank surface or use high quality shielding material over the front, never the back, of the instrument.

For those not in the right location, lacking suitable equipment, or simply thwarted by cloud, the event will be streamed live by Time and Date and in conjunction with the Perth Observatory.

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Deep-sea researchers have found polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) – a human-made, carcinogenic pollutant – at one of the deepest points on planet Earth, the Atacama Trench in the Pacific Ocean. This is despite the chemical being widely banned in the 1970s,

indicating just how long this potent environmental scourge can continue to linger.

Environmental scientists at Stockholm University and the University of Southern Denmark studied sediment cores from five different locations in the Atacama Trench at a depth of 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) below sea level. 

They found PCBs in every single sample. 

While the levels of the chemical were relatively small, the researchers say it’s concerning they were even found at this extremely remote location. 

"It is thought-provoking that we find traces of human activity at the bottom of a deep-sea trench; a place that most people probably perceive as distant and isolated from our society," Professor Ronnie N. Glud, study author from the Director of the Danish Center for Hadal Research at the University of Southern Denmark, said in a statement.

PCBs are a broad family of human-created organic chemicals that were used for a variety of industrial processes and consumer products in the 20th century. They were used as coolants and lubricants in transformers, capacitors, and other electrical equipment, as well as plasticizers in paints, plastics, and rubber products.

The chemicals were eventually banned in the US in 1979, then later globally after it became apparent how these chemicals harm human health and the natural world. One of the main worries is that there’s very strong evidence the chemicals are linked to cancer. It's also likely they affect the reproductive system, nervous system, and endocrine system. 

As a further concern, PCBs are tough to break down and can persist in the environment for a very long time, passing from animal to animal via the food chain. 

"In our study, we saw that the sediment at the deepest locations in the Atacama Trench had a lower proportion of easily degradable organic carbon. We also found that there were higher concentrations of PCB per gram of organic carbon in sediment deeper in the trench. This is due to the fact that the sediment's organic carbon is degraded, but PCB, which is more long-lived, remains and can therefore accumulate," added Professor Anna Sobek from the Department of Environmental Science at Stockholm University.

In the next part of the research, the same team will be headed north in the Pacific to take samples from the depths of the Japan Trench, hoping to reveal whether a similar situation exists there. 

"In future studies, we will also study the uptake in bottom-dwelling animals to try to understand how pollutants spread and can affect the food web in the deep sea trench. We will also study how the microbial community in the deep sea trench may contribute to the degradation of certain pollutants," said Sobek.

The new stud was reported in the journal Nature Communications.

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The Indian government has granted the final approvals necessary for construction to begin on LIGO-India, a nearly identical version of the twin LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) facilities that made history after making the first direct detection of ripples in space and time known as gravitational wavesin 2015. The Indian government will spend about $320 million to build LIGO-India, with first observations expected by the end of the decade.

"We've worked very hard over the past few years to bring a LIGO detector to India," says David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory at Caltech. "Receiving the green light from the Indian government is a very welcome development that will benefit not only India but the entire international gravitational-wave community."

"As the newest gravitational-wave detector, LIGO-India will have all of our latest and best techniques incorporated from the get-go," says Rana Adhikari, a professor of physics at Caltech who helps lead the development of LIGO-India along with Reitze and others on the LIGO team, in collaboration with Indian scientists.

LIGO-India is a collaboration between the LIGO Laboratory—operated by Caltech and MIT and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)—and India's Raja Ramanna Center for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), and the Department of Atomic Energy Directorate of Construction Services and Estate Management (DCSEM). The planned facility—which, like the LIGO observatories in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, will include an L-shaped interferometer with 4-kilometer-long arms—will be built near the city of Aundha in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

When LIGO-India is completed, it will join a global network of gravitational-wave observatories that includes Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. With its advanced gravitational-wave-sensing technology, LIGO-India will greatly improve the ability of scientists to pinpoint the sky locations of the sources of gravitational waves. Because of its location on Earth with respect to LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA, it will also fill in blind spots in the current gravitational-wave network.

"LIGO-India will increase the precision with which we can localize the gravitational-wave events by an order of magnitude," says Adhikari. "This will greatly enhance our ability to answer fundamental questions about the universe, including how black holes form and the expansion rate of our universe, as well as to more rigorously test Einstein's general theory of relativity."

"I am very pleased to learn of the Indian Cabinet's approval of construction funding for a gravitational-wave observatory there," says NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "Partnering with like-minded nations like India who share our values and aspirations will not only make possible fantastic discoveries but, more importantly, energize talent and unleash innovation everywhere. Utilizing high-tech interferometer components developed by the NSF-funded LIGO collaboration, LIGO-India will augment the existing network of gravitational-wave detectors—the two LIGO detectors in the U.S., Virgo in Italy, and KAGRA in Japan—to enable more precise identification of the location of gravitational-wave sources and more robust monitoring of their signals. This will give a big boost to researchers around the world who will combine observations from optical and radio telescopes with the information from the gravitational-wave network to make new discoveries about the universe."

So far, LIGO and Virgo have detected the massive rumblings of dozens of collisions between black holes. In 2017, the observatories also detected a collision between neutron stars that sent out not only gravitational waves but a powerful burst of light waves spanning the electromagnetic spectrum. Because all three gravitational-wave detectors (LIGO's twin facilities and Virgo) were observing the sky during the 2017 event, scientists were able to narrow down the region of sky where the event occurred. This proved to be a crucial factor in guiding the light-based telescopes to pinpoint the precise location of the spectacular blast. The light-based observations led to the discovery that heavy elements, such as gold, were forged in the cosmic explosion.

Since that event, one more collision involving neutron stars was confidently detected by the LIGO-Virgo network, although it was not seen with light-based telescopes. With LIGO-India's eyes on the sky, spotting these so-called multi-messenger events (where light and gravitational waves are the messengers) should become an easier task.

Some preconstruction activities for LIGO-India have already taken place, such as the design of the LIGO-India buildings, the construction of the roads that lead into the site, and the fabrication and testing of vacuum chambers. The facility will be built by Indian researchers working jointly with members of the LIGO team.

The international collaboration has already resulted in an exchange of ideas and new relationships between the two countries. For instance, dozens of Indian students have been chosen to work with the LIGO team as part of Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. In addition, Caltech plans to invite several visiting scientists from India to work on LIGO at Caltech.

"Having a distant third LIGO observatory in the international network, which benefits from common instrument designs, commissioning knowledge, technical coordination, and sensitivity, will fulfill a longstanding LIGO goal," says Fred Raab, the former associate director for observatory operations at LIGO Hanford who has been working on the LIGO-India project for nearly a decade. "This will be a game-changer for science."

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SpaceX has been developing rockets for a while now, but the recent project is truly mind-blowing, a 394 ft. rocket with a payload of 150 tons, bigger and heavier than Saturn V, another large rocket of the company. Besides, it is totally reusable, which is an important feature SpaceX prioritizes.

The schedule was set, and the calendar showed April 17 for the launch. Starship was moved to SpaceX's launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas. Today, the engineers took their places to launch the biggest rocket but encountered an issue.

Normally, Starship's launch involves two stages. First is its Super Heavy booster, which is powered by 33 engines and uses a mix of liquid oxygen and Methane, generating 17 million pounds of thrust. Secondly, the top half of Starship was going to be separated and fire its six raptor engines. Unfortunately, none of these happened today.

SpaceX Starship

Why did SpaceX postpone the launch?

Right before the launch, engineers began fueling Starship. However, they noticed something was off and tried to overcome the issue to meet the deadline. According to officials, Starship faced a pressurization issue, which made it impossible to launch.

"The clock is coming up on T minus 17 minutes on lift off. The first stage team is dealing with a pressurisation issue. We do have the capability of holding the count and treating today as a wet dress." said John Insprucker, SpaceX's principal engineer.

While the engineers were dealing with the issue, people kept on waiting and watching the live stream to get an update. Finally, SpaceX decided to postpone its first test mission, Insprucker announced during the live stream. 

"A pressurant valve appears to be frozen, so unless it starts operating soon, no launch today," Elon Musk added about the technical issue.

SpaceX Starship

What's next?

Just because it failed to launch its rocket today, it doesn't mean that SpaceX will give up on all the investments and time spent on this giant. SpaceX announced that the launch has been postponed for at least 48 hours. Until then, engineers will try their best to solve the matter.

For now, SpaceX hasn't made any following announcements about the issue. We will need to wait 48 hours and see if the engineers will be able to solve the matter, and Starship will be ready to take off.

Besides, SpaceX's initial Starship tests have all ended in massive explosions. Musk recently said he hopes that this time Starship will reach the orbit and "don't blow up the launch pad."

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We do not understand 95 percent of the contents of the Universe. Collectively known as the dark sector, the unknowns include both dark matter and dark energy.

Dark matter appears to be the dominant form of matter in the Universe, with each galaxy containing up to 80 percent of this invisible form of matter. Meanwhile, dark energy is some source of energy that suffuses all of space-time and is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the cosmos.

But the statements that dark matter and dark energy are physical entities rests on the assumption that our understanding of gravity is correct.

Currently, our best understanding of gravity comes from Einstein's general theory of relativity. This theory tells us that gravity is the manifestation of the bending and warping of space-time itself.

But we know the general theory of relativity is incomplete. We know that it breaks down in the centers of black holes and at the beginning of the universe. So we know we do not yet have the full story of gravity in our hands.

Motivated by this, many people over the decades have proposed theories of modified gravity, which constitute a set of extensions and refinements to Einstein's original model.

However, all these extensions face a series of difficult hurdles. We have tested general relativity in many contexts and on many scales, so it is difficult to construct a theory that is significantly different enough from vanilla general relativity to potentially explain away dark matter and dark energy, and yet satisfies all known observational constraints.

The more ways we can develop to probe modified gravity the better. And so a team of researchers have found that we don't necessarily need to look to the stars to test various modified theories of gravity. We can instead look down into the Earth. They discovered that under modified gravity, seismic waves travel through the Earth at different rates and in different ways.

Since we know so many properties of the Earth so well, like its mass and its moment of inertia, we can turn this knowledge around to use seismic data to constrain modified gravity theories.

So far the data do not suggest any need for a deviation from Einstein's original work. But the more tools we develop, and the more ways we can search, the better.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

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"The issues of plastic go beyond just ingestion and entanglement," Linsey Haram, a marine ecologist formerly at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, explained when in the process of conducting her research. "It's creating opportunities for coastal species' biogeography to greatly expand beyond what we previously thought was possible."

Haram first drew attention to the emergence of coastal species on buoyant plastic rafts adrift in the open ocean with a paper she co-authored that warned this could be a new route by which coastal critters invade new, unsuspecting habitats.

Rarely documented until now, one historical example was of coastal-dwelling invertebrates hitching a ride across the North Pacific Ocean on plastic debris swept out to sea in the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Hundreds of invertebrate species clung on for six years to debris that washed ashore in North America and Hawaii in 2017.

But the extent to which coastal species, once assumed incapable of surviving long periods of time on the high seas, hopped aboard rafts of plastic waste remained largely unknown. What kinds of species are finding refuge in the refuse? What new communities are forming on the high seas far beyond their usual limits?

To answer those questions, Haram sampled debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the swirling mass of plastic buoys, buckets, bottles, rope, and fishing nets that continues to accumulate in the North Pacific Ocean, thousands of kilometers from any coastline.

Most of that plastic waste can be traced back to just five industrialized fishing nations, recent studies show, but the growing collection of unlikely passengers nestled within the Garbage Patch had for the most part been overlooked.

Now, Haram's latest study suggests that communities of coastal species rafting on plastic waste were more common and diverse than scientists had previously suspected.

Coastal invertebrate species such as crustaceans, sea anemones, and bryozoans, were found on some 70 percent of the 105 plastic items Haram and her colleagues surveyed. The number and taxonomic richness of coastal species on those items also far outweighed the diversity of pelagic species that usually exist in the open ocean.

"It appears that coastal species persist now in the open ocean as a substantial component of a neopelagic community sustained by the vast and expanding sea of plastic debris," the researchers write in their new paper.

Linsey Haram analyzing sponges, hydroids, and bryozoans on plastic debris. (Luz Quiñones/Smithsonian)

Coastal invertebrates were not only surviving but apparently thriving in their newfound, floating habitat. Fern-like hydroids (related to jellyfish and corals) bearing reproductive structures were found amongst the trash, along with egg-carrying amphipods and sea anemones of various sizes.

Rather than the plastic mass being inhospitable to coastal-dwelling species, it seems that coastal critters are living long enough to reproduce – and likely competing with pelagic rafters for space and resources.

Plastic debris sampled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between 2018 and 2019. (Haram et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2023)

How coastal invertebrates are surviving in an environment so unlike their own is still puzzling. Somehow they are finding food in a part of the ocean so remote marine scientists called it a food desert.

What we do know is that plastic hangs around for decades, if not centuries, and the amount of plastic pollution flowing into the oceans each year is only set to increase unless new policies such as a global treaty cut back and clean up plastic waste.

Plastic is already transforming marine ecosystems in unsettling ways, and if coastal invertebrates venture out to sea aboard rafts of floating debris they might begin "fundamentally altering" oceanic communities, Haram and colleagues warn.

Of course, nature is just finding a way to survive in turbulent times. More research to sift through communities rafting upon floating plastic waste would at least help us understand the changes afoot.

Haram and colleagues expect to discover more coastal species making their maiden voyage into the high seas with future studies, and hope to understand if any differences exist between ocean gyre systems in the North and Southern Hemisphere.

"Our results demonstrate that the oceanic environment and floating plastic habitat are clearly hospitable to coastal species," the researchers conclude.

The study has been published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

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Pain involves our whole body. When faced with possible threats, the feeling of pain develops in a split second and can help us to "detect and protect." But over time, our nerve cells can become over-sensitized. This means they can react more strongly and easily to something that normally wouldn't hurt or would hurt less. This is called "sensitization."

Sensitization can affect anyone, but some people may be more prone to it than others due to possible genetic factors, environmental factors or previous experiences. Sensitization can contribute to chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine or low back pain.

But it might be possible to retrain our brains to manage or even reduce pain.

'Danger!'

Our body senses possible threats via nerve endings called nociceptors. We can think of these like a microphones transmitting the word "danger" through wires (nerves and the spinal cord) up to a speaker (the brain). If you sprain your ankle, a range of tiny chemical reactions start there.

When sensitization happens in a sore body part, it's like more microphones join in over a period of weeks or months. Now the messages can be transmitted up the wire more efficiently. The volume of the danger message gets turned way up.

Then, in the spinal cord, chemical reactions and the number of receptors there also adapt to this new demand. The more messages coming up, the more reactions triggered and the louder the messages sent on to the brain.

And sensitization doesn't always stop there. The brain can also crank the volume up by making use of more wires in the spinal cord that reach the speaker. This is one of the proposed mechanisms of central sensitization. As time ticks on, a sensitized nervous system will create more and more feelings of pain, seemingly regardless of the amount of bodily damage at the initial site of pain.

When we are sensitized, we may experience pain that is out of proportion to the actual damage (hyperalgesia), pain that spreads to other areas of the body (referred pain), pain that lasts a long time (chronic or persistent pain), or pain triggered by harmless things like touch, pressure or temperature (allodynia).

Because pain is a biopsychosocial experience (biological and psychological and social), we may also feel other symptoms like fatigue, mood changes, sleep problems or difficulty concentrating.

Neuroplasticity

Around the clock, our bodies and brain are constantly changing and adapting. Neuroplasticity is when the brain changes in response to experiences, good or bad.

Pain science research suggests we may be able to retrain ourselves to improve well-being and take advantage of neuroplasticity. There are some promising approaches that target the mechanisms behind sensitization and aim to reverse them.

One example is graded motor imagery. This technique uses mental and physical exercises like identifying left and right limbs, imagery and mirror box therapy. It has been tested for conditions like complex regional pain syndrome (a condition that causes severe pain and swelling in a limb after an injury or surgery) and in phantom limb pain after amputation. Very gradual exposure to increasing stimuli may be behind these positive effects on a sensitized nervous system. While results are promising, more research is needed to confirm its benefits and better understand how it works. The same possible mechanisms of graded exposure underpin some recently developed apps for sufferers.

Exercise can also retrain the nervous system. Regular physical activity can decrease the sensitivity of our nervous system by changing processes at a cellular level, seemingly re-calibrating danger message transmission. Importantly, exercise doesn't have to be high intensity or involve going to the gym. Low-impact activities such as walking, swimming, or yoga can be effective in reducing nervous system sensitivity, possibly by providing new evidence of perceived safety.

Researchers are exploring whether learning about the science of pain and changing the way we think about it may foster self-management skills, like pacing activities and graded exposure to things that have been painful in the past. Understanding how pain is felt and why we feel it can help improve function, reduce fear and lower anxiety.

But don't go it alone

If you have chronic or severe pain that interferes with your daily life, you should consult a health professional like a doctor and/or a pain specialist who can diagnose your condition and prescribe appropriate active treatments.

In Australia, a range of multidisciplinary pain clinics offer physical therapies like exercise, psychological therapies like mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy. Experts can also help you make lifestyle changes to improve sleep and diet to manage and reduce pain. A multi-pronged approach makes the most sense given the complexity of the underlying biology.

Education could help develop pain literacy and healthy habits to prevent sensitization, even from a young age. Resources, such as children's books, videos, and board games, are being developed and tested to improve consumer and community understanding.

Pain is not a feeling anyone should have to suffer in silence or endure alone.

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"It is common to feel low and anxious after being diagnosed with a heart condition," said study author Ms. Ana Luisa Vitorino Monteiro, a meditation teacher and scientific researcher at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. "Our study suggests that meditation could be a useful addition to standard exercise rehabilitation."

It is well established that stress, anxiety and depression are linked with the development and progression of heart disease. The onset of cardiovascular disease is associated with a more than two-fold increased risk of mental health conditions. At least one in five heart patients carries a diagnosis of a mental disorder. It is also recognized that heart patients with mental health problems need extra support to adhere to lifestyle changes and drug treatment.

This study examined the effect of meditation on stress, anxiety, depression and quality of life in patients with coronary artery disease. The study included 40 patients with coronary artery disease who had attended an exercise-based cardiovascular rehabilitation program for at least six months. The average age of participants was 65 years and 20% were women. Participants were randomly allocated to four months of meditation practice on top of usual care, or usual care alone. Usual care was continuing with the exercise program.

The study used karuna meditation which focuses on breathing and compassionate thoughts. The meditation group had a weekly 90-minute session for one month. During the next three months, participants were asked to meditate for 20 minutes a day on their own or using a recording from the investigators, and they received a weekly phone call to ask questions. Stress, anxiety, depression and quality of life were assessed at baseline and after four months using the Perceived Stress Scale, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Beck Depression Inventory and HeartQoL questionnaire, respectively.

Between baseline and the end of the study, average depression, stress and anxiety scores reduced in the meditation group by 44%, 31% and 29%, respectively. The corresponding reductions in the usual care group were 3%, 3% and 3%. Over the same time period, average scores on the emotional dimension of quality of life increased by 60% in the meditation group but reduced by 2% in the usual care group.

Ms. Vitorino Monteiro said, "Meditation is easy to do, can be done almost anywhere and does not require any equipment. Our study shows that meditation can improve psychological symptoms and quality of life in patients with heart disease, which we hope could also be the start of making healthier lifestyle choices."

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UC Riverside Research Letter published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine associated poverty with an estimated 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people 15 years and older.

This estimate is considered conservative because the data is from the year just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused spikes in deaths worldwide and continues to take its toll.

The analysis found that only heart disease, cancer, and smoking were associated with a greater number of deaths than poverty. Obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses, suicides, firearms, and homicides, among other common causes of death, were less lethal than poverty.

"Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes," said David Brady, the study's lead author and a UCR professor of public policy. "Poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as all the homicides in 2019. And yet, homicide firearms and suicide get vastly more attention."

Another finding is that people living in poverty—those with incomes less than 50% of the U.S. median income—have roughly the same survival rates until they hit their 40s, after which they die at significantly higher rates than people with more adequate incomes and resources.

The analysis estimated the number of poverty deaths by analyzing income data kept by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and death data from household surveys from the Cross-National Equivalent File. Deaths reported in surveys were validated in the National Death Index, a database kept by the National Center for Health Statistics, which tracks deaths and their causes in the U.S.

Their findings have major policy implications, the researchers say.

"Because certain ethnic and racial minority groups are far more likely to be in poverty, our estimates can improve understanding of ethnic and racial inequalities in life expectancy," the paper reads.

Additionally, the study shows that poverty should get more attention from policymakers, said Brady, the director of UCR's Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty.

Beyond the emotional suffering of surviving family members and friends, deaths are associated with a great economic cost. Experts agree that a death is expensive for a family, community and government, Brady said.

"If we had less poverty, there'd be a lot better health and well-being, people could work more, and they could be more productive," Brady said. "All of those are benefits of investing in people through social policies."

The paper is titled "Novel Estimates of Mortality Associated With Poverty in the US." In addition to Brady, study authors include Professor Ulrich Kohler at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Professor Hui Zheng at Ohio State University in Columbus.

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Sydney has proudly held the title for more than 100 years.

But with populations rapidly growing on Melbourne's fringe, the city limits have been expanded to include the area of Melton.

The latest government figures, from June 2021, put Melbourne's population at 4,875,400 - 18,700 more than Sydney.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) defines a city's "significant urban area", by including all connecting suburbs with more than 10,000 people.

"With the amalgamation of Melton into Melbourne in the latest... classification, Melbourne has more people than Sydney - and has had since 2018, " the ABS's Andrew Howe told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper - which described the redrawn boundary as "a technicality".

Proud Sydneysiders will point to the ABS's conclusion that when looking at the greater Sydney and Melbourne regions, Sydney remained bigger in June 2021.

Greater regions of a city take into account its "functional area", the ABS says, and include populations who frequent or work within the city, but may live in small towns and rural areas surrounding it.

However the federal government predicts Greater Melbourne will overtake Greater Sydney in 2031-32.

Melbourne's rapid growth is largely thanks to international migration, Australian National University demographer Liz Allen told the BBC.

Dr Allen noted that unlike Sydney, which has a "historical hangover" of a time when "it didn't want to be seen as anything other than white", Melbourne has a reputation for celebrating diversity.

It is also an attractive migration destination as it has employment and education opportunities comparable to Sydney, but has historically been more affordable than the harbour-side city.

It's not the first time Melbourne has held the title of Australia's biggest city.

As a result of the gold rush in the late 19th Century, which saw migrants flock to the state of the Victoria, Melbourne grew rapidly and outnumbered Sydney until 1905.

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9:15 am ET update: SpaceX ended Monday's launch attempt of the Starship vehicle about 10 minutes before liftoff. The problem was caused by a stuck pressurization valve. Instead, the company has turned the launch attempt into a wet dress fueling test.

The company has backup opportunities to launch on Tuesday and Wednesday, but since so much liquid oxygen and methane propellant was loaded on board the vehicle, it will take a minimum of 48 hours to recycle into a new countdown.

 

7:15 am ET update: The first rays of sunlight are visible in the sky over South Padre Island this morning, with a crescent Moon in the sky and the massive Starship rocket on the horizon. As of this writing, SpaceX engineers are still working toward the opening of the launch window at 9 am ET (8 am local time, 1300 UTC).

 

So what will happen? The best bet is probably a scrub due to some technical issue. But there are easily tens of thousands of people crammed into the southern end of South Padre Island in Texas this morning in hopes of seeing the monstrous rocket take flight. The next best thing to being here is watching the company's official webcast, which will begin no earlier than 8:15 am ET, below.

 

Original post:  STARBASE, Texas—It's about to get lit.

 

Probably.

 

SpaceX completed final preparations to its Starship and Super Heavy vehicles on Saturday, re-stacking the them with a flight termination system that will be engaged if the rocket flies off course.

 

Then on Sunday the company completed its final launch readiness review, clearing the rocket for liftoff.

 

Therefore, everything is just about as ready as it can be for the historic first flight test of Starship. But that does not necessarily mean there will be smoke and fire on Monday morning, when the launch window opens at 8 am local time in South Texas (1300 UTC). And we should really set expectations accordingly.

 

First off all, there are some weather issues. SpaceX said Sunday that while conditions at the launch site look fine for liftoff, there are concerns about wind shear higher in the atmosphere. Shear occurs when winds change direction and speed at varying levels of the atmosphere, and if shear is high enough, it can tear apart the structure of a rocket.

 

Beyond weather, this is the first launch attempt for the Super Heavy first stage of the rocket, and the first time the Starship upper stage will fly in a stacked configuration. Counting both stages, there are 39 Raptor rocket engines, all of which will be carefully monitored prior to liftoff. If one of thousands of sensors picks up an errant reading for temperature, pressure, or some other variable at the wrong time, the launch attempt will be scrubbed.

 

SpaceX has conducted multiple fueling tests and static-firing tests of these vehicles, but even so this is a brand new launch system. The odds of getting all the way to T-0 and lifting off on Monday during the 90-minute launch window are probably somewhere in the ballpark of 50 percent, or less, assuming good weather.

 

If the rocket does take flight, that's when the fun begins. No human alive has ever seen a rocket this powerful, or with this many first stage engines, take flight before. It's going to be big and loud, with lots of flame. If all goes well, it also will include some upward motion.

 

Opinions are mixed about how successful this flight will be for Super Heavy and Starship. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has given the launch a 50 percent chance of succeeding, but I believe he is probably deliberately lowering expectations here. He has gotten better at that. On the eve of his very first rocket launch, the Falcon 1 back in March 2006, Musk told a reporter the rocket had a 90 percent chance of reaching orbit.

 

His first three Falcon 1 launches proceeded to fail.

 

But since then SpaceX has gotten rather good at launching rockets. On its debut flight in 2010, the Falcon 9 reached orbit. In 2018, so did the Falcon Heavy. Then, three different versions of Starship prototypes, Starhopper, SN5, and SN8, all successfully launched. So by my count, the last six "new" rockets that SpaceX has debuted have all launched more or less successfully.

 

It would be pretty amazing if Super Heavy and the Starship upper stage follow suit, and you really should tune in to find out. A webcast of the launch attempt will begin about 45 minutes before liftoff.

 

Setting expectations on the eve of Starship’s historic launch

Now new research being presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark (15-18 April) has identified several protective drugs that may lessen the collateral damage caused by antibiotics without compromising their effectiveness against harmful bacteria.

The unique study by Dr. Lisa Maier and Dr. Camille V. Goemans from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany and colleagues, which analyzed the effects of 144 different antibiotics on the abundance of the most common gut bacteria, offers novel insights into reducing the adverse effects of antibiotic treatment on the gut microbiome.

The trillions of microorganisms in the human gut profoundly impact health by aiding digestion, providing nutrients and metabolites, and working with the immune system to fend off harmful bacteria and viruses.

Antibiotics can damage these microbial communities, resulting in an imbalance that can lead to recurrent gastrointestinal problems caused by Clostridioides difficile infections as well as long-term health problems such as obesity, allergies, asthma and other immunological or inflammatory diseases.

Despite this well-known collateral damage, which antibiotics affect which types of bacterial species, and whether these negative side effects be mitigated has not been studied systematically because of technical challenges.

To find out more, researchers systematically analyzed the growth and survival of 27 different bacterial species commonly found in the gut following treatment with 144 different antibiotics. They also assessed the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC)—the minimal concentration of an antibiotic required to stop bacteria from growing—for over 800 of these antibiotic-bacteria combinations.

The results revealed that the majority of gut bacteria had slightly higher MICs than disease-causing bacteria, suggesting that at commonly used antibiotic concentrations, most of the tested gut bacteria would not be affected.

However, two widely used antibiotic classes—tetracyclines and macrolides—not only stopped healthy bacteria growing at much lower concentrations than those required to stop the growth of disease-causing bacteria, but they also killed more than half of the gut bacterial species they tested, potentially altering the gut microbiome composition for a long time.

As drugs interact differently across different bacterial species, the researchers investigated whether a second drug could be used to protect the gut microbes. They combined the antibiotics erythromycin (a macrolide) and doxycycline (a tetracycline) with a set of 1,197 pharmaceuticals to identify suitable drugs that would protect two abundant gut bacterial species (Bacteriodes vulgatus and Bacteriodes uniformis) from the antibiotics.

The researchers identified several promising drugs including the anticoagulant dicumarol, the gout medication benzbromarone, and two anti-inflammatory drugs, tolfenamic acid and diflunisal.

Importantly, these drugs did not compromise the effectiveness of the antibiotics against disease-causing bacteria.

Further experiments showed that these antidote drugs also protected natural bacterial communities derived from human stool samples and in living mice.

"This Herculean undertaking by an international team of scientists has identified a novel approach that combines antibiotics with a protective antidote to help keep the gut microbiome healthy and reduce the harmful side effects of antibiotics without compromising their efficiency," says Dr. Ulrike Löber, of the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany who is presenting the research at ECCMID. "Despite our promising findings, further research is needed to identify optimum and personalized combinations of antidote drugs and to exclude any potential long-term effects on the gut microbiome."

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Our bodies consist of about 30 trillion human cells, but they also host about 39 trillion microbial cells. These teeming communities of bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and fungi in our guts, in our mouths, on our skin, and elsewhere—collectively called the human microbiome—don’t only consist of freeloaders and lurking pathogens. Instead, as scientists increasingly appreciate, these microbes form ecosystems essential to our health. A growing body of research aims to understand how disruptions of these delicate systems can rob us of nutrients we need, interfere with the digestion of our food, and possibly trigger afflictions of our bodies and minds.

But we still know so little about our microbiome that we are just starting to answer a much more fundamental question: Where do these microbes come from? Can they spread from other people like a cold virus or a stomach bug?

Now, the largest and most comprehensive analysis of human microbiome transmission has provided some important clues. Research led by genomicists at the University of Trento in Italy have found hints that microbiome organisms hop extensively between people, especially among those who spend a lot of time together. The findings, published in January in Nature, fill important gaps in our understanding of how people assemble their microbiomes and reformulate them throughout their lives.

Other scientists have applauded the study. Jose Clemente Litran, an associate professor of genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, hailed the work as “outstanding” and said it provided the first clear measure of how much sharing to expect among family members or those who live together.

The study also fuels intriguing speculations about whether microbes can raise or lower our risks for diseases likes diabetes or cancer—and thereby bring a transmissible dimension to illnesses that are not usually considered contagious. For Brett Finlay, a professor of microbiology at the University of British Columbia who wrote a commentary for Science in 2020 about that possibility, the findings “put the final nail in the coffin that noncommunicable diseases maybe shouldn’t be called that.”

Unfathomable Diversity

Microbiomes are like fingerprints: so diverse that no two people can have identical ones. They’re also incredibly dynamic—growing, shrinking, and evolving so much throughout a person’s lifetime that a baby’s microbiome will look drastically different by the time they grow up. A handful of microbial species are found in more than 90 percent of people in westernized societies, but most species are found in 20 percent to 90 percent of people. (Even Escherichia coli, which is probably the only intestinal bacterium most people could name, falls short of 90 percent frequency.) Studies suggest that non-westernized societies have an even greater diversity of microbes and more variable microbiomes.

Within a population, any two randomly chosen individuals usually have less than half of their microbiome species in common—on average, the overlap in the microbial makeup of the gut is between 30 percent and 35 percent. Microbiologists debate whether there is a “core” set of microbial species that all healthy people have, but if it exists, it’s probably a single-digit percentage of the total.

Determining how often microbes pass between people, however, is a much more formidable problem than looking for species. A single species can consist of many different strains, or genetic variants. Researchers therefore need to be able to identify individual strains by looking at the genes in microbiome samples. And in a human microbiome, between 2 million and 20 million unique microbial genes may be present, with the microbes constantly reshuffling their genes, mutating and evolving.

This is why learning how the multitudes of cells in the microbiome spread is “much more difficult than learning how to trace the spread of one pathogen,” said Mireia Valles-Colomer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Trento and the first author on the new study. Until recently, tracing strains through a population was impossible.

In 2010, when Nicola Segata first began analyzing massive genetic data sets for the Human Microbiome Project as a postdoc at Harvard University, the available tools lacked the resolution needed to pinpoint which species were in people’s microbiomes. They could identify the general taxonomic group that a microorganism belonged to, but that was like narrowing down someone’s location to the US Midwest.

Over the next few years, various laboratories found evidence that social interaction and living in proximity affected the microbiomes of primates and mice. Studies of humans conducted on relatively isolated populations in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere also found signatures of microbial sharing. Some even found traces of possible transmission from pets. But because of the limitations of those studies, it wasn’t clear how much transmission was happening and whether it happened everywhere to the same degree.

This changed after Segata established his lab at the University of Trento in 2013. He and his team began to create and refine metagenomics tools that could distinguish between strains of the same species, which made it possible to study microbiome transmission in more detail.

Segata started probing this question in 2018 by analyzing the microbes of mothers and their infants. His group’s findings and several other studies confirmed earlier suspicions that there is a massive amount of transmission from mother to baby, such that the mother is “imprinting the microbiome at birth,” Segata said. Recent work has shown that mothers continue to mold the microbiomes of their infants over the few years.

But the diversity of the microbiome changes significantly between childhood and adulthood, so this early inheritance from mothers “is not explaining the microbes we are seeing in the adults,” Segata said. In follow-up experiments, the researchers largely ruled out the possibility that the new microbes came from the food people ate, because those microbes weren’t able to colonize the gut very well.

So “it has to be transmission,” Segata said. “It has to be that what we have in the gut is coming from the gut of other individuals.”

Sharing With Family and Friends

For the new global analysis of microbiomes, Segata, Valles-Colomer, and their colleagues honed their tools enough to recognize previously unknown species and different strains of the same species. Using these tools, they examined more than 9,700 samples of stool and saliva from 20 countries on five continents, representing communities with very diverse lifestyles and covering the full range of the human lifespan and many different living arrangements. They traced more than 800,000 strains of microbes between families, roommates, neighbors, and villages and calculated what percentage of shared species were the same strain.

As they expected, they found that the most sharing of strains happened between mothers and infants in the first year of life—about 50 percent of the shared species found in the infants’ guts were strains that spread from the mother. The mother’s influence diminished with time—slipping from 27 percent at age 3 to 14 percent by age 30—but didn’t disappear. Some elderly people in China were shown to still share strains with their surviving centenarian mothers.

The researchers Mireia Valles-Colomer and Nicola Segata of the University of Trento in Italy recently completed a massive analysis of human microbiome transmission around the world —the most comprehensive such study ever performed.

Courtesy of University of Trento

For Veena Taneja, an immunologist at the Mayo Clinic who was not involved in the study, one of the more surprising tidbits in the findings was that although infants born vaginally shared more strains with their mothers than infants born by C-section did, this difference vanished by three years of age. “People make a big deal out of it” that babies born via C-section might be more at risk for certain diseases, she said. But the findings suggest that maybe it “should not be a big thing.”

(That view was corroborated by a new study published this month in Cell Host & Microbe. It found that babies born via C-section received less of their mother’s microbiomes than babies born vaginally, but that they didn’t miss out because they received more microbes from breast milk.)

As we get older, a sizable portion of our microbiomes continues to come from the people we live with or near. Unsurprisingly, the study by Segata and colleagues found that spouses and other physically intimate partners shared a lot of microbes: 13 percent of the gut species they shared were of the same strain, as were 38 percent of their shared oral species.

But people who lived together platonically weren’t far behind, at 12 percent for shared gut species and 32 percent for shared oral species. That’s because, as Segata, Valles-Colomer and their team found, the single most important determinant of transmission was time spent together. People living under one roof shared the most strains, but even people living in the same village tended to have more strains in common than people separated by greater distances. The frequency of strain sharing was consistent across different societies, but the team did confirm previous findings that people in non-westernized countries tend to have more diverse microbiomes.

The researchers also found that strains held in common could be lost over time. Twins growing up together had about a 30 percent strain-sharing level that dropped to about 10 percent after 30 years of living apart.

Segata thinks it’s likely that most of the other strains of shared species also come from other people—primarily from close contacts like friends or coworkers, but maybe also from people we encounter far more briefly and casually. (Pets, however, are probably not big contributors: Segata said that animals mostly harbor microbial species that don’t typically colonize or persist in us.)

The findings are the strongest evidence to date that we share parts of our microbiomes with the people we spend the most time with. The fact that the authors were able to see this pattern of transmission across the globe, and not just in a single population, was “striking,” said Ilana Brito, an associate professor in biomedical engineering at Cornell University. These data sets are extremely noisy, with many mutations happening across these different organisms, she added. But the team successfully uncovered “the signal across the noise.”

It’s not clear how microbiome organisms spread between people. Kissing and sex explain some of it, but microbes could also be transmitted through droplets spewed by coughs and sneezes, or they could be picked up from contaminated surfaces. There’s also still a lot to learn about which microbes are more easily spread than others. Answering that question is critical for understanding the implications of the idea that microbiome organisms can spread.

Spreading Health or Disease

Now that the extent of sharing has revealed the patterns of distribution of unique microbes, we can examine what happens in disease. “In that sense, I think this work is really fundamental,” Clemente said.

Some diseases that aren’t usually considered contagious could have an overlooked communicable aspect. Studies have found that many people with diseases that don’t spread person to person have microbiomes that seem to be “screwed up,” Finlay said.

Some E. colistrains, for example, may release toxins that could increase the risk of cancer. People with certain colourectal cancers whose microbiomes contain more of a Fusobacterium species tend to have a worse prognosis and worse outcomes with treatment. Gut microbes that affect glucose and insulin levels in the body have been tied to obesity and conditions like metabolic syndrome and even Type 2 diabetes. An unbalanced gut microbiome has been linked to neurodegeneration, and it’s theorized that it might play a role in brain conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.

“If these diseases are at least partially dependent on the microbiome, and then the microbiome is at least partially transmissible, then these diseases become at least partially transmissible,” Segata said.

But “understanding the amount to which a certain microbiome contributes to [disease] risk, that’s the hard question,” Clemente said. Even most studies that find such associations can’t tease apart whether the microbes cause the disease or simply find it easier to colonize a person at risk for the disease.

If “bad” microbes that raise the risk of noncommunicable health problems can be transmitted between people, then in theory “good” microbes that lower those risks can be as well. Some studies suggest that microbes can be protective, especially in early life, against conditions like asthma and allergies. Deliberately sharing pieces of healthy microbiomes, such as through fecal transplants, has proved astonishingly successful in treating certain diseases and infections like that of the bacteria Clostridium difficile.

We evolved to maintain our microbial populations because we greatly benefit from them, said Jens Walter, a professor of ecology, food and the microbiome at University College Cork and the APC Microbiome Ireland. That’s why Walter is unconvinced by the hypothesis that our shared microbes might be causing diseases and is more drawn to the opposite idea, sometimes called the “old friends” or hygiene hypothesis. It proposes that throughout evolution, our microbiomes may have helped to train the responses of our immune system. The modern increase in the use of antibiotics and antiseptics and our greater general cleanliness could therefore be altering the makeup of the microbiome and creating more health vulnerabilities for us.

Compared to a century ago, “we are definitely not spreading microbes more readily in today’s world,” Walter said. Inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and Type 1 diabetes—all of which are considered immunological disorders rather than communicable diseases—are more prevalent in westernized societies that tend to use antibiotics and antiseptics extensively.

The beneficial or detrimental effects of sharing could depend on which species and strains are shared, which is still a bit of black box. We should also consider, Brito said, that it might not be individual organisms in our microbiome that affect our health but rather communities of them that get transmitted together. Certain organisms might matter more in one community context than another.

Segata, Valles-Colomer, and their team analyzed only healthy individuals in their study, but in their ongoing research, they are applying their metagenomic tools to data sets from people with diseases to see if those findings illuminate the connections between health and microbiomes.

They are also currently sampling data from three daycare centers—from infants and their parents, siblings, pets, and teachers. The researchers are hoping to figure out how the microbes are transmitted and how long it takes for specific gut and oral microbes to jump between people.

Tracking the spread of microbiome organisms was neglected for a long time because “we did not think it would have so much influence on our health,” Valles-Colomer said. Now that we have the techniques to probe the microbiome, “we see it associated with virtually any disease.”

Editor’s note: Research by Segata and his group has received funding from the Simons Foundation, which also funds Quanta, an editorially independent magazine. Simons Foundation funding decisions have no influence on the magazine's coverage.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

The Biggest Microbiome Study Sheds New Light on Shared Health Risks

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Most of us came out of the pandemic a bit torn and tattered. Deprived of physical gatherings and exposed to uncertainties from continuously prolonged lockdowns and social restrictions, we turned to humanity’s technological advances whose arsenal encompasses an array of social media platforms, video conferencing systems and a deluge of entertainment from streaming services.

We fought hard against loneliness, but some were then left with another problem: an increased dependence on this said arsenal.

Compounded intensity

Cooped inside their respective houses for a good part of their time, people desperately yearned for connections to the outside world. Dreaming up moments where they could gather with friends and family without nagging uneasiness, the fear of unknowingly exposing loved ones with the sometimes-asymptomatic disease – or to catch it from others instead.

We fulfilled these yearnings through the internet: catching-up with friends over video conferencing platform Zoom or chatting with others through instant messaging services such as WhatsApp. We found solace in following each other’s Instagram feeds and tuning into their live videos. Instagram saw a 40 percent increase of users during the initial lockdown period, and by the beginning of 2023, there were 105.7 million Indonesians using the platform, accounting from the total of 167 million social media users (a drop from 2022’s 191 million users).

All of our social contact shifted online and, by the time we were out of the woods, some of us were already facing a higher reliance on this form of personal connection. This further compounded a longstanding social media problem of “the fear of missing out”, one among 11 other problems addressed by Meta themselves in a September 2021 release in response to The Wall Street Journal’s piece, “The Facebook Files”.

In 2022, Bandung based creative worker Ichiko (not her real name) realized that she could not take her hands off her smartphone, constantly checking for updates and reopening applications that she had already closed mere seconds ago. She did it mindlessly, not even sure what she was looking for.

“My mood was all over the place,” said Ichiko, speaking to The Jakarta Post on April 4, “as on one timeline there was everything. Work, exhibition invites, practically everything. People’s personal posts were there as well, along with memes and shitposts. Different moods and they were all jumbled together. It can easily overwhelm you in one minute.”

(Archive/Panji Indra)

Ichiko tried abstaining from all her social media accounts for a week after she discovered health influencer and therapist Qintari Aninditha on Instagram. “She was talking about this method called the ‘dopamine detox’,” said Ichiko.

During the abstaining week, Ichiko noted that the process was helpful for her. “I had more time to do other meaningful things and be more creative, as in when I was bored, I did not immediately turn to my phone and I often had this aha moments for unsolved works. If I scroll [social media], it’d just block my creative thinking,” she said. “But I was then back to scrolling again after the [abstaining] week.”

Brain chemistry

The dopamine detox, also referred to as “dopamine fast”, has been all the rage since its introduction in 2019. It was created by United States-based psychiatrist Cameron Sepah, who referred to the method, which he now coined Dopamine Fasting 2.0, as “an antidote to our overstimulated age.”

“Dopamine is just a mechanism that explains how addictions can become reinforced, and makes for a catchy title. The title’s not to be taken literally,” Sepah told the New York Times in 2019. Its catchy name, however, gained major traction with the masses and further spawned misconceptions, which Harvard Medical School instructor and physician Peter Grinspoon referred to as a “maladaptive fad.”

Some people interpreted his method differently and went for something more destructive and ascetic than what Sepah initially intended. Some interpreted it to be abstaining from even talking, by meditating and not showing up for work, among many other actions.

“It’s actually a form of cognitive behavioural therapy,” said Jakarta-based psychiatrist Lidya Heryanto regarding the highly popular method. “Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and a pleasure hormone that works in the reward-pleasure system in our brain.

“Let’s say that someone is studying, for instance, then he comes out as the top of the class. Or he competes, then he wins. He goes through a certain activity before achieving the reward. That someone would then replicate what he did to achieve that dopamine – that is pleasure,” Lidya continued.

She noted that, in the old, pre-internet days, people were much more used to pain and unpleasantness. “Process. Now, everything is instant,” she remarked. These shortened intervals in achieving the end of one’s journey for pleasure leads to an increased frequency of dopamine rush, which then would push one’s tolerance in the long run.

“Large amounts of dopamine instead poison our brain,” she noted. This was due to us memorizing an abnormal amount, because of the frequent dopamine jolts from likes, as normal. “When the intensity decreases, we’d feel unhappy.”

“What it means to ‘detox’ here is not literal. Dopamine will always be present,” she explained. “There’d be withdrawal, too. The first step in a ‘dopamine detox’ would be to find a ‘substituting behavior’. For instance, find other activities for substitutes such as sports, talking to others or maybe read a book. Extend the duration until the ‘pleasure’ is achieved. The aim is to normalize the brain with a balanced dopamine amount.”

To make one’s own way

While Ichiko managed to come across the method online and willingly abstained from social media in the effort to detox, or rebalance, her brain chemistry, Bandung-based visual merchandiser Adya Grahita and Jakarta based artist/musician Monica Hapsari wandered into the same path unintentionally.

Adya was feeling like she was at the end of the line when her job hunt did not bear fruit months after her previous job. Her desperation were amplified by social media, where her friends were sharing updates of their lives, including their careers and achievements.

It drove her to all sorts of negative thoughts, where she was envious of others’ achievements, or was simply jealous of relationships that were pictured on social media. “It was toxic, and I grew more and more demotivated,” Adya said. She was driven to the brink when she decided to not open her accounts for months. “But it was more because I was afraid. Who am I to share anything about my life?”

In turn, she grew more mindful of her immediate surroundings after jumping off the bandwagon. “I grew closer to my family at home. I shared more with my parents and my sister,” said Adya.

In Monica’s case, her renouncing of social media happened when she started visiting a monastery in Bandung to learn meditation in the effort to overcome her chronic anxiety. “I was a patient of dr. Erwin Kusuma,” Monica said, referring to the renowned late psychiatrist. Monica’s approach was initially intended for her to finally steer off medication.

“I had heart palpitations and I was always under this feeling of wanting to cry,” Monica said. “It happened every time I went onto social media.” At one point, she could not sleep for as long as five days, and was losing her sense of self. It went on for 10 years.

During her ‘off-grid’ retreats, Monica was often tasked with sweeping the monastery and cleaning its dog kennel, which she found, at first, quite troubling. But she went on her own way to mindfulness when she discovered herself through soaking up her suffering, then moving on

“I started to see the dogs in a different light,” said Monica, holding back her tears. “I stopped thinking about myself and started to think about them. These dogs were rescued from the streets, some of them were even beaten by people and disease-ridden.” She cried.

She grew aware of her immediate surroundings and established a real relationship with them. After that, she went on a journey to the Himalayas, fully detached from the digital world for a month. She managed to find herself there.

“I’m not the only one who suffers in this world. [...] Once my perspective toward the world changed, my reality changed.”

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More than 30 minutes of sleep during the daytime can lead to a heart rhythm condition called atrial fibrillation (a-fib), shows a new study, which is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

"Our study indicates that snoozes during the day should be limited to less than 30 minutes," study author Jesus Diaz-Gutierrez, of Juan Ramon Jimenez University Hospital in Huelva, Spain, said in a news release from the European Society of Cardiology.

Atrial fibrillation is a cardiac disorder that causes irregular and sometimes very rapid heart rhythm. This can lead to blood clots in the heart, thereby increasing the risk of stroke and other cardiac ailments, according to Mayo Clinic. The condition predominantly occurs in the heart's upper chamber, Health Day reported.

Over 20,000 Spanish university graduates participated in the study. They were grouped under three categories: the ones who don't nap, those who nap less than 30 minutes and those who nap 30 minutes or more each day. During the follow-up period of 14 years, 131 participants developed a-fib.

Researchers found those who took longer naps were twice at the risk of developing the disorder compared to those who slept less during the day. Those who didn't nap at all were in the no-risk zone.

The study indicated that people who napped for fewer than 15 minutes had a 42% lesser chance of developing a-fib, and those whose sleep routine was limited between 15 to 30 minutes had a 56% reduced risk of a-fib as compared to long nappers.

"The results suggest that the optimal napping duration is 15 to 30 minutes," Diaz-Gutierrez said. "Larger studies are needed to determine whether a short nap is preferable to not napping at all."

"Long daytime naps may disrupt the body's internal clock (circadian rhythm), leading to shorter night-time sleep, more nocturnal awakening, and reduced physical activity," the researcher explained said. "In contrast, short daytime napping may improve circadian rhythm, lower blood pressure levels, and reduce stress."

The study has just established a link between long naps and a-fib, it doesn't explain its cause and effects.

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Officially labeled XBB.1.16, Arcturus is a subvariant of Omicron that was first seen in India and has been on the World Health Organization’s watchlist since the end of March. The CDC’s most recent update now lists Arcturus as causing 7% of U.S. coronavirus cases, landing it in second place behind its long-predominant Omicron cousin XBB.1.5, which causes 78% of cases.

Arcturus is more transmissible but not more dangerous than recent chart-topping strains, experts say.

“It is causing increasing case counts in certain parts of the world, including India. We’re not seeing high rates of XBB.1.16 yet in the United States, but it may become more prominent in coming weeks,” Mayo Clinic viral disease expert Matthew Binnicker, PhD, told The Seattle Times.

Arcturus has been causing a new symptom in children, Indian medical providers have reported.

“One new feature of cases caused by this variant is that it seems to be causing conjunctivitis, or red and itchy eyes, in young patients,” Binnicker said. “This is not something that we’ve seen with prior strains of the virus.”

More than 11,000 people in the U.S. remained hospitalized with COVID at the end of last week, and 1,327 people died of the virus last week, CDC data show. To date, 6.9 million people worldwide have died from COVID, the WHO says. Of those deaths, more than 1.1 million occurred in the U.S.

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