Sunday, April 16

• The first launch this week will be a Long March 4C taking off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre at 1:36 a.m. UTC. It will be carrying the Fengyun 3G meteorological satellite to a polar orbit. Like other Chinese launches, there may not be live footage of this launch but there should be a recap video next week.

Monday, April 17

• With any luck, SpaceX will be able to launch its Super Heavy rocket in its first suborbital test flight on Monday. The launch window is between 12:00 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. UTC and it’ll take off from Orbital Launch Pad 1 at the Starbase in Texas. The Super Heavy rocket will be carrying a Starship prototype and the mission will see SpaceX attempt one full orbit of the planet. Afterwards, Starship will perform a re-entry and splashdown near Hawaii. You can check out SpaceX’s website at the designated time to watch the launch.

Tuesday, April 18

• Just a day later and SpaceX will be launching its Falcon Heavy rocket, this time carrying the ViaSat 3 Americas, Arcturus, and G-Space 1 communications satellites into orbit. The ViaSat satellite will provide broadband communications from a geostationary orbit. This flight is due for take-off from 11:29 p.m. UTC in Florida and should be available on the SpaceX website as well.

Wednesday, April 19

• Completing a hat trick, SpaceX will perform its third launch of the week. This time is a Falcon 9 carrying several Starlink internet-beaming satellites to orbit. To help keep the cost of launches down, SpaceX typically lands the first stage of the rocket so that it can be reused in the future. Additionally, Starlink satellites now go to space with anti-reflective coatings to minimize disruption to astronomers. This mission will take off at 1:33 p.m. UTC from Cape Canaveral.

Saturday, April 22

• Finally, on Saturday, India will launch its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) to launch the TeLEOS 2 SAR satellite for AgilSpace Singapore. This satellite will perform Earth observation tasks. It will take off at 9:00 a.m. from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

Recap

• The first launch this week was an Ariane 5 rocket carrying the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission. You can see footage of the launch below.

• The final launch was a Falcon 9 rocket performing the Transporter-7 mission, a rideshare that delivers 51 payloads into space for various entities.

That’s all we have this week, be sure to check in next time.

TWIRL 110: SpaceX will launch its Super Heavy rocket carrying Starship

In an unexpected and unintentional ode to Aquaman, a rather unusual biomaterial has been trialed in Brazil, where it’s been used to great success in the treatment of burns. If something seems fishy to you, that's probably because it is: the secret ingredient in all this is tilapia, the freshwater fish native to Africa but abundant in Brazil’s rivers. 

In the last few years, researchers have experimented with using its skin to aid healing during skin grafts. For example, back in 2019, the unorthodox treatment was documented in a case report, which detailed its efficacy in treating burns caused by a gunpowder explosion.

Thanks to its high type I collagen content, tensile strength, and similar morphology to human skin, tilapia skin makes an ideal piscine plaster. It “prevents loss of moisture and proteins on the wound and it stays bonded to the bed of the wound until it heals over,” Dr. Edmar Maciel, one of the study’s authors, told The New York Times last year. This helps to speed up wound recovery and protect against contamination.

The study describes the case of a 23-year-old man, who had sustained burns to his arms, face, and torso, and was helped in his recovery by the use of Nile tilapia fish skin. First, the skin was chemically sterilized, treated with glycerol, and irradiated, before being tested for bacteria and fungi and refrigerated, to limit the risk of infection.

Once the wounds on the man’s arms had been cleaned and the necrotic (dead) and fibrinous tissue removed, the treated tilapia skin was placed on top. Silver sulfadiazine cream, commonly used on burn patients in Brazil, was added, followed by gauze and bandage, which were removed every 72 hours in the first week to ensure the tilapia skin had adhered to the wound. 

By days 12 and 17, reepithelialization – the formation of a new skin barrier between wound and environment – had occurred for the right and left arm, respectively. At this point, the tilapia skin, which had dried and loosened from the burn, was peeled away to reveal the healed skin. No side effects were noted.

Previously, human, pig, and even frog skin has been used in skin grafts, but at Brazil’s public hospitals, these are not always available. Instead, gauze bandages, which require regular and painful changing, are most often used. Tilapia, however, are a dime a dozen in Brazil’s rivers, so could be a valuable, and sustainable, alternative.

“The fish skin is usually thrown away, so we are using this product to convert it into something of social benefit,” Odorico de Morais, a professor at the Federal University of Ceará, told Reuters in 2017.

It may also be a more cost-effective option: one 2022 study found that the unlikely biomaterial costs just $1 per patch, excluding transportation and labor expenses.

And its use in skin grafts is not just a one-time (or one-species) thing. Tilapia skin has also been used to treat pediatric burns, and has even helped our four-legged friends, having aided the healing of a bite wound in a miniature dachshund.

Suddenly it's not sounding (quite so) fishy anymore.

The study is published in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports.

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Around 5,500 children with rare genetic diseases can put a name to their condition for the first time, thanks to a decade-long study. Sixty of the diseases diagnosed are brand new to science, and three-quarters of the genetic mutations identified were not inherited from the children’s parents. Understanding the genetic causes of their conditions means that these children can have access to the best possible treatment, and that even those with very rare diseases may no longer feel quite so alone.

Jessica Fisher’s son Mungo was already 18 when the Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) study finally came up with the answers the family had been seeking all his life. He had an extremely rare mutation in a gene called PCGF2, causing learning difficulties, growth restriction, and distinctive facial differences such as a large forehead and sparse hair. The disorder is also associated with a range of potential issues with digestion, the circulatory systems, bones, and the heart.

Mungo’s specific condition was named Turnpenny-Fry syndrome when it was discovered by the DDD study in 2015. Fisher had thought that her son was one-of-a-kind until the study connected her with another family, all the way on the other side of the globe.

“When I first saw a picture emailed to me of the other family’s child it was really emotional,” Fisher explained in a statement. “We’d always looked around for children who might look like Mungo – and here was a child in Australia who could have been his sibling.”

Now, this support network has grown into a Facebook group of 36 families from around the world. Children born with Turnpenny-Fry syndrome can be diagnosed much earlier, and have immediate access to support and the knowledge that there are others out there like them.

“For us, getting a diagnosis really helped us understand what to expect. Compared to families who came before the condition had an official diagnosis, we were lucky,” said Dasha Brogden, whose daughter Sofia was diagnosed with Turnpenny-Fry syndrome when she was just one month old. “Very few people are living through this experience, and it feels like Jessica and Mungo are like family to us.”

The DDD study was a collaboration between 24 regional genetic medicine services across the UK and Ireland, and included more than 13,500 families, all of whom had children with a severe, undiagnosed developmental disorder.

While prior testing had been unable to find answers for these families, advanced genomic analysis carried out at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, UK, used data from both the children and their parents to find the specific genetic changes causing these rare conditions. The high-tech sequencing methods used, and being able to share data with each patient's medical team using a powerful platform called DECIPHER, were key to the success of the study.

“Many of these diagnoses were only made possible through combining data across all diagnostic centres in the UK and Ireland. For some diagnoses, it was only through sharing data with international colleagues that it was possible to make a diagnosis,” said Professor Matthew Hurles, co-author of a new paper detailing the approaches used in the DDD study.

Lead clinician Dr Helen Firth added, “Embedding a powerful informatics platform at the heart of this study facilitated the collaboration with families, clinicians and scientists engaged in the project, and played a crucial role in its diagnostic success and in the discovery and ultimately treatment of new causes of rare genomic disease.”

So far, 5,500 of the children taking part in the study have received a diagnosis, with diseases involving mutations in over 800 genes. But the work isn’t finished yet. 

The genomic data analysis is still ongoing, and broader application of the study methods is already starting to mean more children receiving a diagnosis – and the support and help that comes with it – much earlier in life.

The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Some of the oldest windmills in the world are found in Nashtifan, on the windswept plains of northeastern Iraq. These vertical-axis windmills are thought to have been built over 1,000 years ago. They still work today and could be used to mill grain into flour. 

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Property damage was catastrophic, and Purkis stressed future submarine eruptions could prove even worse. Most volcanoes are located closer to major population centers, or in locations that would focus waves towards cities rather than dampening them. Yet many of these may be capable of eruptions of similar size to HTHH. The Tonga-Kermadec Arc sits upon the fastest-converging – and therefore most seismically active – subduction boundary on Earth, with the greatest density of submarine volcanoes. 

The study is published open access in Science Advances.

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Europe successfully launches spacecraft toward the moons of Jupiter [Updated]

Rocket Report: SpaceX may lease High Bay 1 in the VAB; China to fight price war

Our means of payment have been constantly evolving and have done so all the more rapidly during the COVID-19 crisis. They have indeed been greatly digitized: although a majority of those made in shops are in cash, their number is constantly decreasing and the share of cash in the total value of exchanges is already a minority. Some believe that we are on the verge of a "cashless society", which they see as holding the promise of economic efficiency and social progress.

Individually, most of us can see advantages in the increasing payment digitization. Although some adaptation may be necessary, they often appear to be more convenient, faster, and more secure. In the euro area, half of the respondents now say they prefer digital payments to cash.

But we also see that what may be perceived as rather positive for oneself as an individual does not necessarily translate into a vision of a desirable future for society as a whole.

Among European respondents, a slight majority (55%) say that it is important or very important for them to be able to continue to pay in cash in the future. As with other countries, in France cash is being used less and less, yet 83% of respondents say they are worried about the disappearance of cash.

Why are there such differences between practices and perceptions?

Monetary exclusion

One concern is for those who find it more difficult to adapt to digital payments. Even if this transition can be seen as positive "on average", it is not favorable to all, and its negative impacts mainly fall on those who are already the most vulnerable.

Among the poorest 40% of the population in the euro area, about 20% are excluded from digital payments because they do not use any payment cards: this would mean more than 23 million people. For them, the increasing digitization of payments complicates their daily lives, creating difficulties in accessing goods and services, additional costs, a loss of autonomy and a feeling of relegation.

Certain types of means of payment now seem indispensable for full participation in socioeconomic activity, yet they're not necessarily available to everyone. Digitalization thus increases the number of people in a situation of "monetary exclusion"—they may have money, but not in the right form.

More generally, with the evolution of our monetary forms, something deeper is at stake that cannot be summed up in simple considerations of practicality. Money is not just a simple technical tool that makes our economic transactions more fluid, but a social institution: our collective use of money helps shape our society.

From this point of view, the dematerialization of money is also accompanied by a loss of meaning: the meaning conveyed by the symbolic dimensions of our coins and notes. For example, a 2021 study found that after the introduction of the euro in 2002, people identified themselves more as European citizens. It is not certain that this would have been the case in a cashless society.

In the current context, while cash is supposed to be legal tender—that is to say, it should be compulsorily accepted as a means of payment—an increasing number of shops have already switched to "cashless" (especially in urban centers). In several European countries, the usability of cash is becoming increasingly uncertain, while access to it is becoming more difficult as bank branches and even cash machines disappear. It is also this dual constraint on users that explains the evolution of payment practices.

What is also not as apparent is that the types of payment used are less and less the public goods they should be. Indeed, given the central role that payment services play in our societies, they should be universally accessible and mainly free of charge for their users. However, these services are increasingly subject to commercial management, guided by profitability principles that limit their accessibility. This poses a risk to the legitimacy of our public institutions—to which money is always fundamentally linked—and to the trust we place in them.

With the digitization of our means of payment, the sovereign signs that represent our institutions are replaced by commercial brands—those of payment-card networks (Visa and Mastercard, in particular) or of the new payment services proposed by the GAFAM (ApplePay, for example) and other tech companies. The process of digitization of money should be seen for what it really is: not primarily the dematerialization of our means of payment, but their increasing privatization.

Cash is no exception either, since our coins and banknotes are largely minted and printed by private companies, and all of them are delivered to the public by other private companies. If cash is disappearing today, it is primarily because it is seen as a source of costs by those who have been entrusted with its management.

The digitization of means of payment is therefore not just a technical development. As it translates into a greater commodification of the fundamental element of money, it is also a political and social issue. In a context where everyone must be able to use digital means of payment satisfactorily in order to participate fully in society, it is the question of the division of tasks between the public and the private sector that must be reopened.

The digital euro currently being developed by the European Central Bank could be an opportunity to reaffirm the public nature of money and to (re) develop a genuine public service for account and payment services.

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The worst effects of alcohol go far beyond the last head-splitting, gut-wrenching hangover you had and would rather forget.

Dehydration is part of it, but consuming alcohol also inflames the intestines and leaves the body with a bunch of toxic byproducts it has to deal with – which over time can lead to serious health harms.

Aiming to alleviate the burden of alcoholism, a team of Chinese researchers has been trialing a modified probiotic supplement that they say can protect mice – and maybe one day humans – against the acute effects of consuming too much booze.

Given its widespread use, alcohol remains one of the leading contributors to death and disease worldwide, responsible for some 5 percent of yearly mortalities and roughly the same fraction of global burden of disease and injury.

"Alcohol intake has been shown to be associated with a variety of diseases, such as fatty liver, cirrhosis, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and cancer," explains medical researcher Xiaoxiao Jiang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues in their published paper.

"Therefore, the development of effective products to reduce alcohol intake is receiving increasing attention."

Most of the alcohol we consume is processed in the liver with the help of two enzymes. One, called alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), snaps into action relatively quickly, breaking ethanol down into the less harmful compound, acetaldehyde. Still, consume too much booze, the intestines will cop a beating while ADH is taking action.

This new therapy – which has yet to be tested in humans – takes advantage of a naturally occurring variant of ADH (called ADH1B) that is found primarily in East Asian and Polynesian populations and shows greater activity than other forms of ADH. In other words, it breaks down ethanol faster.

But how to deliver it safely? The researchers tinkered with Lactococcus lactis, a bacterium used to produce buttermilk and cheese. Slipping an extra genetic instruction into its tiny genome, L. lactis was engineered to produce the human ADH1B enzyme. It was then tested on mice that had been exposed to different levels of alcohol.

Mice treated with the modified probiotic recovered from alcohol exposure faster than untreated mice, who still showed signs of drunkenness and had rising blood alcohol levels two hours after drinking.

The researchers hypothesize that the oral probiotic works to metabolize alcohol in the gut, thereby reducing the amount of alcohol that is absorbed into the bloodstream.

Further experiments showed that mice treated with the probiotic had fewer signs of acute liver damage and less intestinal inflammation, the likes of which are caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

"Our results showed that this recombinant probiotic can reduce alcohol absorption and protect the body from alcohol damage, including hangover, liver, and intestinal damage," the researchers write.

The appeal of a pill that can alleviate the worst effects of alcohol is obviously huge – and this is not the first time such a therapy has been tested.

In 2022, an anti-hangover probiotic containing two gut-friendly bacteria went on sale in the UK, claiming to rapidly break down alcohol in the gut before it reaches the liver.

But with limited data available on which to judge its effects, experts questioned how well it would work for different people since weight, sex, age, physical activity, and food intake can all alter how alcohol is absorbed. The same would apply to this latest therapeutic candidate if it were one day tested in humans.

Hormone injections to reverse drunkenness and a prototype breathing device to help the body expel alcohol have also been tested as ways to counteract excessive drinking. Ideally, with more testing, treatments like these could help sober up people who fall foul to a night of heavy drinking.

However, mounting evidence suggests that even moderate drinking has harmful effects and so the general health advice remains the same: limit the number of drinks you consume to reduce the toll on your health.

That's easier said than done for some people who wrestle with addiction and substance misuse – people who are in need of much more holistic healthcare than some probiotic pill.

The study has been published in Microbiology Spectrum.

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You are horribly outnumbered.

Even within your own body, your 30 trillion human cells can’t compete with the 40 trillion or so bacteria that live rent-free in your gut, on your skin, under your toenails. 

Your very DNA owes a significant chunk—about 8 percent—of its content to retroviruses, which, when they infect a sperm or egg cell, can rewrite short sections of our genetic code in a way that’s passed down to the next generation. It’s thought that these snippets gave our distant ancestors the ability to form memories and carry their young in a womb instead of laying eggs—without them, humans could look very different.

And it doesn’t stop there. Even today, those bacteria living in your gut—your microbiome—may be influencing your behavior in ways that you can’t sense and that scientists don’t understand, releasing neurotransmitters to make you more sociable and more likely to spread bacteria, playing your brain like an instrument to serve their own ends.

It took the Covid-19 pandemic to really expose the power that germs have over our lives. But bacteria and viruses have been shaping our world in invisible ways for millennia, influencing not only our individual bodies but also the shape of the world we live in: history, politics, religion. That’s the argument made by public health researcher and sociologist Jonathan Kennedy in his compelling new book, Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History. “In the spring of 2020 loads of people were saying, ‘This is extraordinary, this is unprecedented,’” he says. “I had a pretty good idea that it wasn’t.”

Looking through the literature, Kennedy was struck by a question: “If bacteria and viruses had such a big impact on us as individuals, what impact have they had on us as aggregations of bodies: the body politic, the body economic, the body social?” In other words, how have germs influenced human history and, more pertinently—what kind of impact might a global pandemic have on what’s to come?

“Historians tend to see the natural world as a stage on which humans—sometimes great men, sometimes groups of people—act,” Kennedy says. “We have to change the conceptualization of history, we have to see ourselves as part of an ecosystem.”

That ecosystem can, Kennedy argues, help explain long-standing mysteries, like why Homo sapiens outlasted the Neanderthals, for instance—answer: a potent mixture of pathogens and interbreeding. It can also make sense of how small groups of conquistadors were able to overpower huge New World empires—infectious diseases like smallpox were transported across the Atlantic by the first arrivals, then decimated the New World populations so that by the time the conquests of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro began, once thriving communities had already been turned into ghost towns. “The population of the Americas fell by 90 percent in the century after Columbus arrived in Hispaniola,” Kennedy says. “The drop in population was so marked that you can still see it in ice cores that are drilled in Greenland. It had an impact on the temperature of the world.”

The success of the conquistadors has been attributed to guns, germs, and steel, but you could also point to a quirk of fate: The New World has fewer domesticable animals than the Old and fewer that live in large herds like cows and sheep. As a result, infectious diseases have had less chance to incubate and jump the species barrier to humans, and so people living in the Americas had never had the chance to build up immunity to pathogens like smallpox, which is thought to have jumped from livestock to humans in the early days of agriculture, around 10,000 BC. 

There are other compelling examples of germs changing the course of history: how the Black Death reduced the working population and made labor more valuable, sparking the end of feudalism; how malaria rendered much of Africa impenetrable until the 1880s until the widespread use of quinine (which comes from the bark of the South American cinchona tree).

Diseases may also be responsible for the spread of religions like Christianity, which exploded in popularity after the third-century Plague of Cyprian, which was, some scientists now believe, a type of hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola. Christianity encouraged acts of kindness as a route into heaven—rather than fleeing from the sick, Christians nursed them back to health, drastically improving their survival rates. “Even with basic nursing, providing people with water and food, you could maybe save two-thirds of people who were sick,” Kennedy says. To the untrained eye, this would have looked a lot like a miracle—the best kind of publicity for any new religion. In comparison, “paganism didn’t provide a very helpful way for interpreting the impact of infectious disease outbreaks,” Kennedy says.

But the spread of Christianity also spread the notion of man’s dominion over nature. In the long term, that attitude has contributed to climate change and driven our relentless push into remote areas, both things that can distribute new diseases as we rub up against nature in strange new ways. 

Things came full circle with Covid, though. It remains to be seen what impact the latest pandemic will have. “Being in the eye of the storm it’s hard to tell, but if we look back at history there’s so many cases of pandemics, epidemics coming along, killing lots of people, harming societies, and creating the space for new ideas and new societies to emerge,” Kennedy says. “Probably when we look back at this period we’ll see that there were changes that were maybe already underway, but that Covid-19 has either accelerated them or changed the trajectory of history.”

Covid has perhaps already served as a humbling reminder of the natural order of things. “It’s been quite a shock to the way in which a lot of us see the power of humans,” Kennedy says. “You can make a pretty good argument that we have been living, and still live, and always will live in the age of microbes. Coming to terms with that is part of really learning how to live successfully on this planet.”

(Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History by Jonathan Kennedy is published on April 13.)

Diseases Didn’t Just Shape History, They Control the Future

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In the secret world below the Antarctic sea ice, salty frozen fingers slowly descend towards the ocean floor. They’re called brinicles, and while they may look similar to the stalactites we find in caves on the surface, they may actually have more in common with hydrothermal vents. But creatures of the deep, beware: anything caught in the path of a brinicle will be frozen alive.

As polar sea ice forms, the salts within the water are separated out from the pure ice crystals and can form pockets of extra-salty brine in channels and fractures within the sea ice. The brine can eventually leak out into the open sea below the ice layer. The extra salts make it heavier than the surrounding water, so it sinks. It’s also even colder than the water around it, so it absorbs heat – enough to push the already near-freezing seawater over the edge.

The result is a streamer of sinking brine that pulls a shroud of frozen seawater around itself as it descends, sometimes all the way to the seafloor if there’s enough brine leaking out and no strong currents to disrupt it. While majestic to look at, it’s not great news for the bottom-feeding critters that inhabit these chilly waters – the brinicle’s icy creep can continue along the seabed, freezing anything unlucky enough to stumble into its path.

Film crews for the 2011 BBC series Frozen Planet captured a large brinicle forming in remarkable detail, and you can see it in all its glacial glory in this video.

As icy projections growing downwards from a solid surface, you can see why people have likened brinicles to stalactites. But a study in 2013 proposed that it makes more sense to think of these structures as “inverse chemical gardens”, and that the way they grow has much more in common with mud volcanoes and hydrothermal vents.

Many in the scientific community believe that hydrothermal vents may have been crucial to the beginnings of life on our planet. It’s one of several theories, and the question is far from settled; but the study authors suggest that brinicles could play a starring role in another school of thought, which proposes that the rejection of salt from sea ice could have produced conditions compatible with the origins of life. Could that also extend to other far-distant worlds? Scientists suspect that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede may be home to an ice-covered ocean – what role might brinicles have played there?

This is all speculation, for now. Brinicles require a perfect confluence of conditions to form, so they’ll always be tricky to study. But as time goes by, we will surely learn more and more about these fragile, frigid “fingers of death”.

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Update: The launch has been postponed due to possible lightning strike and rescheduled for tomorrow, April 14 at 12:14 pm UTC (8:14 am EST).

Tomorrow, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the first-ever European mission to Jupiter. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, also known as JUICE, has a big mission ahead of it, providing new insights into the Jovian system with a focus on the three icy moons of Jupiter: Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

The mission will travel to Jupiter over the next eight years, a period which will include three flybys of Earth (the last one in 2029), one of Venus, and one of asteroid 223 Rosa in the main Asteroid Belt. In July 2031, it will first fly past Ganymede and then enter an orbit around Jupiter.

“We have two big topics for the JUICE mission. The first one is to study what we call habitable places. Do we have places around a planet like Jupiter where we can have habitable conditions or conditions interesting for life? We have some good evidence that there is a lot of liquid underneath the surfaces of some of these icy moons,” Dr Olivier Witasse, a planetary scientist working on the scientific aspects of the Mission, told IFLScience.

“The second topic is Jupiter,” he continued. “It is a very interesting planet, a miniaturized solar system with many many moons, dust rings, and a huge magnetic field that rotates very quickly. We would like to understand the system as a whole. And to maybe have a kind of model for exoplanets and extrasolar systems.”

How to watch ESA's JUICE mission launch

The Ariane V rocket carrying JUICE will launch from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana at 12:14 pm UTC (8:14 am ET) on April 14, 2023, and will be streamed live by the European Space Agency's WEB TV from 11:45 pm UTC (7:45 am ET). Everything going well, JUICE will be released 28 minutes after the launch at around 12.45 pm UTC, beginning its trek to Jupiter.

https://youtu.be/ZD9n9HLwswQ

The spacecraft will fly past Europa twice, Ganymede 12 times, and Callisto 21 times. Callisto has the oldest surface in the Solar System and may have a liquid ocean. If there is one, JUICE will find it. 

When JUICE finally enters into orbit around primary target Ganymede it will become the first spacecraft orbiting a moon other than ours. Ganymede is the biggest moon in the Solar System and the only one with a magnetic field, and JUICE will dedicate the latter part of its mission to investigating its potential habitability.

“We don't go there [to Jupiter] very often, so once we go there, we're getting everything we need,” Dr Witasse told IFLScience. “We have a great suite of payload and I think the science investigations are quite exciting!”

The 2030s will bring new insights into the Jovian system – and maybe even evidence that life could or does exist elsewhere in the Solar System.

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When you are bitten by a snake, it is easy to panic and do something inadvisable. Take for example, the man who cut off his finger following a snake bite only to be told that it was "not necessary at all" as the snake in question was "not that toxic".

But no matter how panicky you get, it is inadvisable to hook yourself up to a car battery and electrocute yourself for a full five minutes, as one bizarre case report makes abundantly clear. In the report, titled "Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation", doctors detail how a man from Arizona tried the unusual method after being bitten by his pet rattlesnake for the 15th time. 

In the report, the team notes that applying high-voltage, low-current electric shocks to rattlesnake bites had been touted as a concept, before receiving a moderate amount of coverage in the media. Evidence in favor of electrocuting snake bite wounds was anecdotal, and it was ineffective when tested on animals. 

Prior to reading about the technique, the 28-year-old snake owner had treated his rattlesnake bites with antivenom, but had reacted badly and gone into anaphylactic shock. This time, when he was bitten on the face by his lip, he had an alternative treatment ready.

"Based on their understanding of an article in an outdoorsman's magazine, the patient and his neighbor had previously established a plan to use electric shock treatment if either was envenomated," the team write in the case report. 

"The patient was placed supine next to a car, and a spark plug wire was attached to his upper lip by a wire with a small clip at each end. The engine was started and repeatedly revved to 3,000 rpm for approximately five minutes. The patient lost consciousness with the first electrical charge."

Fifteen minutes later, an ambulance arrived on the scene and found him "unconscious and incontinent of stool", with low blood pressure, slowed breathing, and swelling (images of the man's swelling can be viewed here) on his face, neck, and chest.

After being airlifted to hospital, he spent the next four days under close supervision whilst being hooked up to a car battery treated for the bite and subsequent electrocution. After further treatment for serum sickness from the antivenom, he was released, though he returned to hospital for reconstructive surgery after losing tissue in his upper lip.

"Despite many attempts, investigators in the United States have been unable to demonstrate any beneficial effect from electric shock treatment, even when applied under ideal conditions," the team wrote in their discussion, noting that despite this 7,000 stun guns designed to "treat" snakebites had been sold in the US by 1990, before they were banned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"Because animal studies have not shown a beneficial effect," they conclude, "it is strongly advised that electric shock therapy not be used for the treatment of pit viper poisonings in the United States".

For his troubles, the former US Marine was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize "for his determined use of electroshock therapy – at his own insistence"

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In 1996 on the way to visit his girlfriend, photographer Charles “Chuck” O’Rear stumbled upon Bliss. Stopping off amidst California hills, he noted that the lighting after a storm was doing good things for the landscape. The image he snapped would become what’s thought to be the most viewed image in the world, and if you’ve ever used a Microsoft computer, you might’ve seen it.

The famous image known as Bliss had humble beginnings, first sold as a stock photo to Corbis, the image licensing company founded by Bill Gates in 1989. It hit the big time when it became the desktop wallpaper for Windows XP in 2001, and is thought to have since become the most viewed image in the world, seen by over a billion people.

Some have argued that the perfection of the image means it must be digitally altered, but O’Rear has maintained that the arresting composition was simply a combination of good kit, timing, and weather.

“There was nothing unusual,” he told Slate. “I used a film that had more brilliant colors, the Fuji Film at that time, and the lenses of the RZ67 were just remarkable. The size of the camera and film together made the difference and I think helped the Bliss photograph stand out even more. I think if I had shot it with 35 millimeter, it would not have nearly the same effect.”

O’Rear now lives in Napa Valley north of San Francisco Bay, very near to where Bliss was taken. He was prepared to take the photo because of weather patterns in the region that see increased rainfall turn the hills a luscious shade of green.

Back in 1996, O’Rear was driving to see his girlfriend near San Francisco every Friday afternoon, and each week he went out with his photography kit in the car just in case. On one January day, he sees just the sight he’d been waiting for, so pulls over and sets up his equipment to take a few shots.

O’Rear admits that the final image probably wasn’t even the one he was aiming for since the clouds were moving the whole time it took him to set up his camera. Without digital technology, he also couldn’t check what he’d taken but felt confident he’d secured a nice shot.

Evidently, it was exactly what Microsoft was looking for as they contacted his agent to buy the rights. The price they were willing to pay was more than any courier was willing to take on in shipping the original image to them, so Microsoft paid for O’Rear to bring them the physical image in person. 

“I had no idea where it was going to go,” O’Rear, who has since spotted his photo in the background of news reports at the White House and in interviews with the Kremlin, said.

From the rainy hills of California to a global audience. Not bad for an impromptu shot on a rainy day.

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It’s hard to find a human culture that doesn’t enjoy scrawling and carving into the environment around them - and the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula are no different. Found along Qatar’s northeastern coast, Al Jassasiya is a dozen different rock-carving sites that feature hundreds upon hundreds of carvings.

Al Jassasiya was first formally discovered by a Danish archaeologist in 1957, but the site was systematically studied in the 1970s when researchers counted a total of 874 carvings. 

One of the recurring images that appears among the Al Jassasiya petroglyphs is strange ovals with lines coming out, which look a bit like crawling bugs. However, it’s thought they represent a boat with oars, as seen from a bird's eye view. Researchers have suggested the boats depict pearling crafts as pearls were widely exported from this part of the world in ancient times.

It's not known what some of the symbols and shapes represent or were used for. Image credit: Alizada Studios/Shutterstock.com

Other common themes are geometric shapes, enigmatic symbols, and animals, including ostriches and fish. There are also a load of “cup and ring marks,” which are patterns found in prehistoric art from almost every part of the world. 

The carvings are examples of early petroglyphs that date back to the 15th century CE. They feel a million miles away from the glitzy capital of Doha, which is found just an hour's drive south of the area.

The site is sometimes called Jebel Jassassiyeh, which loosely translates from Arabic to mean “to search, hill.” The name likely originated from a time when this slightly elevated area was used to look out over the sea to view incoming ships. 

Prehistoric art is often associated with the cave paintings of Europe or the giant Nazca Lines of South America, but the Arabian Peninsula is decorated with a wealth of different styles – especially petroglyphs, which describe images carved into the rock. 

Some of the most impressive were discovered near the Sakaka in the al-Jawf Province of Saudi Arabia that feature life-size carvings of camels. Scientists believe some of these carvings here were created 8,000 years ago, which is exceptionally old for this style of artwork. 

Researchers have even used carvings in the Saudi desert to show that this part of the world was home to some unexpected wildlife species. 

The meaning behind Al Jassasiya is a bit more cryptic than these other sites, but it does show that this part of the Arabian Peninsula was once home to an array of bustling and diverse cultures. 

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In the fall of 2017, Mehtaab Sawhney, then an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined a graduate reading group that set out to study a single paper over a semester. But by the semester’s end, Sawhney recalls, they decided to move on, flummoxed by the proof’s complexity. “It was really amazing,” he said. “It just seemed completely out there.”

The paper was by Peter Keevash of the University of Oxford. Its subject: mathematical objects called designs.

The study of designs can be traced back to 1850, when Thomas Kirkman, a vicar in a parish in the north of England who dabbled in mathematics, posed a seemingly straightforward problem in a magazine called the Lady’s and Gentleman’s Diary. Say 15 girls walk to school in rows of three every day for a week. Can you arrange them so that over the course of those seven days, no two girls ever find themselves in the same row more than once?

Soon, mathematicians were asking a more general version of Kirkman’s question: If you have n elements in a set (our 15 schoolgirls), can you always sort them into groups of size k (rows of three) so that every smaller set of size t (every pair of girls) appears in exactly one of those groups?

Such configurations, known as (n, k, t) designs, have since been used to help develop error-correcting codes, design experiments, test software, and win sports brackets and lotteries.

But they also get exceedingly difficult to construct as k and t grow larger. In fact, mathematicians have yet to find a design with a value of t greater than 5. And so it came as a great surprise when, in 2014, Keevash showed that even if you don’t know how to build such designs, they always exist, so long as n is large enough and satisfies some simple conditions.

Now Keevash, Sawhney and Ashwin Sah, a graduate student at MIT, have shown that even more elusive objects, called subspace designs, always exist as well. “They’ve proved the existence of objects whose existence is not at all obvious,” said David Conlon, a mathematician at the California Institute of Technology.

To do so, they had to revamp Keevash’s original approach — which involved an almost magical blend of randomness and careful construction — to get it to work in a much more restrictive setting. And so Sawhney, now also pursuing his doctorate at MIT, found himself face to face with the paper that had stumped him just a few years earlier. “It was really, really enjoyable to fully understand the techniques, and to really suffer and work through them and develop them,” he said.

Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

‘Beyond What Is Beyond Our Imagination’

For decades, mathematicians have translated problems about sets and subsets — like the design question — into problems about so-called vector spaces and subspaces.

A vector space is a special kind of set whose elements — vectors — are related to one another in a much more rigid way than a simple collection of points can be. A point tells you where you are. A vector tells you how far you’ve moved, and in what direction. They can be added and subtracted, made bigger or smaller.

Consider the room you’re in. It contains an infinite number of points, and an infinite number of vectors — ones stretching from where you are to every point in the room. All of those vectors can be constructed out of three fundamental ones: a vector pointing horizontally in front of you, another to your right, and another pointing up. By adding these vectors, multiplying them by real numbers, or doing some combination of the two, you can generate the three-dimensional vector space in which you live. (The number of vectors needed to generate the whole space is the dimension of the vector space.)

Various subspaces lie inside each vector space. Take just the vectors pointing to your right and in front of you. These define a two-dimensional subspace — a flat plane parallel to the floor.

Mathematicians often work with finite vector spaces and subspaces, where vectors can’t point in every possible direction (and don’t have the same notion of length). In this world, each vector space has only a finite number of vectors.

The subspace design problem deals with n-dimensional vector spaces and their subspaces. In such vector spaces — again, so long as n is sufficiently large and satisfies simple conditions — can you find a collection of k-dimensional subspaces such that any t-dimensional subspace is contained in exactly one of them? Such an object is called an (n, k, t) subspace design. It’s conceptually similar to the ordinary designs problem, but it involves arrangements that are much more tightly constrained.

This finite 3D vector space consists of eight vectors. Its 2D subspaces are particular subsets of four vectors.

Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

“It’s an important problem because it’s one corner of a very deep analogy between sets and subsets on the one hand, and vector spaces and subspaces on the other,” said Peter Cameron of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

In the 50 years since mathematicians started thinking about this problem, they’ve found only one nontrivial example (though they know that more general kinds of subspace designs exist): In a 13-dimensional vector space, it’s possible to cover two-dimensional subspaces with three-dimensional ones exactly once. The result required a massive computer-based proof, because even for such small values of n, k and t, you end up working with millions of subspaces. The complexity of such systems “isn’t just beyond our imagination; it’s beyond what is beyond our imagination,” said Tuvi Etzion of the Technion in Israel, who helped discover the example.

But do subspace designs always exist, for any k and t? Some mathematicians conjectured that, by and large, such objects are impossible. Others, heartened by work done over the years on designs, figured that “it may be hard to prove, but if there isn’t an obvious reason for them not to exist, then they should exist,” Keevash said.

Compared to the designs realm, “for this problem, there was just nothing,” Sah said. “I guess that prompts a bit of curiosity whenever that happens.”

A Sponge for Errors

Sah and Sawhney met in 2017 as undergraduates at MIT (and ended up attending the same reading group). A few months later, “they started working together and just never stopped,” Conlon said. “They’re producing high-quality research at a rate where I can’t even blink.”

The two young mathematicians were intrigued that it had been so hard to write down just one explicit example of a subspace design, and they saw the problem as a perfect way to explore the boundaries of important techniques in combinatorics.

In proving the existence of special objects called “subspace designs,” the mathematicians Mehtaab Sawhney, Ashwin Sah and Peter Keevash (left to right) tested the limits of several well-known methods in combinatorics.

From left: Courtesy of Mehtaab Sawhney; Celeste Noche; Courtesy of Peter Keevash

Keevash, meanwhile, had kept the question in the back of his mind since his 2014 result. When Sah and Sawhney approached him at a conference last year, the three decided to go for it.

They followed the same overall strategy that Keevash had laid out in his designs work — but because of the tighter constraints at hand, “in practice, all of the steps ended up being very different in their implementation,” Keevash said. First, they set aside a carefully chosen set of subspaces, called a template. The template would later act as an island of structure in an ocean of randomness.

They then applied a modified version of a fundamentally random process called the Rödl nibble to cover most of the remaining subspaces. That left a sparse hodgepodge of subspaces that they still had to deal with. On the surface, those subspaces looked completely unstructured; it seemed impossible to arrange them into clusters that could be properly covered.

That’s where the template came in. They broke the template into pieces and combined some of its subspaces with the subspaces in the hodgepodge — snugly tucking them into larger arrangements that could be properly covered. They had to carefully track how they were doing this to make sure that every move they made led toward that more global structure. But ultimately, they were able to use the template to fill all the holes that the Rödl nibble hadn’t been able to cover. Like a sponge, the template soaked up all the errors within the design. (As a result, this general technique is called “absorption.”) “It’s almost like you’re trying to put a carpet in the corner,” Sawhney said. “It pops up somewhere else, and you push it, and somehow, after 20 pushes, the carpet is just flat.”

This completed the proof. It’s important to note that, as with the designs work, this result could, at least theoretically, be used to construct these objects — but only for very large n. Finding concrete, practical examples remains a task for the future.

In the end, the work illustrated yet another counterintuitive way that mathematicians can harness the forces of randomness to search for hidden structure. “All sorts of unexpected structure is possible,” said Cheryl Praeger, a mathematician at the University of Western Australia.

“The proof demonstrates that Keevash’s techniques work in wider contexts than they were designed for,” Cameron said. It implies that other difficult problems might be tackled by combining randomness and absorption in clever ways.

Those techniques felt magical to Sawhney when he first read about them in Keevash’s paper as an undergraduate. Even now that he’s gained a much deeper understanding of them, “this impression doesn’t go away.”

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In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.

Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.

The Alaskan Inuit language, known as Iñupiaq, uses an oral counting system built around the human body. Quantities are first described in groups of five, 10, and 15 and then in sets of 20. The system “is really the count of your hands and the count of your toes,” says Nuluqutaaq Maggie Pollock, who taught with the Kaktovik numerals in Utqiagvik, a city 300 miles northwest of where the numerals were invented. For example, she says, tallimat—the Iñupiaq word for 5—comes from the word for arm: taliq. “In your one arm, you have tallimat fingers,” Pollock explains. Iñuiññaq, the word for 20, represents a whole person. In traditional practices, the body also serves as a mathematical multitool. “When my mother made me a parka, she used her thumb and her middle finger to measure how many times she would be able to cut the material,” Pollock says. “Before yardsticks or rulers, [Iñupiat people] used their hands and fingers to calculate or measure.”

During the 19th and 20th centuries, American schools suppressed the Iñupiaq language—first violently and then quietly. “We had a tutor from the village who would help us blend into the white man’s world,” Pollock says of her own education. “But when my father went to school, if he spoke the language, they would slap his hands. It was torture for them.” By the 1990s the Iñupiaq counting system was dangerously close to being forgotten.

The Kaktovik numerals started as a class project to adapt the counting system to a written form. The numerals, based on tally marks, “look like” the Iñupiaq words they represent. For example, the Iñupiaq word for 18, “akimiaq piŋasut,” meaning “15-3,” is depicted with three horizontal strokes, representing three groups of 5 (15) above three vertical strokes representing 3.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Unicode Request for Kaktovik Numerals,” by Eduardo Marín Silva and Catherine Strand. Submitted to Unicode Technical Committee Document Registry March 16, 2021 (reference)

“In the Iñupiaq language, there wasn’t a word for 0,” says William Clark Bartley, the teacher who helped develop the numerals. “The girl who gave us the symbol for 0, she just crossed her arms above her head like there was nothing.” The class added her suggestion—an X-like mark—to their set of unique numerals for 1 through 19 and invented what mathematicians would call a base 20 positional value system. (Technically, it is a two-dimensional positional value system with a primary base of 20 and a sub-base of 5.)

Because of the tally-inspired design, arithmetic using the Kaktovik numerals is strikingly visual. Addition, subtraction and even long division become almost geometric. The Hindu-Arabic digits are an awkward system, Bartley says, but “the students found, with their numerals, they could solve problems a better way, a faster way.”

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Unicode Request for Kaktovik Numerals, by Eduardo Marín Silva and Catherine Strand. Submitted to Unicode Technical Committee Document Registry March 16, 2021 (reference)

“The Iñupiaq way of knowing is often done by showing,” adds Qaġġuna Tenna Judkins, director of Iñupiaq education in northern Alaska’s North Slope Borough. Visualizing arithmetic makes those concepts a lot easier to understand, she says.

At first students would convert their assigned math problems into Kaktovik numerals to do calculations, but middle school math classes in Kaktovik began teaching the numerals in equal measure with their Hindu-Arabic counterparts in 1997. Bartley reports that after a year of the students working fluently in both systems, scores on standardized math exams jumped from below the 20th percentile to “significantly above” the national average. And in the meantime, the board of education in the North Slope Borough’s district seat, Utqiagvik, passed a resolution that spread the numerals almost 500 miles along the Arctic coast. The system was even endorsed by the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents 180,000 Inuit across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia.

But under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, from 2002 to 2015, schools faced severe sanctions—or even closure—for not meeting state standards, provoking a “scare” that some local educators say squeezed the Kaktovik numerals into a marginal role despite the system’s demonstrated educational impact. “Today the only place [they’re] really being used is in the Iñupiaq language classrooms,” says Chrisann Justice, the North Slope Borough’s Iñupiaq education department specialist. “We’re just blowing on the coal.”

Now support from Silicon Valley is helping to reignite the Kaktovik numerals. Thanks to efforts by linguists working with the Script Encoding Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, the numerals were included in the September 2022 update of Unicode, an international information technology standard that enables the digitization of the world’s written languages. The new release, Unicode 15.0, provides a virtual identifier for each Kaktovik numeral so developers can incorporate them into digital displays. “It really is revolutionary for us,” Judkins says. “Right now we either have to use photos of the numerals or write them by hand.”

There is still work to be done. Google is building a font for the numerals based on the Unicode update, says Craig Cornelius, a Google software engineer who works to digitally preserve endangered languages. The company made a “prelease” of its font available for computer download in March, although it won’t appear on the Android operating system until at least late summer. Desktop and mobile keyboards with the numerals need to be produced as well.

But excitement over the traditional system’s cyber-debut is growing. “If we went to a math textbook creator and said, ‘Hey, can you build us a textbook but convert the Arabic numerals into Kaktovik numerals?’ it would be that much easier,” Judkins says.

Unicode inclusion also pushes the boundary of what is mathematically feasible with the Kaktovik numerals. At higher levels, mathematics becomes an increasingly digital discipline. The basic theory can be illustrated on a blackboard, but complex problems often need to be solved with a computer. Without digital availability, the Kaktovik numerals would be confined to their arithmetic wheelhouse at a time when the Iñupiaq language is being revitalized for broad modern use. Being able to input the Kaktovik numerals into computation engines such as WolframAlpha, Judkins says, is “going to be a game changer. You are almost going to be able to choose: Am I going to be in English, or am I going to be in Iñupiaq? And if I am in Iñupiaq, I’m using all Kaktovik numerals.”

Nearly 3,000 miles away, in Oklahoma, Unicode holds similar promise for the Cherokee community. In the early 1800s Cherokee polymath Sequoyah invented the Cherokee syllabary of written characters. “Around the same time, he also developed a number system,” says Roy Boney, language program manager for the Cherokee Nation. Cherokee numerals weren’t endorsed by the tribal government until 2012. A long history of trade with French and British settlers had meant the Hindu-Arabic numerals were already in use when Cherokee numerals were invented.

While it’s unclear if Cherokee numerals have since gained traction, Boney reports that interest in the system is growing. “We have the numbers and need to use them,” he says. “It’s been a slow roll, but we have been introducing the numbers into our education settings” and are beginning to demonstrate the community use needed for inclusion in Unicode. Once the numerals are included, Boney and his colleagues hope to create a programming language using Cherokee script and numbers.

Hindu-Arabic numerals’ ubiquity is powerful and has often come at the expense of culturally meaningful systems. But now those systems are slowly going digital, which is creating opportunities for their use that would have been unthinkable even two years ago. As Nuluqutaaq Maggie Pollock puts it: “This is just the beginning.”

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South Korea is to offer reclusive youths a monthly living allowance of 650,000 won ($490) in order to encourage them out of their homes, as part of a new measure passed by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. The measure also offers education, job and health support.

The condition is known as “hikikomori”, a Japanese term that roughly translated means, “to pull back”. The government wants to try to make it easier for those experiencing it to leave the house to go to school, university or work.

Included in the programme announced this week, which expands on measures announced in November, is a monthly allowance for living expenses for people aged between nine and 24 who are experiencing extreme social withdrawal. It also includes an allowance for cultural experiences for teenagers.

About 350,000 people between the ages of 19 and 39 in South Korea are considered lonely or isolated – about 3% of that age group – according to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.

Secluded youth are often from disadvantaged backgrounds and 40% began living reclusively while adolescents, according to a government document outlining the measures.

The document includes case studies that describe young people using reclusiveness as a way to cope with setbacks in their family lives. One young person describes their depression as a result of domestic violence. “When I was 15 years old, domestic violence made me depressed so much that I began to live in seclusion. A lethargic person who sleeps most of the time or has no choice but to eat when hungry and go back to sleep.”

Another said that they had become a recluse when their family “went bankrupt”.

The new measures aim to strengthen government support “to enable reclusive youth to recover their daily lives and reintegrate into society”, the government said in a statement.

Among the other types of support are paying for the correction of affected people’s physical appearance, including scars “that adolescents may feel ashamed of”, as well as helping with school and gym supplies.

South Korea also has a relatively high rate of youth unemployment, at 7.2%, and is trying to tackle a rapidly declining birthrate that further threatens productivity.

“This policy is fundamentally a welfare measure,” Shin Yul, a political science professor at Myongji University in Seoul, told Bloomberg. “While it’s good to try various approaches to boost working-age population, it cannot be seen as a long-term solution to fix the population problem here”.

President Yoon Suk-yeol last month declared the birth rate a “crucial national agenda”.

This year South Korea became the only country in the world with a fertility rate of below one, with women having an average of 0.78 children. Many of the reasons behind women choosing not to have children are economic: the high cost of raising children, an economic slowdown, limited job prospects and the rising cost of housing.

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We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and Emeryville address SFPD officers traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT.

Multiple police sources have described the predawn knifing that last week left the 43-year-old Lee dead in a deserted section of downtown San Francisco as neither a robbery attempt nor a random attack.

Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.

Some manner of confrontation allegedly commenced while both men were in the vehicle, and potentially continued after Lee exited the car.

Police allege that Momeni stabbed Lee multiple times with a knife that was recovered not far from the spot on the 300 block of Main Street to which officers initially responded.

This scenario would explain in part why Lee was walking through a portion of Main Street in which there is little to no foot traffic at 2:30 a.m.

That was one of several incongruous circumstances surrounding Lee’s violent death which law-enforcement sources from the get-go felt made it far from a straightforward or random crime.

Nevertheless some of Lee’s fellow tech luminaries and a chorus of other influential voices portrayed this killing as part and parcel of a city awash in violent crime and on a descent into further chaos. While Lee is one of a dozen homicide victims in San Francisco this year, his is the only killing that has garnered national coverage — or, in most cases, even cursory local coverage.

San Francisco’s other homicide victims in 2023 are Gavin Boston, 40; Irving Sanchez-Morales, 28; Carlos Romero Flores, 29; Maxwell Maltzman, 18; Demario Lockett, 44; Maxwell Mason, 29; Humberto Avila, 46; Gregory McFarland Jr, 36; Kareem Sims, 43; Debra Lynn Hord, 57; and Jermaine Reeves, 52.

San Francisco is home to much in the way of visible public misery, unnerving street behavior and overt drug-use. Its property crime rate has long been high, and the police clearance rate for property crimes has long been minimal. But the city’s violent crime rate is at a near-historic low and is lower than that in most mid-to-large-sized cities.

Today’s arrest would appear to undermine the premise that Lee’s violent death was due to street conditions in San Francisco. If the police do have their man, this was not a robbery gone bad nor a motiveless assault by some random attacker — but an alleged grievance between men who knew one another, that the suspect purportedly escalated into a lethal conflict.

< View the graphic at the source page. >

Lee’s death, however, was packaged in the media and on social media into a highlight reel of recent San Francisco misfortunes and crimes: large groups of young people brawling at Stonestown; the abrupt closure of the mid-market Whole Foods, leaving San Franciscans just eight other Whole Foods within city limits; the severe beating of former fire commissioner Don Carmignani in the Marina District, allegedly by belligerent homeless people — it all adds up to a feeling of a city coming undone.

This manner of coverage, however, does not capture the actual lived experience of the vast majority of San Franciscans. It also omits potentially mitigating details of the individual events. Carmignani, for instance, was brutally struck in the head with a metal rod and hospitalized. But the lawyer for his alleged attacker claims that the former fire commissioner first pepper-sprayed the homeless man accused of beating him — which certainly would color this incident.

Of note, police sources say that a series of homeless people had previously been pepper-sprayed in the Marina prior to this instance.

The arrest in the Lee case is a breaking story. We will update this article as soon as possible.

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The inside of your mouth is the perfect place for bacteria to thrive: It’s dark, it’s warm, it’s wet and the foods and drinks you consume provide nutrients for them to eat.

But when the harmful bacteria build up around your teeth and gums, you’re at risk of developing periodontal (or gum) disease, experts say, which is an infection and inflammation in the gums and bone that surround your teeth.

And such conditions in your mouth may influence the rest of your body, said Kimberly Bray, a professor of dental hygiene at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

A growing yet limited body of research, for instance, has found that periodontal disease is associated with a range of health conditions including diabetes, heart disease, respiratory infections and dementia.

Exactly how oral bacteria affect your overall health is still poorly understood, Dr. Bray said, since the existing research is limited and no studies have established cause-and-effect.

But some conditions are more associated with oral health than others, experts say. Here is what we know.

The health issues linked with oral health

About 47 percent of people aged 30 years and older in the United States have some form of periodontal disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In its early stages, called gingivitis, the gums may become swollen, red or tender and may bleed easily. If left untreated, gingivitis may escalate to periodontitis, a more serious form of the disease where gums can recede, bone can be lost, and teeth may become loose or even fall out.

With periodontitis, bacteria and their toxic byproducts can move from the surface of the gums and teeth and into the bloodstream, where they can spread to different organs, said Ananda P. Dasanayake, a professor of epidemiology at the New York University College of Dentistry.

This can happen during a dental cleaning or flossing, or if you have a cut or wound inside your mouth, he said.

If you have inflammation in the mouth that is untreated, some of the proteins responsible for that inflammation can spread throughout the body, Dr. Bray said, and potentially damage other organs.

Diabetes

Of all the associations between oral health and disease, the one with the most evidence is between periodontal disease and diabetes, Dr. Bray said. And the two conditions seem to have a two-way relationship, she added: Periodontal disease seems to increase the risk for diabetes, and vice versa.

Researchers have yet to understand exactly how this might work, but in one review published in 2017, researchers wrote that the systemic inflammation caused by periodontal disease may worsen the body’s ability to signal for and respond to insulin.

In another study, published in April, scientists found that diabetics who were treated for periodontal disease saw their overall health care costs decrease by 12 to 14 percent.

“You treat periodontal disease, you improve the diabetes,” Dr. Dasanayake said.

Pneumonia

If large amounts of bacteria from the mouth are inhaled and settle in the lungs, that can result in bacterial aspiration pneumonia, said Dr. Frank Scannapieco, a professor of oral biology at the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine.

This phenomenon has been observed mainly in patients who are hospitalized or older adults in nursing homes, and is a concern for those who can’t floss or brush their teeth on their own, said Dr. Martinna Bertolini, an assistant professor of dental medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine.

Preventive dental care such as with professional teeth cleanings, or periodontal treatments like antibiotic therapy, can lower the risk of developing this kind of pneumonia, Dr. Scannapieco said.

Cardiovascular disease

In a report published in 2020, an international team of experts concluded that there is a significant link between periodontitis and heart attack, stroke, plaque buildup in the arteries, and other cardiovascular conditions.

While researchers haven’t determined how poor oral health might lead to worse heart health, some evidence suggests that periodontal bacteria from the mouth may travel to the arteries in vascular disease patients, potentially playing a role in the development of the disease.

And a 2012 statement from the American Heart Association noted that inflammation in the gums has been associated with higher levels of inflammatory proteins in the blood that have been linked with poor heart health.

Some research also suggests that better oral hygiene practices are linked with lower rates of heart disease.

For example, in a study published in 2019, researchers reviewed the health records of nearly 250,000 healthy adults living in South Korea and found that over about 10 years, those who regularly brushed their teeth and received regular dental cleanings were less likely to have cardiovascular events than those who had poorer dental hygiene, formed more cavities, experienced tooth loss or developed periodontitis.

Pregnancy complications

A number of studies and reviews have found associations between severe periodontal disease and preterm, low birth weight babies, Dr. Dasanayake said. Though more research is needed to confirm the link.

In a 2019 review, researchers found that treating periodontal disease during pregnancy improved birth weight and reduced the risk of preterm birth and the death of the fetus or newborn.

And in a 2009 study, researchers found that oral bacteria could travel to the placenta — potentially playing a role in chorioamnionitis, a serious infection of the placenta and amniotic fluid that could lead to an early delivery, or even cause life-threatening complications if left untreated.

Research also suggests that bacteria from your mouth may activate immune cells that circulate in the blood, causing inflammation in the womb that could distress the placenta and fetal tissues.

There is longstanding research that periodontitis may induce preterm birth in animals like mice, and that treating these infections can protect against low birth weights and preterm birth.

Dementia

Researchers have been increasingly interested in the role of oral health in dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Scannapieco said.

“Bacteria that are found in the mouth actually have been identified in the brain tissue of patients with Alzheimer’s,” he said, implying a potential role for them in the disease.

In a recent review, scientists noted that oral bacteria — especially those related to periodontitis — could either affect the brain directly via “infection of the central nervous system,” or indirectly by inducing “chronic systemic inflammation” that reaches the brain.

However, there’s no evidence that oral bacteria alone could cause Alzheimer’s, the review authors wrote. Rather, periodontal disease is just one “risk factor” among many for people who are predisposed to Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.

Other conditions

Oral bacteria have also been robustly linked with a number of other conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, Dr. Bray said. And emerging research is starting to link oral bacteria with kidney and liver disease, as well as colorectal and breast cancers.

But more research is needed to confirm all of these links, the experts said. And we still don’t know if regular dental care and periodontal treatments may help prevent or improve any of the conditions mentioned above, Dr. Scannapieco said.

What you can do

The best way to maintain good oral health is to follow the classic dental care advice, including brushing your teeth twice a day and flossing every day, Dr. Scannapieco said.

“Not all people really appreciate their oral health, and they’re only reminded of it when they have a toothache or some pain,” he added. But it’s important to be just as diligent and proactive about your oral health as you are with exercise or diet or any other aspect of well-being.

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