Wednesday, April 12

• The first launch of the week will be a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying several smallsats as part of the Transporter-7 rideshare mission. The satellites will be placed in a Sun-synchronous orbit and will perform a whole host of missions of their own. This mission will take off at 6:45 a.m. UTC from Vandenberg AFB in California. It should be available on the SpaceX website to live stream.

Thursday, April 13

• The final launch of the week, and most exciting, is the launch of Arianespace’s Ariane 5 ECA+ rocket. The launch itself is not what’s special, but the payload. It will be launching the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft which will be heading off to investigate Jupiter and three of its moons; Ganymede, Callisto, and Europe – all of which have oceans that could contain life. After the launch, which is due at 12:15 p.m. UTC from French Guyana, we’ll have to wait until July 2031 until the craft reaches our closest gas giant. If you want to watch, tune into ESA Web TV at the time of launch.

Recap

• The first launch last week was a Falcon 9 carrying the Tranche 0 mission for the Space Development Agency (SDA). The satellites will be used for communications, data, and missile warnings.

• Next, we saw the maiden flight of the Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-2. It carried the Love Space Science remote-sensing satellite into a Solar-synchronous orbit.

• Next up was another Falcon 9, this time carrying the Intelsat IS-40e satellite with NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument aboard.

• Below is a video of the satellite’s deployment.

• The final launch was that of iSpace’s Hyperbola-1 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre. The launch was done to test measures taken after a prior failed launch.

That’s all for this week, check in next time!

TWIRL 109: European Space Agency to send JUICE to Jupiter and its moons

The company's artificial intelligence powered Ernie bot, launched last month, has been touted as China's closest answer to the U.S.-developed chatbot ChatGPT.

Baidu said it had lodged lawsuits in Beijing Haidian People's Court against the developers behind the counterfeit applications of its Ernie bot and the Apple company.

"At present, Ernie does not have any official app," Baidu said in a statement late on Friday posted on its official "Baidu AI" WeChat account.

It also posted a photograph of its court filing.

"Until our company's official announcement, any Ernie app you see from App Store or other stores are fake," it said.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Reuters search on Saturday found there were still at least four apps bearing the Chinese-language name of the Ernie bot, all fake, in Apple's App Store.

The Ernie bot is only available to users who apply for and receive access codes. In its statement, Baidu also warned against people selling access codes.

Source

The temperature of the world’s ocean surface has hit an all-time high since satellite records began, leading to marine heatwaves around the globe, according to US government data.

Climate scientists said preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) showed the average temperature at the ocean’s surface has been at 21.1C since the start of April – beating the previous high of 21C set in 2016.

“The current trajectory looks like it’s headed off the charts, smashing previous records,” said Prof Matthew England, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales.

Three years of La Niña conditions across the vast tropical Pacific have helped suppress temperatures and dampened the effect of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

But scientists said heat was now rising to the ocean surface, pointing to a potential El Niño pattern in the tropical Pacific later this year that can increase the risk of extreme weather conditions and further challenge global heat records.

Dr Mike McPhaden, a senior research scientist at Noaa, said: “The recent ‘triple dip’ La Niña has come to an end. This prolonged period of cold was tamping down global mean surface temperatures despite the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“Now that it’s over, we are likely seeing the climate change signal coming through loud and clear.”

La Niña periods – characterised by cooling in the central and eastern tropical Pacific and stronger trade winds – have a cooling influence on global temperatures. During El Niño periods, the ocean temperatures in those regions are warmer than usual and global temperatures are pushed up.

According to the Noaa data, the second-hottest globally averaged ocean temperatures coincided with El Niño that ran from 2014 to 2016.

Ocean surface temperatures are at a record high
Average daily sea surface temperature, 60S to 60N

< View the graphics at the source page. >

The data is driven mostly by satellite observations but also verified with measurements from ships and buoys. The data does not include the polar regions.

More than 90% of the extra heat caused by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and deforestation has been taken up by the ocean.

A study last year said the amount of heat accumulating in the ocean was accelerating and penetrating deeper, providing fuel for extreme weather.

England, a co-author of that study, said: “What we are seeing now [with the record sea surface temperatures] is the emergence of a warming signal that more clearly reveals the footprint of our increased interference with the climate system.”

Measurements from the top 2km of the ocean show the rapid accumulation of heat in the upper parts of the ocean, particularly since the 1980s.

Dr Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist and distinguished scholar at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, said observations showed the heat in the tropical Pacific was extending down to more than 100 metres.

He said that heat would have knock-on effects for the atmosphere above, creating more heat, adding energy to weather systems and causing marine heatwaves.

Dr Alex Sen Gupta, an associate professor at the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre, said satellites showed that on the ocean surface, temperature rises had been “almost linear” since the 1980s.

“What’s been surprising is that the last three years have also been really warm, despite the fact that we’ve had La Niña conditions,” he said. “But it is now warmer still and we are getting what looks like record temperatures.”

Sen Gupta is part of an international team of scientists studying marine heatwaves – which are classified by his group as an area of the ocean where temperatures are in the top 10% ever recorded for that time of year for at least five straight days.

Current observations show moderate to strong marine heatwaves in several regions, including the southern Indian Ocean, the south Atlantic, off north-west Africa, around New Zealand, off the north-east of Australia and the west of Central America.

< View the graphics at the source page. >

“It’s unusual to see so many quite extreme marine heatwaves all at the same time,” said Sen Gupta.

While marine heatwaves can be driven by local weather conditions, studies have shown they have increased in frequency and intensity as the oceans have warmed – a trend forecast to worsen with human-caused global heating.

Hotter oceans provide more energy for storms, as well as putting ice sheets at risk and pushing up global sea levels, caused by salt water expanding as it warms.

Marine heatwaves can also have devastating effects on marine wildlife and cause coral bleaching on tropical reefs. Experiments have also suggested that warming oceans could radically alter the food web, promoting the growth of algae while lowering the types of species that humans eat.

Prof Dietmar Dommenget, a climate scientist and modeller at Monash University, said the signal of human-caused global heating was much clearer in the oceans.

“Obviously we’re in a fast-warming climate and we’re going to see new records all the time. A lot of our forecasts are predicting an El Niño.

“If this happens, we’ll see new records not just in the ocean but on land. This data is already suggesting we’re seeing a record and there could be more coming later this year.”

Source

Now, not even reality is required for photographs to look authentic — just artificial intelligence responding to a prompt. Even experts sometimes struggle to tell if one is real or not. Can you?

The rapid advent of artificial intelligence has set off alarms that the technology used to trick people is advancing far faster than the technology that can identify the tricks. Tech companies, researchers, photo agencies and news organizations are scrambling to catch up, trying to establish standards for content provenance and ownership.

The advancements are already fueling disinformation and being used to stoke political divisions. Authoritarian governments have created seemingly realistic news broadcasters to advance their political goals. Last month, some people fell for images showing Pope Francis donning a puffy Balenciaga jacket and an earthquake devastating the Pacific Northwest, even though neither of those events had occurred. The images had been created using Midjourney, a popular image generator.

On Tuesday, as former President Donald J. Trump turned himself in at the Manhattan district attorney’s office to face criminal charges, images generated by artificial intelligence appeared on Reddit showing the actor Bill Murray as president in the White House. Another image showing Mr. Trump marching in front of a large crowd with American flags in the background was quickly reshared on Twitter without the disclosure that had accompanied the original post, noting it was not actually a photograph.

Experts fear the technology could hasten an erosion of trust in media, in government and in society. If any image can be manufactured — and manipulated — how can we believe anything we see?

“The tools are going to get better, they’re going to get cheaper, and there will come a day when nothing you see on the internet can be believed,” said Wasim Khaled, chief executive of Blackbird.AI, a company that helps clients fight disinformation.

Artificial intelligence allows virtually anyone to create complex artworks, like those now on exhibit at the Gagosian art gallery in New York, or lifelike images that blur the line between what is real and what is fiction. Plug in a text description, and the technology can produce a related image — no special skills required.

Often, there are hints that viral images were created by a computer rather than captured in real life: The luxuriously coated pope had glasses that seemed to melt into his cheek and blurry fingers, for example. A.I. art tools also often produce nonsensical text. Here are some examples:

Rapid advancements in the technology, however, are eliminating many of those flaws. Midjourney’s latest version, released last month, is able to depict realistic hands, a feat that had, conspicuously, eluded early imaging tools.

Days before Mr. Trump turned himself in to face criminal charges in New York City, images made of his “arrest” coursed around social media.They were created by Eliot Higgins, a British journalist and founder of Bellingcat, an open source investigative organization. He used Midjourney to imagine the former president’s arrest, trial, imprisonment in an orange jumpsuit and escape through a sewer. He posted the images on Twitter, clearly marking them as creations. They have since been widely shared.

The images weren’t meant to fool anyone. Instead, Mr. Higgins wanted to draw attention to the tool’s power — even in its infancy.

Midjourney’s images, he said, were able to pass muster in facial-recognition programs that Bellingcat uses to verify identities, typically of Russians who have committed crimes or other abuses. It’s not hard to imagine governments or other nefarious actors manufacturing images to harass or discredit their enemies.

At the same time, Mr. Higgins said, the tool also struggled to create convincing images with people who are not as widely photographed as Mr. Trump, such as the new British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, or the comedian Harry Hill, “who probably isn’t known outside of the U.K. that much.”

Midjourney was not amused in any case. It suspended Mr. Higgins’s account without explanation after the images spread. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

The limits of generative images make them relatively easy to detect by news organizations or others attuned to the risk — at least for now.

Still, stock photo companies, government regulators and a music industry trade group have moved to protect their content from unauthorized use, but technology’s powerful ability to mimic and adapt is complicating those efforts.

Some A.I. image generators have even reproduced images — a queasy “Twin Peaks” homage; Will Smith eating fistfuls of pasta — with distorted versions of the watermarks used by companies like Getty Images or Shutterstock.

In February, Getty accused Stability AI of illegally copying more than 12 million Getty photos, along with captions and metadata, to train the software behind its Stable Diffusion tool. In its lawsuit, Getty argued that Stable Diffusion diluted the value of the Getty watermark by incorporating it into images that ranged “from the bizarre to the grotesque.”

Getty said the “brazen theft and freeriding” was conducted “on a staggering scale.” Stability AI did not respond to a request for comment.

Getty’s lawsuit reflects concerns raised by many individual artists — that A.I. companies are becoming a competitive threat by copying content they do not have permission to use.

Trademark violations have also become a concern: Artificially generated images have replicated NBC’s peacock logo, though with unintelligible letters, and shown Coca-Cola’s familiar curvy logo with extra O’s looped into the name.

In February, the U.S. Copyright Office weighed in on artificially generated images when it evaluated the case of “Zarya of the Dawn,” an 18-page comic book written by Kristina Kashtanova with art generated by Midjourney. The government administrator decided to offer copyright protection to the comic book’s text, but not to its art.

“Because of the significant distance between what a user may direct Midjourney to create and the visual material Midjourney actually produces, Midjourney users lack sufficient control over generated images to be treated as the ‘master mind’ behind them,” the office explained in its decision.

The threat to photographers is fast outpacing the development of legal protections, said Mickey H. Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association. Newsrooms will increasingly struggle to authenticate content. Social media users are ignoring labels that clearly identify images as artificially generated, choosing to believe they are real photographs, he said.

Generative A.I. could also make fake videos easier to produce. This week, a video appeared online that seemed to show Nina Schick, an author and a generative A.I. expert, explaining how the technology was creating “a world where shadows are mistaken for the real thing.” Ms. Schick’s face then glitched as the camera pulled back, showing a body double in her place.

The video explained that the deepfake had been created, with Ms. Schick’s consent, by the Dutch company Revel.ai and Truepic, a California company that is exploring broader digital content verification.

The companies described their video, which features a stamp identifying it as computer-generated, as the “first digitally transparent deepfake.” The data is cryptographically sealed into the file; tampering with the image breaks the digital signature and prevents the credentials from appearing when using trusted software.

The companies hope the badge, which will come with a fee for commercial clients, will be adopted by other content creators to help create a standard of trust involving A.I. images.

“The scale of this problem is going to accelerate so rapidly that it’s going to drive consumer education very quickly,” said Jeff McGregor, chief executive of Truepic.

Truepic is part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a project set up through an alliance with companies such as Adobe, Intel and Microsoft to better trace the origins of digital media. The chip-maker Nvidia said last month that it was working with Getty to help train “responsible” A.I. models using Getty’s licensed content, with royalties paid to artists.

On the same day, Adobe unveiled its own image-generating product, Firefly, which will be trained using only images that were licensed or from its own stock or no longer under copyright. Dana Rao, the company’s chief trust officer, said on its website that the tool would automatically add content credentials — “like a nutrition label for imaging” — that identified how an image had been made. Adobe said it also planned to compensate contributors.

Last month, the model Chrissy Teigen wrote on Twitter that she had been hoodwinked by the pope’s puffy jacket, adding that “no way am I surviving the future of technology.”

Last week, a series of new A.I. images showed the pope, back in his usual robe, enjoying a tall glass of beer. The hands appeared mostly normal — save for the wedding band on the pontiff’s ring finger.

The post Can We No Longer Believe Anything We See? appeared first on New York Times.

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A long-lost letter from the scientist to an inquiring engineer in 1949 turned out to be extraordinarily prescient in the fields of biology and physics.

The original inquiry from engineer Glyn Davys, which started the correspondence, has since been lost, but judging from Einstein's reply, Davys's question had something to do with animal perception and what it can tell us about the physical world.

"It is thinkable that the investigation of the behavior of migratory birds and carrier pigeons may someday lead to the understanding of some physical process which is not yet known," Einstein wrote in his reply.

More than 70 years later, we now know Einstein's hunch was right on the money. Evidence now suggests birds can sense Earth's magnetic field using special photoreceptors in their eyes that are sensitive to subtle shifts in the planet's magnetic field. This is what allows them to migrate thousands of kilometers without getting lost.

Other animals, like marine turtles, dogs, and bees, also show an uncanny ability to sense our planet's magnetic fields, although not necessarily through the eyes.

"It is amazing that [Einstein] conceived this possibility, decades before empirical evidence revealed that several animals can indeed perceive magnetic fields and use such information for navigation," wrote researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, where the letter was donated.

Still, the Nobel Prize winner did have some clues to guide his thinking. At the time the letter was written, biological science and physical science were beginning to merge like never before. Bat echolocation had recently been discovered, and radar technology was beginning to take root.

In fact, Davys himself was a researcher in this field, which is probably why he was interested in other strange animal senses, like those shown by bees.

In Einstein, he found a like-minded soul. It seems the famous physicist was also fascinated by biological science as a window to unseen physical forces.

His return letter, which was undiscovered until Davys's death in 2011, is short, but it confirms Einstein was similarly fascinated by the behavior of bees.

(Dyer et al., J Comp Physiol A, 2021)

In the type-written note, Einstein admits he is well acquainted with Karl von Frisch, who had recently figured out bees navigate using the polarization patterns of light.

Einstein is known to have attended one of von Frisch's lectures at Princeton University six months before the letter was sent. He even had a personal meeting with the researcher, and these interactions clearly left an impression.

While Davys seems to be most interested in how this new biological knowledge can inform future technology, Einstein argues we need more biological research.

"I cannot see a possibility to utilize those results in the investigation concerning the basis of physics," he replied to Davys.

"Such could only be the case if a new kind of sensory perception, resp. of their stimuli, would be revealed through the behavior of the bees".

Since the letter was sent, we've learned a lot about bee behavior and how these curious insects perceive the world. Just as Einstein predicted, that knowledge is already helping us improve technology, like the cameras on our iPhones.

Despite decades of research, however, there's still a lot of mystery left. The exact mechanisms by which animals perceive light or sense the Earth's magnetic field are still being teased apart, and it might not be the same for every species.

Bees, for instance, appear to sense the magnetic field in their abdomen, while birds and dogs seem to do so predominantly through special photoreceptors in their eyes called cryptochromes.

Even human cells make cryptochromes, and recent research reveals these cells respond dynamically to changes in the magnetic field.

This is ironic because it's what you would expect from a unique quantum reaction. For a photoreceptor to sense a magnetic field, it would require electrons within the cell to become entangled, and Einstein at the time had rejected this idea, calling it "spooky action at a distance".

Clearly, Einstein wasn't always right, but even when it came to fields of science outside his expertise, the man had brains.

The study was published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A.

A version of this article was first published in May 2021.

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Big is beautiful. That was the message of post-second-world-war science. The model was the Manhattan Project, to build the first atom bombs.

When hostilities ended, it continued with larger and larger particle accelerators, to probe matter at smaller and smaller scales—and bigger telescopes to do that probing at the largest scales imaginable. And, of course, there was the space race, which at its height in the mid-1960s absorbed more than 4% of America’s federal budget. After the Apollo Moon landings it went on to spawn the space shuttle and the International Space Station, as well as a programme of uncrewed missions to explore the nether reaches of the solar system.

Nice for scientists, then. But so 20th century. For all of these projects were essentially about physics. By the late 1980s biologists were gaining confidence that the next century would belong to them. Biotechnology—the ability to tweak DNA itself for profit—was taking wing. The number of biologists in training was booming. Some in the field were looking enviously at the physicists and asking themselves where they might queue up to dip their bread in the gravy.

The answer, after the usual political haggling, was the Human Genome Project (HGP), an American initiative globalised through the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium of 20 laboratories, eight of which were outside the United States. Though cheap by the standards of big physics (its projected cost of $3bn would barely have bought a couple of shuttle launches to the space station), it gave biology a taste of the big time. It also created a substantial and continuing news story for the media to cover—an Apollo project, if you like, for the discipline. And, by spurring the development of DNA-sequencing technology, by showing how biological research could be organised on a large scale, and by revolutionising the field of molecular genetics with its results, it changed biology itself.

A billion here, a billion there

The idea was to spend the money working out the order of the 3bn or so base pairs that constitute the DNA of the human genome. Base pairs are the twin chemical units which form the heart of the double helix that is DNA. Their individual components (A&T and C&G) are the chemical letters of the genetic script.

When the project started in 1990 people thought this script came in two forms: genes and junk. The genes almost all encoded proteins, and transferred their information to a cell’s protein-building apparatus via messenger molecules made of a DNA-like substance called RNA. The junk was, well, junk.

How wrong they were. There is a lot more to functional DNA, it turns out, than protein-coding genes alone. There are now reckoned also to be genes that turn out more than half a dozen classes of non-messenger RNAs, each with a different job to do. Besides those involved in making proteins, others assist in gene regulation, DNA replication and the process of splicing, by which superfluous material is excised from RNA messengers. On top of those are stretches of DNA that serve to regulate how a gene gets expressed in the body’s cells.

Even the non-functional DNA is interesting. Much of it consists of self-copying elements called retrotransposons, which might be viewed as the genetic equivalent of parasites, though some have been co-opted into useful roles. Buried among those are fossil remains of ancient viral infections and of genes that once worked, but which natural selection has disabled.

The other unexpected discovery was how few protein-coding genes there are. Predictions at the beginning ranged from 50,000 to 100,000. In fact, the figure is about 20,000. This is more or less the same as turned out to be the case for mice (which had their own, subsidiary genome-sequencing project), and only 50% more than for fruit flies (ditto). Whatever it is that makes human beings bigger and more sophisticated than other animals, it isn’t having more genes which encode proteins.

These things, though, took a while to find out. First, the project had to be set up. That happened under the auspices of James Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of DNA’s double-helical structure and of the way base-pairing works: in a genetic sequence, A (adenine) always pairs up with T (thymine), and G (guanine) always pairs with C (cytosine). Like the genome itself, the project was a kludge. Besides the complication of its international extension via the consortium, even the American part had two masters. It was dominated by the country’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). But the Department of Energy (DoE) was also involved. The DoE’s interest in matters nuclear (it runs America’s weapons labs), and therefore mutagenically radioactive, had given it a well-established mandate to do genetic research. That complicated the bureaucracy.

Dr Watson left in 1992, over a dispute about patenting sequences of DNA (he did not want it but the NIH, in certain circumstances, did), and was replaced by Francis Collins, a disease-gene hunter from the University of Michigan. In Britain, meanwhile, the Wellcome Trust (one of the world’s biggest medical-research charities) pitched in with a purpose-built sequencing factory called the Sanger Centre (after Fred Sanger, who invented DNA sequencing), near Cambridge. This was to be run by John Sulston, an expert on the genetics of a nematode worm called C.

elegans. This ended up doing about a third of the work. And then there was the formidable presence of Eric Lander, head of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Centre for Genome Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he managed to turn into the largest of America’s sequencing laboratories.

No battle plan survives enemy contact

At the start of the HGP its leaders thought it would take 15 years to complete. But they reckoned without the efforts of the man who would become the project’s disruptive-innovator-in-chief—Craig Venter.

Dr Venter initially upset the applecart in 1995, by using a novel technique called whole-genome shotgun sequencing to produce the first full DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae). Then, in 1998, with money from Perkin-Elmer, a scientific-instrument company that was about to launch an upgraded sequencing machine, he set up a rival, private, human genome project, in the shape of a firm called Celera. The plan was for this enterprise’s revenue to come from patenting genes it discovered that were thought to have commercial potential.

Whole-genome shotgunning, as the name suggests, blasts entire genomes into sequenceable fragments. It produced results faster than the traditional sequencing methods being used thus far by the HGP consortium. The H. influenzae incident was bad enough for those running the official project. That Dr Venter might repeat it with a genome 1,700 times bigger would be even more embarrassing. But what particularly horrified people was the patenting.

After its own early foray in that direction, the NIH had by now changed tack. The official project was putting its discoveries straight into the public domain, making them unpatentable. Dr Watson said in an interview, referring to Celera’s approach, “You shouldn’t patent something a monkey could do”. Sulston was equally critical. “I believe”, he said, “our basic information, our ‘software’ [meaning the genome], should be free and open for everyone to play with, to compete with, to try and make products from…Craig has gone morally wrong.”

The gloves were now off. Under Dr Lander’s tutelage (for he had now become the project’s self-appointed knocker-together-of-heads) the public endeavour was reorganised to become truly big science, with an industrialised effort focused on just five laboratories, including his and Sulston’s, that had the capacity to scale up quickly. New deadlines were set: to produce a “working draft” by 2001 and to complete the sequence in 2003. Celera, meanwhile, built its own genome-sequencing factory, stuffed with Perkin-Elmer’s new machines, in Rockville, Maryland, a few kilometres from the NIH’s headquarters in Bethesda.

In the end, a truce was called. In a deal brokered by Ari Patrinos, head of the DoE’s side of the project, Dr Collins and Dr Venter shook hands under the benign gaze of Bill Clinton at the White House on June 26th 2000, and the race was declared a dead heat. Both sides, it was agreed, had finished a working draft. In Britain Tony Blair, then prime minister, similarly honoured Sulston and Sanger at 10 Downing Street. Champagne corks popped and everyone celebrated.

The memory lingers on

You can, though, celebrate finishing something only once. So when, on April 14th 2003—as Dr Lander had decreed, and two years ahead of the original schedule—the consortium declared the project truly completed, nobody really noticed. And, in truth, even then it wasn’t. That announcement was of a finished sequence which covered 99% of the genome and was 99.99% accurate. But the 99% applied only to the so-called euchromatic parts of chromosomes, the bits where the genes are. It ignored the rest—the telomeres which cap each end of a chromosome, and the centromere that links its two arms—all of which are full of repetitive, and thus hard-to-sequence, DNA.

Yet these bits are important. Telomeres shrink each time a cell divides, limiting the number of possible divisions and so contributing to ageing.

And centromeres are the places where chromosomal replication, which precedes cell division, start. But it was only in March last year that this remaining 8% of the genome was fully cracked, by a group called the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium. And even that was not the actual end. The completion of the Y chromosome, characteristic of men and also replete with repetitive DNA, was announced by T2T only in December.

So the project is now truly over. But the captains and the kings departed long ago. Dr Watson and Dr Lander are both in the doghouse. In 2007, and again in 2019, the former made some appalling public remarks about genetics, intelligence and black people, and is pretty much shunned as a result. The latter’s robust approach to management—which did so much to get the project back on track in the face of Dr Venter’s challenge—is now out of sympathy with the times. It led to accusations that he had bullied staff during his brief tenure as President Joe Biden’s science adviser, for which he publicly apologised.

Dr Collins, with a skill that the Vicar of Bray would have admired, not only survived two changes of administration as America’s chief geneticist but was subsequently, in 2009, made head of the NIH, where he pulled off the same administration-hopping trick, retiring in December 2021.

John Sulston died in 2018. Dr Venter set up a not-for-profit research institute in his home of La Jolla, California, which last year he transferred to the University of California, San Diego; and a commercial outfit, Synthetic Genomics (now Viridos), which Dr Patrinos also joined, that works on biofuels.

Extraordinary achievement though it was, no one has yet won a Nobel prize for the Human Genome Project. Perhaps no one will. In the end Dr Watson was half right. Obtaining the sequence itself, if not quite something a monkey could do, was, once the technology was perfected, mainly handle-turning. But what you do with that sequence is another matter.

Transcripts of reality

The sheer complexity of the genome has been a revelation. At a stage of his career when he was working at the NIH, before he left to become the public project’s gadfly, Dr Venter had sought to short-circuit the enterprise using a technique called expressed sequence tagging. This employs DNA copies of parts of the RNA messengers (because DNA is a more stable molecule) to characterise genes and also to locate them on chromosomes. On the old model of genes and junk, pursuing this route could have found a lot of the genes (because only the genes would have been transcribed into RNA in a cell in the first place). The junk, in his view back then, could probably have been ignored.

Making “transcriptomes”, of which this was an early example, has indeed become a useful tool. But the way RNA messengers are generated is more complex than simply copying a stretch of DNA. Genes themselves contain sequences called exons that end up in the messenger and others, called introns, that don’t. (They are copied, but then edited out in the process of splicing.) Also, different messengers, with different combinations of exons, sometimes emerge from the same stretch of DNA.

The discovery of intricacies like this, which give a far better understanding of how cells work than previously existed, has eroded the idea of genetics being a separate discipline and turned it into a branch of molecular biology. One of the most exciting parts of applied biology at the moment is the field of gene-editing, which has both medical and agricultural uses. It relies on tweaked versions of molecular constructs that bacteria use to chop up viral intruders by recognising their genetic material. It uses these to excise and replace bits of DNA in target organisms. Genetics? Molecular biology? Or no distinction?

Understanding genetics at the molecular level also helps the understanding and treatment of disease. This is especially true for cancer, which is caused by mutations of parts of the genome that regulate cell growth and division. It is true, too, for what are known as Mendelian disorders, in which a single malfunctioning gene is the cause of the symptoms. But it has far wider ramifications than these.

The rise of biobanks—mass repositories of data that archive information on people’s medical histories and other relevant aspects of their lives, along with their genomes—is beginning to reveal more subtle impacts of genes on health, and especially how genes and environment interact to create disease. Just as any distinction between genetics and molecular biology has now been blurred, so too will the distinction between genetic and non-genetic illnesses.

All this is made possible by the continued improvement and cheapening of the process of sequencing itself. The latest machines, from a firm called Oxford Nanopore Technologies, do not even need to break DNA strands into fragments. Rather, they pull an entire strand through a molecular pore mere nanometres in diameter, reading the bases as the strand passes and yielding a result in minutes.

To infinity and beyond

No part of biology is untouched by the consequences of the genome project. Even muddy-boots disciplines like ecology and animal behaviour benefit. They can use sequencing to discover which species are present in an area, and sometimes to count individual animals. Sequencing has also revealed a diversity of micro-organisms on land and at sea that had hitherto just been guessed at, because most such microbes cannot be cultivated in laboratories.

And one other thing. The model of multi-centre collaboration pioneered by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium is now a standard way of doing biology. There is still a tension between the sort of diversity the consortium began with and the centralising economies-of-scale approach that Dr Lander imposed at the end. But with the vast improvement in communications brought about initially by email and the world wide web, which rose in parallel with the genome project, and subsequently by social media, huge collaborations are now possible, such as the Human Cell Atlas, which has 1,483 participating organisations.

What of the downsides? One thing which concerned people in the 1990s was that information about health risks revealed by individuals’ DNA might be abused, either by employers or insurance companies. That has not happened. If anything things have gone in the opposite direction, with legislation in some places banning discrimination by insurance firms based on the most obvious genetic distinction of all, that between males and females.

Another fear was that genetic knowledge might lead to tinkering for enhancement not just of crops and animals, but of human beings. When somebody actually tried this, though, in 2018 in China, the roof fell in on him. He was excoriated by the world, and imprisoned by his government.

A third worry was that a project which, for obvious reasons, was conducted in a bunch of rich countries, would fail to benefit poorer parts of the world. At the beginning it was indeed true that most human genomes were collected in the rich world. But that is changing. In 2021, for example, the Three Million African Genomes project was set up to redress the fact that less than 2% of all sequenced genomes were, at that time, African—though Africans form 17% of humanity. The hope is thereby to ask questions the answers to which relate more to Africa than to the rest of the world.

The quarrelsome, egotistic white men who set the genomic ball rolling back in the 1990s have thus created something that is changing humanity’s understanding of both the world and of itself—even to the point of showing that many non-African people are actually descended from hybridisations between Homo sapiens and other species of humans who were already living in Asia and Europe as the former spread from its African homeland.

Genomics has therefore come to form a framework for biology in the way that the periodic table forms one for chemistry. It touches everything. And with that, the ambitions for their subject of those biological prophets of the 1980s are being fulfilled in a manner they could scarcely have dreamed of.

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You may have noticed that ice cubes kept in the freezer for a long time have a tendency to shrink as water is lost. This is because in dry freezer air, ice can transform directly into water vapour without first becoming a liquid, in a process known as sublimation.

Ice sublimates in an effort to equilibrate with the vapour pressure of air in the freezer. The water lost from food items during sublimation is redeposited on the food’s surface, and on refrigeration cools as ice crystals.

The moisture loss means that fruit and vegetables can become shrivelled and dry, while meats can develop a leathery texture and dark spots. The dehydration creates pockets in the food which are then open to the air, accelerating oxidation. In fatty foods, this oxidation can cause unpleasant flavours. Food with freezer burn is unpalatable, but safe to eat.

All foods are susceptible to freezer burn, but those with higher moisture levels will develop it more rapidly. To reduce the likelihood of freezer burn, you can vacuum seal food to remove the air that drives the sublimation process. Or if you don’t have a vacuum sealer, wrap the products as tightly as possible and stack them to limit the exposed surface area.

Finally, make sure you regularly rotate your freezer stock so that items are not left languishing for long periods. Some people suggest filling containers with water and leaving them open in the freezer to help maintain humidity and reduce sublimation. Self-defrosting freezers can cause more burn. They regularly melt the ice layer on refrigeration coils, but this keeps the vapour pressure low, driving sublimation.

Freezer burn is similar to the freeze-drying process that food companies use to create long-life foods for astronauts and mountaineers, as well as instant coffee and some dried fruits. The industrial process involves freezing foods, dropping the pressure using a vacuum, then removing the ice.

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Can stress cause stomach pain?

Stress, especially chronic stress, can indeed increase your risk for gastrointestinal (GI) problems.

"Stress and anxiety are common causes of stomach pain and other GI symptoms," Dr. Nina Gupta, a gastroenterologist at University of Chicago Medicine, said recently in an article. Stress impacts the digestive system through the nervous system, and can affect food movement and the gut's bacterial balance. Stress can also cause people to eat poorly, smoke and/or drink too much alcohol or caffeine—all habits that can trigger stomach pain.

Outside the brain, the gut has the greatest area of nerves. This component of the autonomic nervous system—known as the enteric nervous system—is sometimes referred to as the "second brain." According to Harvard Health, "neurons lining the digestive tract signal muscle cells to initiate a series of contractions that propel food farther along, breaking it down into nutrients and waste."

The enteric nervous system communicates with the central nervous system and is known as the "brain-gut axis." This connection explains why stress may cause digestive problems.

According to the American Psychological Association, stress may increase the risk for or exacerbate symptoms of the following gut diseases or dysfunction:

•     Bloating, burping, gas

•     Heartburn, acid reflux or gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)

•     Nausea and vomiting

•     Diarrhea

•     Constipation

•     Ulcers

•     Inflammatory bowel disease or irritable bowel syndrome

Bloating, burping, gas

Stress can contribute to bloating, burping or gassiness by making swallowing foods difficult or increasing swallowed air, per the American Psychological Association.

It can also slow the digestive process, allowing gut bacteria to create gas. For treatment, gastroenterologist Dr. Roshini Rajapaksa of NYU Langone Health in New York City recommends exercise: "Exercise actually helps your colon start moving and it moves that gas along, so it's not going to stay in your system," she said recently. She also suggested to avoid chewing gum, using straws or drinking carbonated beverages, to keep you from swallowing extra air.

Heartburn, acid reflux or GERD

Emotional stress can increase stomach acid production leading to heartburn and acid reflux, according to Harvard Health. It can also aggravate GERD, a disorder where acid rises up from the stomach into the esophagus. How to counteract that? Harvard Health experts suggest not smoking, eating a healthy diet, limiting coffee, tea and cola drinks, eating smaller meals, avoiding meals close to bedtime and using relaxation strategies like mindful meditation or deep breathing.

Nausea and vomiting

"Your anxious feelings can translate into a whole range of gastrointestinal symptoms, including stress nausea, abdominal pain, changes in bowel habits, and even stress vomiting," Dr. Timothy Tramontana said recently in a Cleveland Clinic article. Tramontana recommends exercise, meditation and a healthy diet, with frequent smaller meals. Another option is to drink peppermint tea, which is known to settle the stomach.
Diarrhea

Can stress cause diarrhea?

"[Stress] hormones affect the body, including the gut, to shift swiftly into stress mode," gastroenterologist Dr. Christine Lee said recently in a Cleveland Clinic article. Adrenal glands release hormones like cortisol, serotonin and adrenaline. "There are more serotonin receptors in the intestinal tract than in the brain… [Serotonin] can make your stomach turn. It stimulates the intestines, creating waves of contractions in the colon."

"It can cause a constellation of symptoms of nausea, gas, bloating and crampy abdominal pains," Lee explained, noting that the release of stress causes the diarrhea. "Everything relaxes, and what was on hold is released," she said. "This counter-response can cause symptoms of nausea, pain, flushing, diarrhea or even sweating."

Treatment suggestions include mindful eating—a practice that involves slowing down and savoring each bite of food—and avoiding stressful environments when eating, like eating while driving. Listening to your body and eliminating waste when the urge occurs, rather than holding it in, also improves bowel movements.

Constipation

Can stress cause constipation?

Constipation results when food moves too slowly through the gut. According to the American Institute of Stress, when the body goes into fight-or-flight mode, it diverts blood flow away from the intestines that can cause intestinal movement to slow down, resulting in constipation. Another stress hormone, corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF), slows down the intestines. Stress may also affect healthy gut bacteria, slowing digestion.

Treatment can include exercise, a healthy diet with plenty of fiber, maintaining proper hydration, allowing time when going to the bathroom and engaging in stress-relieving activities like listening to peaceful music, journaling or reading. If you have a history of trauma or are coping with anxiety or depression, professional therapy may be helpful.

Stomach ulcers

Stomach ulcers can be made worse by stress.

Ulcers are open sores or raw areas in the lining of the stomach or intestine. A gastric ulcer is in the stomach; a duodenal ulcer is in the intestines.

According to the University of Pennsylvania Medicine, an imbalance between digestive juices and chemicals that protect the stomach lining causes ulcers, often from a bacteria called Helicobactor pylori. Stress does not cause ulcers, but it can exacerbate them.

Recommendations for treatment include professional care and lifestyle changes including smoking cessation, avoidance of alcohol and stress management.

Gastrointestinal disorders

Gastrointestinal disorders include irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which is a group of symptoms that includes chronic abdominal pain and bowel changes like diarrhea, constipation or both. The underlying cause is unknown. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) refers to two conditions, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and these are caused by a malfunctioning immune system, according to Harvard Health. IBD symptoms include abdominal pain, cramping, fevers, diarrhea, and bloody bowel movements. The relationship between stress and both IBS and IBD is unclear, but stress can make symptoms worse. Using stress management techniques and consulting with your health care provider are recommended.

Copyright © 2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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An international team of scientists has published the results of their research into 23 woolly mammoth genomes in Current Biology. As of today, we have even more tantalizing insights into their evolution, including indications that, while the woolly mammoth was already predisposed to life in a cold environment, it continued to make further adaptations throughout its existence.

 

Years of research, as well as multiple woolly mammoth specimens, enabled the team to build a better picture of how this species adapted to the cold tundra it called home. Perhaps most significantly, they included a genome they had previously sequenced from a woolly mammoth that lived 700,000 years ago, around the time its species initially branched off from other types of mammoth. Ultimately, the team compared that to a remarkable 51 genomes—16 of which are new woolly mammoth genomes: the aforementioned genome from Chukochya, 22 woolly mammoth genomes from the Late Quaternary, one genome of an American mastodon (a relative of mammoths), and 28 genomes from extant Asian and African elephants.

 

From that dataset, they were able to find more than 3,000 genes specific to the woolly mammoth. And from there, they focused on genes where all the woolly mammoths carried sequences that altered the protein compared to the version found in their relatives. In other words, genes where changes appear to have been naturally selected.

What’s new (gene-wise)?

David Díez-del-Molino is an evolutionary biologist and the lead author on this paper. "What we call ‘highly evolved genes’ are genes that have a lot of these non-synonymous mutations. The more they have, the more highly evolved that we consider them,” he explained in a video interview with Ars. “The truth is (and by the way, we do mention this in the limitations of the study) all mutations are relevant. So genes that have only one of these mutations, they could be very important for the woolly mammoth phenotype. So we use the number of mutations as an indication of how much the gene has changed in the woolly mammoth.”

 

Some of those highly evolved genes offer intriguing insight into the woolly mammoth’s environment. The team found evidence for genes involved in the immune system, specifically those that might be useful against parasitic worms or pathogens. Other genes might have helped with DNA repair. Two of the genes they identified in this regard (BRCA1 and BRCA2) are involved with breast cancer in humans, acting to suppress tumors. Could woolly mammoths have been, like their extant relatives, cancer-resistant?

 

Some of the altered genes are involved in fat storage, heat production, and metabolism, all of which could be very useful against the Arctic cold. Other changes indicate that woolly mammoths may have had altered cold sensation, such as the ability to feel pain in reaction to cold temperatures.

 

Perhaps most intriguing are the genes related to hair. The team found changes in several genes that, in humans, are responsible for genetic disorders. With names like Uncombable Hair Syndrome and the appropriately named “woolly hair syndrome” (Carvajal syndrome), these disorders collectively produce uncombable, bushy, wiry, and frizzy hair. These attributes, however, correspond with what we imagine of woolly mammoth fur: one big bushy, wiry, uncombable coat of hair. And these genes indicate mammoth fur wasn’t the same for all woollies; it may have evolved over the course of their existence such that later species may have had coats that were different from earlier ones.

 

“It’s so funny,” Díez-del-Molino said, “because all the names were everything that we thought the mammoth hair was! But it’s important to note that we don’t exactly know the function in woolly mammoths because they are not exactly the same mutations [seen in humans].”

New effort IDs the genes that made the mammoth

The US is experiencing devastation from a flurry of tornadoes. At least five people died Wednesday when a tornado tore through southeastern Missouri. It followed six in New Jersey and one in Delaware that killed a person and became the state’s widest on record. Batches of tornadoes killed more than 30 people in the South and Midwest over the weekend. And January saw 168 preliminary tornado reports, nearly five times that month’s average between 1990 and 2010. 

It’s been a busy and deadly start to tornado season, and the twisters have hit regions typically spared. We know that a warming climate is creating moisture and instability in the air—two factors that spur the formation of tornadoes. But experts caution that it’s too soon to link one major event—or even season—to climate change. What they are seeing is changes in when and where the tornadoes strike, which could expose more people to danger. 

“We are still very unsure what the future holds,” says Jana Houser, a professor of meteorology at the Ohio State University. Meteorologists can look at increased humidity and warming, along with changes in the jet stream, and see how they may affect the storms that cause tornadoes. But, Houser says, “we really can’t pinpoint what we expect to see in terms of when and where tornadoes are going to occur.” 

Most tornadoes spring from uncommon supercell thunderstorms. To form, tornadoes need moist, warm air near the ground. But they also need a strong, vertical wind shear, which is caused by wind changing direction and speed between the ground and higher elevations. Air begins to spin horizontally in a cylinder-like shape. As that is lifted and gains speed, it narrows and forms the menacing funnel we recognize as a tornado. 

To understand how tornado patterns might change, meteorologists are looking at trends in their parent supercell storms. More heat in the atmosphere leads to more moisture and more instability. But wind shear, the other component of a tornado, may actually decrease over time with climate change. The jet stream could weaken as temperature differences between Arctic and mid-latitude air lessen, which affects wind shear. The end result of those changes mingling in the atmosphere isn’t clear. 

“We’re in the experiment,” says Walker Ashley, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University who wrote a recent paper on changing tornado patterns. “When we look at the fundamental ingredients that go into creating the severe storm, we are having changes. It’s a question of how much and to what scale?”

It’s likely supercell storms will hit the US more often in the late winter and early spring and become less frequent in the late summer and fall, experts say. And tornado territory is shifting too. “Tornado Alley,” a swath of land encompassing parts of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska, has long been the twister hotbed. But drought conditions are leading to fewer storms, says Robert Trapp, professor and head of the Department of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Still, as storms are suppressed in the Great Plains, they’re becoming more common to the east. That’s because the US Southeast has long had wind shear, Ashley says. And as climate change adds moisture and instability to the environment, it brings the additives that form tornadoes. 

It’s harder to make a connection between climate change and tornadoes than it is for other disastrous weather, like heat waves or hurricanes. By comparison, tornadoes are small-scale events in both size and duration. The US National Weather Service only began keeping records of tornadoes in 1950, and many have gone unobserved in unpopulated areas. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that the number of days with tornadoes each year has dropped over time, but there’s more tornado activity on the days when they do occur.

The records also show tornadoes are capricious—some years they kill 10 to 20 people across the US. Others, they take more than 100 lives. But overall, the number of deaths per million people has fallen over time. 

Still, their power to destroy may grow for a simple reason: There are more people in their paths. The US population has more than doubled since 1950. The Southeast, where tornado activity could increase, has been a hot spot for real estate development. Ashley calls this the “bull’s-eye effect.” Whether or not tornadoes increase in frequency and intensity, they’ll be more likely to run into people as communities expand. And more tornadoes in the off-season—and in new places—could lead to more devastation.

America’s Tornadoes Are Evolving, Fast

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Rocket Report: Starship gets a tentative launch date; China tests ocean landing

Before humans started heating the planet by burning fossil fuels in the 19th century, Earth had experienced centuries-long widespread cool period known as the Little Ice Age.

Scientists believe this cold spell may have been triggered, in part, by volcanic eruptions which made the atmosphere hazier, blocking some incoming sunlight.

Records of these eruptions are sparse, and much of our knowledge of them comes from the traces left behind in polar ice and tree rings, which are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory.

In a new study published in Nature, an international team of researchers led by Sébastien Guillet at the University of Geneva has found another way to learn about these historical eruptions: by studying descriptions of lunar eclipses in medieval manuscripts.

Dark eclipses

The researchers compiled hundreds of records of lunar eclipses from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, documenting 187 eclipses between 1100 and 1300.

In particular, they searched for descriptions that provided information on the brightness and colour of the Moon during the eclipse. Most of these turned out to be from European monks or clerics, writing in Latin.

During a total lunar eclipse, the Moon turns red due to sunlight refracted by Earth’s atmosphere. A particularly dark eclipse indicates more aerosols in the atmosphere, which is a sign of recent volcanic activity. Image credit: Chris Harwood/Shutterstock.com

Based on these descriptions, the researchers ranked the colour and brightness of the Moon reported in each total eclipse. The brighter the eclipse, the clearer the atmosphere at the time: darker eclipses indicated a higher level of aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere – a marker of recent volcanic activity.

The next step was to put the eclipse data together with simulations of how aerosol particles behave in the atmosphere, modern satellite observations, and climatic evidence from historical tree ring records.

This allowed the researchers to estimate the timing of the culprit eruptions more precisely than from previous ice core records – and determine which eruptions reached the stratosphere and would be more likely to generate climatic cooling effects.

What lunar eclipses tell us about the state of the atmosphere

A total lunar eclipse is a beautiful sight. When the Sun, Earth and Moon align perfectly, our planet blocks direct sunlight from reaching the Moon’s surface.

However, Earth’s atmosphere bends sunlight around our planet. As a result, some sunlight reaches the Moon even during a total eclipse.

Earth’s atmosphere also scatters sunlight - acting as a giant colour filter. The bluer the light, the more it is scattered – which is why the sky is blue in the daytime, and why the Sun appears ruddy at dawn and dusk.

During a total lunar eclipse, the sunlight reaching the Moon has been filtered by Earth’s atmosphere, removing much of the blue and yellow light. The light that reaches the Moon is effectively the sum of all the dawns and all the dusks occurring at that time.

And the state of Earth’s atmosphere at that time controls just how much light is filtered.

NASA video released to explain the total Lunar eclipse seen from the Americas in December 2011.

How volcanoes affect lunar eclipses

If you’ve ever seen a sunset during a dust storm, or on a very smoky day, you know the extra particles clogging up the sky can produce deep, vibrant reds and oranges.

Imagine a total lunar eclipse occurring while wildfires rage overseas. The fires would pump smoke and dust into Earth’s atmosphere, making the Moon redder and darker during the eclipse.

Which brings us to the effect of volcanoes. The largest volcanic eruptions pump vast amounts of material into Earth’s stratosphere, where it can remain for many months.

The spectacular volcanic sunsets seen throughout Australia in the months following the Tongan volcanic eruption of January 2022 are a great example. And that material, once in the stratosphere, will spread around Earth.

What effect does this have on lunar eclipses? It turns out the brightness of the Moon during a lunar eclipse depends the amount of material in our stratosphere. In the months after a large eruption, any lunar eclipse would be markedly darker than normal.

How volcanoes affect the climate

Volcanic eruptions can eject huge amounts of ash, sulphur dioxide, and other gases high into the atmosphere. Eruptions can cause either cooling or warming (both temporary). The effect depends on exactly what the volcano spews out, how high the plume reaches, and the volcano’s location.

Sulphur dioxide is particularly important. If it reaches the stratosphere, it reacts with water vapour to form a lingering veil of sulphate aerosols. These aerosols, along with the volcanic ash, block and scatter Solar radiation, often leading to cooling at the Earth’s surface.

Large volcanic eruptions, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines and the infamous 1815 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia, slightly lowered global temperature in the years after the eruption. After Tambora, Europe and North America experienced a “year without a summer” in 1816.

On the other hand, water vapour and carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions have a warming effect. It’s only small, as all present-day volcanic emissions produce less than 1% of the carbon dioxide released by human activities.

The past and future of volcanoes, eclipses, and the climate

Eyewitness accounts through historical reports and oral traditional knowledge are often overlooked in the study of volcanoes. However, the inclusion of broader sources of knowledge is incredibly valuable to help us understand past impacts of volcanic eruptions on people and the environment.

In this study, the combination of historical observations with ice records and climate reconstructions from tree rings has enabled more precise timing of those ancient eruptions. In turn, this has allowed us to better understand their potential impact on the climate during the European Middle Ages. Such information can help us to understand the role these eruptions may have played in the transition to the Little Ice Age.

In the future, volcanoes may have to work a little harder to create a “dark” eclipse. As the atmosphere warms, the altitude of the stratosphere will increase. As a result, it may take a bigger eruption to put significant amounts of aerosols into the upper layer where they will hang around to darken the Moon for future generations!

Heather Handley, Associate Professor of Volcanology and Geoscience Communication, University of Twente and Adjunct Associate Professor, Monash University and Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

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

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The volcanic eruption that obliterated the Roman town of Pompeii sent out an initial wave of hot gas that reached temperatures high enough to turn people’s brains to glass. According to a new study, this short-lived early burst of heat engulfed the nearby town of Herculaneum in a 550°C  inferno (1,022°F), bringing instant death and destruction.

The study authors analyzed carbonized wood from multiple sites in Herculaneum, which was closer to Mount Vesuvius than Pompeii, in order to reconstruct the thermal events that followed the eruption in 79 CE. Based on the incomplete charring of certain samples, they were able to deduce that the town was initially blasted by a very brief yet unimaginably hot gas-particle flow known as a diluted pyroclastic density current (PDC).

Reporting their findings, the researchers explain that “the first diluted PDC entered in Herculaneum with a temperature exceeding 550°C recorded by samples collected at the Collegium Augustalium and the Decumanus Maximus [main street].”

“This early > 550°C event was later followed by the succession of [pyroclastic currents] which finally buried the town under 20-meter (66 feet) thick volcanic deposits. These later flows were characterized by lower temperature,” they write.

Due to the brief nature and extreme heat associated with this initial blast, the entire event left only a few decimeters of ash on the ground, which may explain why it had never been detected until now. However, the destructive power of diluted PDCs has been observed in the aftermath of more recent volcanic eruptions, such as that in Martinique in May 1902, when almost 30,000 people were instantaneously killed by a gas flow of this nature.

While direct evidence for the diluted PDC at Herculaneum had never previously been recorded, the study authors say numerous clues can be found in the remains of some of the victims. For instance, while many corpses at Pompeii were found frozen in “the typical post-mortem stance known as pugilistic attitude,” the bodies at Herculaneum were unable to adopt such a position because their soft tissue had been demolished by the intense heat.

The discovery of a well-preserved vitrified brain inside the skull of an individual at the Collegium Augustalium, meanwhile, provides yet more clarity. According to the researchers, a brain can only be turned to glass if “the heating event is short-lived so that the tissue is not fully vaporized,” while the preservation of this crystal cerebellum depended upon subsequent pyroclastic currents being cool enough to allow for the build-up of ash.

Having reconstructed the events that followed the eruption, the study authors say their findings may have implications for the modern inhabitants of nearby Naples should Vesuvius blow its top again. If another diluted PDC should result, then the researchers believe that the “potential for survival critically depends on the ability of shelters to prevent infiltration of the hot dusty gas.” 

“This could allow people who may not had the chance to evacuate earlier to survive and wait for rescue,” they write.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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If you’ve ever had the eerie sensation there’s a presence in the room when you were sure you were alone, you may be reluctant to admit it. Perhaps it was a profound experience that you are happy to share with others. Or – more likely – it was something in between the two.

Unless you had an explanation to help you process the experience, most people will struggle to grasp what happened to them. But now research is showing this ethereal experience is something we can understand, using scientific models of the mind, the body, and the relationship between the two.

One of the largest studies on the topic was carried out as long ago as 1894. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) published their Census of Hallucinations, a survey of more than 17,000 people in the UK, US and Europe. The survey aimed to understand how common it was for people to have seemingly impossible visitations that foretold death. The SPR concluded that such experiences happened too often to be down to chance (one in every 43 people that were surveyed).

In 1886, the SPR (which numbered former UK prime minister William Gladstone and poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson among its patrons) published Phantasms of the Living. This collection included 701 cases of telepathy, premonitions and other unusual phenomena.

For instance, the Reverend P H Newnham, of Devonport in Plymouth, told the story of a visit to New Zealand, where a night-time presence warned him away from joining a boat trip at dawn the next morning. He later learnt that all on the voyage had drowned.

At the time, phantasms was criticised for being unscientific. The census was received with less scepticism, but it still suffered from response bias (who would bother responding to such a survey except those with something to say). But such experiences live on in homes across the world, and contemporary science offers ideas for understanding them.

Not such sweet dreams

Many of the accounts SPR collected sound like hypnagogia: hallucinatory experiences that happen on the boundaries of sleep. It has been suggested that several religious experiences recorded in the 19th century have a basis in hypnagogia. Presences have a particularly strong link with sleep paralysis, experienced by around 7% of adults at least once in their life. In sleep paralysis our muscles remain frozen as a hangover from REM sleep, but our mind is active and awake. Studies have suggested more than 50% of people with sleep paralysis report encountering a presence.

While the Victorian presences documented by the SPR were often benign or comforting, modern examples of presence triggered by sleep paralysis tend to exude malevolence. Societies around the world have their own stories about nighttime presences – from the Portuguese “little friar with the pierced hand” (Fradinho da Mao Furada) who could infiltrate people’s dreams, to the Ogun Oru of the Yoruba people in Nigeria, which was believed to be a product of victims being bewitched.

But why would an experience such as paralysis create a feeling of presence? Some researchers have focused on the specific characteristics of waking up in such an unusual situation. Most people find sleep paralysis scary, even without hallucinations. In 2007, sleep researchers J. Allen Cheyne and Todd Girard argued that if we wake paralysed and vulnerable, our instincts would make us feel threatened and our mind fills in the gap. If we are prey, there must be a predator.

Another approach is to look at the commonalities between visitations in sleep paralysis and other types of felt presence. Research over the past 25 years has shown presences are not only a regular part of the hypnagogic landscape, but also reported in Parkinson’s disease, psychosis, near-death experiences and bereavement. This suggests that it’s unlikely to be a sleep-specific phenomenon.

Mind-body connection

We know from neurological case studies and brain stimulation experiments that presences can be provoked by bodily cues. For example, in 2006 neurologist Shahar Arzy and colleagues were able to create a “shadow figure” that was experienced by a woman whose brain was being electrically stimulated in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ). The figure seemed to mirror the woman’s body position – and the TPJ combines information about our senses and our bodies.

A series of experiments in 2014 also showed that disrupting people’s sensory expectations seems to induce a feeling of presence in some healthy people. The way the procedure the researchers used works is to trick you into feeling as if you are touching your own back, by synchronising your movements with a robot directly behind you. Our brains make sense of the synchronisation by inferring that we are producing that sensation. Then, when that synchronisation is disrupted – by making the robot touches slightly out of sync – people can suddenly feel like another person is present: a ghost in the machine. Changing the sensory expectations of the situation induces something like a hallucination.

That logic could also apply to a situation like sleep paralysis. All our usual information about our bodies and senses is disrupted in that context, so it’s perhaps no surprise that we may feel like there is something “other” there with us. We might feel like it’s another presence, but really, it’s us.

In my own research in 2022, I tried to trace the similarities in presences from clinical accounts, spiritual practice and endurance sports (which are well known for producing a range of hallucinatory phenomena, including presence). In all of these situations, many aspects of the feeling of a presence were very similar: for example, the subject felt that the presence was directly behind them. Sleep-related presences were described by all three groups, but so were presences driven by emotional factors, such as grief and bereavement.

Despite its century-old origins, the science of felt presence has really only just begun. In the end, scientific research may give us one over-arching explanation, or we may need several theories to account for all these examples of presence. But the encounters people described in Phantasms of the Living aren’t phantoms of a bygone age. If you’re yet to have this unsettling experience, you probably know someone who has.

Ben Alderson-Day, Associate Professor of Psychology, Durham University

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

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The research sheds new light on the spread of COVID-19 in households, where most transmission of SARS-CoV-2 occurs, and it is the first to link the presence of SARS-CoV-2 on people's hands and frequently touched household surfaces to the risk of infection among contacts. The findings support the use of interventions at home when someone has an infection, in particular frequent handwashing, regular surface disinfection, and physical distancing as well as the use of masks to curb the spread of COVID-19.

The study of 279 households in London, published in The Lancet Microbe, was conducted at the height of the pandemic during the alpha and pre-alpha waves. The research was carried out at the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Respiratory Infections, a research partnership between Imperial College London and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

Professor Ajit Lalvani, lead author of the study, and Director of NIHR HPRU in Respiratory Infections, said, "There's no doubt that if you have COVID-19, you're emitting the virus into the air as micro-aerosols as well as large droplets that land on your hands and the surfaces around you.

What hasn't been shown, until now, is that the presence of the virus on people's hands or household surfaces predicts transmission to contacts.

"Our real-life study in London households provides the first empirical evidence to show that the presence of SARS-CoV-2 on people's hands and surfaces contributes significantly to spread of COVID-19. Since we didn't systematically sample household air, we cannot rule out airborne transmission occurring in parallel."

The first study of its kind—by researchers from Imperial College London, the UKHSA, and the University of Oxford—prospectively recruited 414 susceptible household contacts living in the same households as 279 newly diagnosed primary cases between 1 August 2020 and 31 March 2021. Since the study was conducted early in the pandemic, very few had been vaccinated or previously infected and the majority were therefore non-immune and susceptible to infection. This enabled the researchers to rigorously assess risk factors and vectors for transmission in unique circumstances akin to a natural experiment. The age range was 6-79 years, and 52% were female.

All contacts were regularly tested for SARS-CoV-2 infection by PCR on nose and throat (upper respiratory tract (URT)) swabs.

The researchers also took swabs from primary cases' and contacts' hands as well as the most frequently touched surfaces in communal areas (for example, fridge-door and kettle handles, kitchen taps etc.) to measure SARS-CoV-2 genetic material (RNA) and the number of virus particles.

The researchers looked for correlations between microbiological detection of the virus on hands and surfaces and transmission to household contacts.

Nieves Derqui, first author for the study, from Imperial College London's NIHR HPRU in Respiratory Infections, said, "In houses in which we found the virus on surfaces and the hands of participants, infection among contacts, and thus transmission, was significantly higher."

After accounting for other potentially influential factors such as sex, vaccination status, underlying illnesses, and contacts' relationship to the primary case, the researchers found that if the virus was detected on primary cases' hands, then contacts in their household were 1.7 times more likely to get infected than those in households where primary cases did not have the virus on their hands.

Similarly, the presence of virus on primary cases' hands was associated with a three times greater risk of contacts in the household having a positive hand-swab, and in turn, contacts with the virus on their hands were twice as likely to become infected with COVID-19.

If virus was present on frequently touched surfaces in the household, contacts were 3.8 times more likely to have detectable virus on their hands and 1.7 times more likely to be infected, i.e. to have a PCR-positive URT-swab.

Among the contacts who were initially uninfected but became infected with COVID-19 during the study, six had positive hand or household surface swabs prior to becoming infected. This supports the directionality of transmission being from household surfaces and contacts' hands to their nose and throat.

Whole genome sequencing of the 25 primary cases and their respective contacts where this was possible confirmed that each primary case-contact pair was infected with the same SARS-CoV-2 strain, confirming household transmission between primary cases and their respective contacts.

Professor Lalvani said, "My team's Herculean logistical undertaking during the challenging circumstances at the height of the pandemic in real-life households strongly supports the theory that SARS-CoV-2 transmission from contaminated surfaces and hands does occur in households.

With successive new variants likely to spread widely despite booster vaccinations, the simple, easily applicable public health interventions and messaging underpinned by our evidence are a valuable, risk-free and timely addition to the toolkit for living safely with COVID-19.

"Our new understanding of the pathways of household transmission now enables us to prioritize simple measures to interrupt spread of the virus.

Our data strongly suggest that as well as frequent handwashing, decontamination of frequently touched surfaces could prevent transmission."

Despite the important findings, the researchers note that this is an observational study and as such cannot prove causation. Moreover, since household air was not systematically sampled, airborne transmission cannot be ruled out.

They also acknowledge that non-white ethnicities and older age groups were under-represented in the study and their results were limited to the pre-alpha and alpha variants, so the results may not apply to other groups or more recent and infectious variants.

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The early days of how an embryo develops are shrouded in mystery because it pulls a kind of vanishing act. Once a sperm finds an egg, it begins a roughly weeklong journey to the uterus, becoming a tiny ball of cells along the way. When it reaches its destination, it attaches to the wall of the uterus, disappearing from view. 

To shed light on the process, researchers are trying to create embryo-like structures derived from stem cells, rather than sperm and eggs, so they can observe early development in the lab. These three-dimensional balls of cells could offer clues to how diseases, birth defects, and miscarriages arise, without the practical and ethical concerns raised by using actual embryos. In the latest effort, researchers in China made these structures using stem cells from macaques and tried to establish pregnancies with them in female monkeys. The experiment is described in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Although other researchers have created “synthetic” embryos before, it’s the first time anyone has done it with monkeys—animals closely related to humans—and tried to get them to implant in the uterus.  \

The authors started with stem cells isolated from monkey embryos that were just a few days old. Stem cells have the potential to turn into any and all body cell types, and theoretically can be used to reconstitute something that resembles an embryo. After placing these cells in lab dishes, the researchers exposed them to a cocktail of nutrients and molecules to coax them into different cell types found in an embryo. 

Under a microscope, the structures looked similar to blastocysts—the early stage of an embryo—at days 8 and 9 of development. They also started to form arrangements that looked like a yolk sac, which appears in early pregnancy and nourishes the embryo. 

“They look very convincing,” says Kotaro Sasaki, an assistant professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, who studies primate embryology and human development and wasn’t involved in the study. “It looks like they have all the cell types that are present normally in embryos.” 

The scientists next took some of these embryo-like balls of cells and transferred them into the wombs of eight female monkeys. In three, the structures implanted into the lining of the uterus—the first step of pregnancy. The authors confirmed the pregnancies with ultrasound and also detected the hormones progesterone and chorionic gonadotropin, which arise during pregnancy. The transplanted structures also formed early gestational sacs, fluid-filled cavities that surround a developing embryo. But the pregnancies were short-lived. These sacs disappeared after about a week. No fetuses formed.

The remaining embryo-like structures were cultured in a dish to mimic how they might continue to develop after implantation in the uterus. But at this later stage, Sasaki says, the lab-made embryos became “kind of disorganized and don’t look quite like normal embryos.” They probably failed because of structural or genetic abnormalities, he says.

That the structures didn’t develop normally points to the fact that they’re not the same as natural embryos, says Nicolas Rivron, an embryologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. “It’s easy to form a structure that looks like a blastocyst,” he says. “But looks can be deceiving.” 

Rivron’s laboratory was the first to create these embryo-like structures in 2018. His team showed that mouse stem cells can self-organize into structures that resemble a blastocyst, which forms five or six days after sperm fertilizes an egg. They dubbed the balls of cells “blastoids.” 

Then in 2021, several labs showed they could create human blastoids using stem cells. And last year, researchers at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology reported that they created mouse structures mimicking natural embryos at 8.5 days of development, which even had beating hearts and neural folds, the foundations of the brain.

Scientists behind these experiments insist that these balls of cells are just models, not actual embryos. The International Society for Stem Cell Research, or ISSCR, a scientific group that sets guidelines for stem cell research, prohibits these structures from being transferred into humans for the purpose of trying to start pregnancies. 

For now, scientists want to use them to better understand early pregnancy. “Because monkeys are closely related to humans evolutionarily, we hope the study of these models will deepen our understanding of human embryonic development, including shedding light on some of the causes of early miscarriages,” said Zhen Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, one of the authors of the study, in a press statement. (Liu’s team did not respond to an emailed request for comment by press time.)

Still, trying this in a monkey is the closest approximation to what could happen in a human. “This shows that you can get a pregnancy started, or at least trigger the macaque's hormonal system to think that it's pregnant,” says Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford School of Medicine. “It says there's some evidence that maybe it could give rise to a baby monkey.”

Embryo research is especially controversial in the US, where it has faced religious objections for decades. While most states allow research on human embryos, national law prohibits federal funds from being used to create or destroy them. 

Several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Korea, have legal restrictions against growing human embryos in a lab past 14 days after fertilization—when the first signs of the central nervous system appear. (In other countries, the 14-day rule is just a guideline, initially established by the ISSCR.) In 2021, the ISSCR relaxed the 14-day rule to consider experiments that involve growing human embryos past that mark on a case-by-case basis.

Embryo models give researchers an alternative without having to rely on the real thing. But as they get more sophisticated, they are raising concerns of their own. “I think what we’d really like to know is: Can an embryo model give rise to a living organism?” Greely says. “If it can, then it should be treated like an embryo. If it can't, then it doesn't need to be treated like an embryo.” 

To answer that question, Greely is in favor of scientists conducting the kind of experiments that the new paper outlines. He feels it would be unethical to do so in people, because any resulting babies could end up with birth defects or genetic disorders.

Rivron thinks scientists should move slowly with trying to establish animal pregnancies with blastoids, because it’s extremely likely that these structures won’t develop correctly. But at the current pace of research in the field, he thinks the first live mouse born from a blastoid could be a reality within five years. “I think we should do things gradually to make sure we do this right.” 

In their press statement, the team behind the new paper recognizes the work may be controversial. “The researchers said they acknowledge the ethical concerns surrounding this type of research but emphasize that there are still many differences between these embryo-like structures and natural blastocysts,” the statement reads. “Importantly, the embryo-like structures do not have full developmental potential. They note that for this field to advance it’s important to have discussions between the scientific community and the public.”

Scientists Turned Monkey Stem Cells Into ‘Synthetic Embryos’

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news reports often get people angry, but wow, did people get mad over an article published last summer about BMW. It described how the German automaker now sold some features of its vehicles as subscriptions, including an offering in South Korea that charged $18 for things that drivers are accustomed to coming standard, such as heated seats.

Subscription-weary consumers reacted with outrage. Spotify, Netflix, razors, coffee: All now come with monthly fees. But being asked to subscribe to heated seats seemed to point to something broken at the core of the money-for-stuff compact that is global capitalism. If a car company could give or take away access to tuchus warmers with the press of a button in faraway Germany, what did it mean to “own” anything?

BMW of North America eventually put out a statement saying it would always allow customers to buy features permanently up front with a vehicle. It also defended offering subscriptions for features such as dashcams and remote start functions to provide “flexibility.” The furor died down, as furors do. 

But in many ways, the BMW heated-seat kerfuffle was an early skirmish in a larger campaign. Almost every global automaker has offered some kind of subscription, such as Tesla’s Full Self-Driving ($15,000 up front, or $99 to $199 a month), General Motors’ crash response and roadside assistance system OnStar (between $25 and $50 a month), or Toyota’s Remote Connect, which offers remote start among other goodies ($8 a month or $80 a year).

It's no surprise that global carmakers are jealous of the fantastical returns of big tech firms like Microsoft and Apple: Sell software, get Googley returns, or so the theory goes. General Motors alone has said it wants to wring some $25 billion in annual revenue out of subscriptions by 2030. Its internal research suggests car buyers are willing to spend an average of $85 a month, CEO Mary Barra said last year.

Automakers’ latest target in the subscriptions push—or shakedown, depending where and how comfortably you’re sitting—is used car owners. The average lifespan of passenger vehicles has steadily ticked up in recent years and now sits at around 12 years in the US, with cars cycling through two or three or four owners before they hit the scrap heap. Carmakers are working on making those owners into subscribers too.  

“It’s a massive market,” says Gary Silberg, who heads the global automotive sector at the accounting and advisory firm KPMG. He says automakers are trying to use the increasingly software-stuffed car to resolve a “silly” situation. “You spend all the money building the car, you spend all the money designing it and building factories, and yet you don’t get to talk to your customer,” Silberg says. More connected vehicles and the apps that go along with them mean that automakers can. “Connected cars have completely changed the landscape of customer interaction,” says Michael Bensel, vice president of mobility and connected services at Cariad, the Volkswagen Group’s automotive software subsidiary. He describes the company’s relationship with car buyers as shifting “from occasional contact at dealerships at times of purchase, maintenance, or repairs, to continuous direct customer contact during the entire ownership period.” 

Automakers are just starting to figure out how to transform used car owners into subscribers. Today, most of them reach used-vehicle owners either when someone buys a used vehicle through a certified dealer (about one-third do in the US) or when that new owner seeks out its app. (Automakers also reach out to owners in the case of recalls, through highly regulated contact with local motor vehicle departments.)

General Motors spokesperson Anna Yu declined to share specific numbers on subscribers who drive used cars, but she says that “second owners are some of our most loyal customers”—often because they proactively reached out to ask about subscription-based products like OnStar or Super Cruise, its advanced driver assistance feature.

Cariad’s Bensel says the VW-owned company is able to push “highly targeted digital campaigns”—that is, ads—directly onto drivers’ control panels or apps. The connectivity now present in some new and newer used cars, he says, also allows Cariad to pull data that help VW “better understand the usage of our vehicles as well as customer needs over a lifetime.” More data, in other words, means automakers could maybe build better products attractive to drivers of cars both new and used—and likely helps tune those digital ads too.

Drivers of used cars whom automakers have a direct line to—whether by email or app—are often offered free trial periods aimed at hooking a consumer to the subscription model of car ownership. But many drivers of used cars aren’t so easily targeted, especially those who don’t buy their cars through automakers’ dealer-controlled networks.

A 2021 survey of more than 2,000 US car owners led data and analytics company LexisNexis Risk Solutions to estimate that 83 percent of owners of used cars with built-in connectivity “remain untapped”—meaning automakers had left money on the table.

Since 2021, LexisNexis has offered  a service called Owner Check aimed at helping automakers root out used car owners. It can link “disparate data sets” to determine when a car has a new owner, and conversely, when a person has a new car, says Dave Nemtuda, the company’s head of automotive product. The company won’t disclose which automakers use Owner Check, but it says companies accounting for 65 percent of the global auto market are either testing or in discussions about the service.

All these new subscription offerings create a new way for automakers to compete—and to position their brand in relation to others. Volvo’s deputy CEO Björn Annwall says the company feels it’s unfair to charge extra to simply activate hardware that’s already in a car—“as in the heated seat,” he says—but it's OK to charge for more complex software. An example of that might be a parking aid that stitches images together from multiple cameras. “This is partly market research, but partly it’s just common sense,” he says. 

It’s a reasonable theory, but like the subscription strategies of all automakers, one that’s largely untested. Ondrej Burkacky, a senior partner with the consulting firm McKinsey who works in automotive software, says some industry projections for subscriber counts and revenue have proven overly optimistic.

The unanswered question, he says, is this: “What are people really going to pay for?” VW’s Cariad reported a $2 billion annual loss last year, amidst software product delays, and it is not the only automaker that has struggled to build easy-to-use systems. As these companies’ software and subscriber drives expand to owners of used cars, so too will the potential for their hopes to be dashed—or to get people really, really mad.

Your Used Car May Soon Come With Subscription Fees

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Jellyfish and flies use the same hormone when they’ve had enough to eat

NASA: Uranus has “never looked better” in spectacular Webb Telescope image

Technological advances in the sector have unlocked many new business opportunities. The industry can now launch constellations of thousand satellites to reach corners of the earth as it had never before (e.g., Starlink), while new markets such as space mining and space tourism are steadily growing. National champions (including the United States and France) have also framed the space sector as a top economic priority. It is thought the technological benefits accrued by companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin or OneWeb, launched by billionaires such as Elon Musk, will also be able to trickle down to non-space sectors such as the energy or freight industries.

Issues for sustainable space

For all these benefits, civil society appears increasingly concerned about the sector’s ecological footprint.

The first main issue to tackle is space debris which are defunct human-made objects in Earth orbit that no longer serve a useful function. These objects include non-operating satellites, abandoned parts of launch vehicles, which carry satellites or spacecraft into space, decommissioned satellites, and even debris resulting from the collision between space objects. In practice, this means more than 30,000 harmful space debris and 3,364 non-operating satellites could collide into an estimated 4,859 active operating satellites, with catastrophic implications for our daily lives in sectors spanning transport and security to finance.

Some space activities could also impact the Earth’s environment, including air, water and soil pollution, and outer-space contaminations. Take, for example, the rising popularity of space tourism. Given soot from spacecrafts currently warms up the Earth at a rate that is 500 times greater than that released by planes, there is growing anxiety over the sector’s associated greenhouse gas emissions and toxic substances. As a result, the debate over space activities cannot be the prerogative of the space community alone.

In an attempt to resolve these issues, our recent research has identified three promising working avenues:

• Collaboration

• Green space technology

• Policies aiming at sustainable development

Tailor solutions for sustainable space

The collaboration needs to be carried out between five key parties: governments, academia, the industry, civil society, and environmental players such as NGOs. Nevertheless, while the industry has already developed an awareness of the issues at stake, the input of academic institutions has yet to be clarified. In particular, academia could provide new ideas in the areas of debris identification and removal, space traffic management, space situational awareness, and in-orbit servicing.

The second solution consists in developing green space technology that would emit less greenhouse gas emissions and other hazardous chemical substances. According to the European Space Agency, these green technologies could minimise the energy consumption throughout the entire life-cycle of a space mission, save up on resources, while also minimising toxic substances to protect human well-being and biodiversity.

Green space solutions to investigate include space traffic management, in-orbit servicing and active debris removal on the one hand. When it comes to the spacecrafts themselves, scientists should also start to imagine greener propulsion, cleaner fuels, and alternatives to toxic material. For example, following the path of SpaceX, all launch vehicle manufacturers are also considering reusable launchers that will reduce CO2 gas emission in a life cycle.

The final solution consists in developing policies that can at once encourage space commercialisation and enhance sustainable policy regime. One instance of this are green innovation policies assisting low-carbon small and medium enterprises. It will be important to align these policies with the 17 pillars of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations. To achieve this agenda, some indicators are emerging such as space sustainability rating and ESG (environment, social and governance).

We think that we are still on time to solve the two main issues in sustainable space: space debris and the sector’s overall ecological impact on Earth. However, space organisations cannot remain idle awaiting that “space shame” – a space version of flight shame (from the original Swedish concept of flygskam) in the aviation sector – propels them into action.

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THE FUTURE OF meat poses a philosophical conundrum. Some things we can unequivocally call a beef burger. A 100 percent beef patty, for example. Take out some of that ground mince and add in a little water, onion, some salt and pepper. Now you’ve a burger that’s 82 percent beef. Is it still a beef burger?

Most people would say so. But what if we push things even further? Say we dialed the animal component way down and chucked some other stuff in there—soy or pea protein, for example. Is a beef burger with 50 percent animal cells still a beef burger? How about a burger that is just 5 percent cow but packs in so much umami beefiness that it’s closer to the real thing than any plant-based burger out there? Is that a beef burger, or just a beef-flavored burger?

In Oakland, California, Upside Foods is experimenting with a couple of blended chicken products. When I visited in May 2022 I tried a breakfast sausage made with 35 percent chicken cells, a chicken paté that was two-thirds chicken cells, as well as a chicken filet that was 100 percent chicken cells. Both of the hybrid meats had the kind of well-seasoned, umami heft that belied their ingredient list. In nearby San Leandro, another cultivated meat startup is trying to push these ratios even further. At SciFi foods, CEO Joshua March has experimented with beef burgers that contain as little as 5 percent animal cells.

“Even at the 5 to 10 percent inclusion rate, you do see some pretty big dramatic improvements in flavor,” says March. The idea is that the plant protein—soy, in SciFi’s case—gives structure and texture, while the beef cells mask the earthy flavors sometimes associated with plant proteins and add a beefy aroma and taste. Fat cells are particularly crucial for giving mostly plant-based burgers a meaty mouthfeel, says March. Just a small amount of fat cells boosts the flavor dramatically.

Taste aside, the real attractiveness of hybrid burgers for cultivated meat companies is that mixing plant and animal proteins brings the cost of their products way down. Growing animal cells in factories is still extremely expensive. Cultivated meat is grown in big facilities full of bioreactors that are expensive to build and run. Cells also require an expensive cocktail of amino acids, sugars, and growth factors that until now has mostly been produced in much smaller quantities for the research and pharmaceutical industries.

It’s essentially a problem of scale. Proteins like soy and pea are produced on a mass scale for very low prices, but the cultivated meat industry is still reliant on supply chains that exist for the pharmaceutical industry, where margins are much higher. In Oxford in the UK, scientists at cultivated meat firm Ivy Farm Technologies are making a hybrid pork meatball made up of 51 percent pig cells, 7 percent pea protein, and then onion, herbs, and seasoning. The single cultivated meatball I tried at Ivy Farm’s pilot plant cost around $20 to produce, and 95 percent of that cost was driven by the animal cells, according to Ivy’s CEO, Rich Dillon.

This is why blending is likely to be the main approach used by cultivated meat companies to get products out, says Steve Molino, an investor at Clear Current Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in cultivated and plant-based meat. A blended burger would be much, much closer to the price of a conventional burger than would a fully cultivated burger. It’ll also help deal with another problem likely to face cultivated meat early on: The total amount of meat produced is likely to be tiny.

There are no large-scale cultivated meat plants in the US. Upside Foods has the largest pilot plant, which can produce 50,000 pounds of cultivated meat each year. In 2021, by way of comparison, 51 billion pounds of chicken was produced in the US alone. Even for cultivated meat to make up a fraction of 1 percent of chicken meat supply in the US would take a quantum leap in terms of production. “The amount that is going to be supplied is so, so small that even enthusiasts are going to be waiting—and we’re going to be able to eat up all that supply very, very quickly,” says Molino. Mixing animal cells with plant-based protein will help this limited supply go a lot further, and allow companies to claw back more of the cost of building cultivated meat factories. 

This might sound like penny-pinching, but mixing meat with plants is nothing new, Dillon points out. Some sausages are just 42 percent pork, and it’s relatively rare to find a minced meat product that doesn’t have at least a few extra ingredients added to bind, bulk, or flavor. Conventional meat manufacturers have also experimented with making blending a virtue—a way to market meat that is better for people and has a lower carbon footprint. In the UK, supermarket Tesco sells a beef meatball blended with butternut squash and onion. It’s not clear whether this kind of blending has much appeal, however. US meat firm Tyson briefly made blended meat-and-plant burgers and nuggets before pulling them from shelves in 2020.

Mixing plant protein and animal cells also lets cultivated meat companies experiment with the ideal composition for a new product. “There are all these different levers to pull,” says Emma Lewis, chief commercial and product officer at Ivy Farm Technologies.

They can play with the ratio of fat and muscle cells for a juicier or leaner meatball and try to dial in specific nutritional qualities. Ivy Farms has also been working with a premium burger restaurant that is interested in creating burgers made of a blend of cultivated beef and conventional meat. “It could be the most sustainable meat out there, or potentially the most nutritional burger, and still taste exactly the same,” says Dillon.

No matter the taste or nutritional profile, taste is going to be key. “You have to blow people’s minds,” says Molino. If hybrid burgers end up tasting no different to plant-based alternatives, then all the hype around lab-grown meat may prove to be worth naught.

The pork meatball I tried in Oxford definitely tasted like meat. It had more bite than a plant-based meatball, and a deep savoriness. The same was true of the blended chicken products I tried at Upside’s pilot plant in Oakland. But all of these are highly seasoned and processed products where the meat isn’t exactly in a leading role.

That might prove to be a problem. For a long time the cultivated meat industry has distinguished itself from the plant-based meat industry because it promises to make “real” meat made out of real animal cells. But March says that it has been clear for a long time that the economics for 100 percent cultivated meat don’t quite add up. “It always shocked me that people were still trying to sell the dream of 100 percent cultivated,” he says. “I do think people have done themselves and the industry a bit of a disservice on that.”

Meat grown in bioreactors is already a bit weird. It might be that mixing animal cells and plant protein is too much extra weirdness for a new product—or it might be that people accept hybrid cultivated meat just like they’re happy to accept hybrid conventional meat. Either way, the industry is about to find out.

Soon—probably within the year—cultivated meat is going to be available in the US. At first it’ll be in just a couple of high-end restaurants, but if these companies are going to deliver on their missions of reducing the cruelty and environmental devastation inherent in our current way of making meat, they’ll need to find a way of getting lots of people to eat their products. And for the foreseeable future, that’ll mean trying to persuade people to embrace hybrid meat.

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Ice sheets can collapse into the ocean in spurts of up to 600 metres (2,000 feet) a day, a study has found, far faster than recorded before.

Scientists said the finding, based on sea floor sediment formations from the last ice age, was a “warning from the past” for today’s world in which the climate crisis is eroding ice sheets.

They said the discovery shows that some ice sheets in Antarctica, including the “Doomsday” Thwaites glacier, could suffer periods of rapid collapse in the near future, further accelerating the rise of sea level.

The rising oceans are among the greatest long-term impacts of global heating because hundreds of major cities around the world are on coastlines and are increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and flooding. The West Antarctic ice sheet may already have passed the point at which major losses are unstoppable, which will lead eventually to metres of sea level rise.

“Our research provides a warning from the past about the speeds that ice sheets are physically capable of retreating at,” said Dr Christine Batchelor at Newcastle University in the UK, who led the research. “It shows that pulses of rapid retreat can be far quicker than anything we’ve seen so far.”

Guardian graphic. Source: Batchelor et al, 2023, Nature

“These pulses translate into sea level rise and could be really important for sea defences,” she said. The rate of loss was critical if, for example, a rise expected over 200 years could actually occur in 20 years, Batchelor said. The research could also be used to enable computer models to make better predictions about future ice loss.

Most previous estimates of the rate of ice sheet collapse have come from satellite data, which has been collected for about 50 years. The geological data used in the study stretches back thousands of years, allowing a much greater range of conditions to be analysed.

The research, published in the journal Nature, used high-resolution mapping of the sea bed off Norway, where large ice sheets collapsed into the sea at the end of the last ice age 20,000 years ago. The scientists focused on sets of small ridges parallel to the coast, which formed at the line where the base of the ice sheet met the oceans, called the grounding line.

As the tides lifted the ice sheets up and down, sediments at the grounding line were squashed into ridges twice a day. As the base of the ice sheet melted over days and weeks, the grounding line retreated towards the shore, leaving behind sets of parallel ridges. Measuring the distance between the ridges enabled the scientists to calculate the speed of the Norwegian ice sheet collapse.

They found speeds of between 50 metres a day and 600 metres a day. That is up to 20 times faster than the speediest retreat recorded previously by satellites, of 30 metres a day at the Pope Glacier in West Antarctica. Ridges had been studied before, in Antarctica, but only over an area of 10 sq km. The new study covered an area of 30,000 sq km, and 7,600 ridges, allowing the scientists to understand what is likely to control the rates of retreat.

The fastest rates of ice sheet loss to the ocean were found where the ice sheet had been resting on a virtually flat sea bed. This is because a relatively small amount of melting at the base of a flat-bedded ice sheet can lift a large section of the sheet and shift the grounding line much further inshore than if the sheet was on a steeper slope.

The Norwegian ridges show rapid spurts of ice loss lasting up to 11 days, but Bachelor suspects they could last for months. “The measurement at Pope Glacier showed 30 metres per day was sustained for about three and a half months. But 600 metres a day definitely wouldn’t be sustained for a year or many years – you’d have no ice left.”

However, she said: “Our findings suggest that present-day rates of melting are sufficient to cause short pulses of rapid retreat across flat-bedded areas of the Antarctic ice sheet, including at Thwaites.”

Prof Andrew Shepherd, at Northumbria University in the UK, who was not part of the study team, said: “It’s pretty incredible, but relic features on the seabed provide much more frequent sampling of ice sheet retreat than we have been able to achieve with satellites.”

“It turns out that retreat is not a steady process, but happens in short bursts,” he added. “We didn’t spot that from space because we tend to track changes once per year at most. Whether the rapid retreat found in the new study might mean worryingly fast increases in future ice loss and sea level rise will depend on whether these fast rates are sustained for periods of time longer than a week or two.”

Dr Johannes Feldmann, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said: “The study [shows] that in the future faster retreat rates than presently observed in, eg Antarctica, are indeed possible under specific circumstances. The implications of such rapid retreat are serious, given the generally irreversible nature of ice sheet retreat.”

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It is often said that cities such as Phoenix are always dry, Seattle is always wet, and San Francisco is always foggy. However, the use of the word “always” is a strong word.

Recent research conducted by the University of California, Davis, analyzed the climate patterns in the Western United States during the Holocene Era, which spans from the current time to the past 11,000 years. The study sheds light on the ancient climate of the “Old West” and reveals that the defining features of California’s climate, such as the coastal fogs that facilitated the growth of towering redwoods, the ocean currents that created rich fishing grounds, and the warm summers and mild winters, emerged around 4,000 years ago.

It also reveals a time when the Pacific Northwest was warm and dry and the Southwest was warm and wet.

An understudied era: The current one

Published in Climate of the Past, a journal of the European Geosciences Union, the study provides a baseline against which modern climate change in the region can be considered. It also sheds light on a lesser-studied geological epoch — the current one, the Holocene.

“We kept looking for this paper, and it didn’t exist,” said lead author Hannah Palmer, who recently earned her Ph.D. from the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “There are many records of past climate for a single location, but no one had put it all together to understand the big picture. So we decided to write it.”

UC Davis students hike in the Grand Canyon, a landscape that has changed dramatically over the past thousands and millions of years. Credit: Joe Proudman/UC Davis

 

The authors analyzed more than 40 published studies, examining the interplay among land and sea temperature, hydroclimate, and fire activity across three distinct phases.

The study found:

• Compared to pre-Holocene conditions (the last Glacial period), the Early Holocene (11,700-8,200 years ago) was a time of warm seas, a warm and dry Pacific Northwest, a warm and wet Southwest, and fairly low fire activity.
• By the Middle Holocene (8,200-4,200 years ago), that pattern reversed: The ocean’s surface cooled, the Pacific Northwest became cool and wet, and the Southwest became drier.
• The Late Holocene (4,200 years ago-present) is the most climatically variable period. It marks a period when the “modern” climate and temperature patterns are established. The study noted a defined interval of fire activity over the past two centuries that is linked to human activity.

Unprecedented interval

The study also considered the impact of humans on environmental changes at the time, noting that the Era of Colonization (1850-present) represents an unprecedented environmental interval in the climate records.

“Humans have been living here throughout the entire Holocene,” Palmer said. “The climate impacted them, and they impacted the climate, especially in recent centuries. This paper shows how that push and pull has changed over the past 11,000 years.”

Different responses

“Sometimes people point to recent rain or cold snaps as evidence against climate change,” said co-author Veronica Padilla Vriesman, a recent Ph.D. graduate from UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “This study illustrates how different regions respond differently to global climate changes. That long-term perspective helps us understand the historical climate of the western U.S. and how it may respond moving forward.”

The study stemmed from a graduate seminar about the Holocene period led by Tessa Hill, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and associate vice provost of Public Scholarship and Engagement. Additional co-authors include Caitlin Livsey and Carina Fish. All authors were part of Hill’s Ocean Climate Lab at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

“Climate records from the Holocene provide a valuable window into the context of human-caused climate change,” said Hill. “They provide an opportunity for us to understand places that may be more or less resilient to change in the future.”

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When you walk through a forest, you are surrounded by carbon. Every branch and every leaf, every inch of trunk, and every tendril of unseen root contains carbon pulled from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. And as long as it stays stored away inside that forest, it’s not contributing to the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide that cause climate change. So it’s only natural that we might want to use forests’ carbon-storage superpower as a potential climate solution in addition to reducing human greenhouse gas emissions.

But climate change itself might compromise how permanently forests are able to store carbon and keep it out of the air, according to a new study led by University of Utah researchers. A study of how different regions and tree species will respond to climate change finds a wide range of estimates of how much carbon forests in different regions might gain or lose as the climate warms. Importantly, the researchers found, the regions most at risk to lose forest carbon through fire, climate stress or insect damage are those regions where many forest carbon offset projects have been set up.

“This tells us there’s a really urgent need to update these carbon offsets protocols and policies with the best available science of climate risks to U.S. forests,” said William Anderegg, study senior author and director of the U’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy.

The study is published in Nature Geoscience. Find an interactive tool showing carbon storage potential in forests in the U.S. here.

A stressed forest in Colorado. Credit: William Anderegg

A multi-perspective modeling approach 

For this study, the researchers were interested in forecasting changes in the amount of aboveground carbon storage in forests of different regions in the United States. Aboveground carbon refers to any living parts of a tree that are above ground, including wood and leaves or needles.

Scientists can look at the future of forests under climate change in a few different ways. They can look at historical and future projections of climate, or look at datasets from long-term forest plots. They can also use machine learning to identify which climate niches tree species most prefer. Or they can use complex models that include interactions between the ecosystem and the atmosphere.

Anderegg and colleagues, including first author and postdoctoral scholar Chao Wu, chose all of the above. 

“Each different method has inherent advantages and limitations,” Wu said. “No model is perfect.”

“By bringing in many different approaches and different model types and comparing them,” Anderegg said, “we can get a sense of what the different models are telling us and how can we learn to improve the models. And we might have much more confidence if all of the models and all of the approaches tell us the same story in a given region.”

Analyzing the combined model outputs, the researchers found that although the models’ forecasts differed in some ways, they did show some consistency in predictions of how different regions’ carbon storage might change in the future. The Great Lakes and Northeastern US, for example, as well as parts of the Southeastern US and the northern Rockies, consistently showed carbon gains in future projections. 

But the models also showed significant risks of losing carbon from forests through the climate triple threat of fire, climate stress and insect damage. With those risks, the models projected a net carbon gain in forests nationwide of between 3 and 5 petagrams of carbon by the end of the 21st century (a petagram is a quadrillion grams – about 25 times the mass of all humans on Earth). Without those climate stresses, forests might be able to pack away a net 9.4 petagrams of carbon.

The researchers also applied their analysis to 139 current projects to offset carbon emissions to the atmosphere by aiming to increase the carbon stored in forests through various approaches. 

“For carbon offsets to be effective,” Anderegg said, “they have to store carbon for a pretty long amount of time – multiple decades to centuries. So if fire’s burning them down or insects are wiping out different areas, it could vastly undermine their effectiveness as climate change solutions.”

Depending on the model method and the climate scenario, the researchers found that large numbers of carbon offset forest projects, particularly in the Southeastern US and on the West Coast, are projected to lose carbon by the end of the century. 

What we still need to know

The results, Wu said, highlight that different climate and ecological models have different strengths and weaknesses, and considering them together reveals the areas of research needed to improve climate projections.

Tree demographic models, for example, include simulations of forest dynamics as old trees die and new trees grow. “But these current models didn’t consider the disturbance-vegetation feedback,” Wu said, referring to the different types of vegetation besides trees that appear following a disturbance like a forest fire and how they might influence the odds of another disturbance. “And also they didn’t consider CO2 fertilization,” or the potential for rising carbon dioxide levels to actually improve plant growth. 

Anderegg identified three research questions that could help:

• How much rising CO2 concentrations might benefit plants and trees and help them grow more. 
• Better data and understanding of climate-driven tree mortality from fire, climate stress, and insects. 
• How biomes will shift around. Following a disturbance, for example, some forests may be able to grow back but some may transition to grasslands and be lost entirely. 

“These are some of the biggest unknowns that the field is really racing to tackle,” he said.

In the meantime, while science works to understand how climate change affects forests, society can help by slowing the pace of climate change.

“Working to tackle climate change as quickly as possible and move to a lower carbon future massively decreases the risks that forests are likely to face in the 21st century,” Anderegg said, “and increases the potential benefits that we might get from forests.”

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When scientists say they have to go to the ends of the Earth for their research, some mean it literally, such as this team lowering seismic detectors into the Antarctic ice. Image credit: Photo courtesy of Lindsey Kenyon.

 ULZVs are poorly understood because the waves suited to probing them are only produced by rare forms of earthquakes. When they do occur, the waves don’t always surface in the most convenient parts of the planet. Less than 20 percent of the boundary between the core and mantle has been surveyed for the presence of ULVZs. Hansen and her students had to repeatedly visit Antarctica to install the monitoring devices they needed. Even where surveys have taken place, existing methods are unable to detect ULVZs less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) thick, so areas considered ULVZ-free may just have a very thin layer.

The ULVZ the team focused on is not under any existing subduction zone, but given the way the continents move around it is plausible it was once and we have found the ancient remains. Indeed, modeling suggests it would take more than 100 million years for crustal material to descend through the 2,000-kilometer (1,200-mile) thick mantle.

The study is published in Science Advances.

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