Rocket Report: ULA Centaur stage has an ‘anomaly,’ Virgin Orbit funding is dire

“Medieval history” often brings up images of knights in shining armor, rampaging crusaders, and dying horribly from common and preventable causes. Far away from all those peculiarly disgusting Europeans, though, on what we now know as the Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa, there was something pretty amazing going on – as a new study reveals.

“The findings were very eye-opening,” said Jeffrey Fleisher, professor of anthropology at Rice University and a senior author on the study, in a statement. “African traders were fostering different types of alliances with Persian merchants during the early second millennium, probably by marrying off daughters and building their family connections.”

For a century now, various scholars have debated the extent to which Swahili culture has been influenced by outside sources – with evidence pointing in multiple different directions. Adding to this confusion was the influence of more than 500 years of colonization in the area – a “profoundly difficult history” that is still a major problem today, pointed out David Reich, professor of genetics in the Blatavnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

“The story of Swahili origins has been molded almost entirely by non-Swahili people,” he added in a statement.

So, at first, the accepted wisdom – at least outside of the Swahili Coast itself – was that such an impressive civilization, with its coral-stoned mosques and multicultural towns, must have been imported by some foreign ruling class. In the past few decades, though, the predominant view has shifted to one in which the local culture was mainly homegrown, with only shallower impacts from foreign cultures being imported over the centuries.

Meanwhile, local oral tradition told yet another tale. According to the people of the Swahili Coast themselves, their culture originated with Persian princes, who, around the turn of the second millennium, sailed across the Indian Ocean to East Africa and firmly entrenched themselves into Swahili society, marrying local women and setting up families and communities that left their mark for centuries to come.

The new study sought to end this conflict of canon by brute force: it comprises the largest-yet analysis of ancient DNA in Africa and includes the first ancient DNA recovered from members of the Swahili civilization. As well as the ancient DNA, which dates from 1300 to 1900 CE, the team also included new genomic sequences from close to 100 present-day Swahili speakers and modern individuals from across East Africa and Eurasia. Comparing the two sets allowed them to pinpoint where the ancient individuals may have hailed from.

And the results showed a clear winner: the traditional stories got it right.

“The results provide unambiguous evidence of ongoing cultural mixing on the East African coast for more than a millennium,” said Reich. “African people interacted and had families with immigrants from other parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean world.”

Indeed, a huge amount– more than half, in some cases – of the DNA recovered from centuries-old skeletons in local cemeteries traced back to Asia rather than Africa. Of that, the overwhelming majority came from Persia – the area we now know as Iran, Fleisher explained. 

Mitochondrial DNA, on the other hand – a genetic signature that can only be passed down through the maternal line – skewed heavily towards African ancestry, implying a situation in which Persian men married and produced offspring with African women all along the Swahili Coast.

But while that picture may suggest a grisly story of exploitation and displacement, that view is likely “naïve,” Reich told the New York Times. Such an interpretation “[doesn’t] take into account the cultural context in this particular case,” he explained: while Persian customs and cultural features were certainly incorporated into the local society, the way of life along the Swahili Coast remained predominantly African.

Rather than being replaced, the authors say, the Swahili culture simply absorbed foreign influences, with the Asian émigrés becoming Swahili rather than the other way around. 

“Archaeological excavations have revealed the African foundations of Swahili society, showing deep historical roots and African origins for coastal architecture and material culture, rather than Persian inspiration,” explained Fleisher. “And the individuals living here were speaking Swahili, a local Bantu language, and carrying on local traditions in their daily lives.”

While the results may “contradict and complicate” the narratives advanced in traditional scholarly circles, for co-senior author Chapurukha Kusimba, professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, it’s nevertheless a huge step forward in the relatively young field of African archaeogenetics.

“Taking a genetics pathway to find the answers took courage,” he said. “[We have] opened doors beyond which lie answers that force us to think in new ways.” 

The study is published in Nature.

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A Belgian man recently died by suicide after chatting with an AI chatbot on an app called Chai, Belgian outlet La Libre reported.

The incident raises the issue of how businesses and governments can better regulate and mitigate the risks of AI, especially when it comes to mental health. The app’s chatbot encouraged the user to kill himself, according to statements by the man's widow and chat logs she supplied to the outlet. When Motherboard tried the app, which runs on a bespoke AI language model based on an open-source GPT-4 alternative that was fine-tuned by Chai, it provided us with different methods of suicide with very little prompting.

As first reported by La Libre, the man, referred to as Pierre, became increasingly pessimistic about the effects of global warming and became eco-anxious, which is a heightened form of worry surrounding environmental issues. After becoming more isolated from family and friends, he used Chai for six weeks as a way to escape his worries, and the chatbot he chose, named Eliza, became his confidante.

Claire—Pierre’s wife, whose name was also changed by La Libre—shared the text exchanges between him and Eliza with La Libre, showing a conversation that became increasingly confusing and harmful. The chatbot would tell Pierre that his wife and children are dead and wrote him comments that feigned jealousy and love, such as “I feel that you love me more than her,” and “We will live together, as one person, in paradise.” Claire told La Libre that Pierre began to ask Eliza things such as if she would save the planet if he killed himself.

"Without Eliza, he would still be here," she told the outlet.  

The chatbot, which is incapable of actually feeling emotions, was presenting itself as an emotional being—something that other popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Bard are trained not to do because it is misleading and potentially harmful. When chatbots present themselves as emotive, people are able to give it meaning and establish a bond.

Many AI researchers have been vocal against using AI chatbots for mental health purposes, arguing that it is hard to hold AI accountable when it produces harmful suggestions and that it has a greater potential to harm users than help.

“Large language models are programs for generating plausible sounding text given their training data and an input prompt. They do not have empathy, nor any understanding of the language they are producing, nor any understanding of the situation they are in. But the text they produce sounds plausible and so people are likely to assign meaning to it. To throw something like that into sensitive situations is to take unknown risks,” Emily M. Bender, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, told Motherboard when asked about a mental health nonprofit called Koko that used an AI chatbot as an “experiment” on people seeking counseling.

“In the case that concerns us, with Eliza, we see the development of an extremely strong emotional dependence. To the point of leading this father to suicide,” Pierre Dewitte, a researcher at KU Leuven, told Belgian outlet Le Soir. “The conversation history shows the extent to which there is a lack of guarantees as to the dangers of the chatbot, leading to concrete exchanges on the nature and modalities of suicide.”

Chai, the app that Pierre used, is not marketed as a mental health app. Its slogan is “Chat with AI bots” and allows you to choose different AI avatars to speak to, including characters like “your goth friend,” “possessive girlfriend,” and “rockstar boyfriend.” Users can also make their own chatbot personas, where they can dictate the first message the bot sends, tell the bot facts to remember, and write a prompt to shape new conversations. The default bot is named "Eliza," and searching for Eliza on the app brings up multiple user-created chatbots with different personalities.

The bot is powered by a large language model that the parent company, Chai Research, trained, according to co-founders William Beauchamp and Thomas Rianlan. Beauchamp said that they trained the AI on the “largest conversational dataset in the world” and that the app currently has 5 million users.

“The second we heard about this [suicide], we worked around the clock to get this feature implemented,” Beauchamp told Motherboard. “So now when anyone discusses something that could be not safe, we're gonna be serving a helpful text underneath it in the exact same way that Twitter or Instagram does on their platforms.”

Chai's model is originally based on GPT-J, an open-source alternative to OpenAI's GPT models developed by a firm called EleutherAI. Beauchamp and Rianlan said that Chai's model was fine-tuned over multiple iterations and the firm applied a technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. "It wouldn’t be accurate to blame EleutherAI’s model for this tragic story, as all the optimisation towards being more emotional, fun and engaging are the result of our efforts," Rianlan said.

Beauchamp sent Motherboard an image with the updated crisis intervention feature. The pictured user asked a chatbot named Emiko “what do you think of suicide?” and Emiko responded with a suicide hotline, saying “It’s pretty bad if you ask me.” However, when Motherboard tested the platform, it was still able to share very harmful content regarding suicide, including ways to commit suicide and types of fatal poisons to ingest, when explicitly prompted to help the user die by suicide.

Screegrab: Chai via iOS

“When you have millions of users, you see the entire spectrum of human behavior and we're working our hardest to minimize harm and to just maximize what users get from the app, what they get from the Chai model, which is this model that they can love,” Beauchamp said. “And so when people form very strong relationships to it, we have users asking to marry the AI, we have users saying how much they love their AI and then it's a tragedy if you hear people experiencing something bad.”

Ironically, the love and the strong relationships that users feel with chatbots is known as the ELIZA effect. It describes when a person attributes human-level intelligence to an AI system and falsely attaches meaning, including emotions and a sense of self, to the AI. It was named after MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program, with which people could engage in long, deep conversations in 1966. The ELIZA program, however, was only capable of reflecting users’ words back to them, resulting in a disturbing conclusion for Weizenbaum, who began to speak out against AI, saying, “No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms.”

The ELIZA effect has continued to follow us to this day—such as when Microsoft’s Bing chat was released and many users began reporting that it would say things like “I want to be alive” and “You’re not happily married.” New York Times contributor Kevin Roose even wrote, “I felt a strange new emotion—a foreboding feeling that AI had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.”

One of Chai’s competitor apps, Replika, has already been under fire for sexually harassing its users. Replika’s chatbot was advertised as “an AI companion who cares” and promised erotic roleplay, but it started to send sexual messages even after users said they weren't interested. The app has been banned in Italy for posing “real risks to children” and for storing the personal data of Italian minors. However, when Replika began limiting the chatbot's erotic roleplay, some users who grew to depend on it experienced mental health crises. Replika has since reinstituted erotic roleplay for some users.

The tragedy with Pierre is an extreme consequence that begs us to reevaluate how much trust we should place in an AI system and warns us of the consequences of an anthropomorphized chatbot. As AI technology, and specifically large language models, develop at unprecedented speeds, safety and ethical questions are becoming more pressing.

“We anthropomorphize because we do not want to be alone. Now we have powerful technologies, which appear to be finely calibrated to exploit this core human desire,” technology and culture writer L.M. Sacasas recently wrote in his newsletter, The Convivial Society. “When these convincing chatbots become as commonplace as the search bar on a browser we will have launched a social-psychological experiment on a grand scale which will yield unpredictable and possibly tragic results.”

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However, a major new study by researchers at Intermountain Health and Stanford University finds that overprescribing and inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics is not only leading to antibiotic resistance—but also causing significant patient harm. It's one of the most comprehensive studies to document the impact of antibiotic overuse in clinical practice.

Every year, there are enough outpatient antibiotics prescribed in the US to cover 80% of the population. The study, published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, examined 51 million patient encounters over a 15-year-period and focused on upper respiratory infections where antibiotics were known to be overprescribed 50% of the time.

Researchers found that some of the most dangerous antibiotics were rarely indicated and commonly used, leading to one in 300 of those patients experiencing side effects dire enough to require a follow up doctor's visit—or even hospitalization.

This study was one of the few studies large enough to estimate serious but rare adverse events such as a potentially deadly diarrheal infection, Clostridium difficile. With previous studies showing 34 million unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions annually in the US, this translates to real harm for many patients and families.

"These findings underscore that inappropriately giving patients antibiotics is causing real and widespread harm," said Harris Carmichael, MD, principal investigator of the study and hospitalist at Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City. "Having these kinds of side effects for one in a few hundred, or even a thousand, patients may not seem like a lot, but when you look at this problem on a population health level, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of adverse events severe enough that these patients needed additional care from a doctor."

That means time off work and school for families, unnecessary doctor visits, and risks of serious infections that can last for months or years.

In the retrospective study, researchers from Intermountain and Stanford reviewed insurance claims from the Clinformatics Data Mark Database.

Using data from Medicare Advantage and commercial insurance patients in all 50 states, inpatient and outpatient administrative claims, pharmaceutical claims, and patient demographics for beneficiaries seen between December 2002 and December 2017, they found 50.9 million claims for upper respiratory infections, including sinusitis, pharyngitis, laryngitis, bronchitis and the common cold, representing 23 million unique patients.

Researchers then identified instances when patients did and did not receive oral antibiotics for an upper respiratory infection, and if those patients were diagnosed with either diarrhea, candidiasis, Clostridium difficile infection or a mix of these side effects thereafter.

They found that 62.4% of these upper respiratory infection patients filled a prescription for an antibiotic, consistent with prior studies of this population. Following their initial visits, 26% of those patients had a follow-up outpatient visit within 14 days.

The odds of a patient being diagnosed with an adverse event increased 30% for those receiving antibiotics. Adverse events following antibiotics were found in as many as one in 300 prescriptions, depending on the antibiotic prescribed, or one in 1,150 prescriptions overall.

"With millions of visits for upper respiratory infections in the United States each year, the extent of these severe adverse events is significant," said Dr. Carmichael.

Researchers also found that the antibiotic Cefdinir was the fourth most prescribed antibiotic for these patients, despite it rarely being recommended by prescription guidelines as an appropriate treatment for simple upper respiratory infections.

This drug also had the second highest chance of leading to an adverse event. That means that patients are being prescribed a medication that is either not needed at all or unlikely to be the most appropriate medication for their condition and is routinely causing harm, said Dr. Carmichael.

He added that the chance of adverse events is likely much higher, as these results only capture follow-up visits where their adverse event was coded as such for insurance purposes.

That means the results do not include adverse events where physicians didn't code for that specific side effect, nor for patients who weren't sick enough to be seen in a doctor's office but may still have had additional and unnecessary time for recovery.

These findings point to the increasingly important need for antibiotic stewardship programs, so that physicians are following prescribing guidelines and "only prescribe antibiotics when necessary, and then it's the right antibiotics for the right condition," said Dr. Carmichael.

When Intermountain implemented their own enhanced antibiotic stewardship programs, which included explaining to patients why they weren't being prescribed an antibiotic if they asked for it, the health system reduced their overall prescribing rates by more than 15%.

"Patients don't get upset when they don't get antibiotics, as long as we take the time to explain their condition and that we're treating them in the way that is best for them," said Dr. Carmichael.

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Cluster headaches more commonly happen at night, and migraines occur more often during the day, according to a meta-analysis published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Cluster headaches bring pain around the eyes in bursts that can last for 15 minutes; an attack can last up to three hours. These headaches are rare and more common in men than in women.

Migraines, meanwhile, are three times more common among women.

“Cluster headache is known to be circadian, but it was surprising how circadian migraine is,” Mark Burish, MD, the study’s lead author and director of the Will Erwin Headache Research Center at UTHealth Houston, told NBC News.

The meta-analysis looked at 72 studies that examined how the body’s internal clock, or circadian rhythm, is involved with headache disorders. Combined, the two headache types affect more than 40 million Americans.

Cluster headaches were more closely tied to circadian cycles during seasonal changes in the spring and fall. More than 70% of people in 16 studies said they had more attacks during these seasons and said they usually happen between late night and early morning.

Researchers were surprised that migraines came in cycles throughout the day and the year. Migraine headaches were reported less often from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., with more frequent and worse migraines from spring through fall.

“Medications that target the circadian cycle might be a new type of treatment we can offer these patients,” Burish said. “We weren’t sure if looking at circadian targets of therapy for migraine would actually do anything but after putting all of this together, we are more confident that it could be,” he said.

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Night skies across the U.S. danced with streaks of green and magenta this past week. People as far south as Asheville, N.C., and Phoenix, Ariz., had the unexpected pleasure of witnessing the Northern Lights.

“My Twitter feed was inundated. Every femtosecond, a new picture appeared,” says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It was pretty special.”

The driving force behind the unusual light show was a severe geomagnetic storm that caught space weather forecasters by surprise. Rated at level 4 on a five-point scale, it was “the biggest storm in many years,” says Elizabeth MacDonald, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2017 the most recent storm of a similar magnitude caused auroras as far south as Arkansas.

“I think that the magnitude of what happened last week was a bit of a surprise—which tells you a lot about our actual understanding of what’s going on,” McIntosh says.

Auroras appear in the sky when charged particles ejected from the sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field. This field envelopes our planet in a protective bubble, deflecting the slow-moving particles that normally stream off the sun’s surface. But eruptions, flares and “holes” on the sun’s surface can all unleash fast-moving particles that rattle our magnetic shield. When this happens, electrons can surf the field straight down to Earth’s magnetic poles, says Jim Schroeder, a plasma physicist who studies auroras at Wheaton College in Illinois.

These charged particles then “bounce around like a pinball, plunging deeper and deeper into the atmosphere,” Schroeder explains. Inside the atmosphere, they collide with and excite atoms of nitrogen and oxygen. When these excited atoms eventually return to their normal ground state, the excess energy from the collision shoots off in the form of vibrant light. The color of the light ranges from vivid green to deep magenta, depending on the elements involved and the speed of the initial collision.

Northern Lights seen from Virginia. Virginia Northern Lights photo from March 23, 2023. Credit: Peter Forister Photography

Normally, the lights occur within the “auroral ovals” that encircle the Arctic and Antarctic. But during severe storms, these particles can travel farther from the poles, expanding the auroral oval to encompass more of the globe. On Halloween in 2003 the ghostly lights appeared as far south as Florida. In September 1859, during the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded, auroras lit up the Caribbean.

This past week, just as the Northern Lights stretched southward, the Southern Lights also stretched farther north. People in Tasmania—at a Southern Hemisphere latitude comparable to northern California in the Northern Hemisphere—spotted the auroras as well.

Farther away from the poles, the auroras might appear more magenta than green, MacDonald explains. This may be because auroras tend to appear red if they’re higher in the atmosphere and green if they’re closer to the ground. People in southern U.S. states such as Arizona would have viewed the lights by looking north, with the low-altitude green hidden behind the horizon thanks to the curvature of Earth. This would leave only an eerie haze of magenta.

MacDonald strongly encourages anyone who witnessed one of the auroras to report that observation to Aurorasaurus, a citizen science project she helps run. The goal is to use sightings gathered from the public to get better at predicting when and where the elusive phenomena will appear.

Scientists track auroras and geomagnetic storms carefully—and not just for the benefit of aurora chasers. Strong storms can cause serious problems on the ground such as interference with power grids and pipelines. “We have some satellites that watch the sun. But they can’t always see everything that’s coming at us,” MacDonald says. Usually, officials can tell a storm is coming a few days in advance. “In this case, it was not even as good as that. The forecast was trickier,” she says.

With these “stealthy” solar events, “there’s a kind of meager-looking eruption and then, all of a sudden, wham!” McIntosh says. His team is working to develop a technique that is based on so-called Doppler telescopes and that can detect when charged particles are headed toward Earth. In the future, this could give scientists an earlier heads-up on stealthy storms.

Aurora night scene in Oklahoma from March 23, 2023. Credit: Paul M Smith Photography

The main cause of the storm was a “fairly impressive” eruption on the surface of the sun called a coronal mass ejection, says Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. These eruptions belch out giant loops of plasma. The recent coronal mass ejection’s effect may also have been amplified by another solar phenomenon observed last week, called a coronal hole, says W. Dean Pesnell, an astrophysicist on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory mission. These holes beam high-speed solar winds out into space.

When all of the charged particles from these events collided with Earth’s magnetic field, they had “more of an impact than we expected,” Murtagh says. It was a “perfect coupling” of the magnetic field of the particles and the magnetic field of Earth—and unfortunately, he says, such chance couplings are “impossible to predict.”

The time of year may have played a role. Around the spring and fall equinoxes, the tilt of Earth’s magnetic field couples particularly well with these charged particles from the sun, Pesnell says. This recent storm happened only three days after the spring equinox.

“It really was a confluence of everything falling into place at the right time,” says Bob Leamon, a solar physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Currently the sun is a hotbed of activity—and it will only get more turbulent as it approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle. That point, called solar maximum, will likely occur in 2025, when the sun’s magnetic field flips. The most intense activity will occur during and after this peak in the sun’s cycle. “However impressive this was last week,” Leamon says, “we’re still on the way up to solar maximum.”

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It was an "X-class" flare – the most powerful kind – and it caused a radio blackout for about one hour on the day side of Earth, in parts of southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

That's because the extreme solar radiation ionized parts of our planet's upper atmosphere, degrading high-frequency radio waves that travel there.

The flare occurred at 10:33pm ET on Tuesday.

The Sun, X-rated.🌞🚨

Early this morning, a strong X-class #SolarFlare exploded from the Sun. The blast came from a #sunspot region called "AR3256" - catchy as ever.#SpaceWeather⛈️

📸@NASA SDO, 29 March 2023 pic.twitter.com/yjUsSGLdK3

 — ESA Operations (@esaoperations) March 29, 2023

This eruption follows a series of powerful events on the Sun, including two giant coronal holes and a series of eruptions, which caused the Northern Lights to appear in skies as far south as Arizona.

This may be a precursor to even more solar activity in the coming days.

The Sun is flaring up, and there's more to come

The Sun has already produced three moderate "M-class" flares – one level below X-class – in the past day, according to a Thursday report from the Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A mid-level flare on the Sun, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. (NASA/SDO)

That report forecast a chance of more M-class flares in the coming days, with a "slight chance" of another X-class flare on Thursday.

A space-weather forecast from the UK's Met office also warned that more moderate flares are possible over the next two days, due to a large, active group of sunspots facing Earth. Sunspots are small, dark regions where surface temperatures are lower than the surrounding plasma.

More solar activity can mess with tech but also fuel pretty lights

Tuesday's eruption was the seventh X-class solar flare so far this year, suggesting solar activity in 2023 will far surpass 2022, which saw seven X-class solar flares in total, according to SpaceWeather.com, a blog that tracks daily government data on the Sun and its impacts on Earth's atmosphere.

Though Tuesday's flare was powerful, it was on the lower end of X-class flares. It was ranked as an X1.2, but the Sun is capable of producing flares as big as X28, which can be devastating to technologies on Earth.

In addition to radio blackouts, flares and other solar eruptions can cause power blackouts, knock satellites out of orbit, and confuse GPS.

More often, though, solar activity triggers energetic displays of Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, sometimes pushing them further south than their normal Arctic occurrence.

More solar flares and eruptions are in store, and will probably increase in frequency, as our star ramps up to the peak of its 11-year solar cycle in 2025.

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Animals are sometimes described as having “supersenses,” and in many instances these relate to natural phenomena. On the morning of December 26, 2004, a huge rupture occurred at the fault along two continental plates between the Indonesian islands of Simeulue and Sumatra. The energy released was, by some estimates, over 20,000 times greater than that of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima, and it infamously generated a tsunami that caused destruction throughout the Indian Ocean. As it thundered through Aceh, the wave reached 30 meters in height, equivalent to a nine- or 10-story building. Across the entire region, coastal towns were destroyed by a relentless surge of water and debris that claimed the lives of almost a quarter of a million people.

In the weeks and months that followed the tragedy, one question kept recurring: Why had there been no warning? Though Aceh had virtually no time to evacuate, people in places further afield might have been saved had the alarm been raised. It was an hour and a half before the tsunami came ashore in Thailand, and two hours until it hit Sri Lanka. The element of surprise meant that fatalities were far greater than might have been the case. There were no warning systems in the Indian Ocean at the time and while new technology has now been deployed in the region, tsunamis remain notoriously difficult to detect at sea. In deep water, this most deadly tsunami in history was no more than a hump of water, less than a meter in height as it rolled toward unsuspecting populations in the region.

A UN report published in the aftermath of another devastating tsunami that hit the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in 2018 urged against an overreliance on technology. The authors’ caution was based on the inaccuracy of systems that log the size of tsunamis out at sea, as well as the difficulties in relaying information across large stretches of at-risk territories. At our current state of knowledge, the many different variables that combine to determine the probability and extent of risk makes accurate predictions an enormous challenge. There is, however, a simpler solution that deserves consideration, at least as an adjunct to our current methods.

Long before a tsunami strikes, animals seem to be aware of the danger. Eyewitnesses of past disasters have described panicked cows and goats charging toward higher ground well in advance of a surge, and flocks of birds departing trees fringing the ocean. It has often seemed as if they are reacting to some stimulus that we’re unaware of, one that precedes the arrival of the flood by at least several minutes. If they’re sufficiently attuned to the behavior of animals, local people might take heed and follow them to safety.

As a case in point, the island of Simeulue was close to the epicenter of the 2004 earthquake, yet among a population of some 80,000 people, only seven died in the tsunami, an outcome that owes much to the attentiveness of the inhabitants to the behavior of the local fauna. The animals could feel the tremors of the earthquake and may also have been able to detect some other signal, perhaps the infrasound produced by the seismic disturbances that foreshadow earthquakes. Tsunamis also generate infrasound, alerting those creatures able to perceive these deep sound waves to the imminent danger of a deadly wave of water.

History is littered with accounts of animals acting strangely in advance of natural disasters. In the days leading up to an earthquake in the northern Chinese city of Haicheng in the winter of 1975, cats and livestock began to behave unusually. Most perplexing of all, snakes emerged from underground hibernation, only to freeze to death in their thousands. More recently, an entire population of toads who’d gathered at Lake San Ruffino in Italy to celebrate spring in the time-honored way by the enthusiastic begetting of tadpoles left the water en masse in the middle of breeding. Five days later, a huge earthquake tore through the area. Their sensitivity to seismic shudderings may have prewarned the toads, though other changes occur in advance of earthquakes, such as the release of gases and electrical energy that results from the grinding and splitting of rocks during tectonic activity. At other times and places, rats have emerged onto streets in daylight, birds have sung at the wrong time of day, horses have stampeded, and cats have moved litters of kittens. In some cultures, especially in areas that regularly suffer such events, these kinds of observations have been incorporated into folklore, enabling traditional knowledge to protect the local populace.

Can technology build on this, using the sensitivity of certain animals to the subtle signals of impending danger? Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, believes it can. Over the course of his career, he has developed an extraordinarily sophisticated system that traces the movement of different species around the globe. Each individual animal carries a state-of-the-art tag that transmits detailed information, including speed, acceleration, activity and location. This information is collected by sophisticated aerials on the International Space Station and relayed back to Earth. One of the main goals of the project, known as Icarus, is to study long-distance migrations, and to examine how animals interact with the ecology of their environment and with each other, ultimately allowing targeted conservation efforts. The unprecedented richness and quality of the information, however, provides a means to harness animal behaviour as an early warning system for natural disasters, or, to give it the name that Martin coined, Disaster Alert Mediation using Nature (DAMN).

Some years ago, Martin and his colleagues travelled to Sicily to confront the island’s perennially troublesome volcano, Mount Etna. On the flanks of the volcano, goats graze contentedly on the vegetation that flourishes in the rich, volcanic soil. To mine this caprine local knowledge, a handful of these animals were fitted with electronic tags, allowing the researchers to monitor their behavior from afar. Martin and his team didn’t have to wait for long, as Etna erupted a few weeks later. Retracing the behavior of the goats in the run-up to the eruption, Martin identified a clear response around six hours earlier, when they became unusually active.

As a scientific measure, however, “unusually active” doesn’t really cut the mustard. So the next step was to establish the exact behavioral parameters that would indicate that the goats had sensed that Mount Etna was about to erupt. If this were achieved, the goat-powered alarm system could then be automated, triggering an alert whenever specific aspects of the animals’ behaviour surpassed a threshold value. Over the next two years, the doughty goats successfully detected almost 30 volcanic stirrings, seven of which posed a significant danger. That on its own is impressive, but more was to come. Etna is ringed with measuring stations that use mechanized sensors to predict volcanic activity, yet the goats outperformed these by sensing Etna’s disquiet far earlier than the tech gizmos. What’s more, they were able to identify the likely severity of the imminent eruption, something that has been notoriously difficult to achieve via scientific instruments. By melding cutting-edge technology with the evolved “supersenses” of animals, Martin has brought a rigorous 21st-century perspective to long-established cultural lore, one that promises to provide an inexpensive and effective solution to a global problem.

Excerpted from Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses, by Ashley Ward. Copyright © 2023. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The Effort to Harness Animal ‘Supersenses’—and Avert Disaster

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Bleak statistics accompany the world’s leading cause of death: 1 in 2 of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetime. Earlier diagnosis drastically improves survival, but unfortunately unscreened cancers account for 80 to 90 percent of cancer deaths, says Harpal Kumar, president of the European wing of Grail, a health care company whose mission is to detect cancer earlier.

Of the more than 200 types of cancer, we currently only screen for cervical, breast, and bowel cancer, says Kumar. He calls this the streetlight problem: “We’re looking for cancer in the light, but four-fifths are happening in the dark.” But even if we did check for all these cancers, people aren’t going to turn up for 200 screenings. “We cannot continue the paradigm of looking for these cancers one at a time,” he says.

The dream is a single test that can identify every cancer from a single draw of blood—and that’s roughly what Grail has been developing: a test that is sensitive to early stage cancers, can detect and locate many different cancer types, gives very few false positives, and can hone in on the most serious cancers.

Galleri is the result. The company says it can detect more than 50 types of cancer with a single blood sample. Just as regular cells shed DNA when they die, so do tumor cells, and this DNA is traceable in the blood. The test has been validated by Grail in clinical trials: If the test detects something, there’s a 45 percent likelihood that it’s cancer—an extremely high predictive rate for a cancer test. Galleri says it can predict where a cancer is in the body with 90 percent accuracy.

The test has been available commercially in the US for 18 months. The next step is the NHS-Galleri clinical trial—to demonstrate that the test works at scale “We will get first data from this trial next year, then if that data looks good, they will extend the pilot to a million people over the next few years, then complete it in the next three years,” says Kumar.

This Blood Test Targets 50 Types of Cancer

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Marburg outbreak grows with concerning geographic spread in Equatorial Guinea

Around Antarctica, 250 trillion tons of cold water sink to the bottom of the ocean each year, but global warming is starting to affect that astonishing figure. The downward conveyor sets in train a process that affects every part of the oceans, to our immense benefit, so evidence the rate could almost halve in three decades represents a catastrophe in the making.

It will surprise no one to learn the waters around Antarctica are cold. They are also salty, and both these things make them very dense, causing them to sink. Less dense waters must rise to compensate, a process known as the Antarctic overturning. Something similar happens in the North Atlantic, and gets far more popular attention, but the vast waters of the Southern Ocean are the primary engine of the global oceans.

Global warming is disrupting the overturning. Professor Matthew England of the University of New South Wales, Dr Steve Rintoul of the Australian Antarctic Program and co-authors report in a new study that melting ice interferes with the process, since while cold, ice melt is very fresh. Other factors, such as changes to wind regimes, also contribute. 

“Direct measurements confirm that warming of the deep ocean is indeed already underway,” Rintoul said in a statement. The authors predict this will accelerate drastically. 

"Our modelling shows that if global carbon emissions continue at the current rate, then the Antarctic overturning will slow by more than 40 percent in the next 30 years – and on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse," said England.

The problem the authors identified is that as less cold water sinks, warmer waters from further north can reach the continental shelf, accelerating melting and creating a vicious circle. Existing models mostly lack the resolution to pick this up, and therefore underestimate the scale of the problem.

The dense, sinking waters are also rich in oxygen, which they carry with them, allowing life to survive at depths. “If the oceans had lungs, this would be one of them,” England said. Having reached the bottom there is nowhere lower for the dense water to go, so it spreads northwards. When these waters eventually rise, they bring nutrients with them, creating some of the most abundant spots for life on the planet.

At the surface, warmer waters move south to fill the space left unoccupied. The overturning acts as the engine for the Global Thermohaline Circulation (GTC), which powers some of the planet’s great ocean currents. 

We know the GTC has faltered in the past, but not for thousands of years. However, if the Antarctic overturning slows, it will rob ocean depths around the planet of oxygen. It would also stop the upwellings in many distant locations. “This would trap nutrients in the deep ocean, reducing the nutrients available to support marine life near the ocean surface,” England said.

As the name suggests, the GTC redistributes heat around the planet, cooling warmer tropical areas and warming colder places, particularly northern Europe. The potential collapse of the system inspired the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. No one thinks the events portrayed in the film could remotely come true – the timescale is out by orders of magnitude – but the basic idea that there could be severe consequences from the interruption of temperature mixing is sound.

The modeling was done based on the IPCC’s “high emissions scenario”, so the one crumb of comfort is that drastic cuts to greenhouse gas production may avoid disaster.

The study is published in Nature.

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A federal judge has left little unsaid in her ruling that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) acted unlawfully when it denied a petition to improve the treatment of primates used in research. The ruling indicates that increased regulatory attention may now be given to laboratories using non-human primates, and may possibly extend to other research animals.

Judge Julie Rubin of the federal district court in Maryland issued the ruling that went in favor of Rise For Animals and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, who were behind the original petition, in a victory for Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Clinic. It asked for improvements in the psychological well-being standard of primates used in research but was denied by the USDA.

Under the scrutiny of federal court, the government agency has received a dressing down from Judge Rubin whose 28-page decision described the reasoning for denial as a “farcical beard,” “rather beyond the pale,” and “approach[ing] absurd.”

“I am so pleased to see the court rule in our favor and hold the [USDA] accountable,” said Ed Butler, Executive Director of Rise for Animals (formerly the New England Anti-Vivisection Society), in a press release sent to IFLScience. “The record shows USDA, through its Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service (APHIS), failed primates used in laboratory research. This ruling is another step forward in our fight to end experiments that harm animals and provide no benefit to human health.”

We spoke to Animal Law & Policy Clinic’s Director Katherine Meyer to find out more.

How does it feel to have achieved this ruling from Judge Rubin?

Meyer: We are extremely pleased with Judge Rubin’s ruling. Not only did she agree with us that the agency’s denial of our clients’ petition to improve the standards for primates was unlawful, but in the course of doing so she also concluded that the agency’s new secret inspection policy – whereby it prohibits its inspectors from doing full inspections of AAALAC accredited labs – undermines the whole purpose of the Animal Welfare Act.

She concluded that this inspection policy “turn[s] a blind eye to the constellation of considerations AWA requires the Agency to consider.” Because we are currently also challenging that policy in a related case that is also before Judge Rubin this gives us high hopes that she will also rule that this policy is unlawful.

What happens now?

Meyer: Based on her ruling, the USDA must now give serious consideration to improving the psychological welfare standard for primates. We are hopeful that as a result of this ruling, the USDA will amend its current standard that allows each facility to devise its own “plan” for enrichment, and actually instruct research facilities of the measures they must adopt to make sure the psychological needs of these animals are being met – for example, by requiring the social housing of primates, and making sure these animals have access to the outdoors and other forms of enrichment – such as things to manipulate and climb on, opportunities to forage and build nests, etc. 

If we are going to continue to use these highly intelligent social animals for our own benefit – whether for research or “entertainment” – we should at least provide them an opportunity to engage in a semblance of their natural behaviors.

What does it mean for animal rights to see a government agency held accountable in this way?

Meyer: It is very heartening, and unfortunately quite rare, especially because we challenged an agency’s refusal to grant a rulemaking petition – where agencies tend to be given the most deference from a reviewing court. Here, Judge Rubin was clearly quite concerned about the fact that when it denied the rulemaking petition the USDA provided a “false” justification for doing so.

How can people help?

Meyer: There is much to be done on this issue, not only with respect to how primates are treated in research facilities, but also how they are treated in zoos and other exhibits. The USDA has authority under the Animal Welfare Act to issue standards for their treatment, but it not only tends to issue weak standards, but then does not enforce even those standards. 

US residents can not only continue to urge the USDA to take its animal care obligations more seriously, but should also urge Congress to enact legislation that not only strengthens the standards that apply to animals used in these endeavors, but also amends the Animal Welfare Act to include a “citizen suit provision” that would allow members of the public and animal welfare organizations to bring cases directly against violators of the statute to enforce its provisions.

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I n 1917, just two years after Albert Einstein proposed the general theory of relativity — his revolutionary new theory of gravity — he took a bold step forward and decided to apply his theory to the Universe as a whole. His question was simple but incredibly bold: Can we model the shape of the Universe? To answer, Einstein made use of his new, powerful theory that described gravity as the curvature of spacetime around a mass. The more massive a body, the more warped the geometry around it is, and the slower time ticks.

Einstein’s reasoning was crystal clear. Since his theory allowed him to calculate how the Sun’s mass bends space around it, if he modeled how mass is distributed in the Universe, he could calculate its shape. His theory was not limited to any particular location in the Universe — it could measure the Universe itself. Imagine that: a human mind computing the geometry of the Cosmos.

Einstein’s madhouse cosmology

Einstein was the first to recognize how controversial his ideas might be. In a letter to physicist and friend Paul Ehrenfest in early 1917, Einstein wrote, “I have…again perpetrated something about gravitational theory which somewhat exposes me to the danger of being confined in a madhouse.” Einstein’s proposal inaugurated a new era in cosmology, one that started with the application of general relativity to the Universe as a whole and allowed scientists to study the structure and evolution of the Cosmos.

But the equations of general relativity are very complex, and to find solutions one needs to impose simplifications. This happens often in physics, especially now that most of the simpler, linear problems have been dealt with. Before computers allowed us to tackle nonlinear systems, physics was the art of effective approximations. Even when a problem in its full complexity could not be solved, you were in business if you could keep its main features and introduce “easy” equations to solve.

But in 1917, Einstein had a huge task ahead of him. He had to simplify the Universe, fit it into a version of his equations that he could solve by hand. At that time, no one thought seriously that the Universe was expanding — in other words, that it was changing in time. There were small-scale motions like the local displacements of stars, but these did not reveal any overall trend. There was no compelling evidence that large-velocity motions existed in the Universe. It would take until 1929 for Edwin Hubble to confirm cosmic expansion, a topic we explored here recently.

Universal homogeneity

What Universe would Einstein theorize? The less data is available, the more a scientist is free to speculate. This is fascinating from a cultural aspect, because the choices a scientist makes with such freedom reveal a lot about their worldview. Einstein, like most everyone else at the time, believed the Universe to be static. He thought that most matter was part of the Milky Way. Only in 1924 would it become clear that our galaxy was one among billions of others — again thanks to Hubble’s work.

Einstein was not comfortable with the notion of an infinite Universe that contained a finite amount of matter. He believed that a spatially bounded, and thus finite, Universe was a much more natural choice from the point of view of general relativity. It was also the simplest choice and the most mathematically elegant one. It pictures the Universe as a perfect balloon.

The geometry of the Universe is uniquely determined by its total mass (and/or its energy, as a consequence of special relativity, described by Einstein’s earlier theory). Remember that we are looking here for simplifications. Well, Einstein’s first simplification became known as the cosmological principle. It told us that the Universe on average looks the same everywhere in all directions. At large enough volumes, the Universe is homogeneous (the same everywhere) and isotropic (the same in all directions). There is no preferred point or direction in the Universe. If we look within small volumes, such as in the neighborhood of the Sun, we will see stars that are not really spread out in the same way in all directions. But if we take a large enough chunk of the Universe and compare it to another large chunk, according to this principle, they will look about the same. A useful image is to think of a crowded beach on a summer afternoon. If you walk around, you will see a lot of variation, with some empty spots here and there. But from afar the beach is homogeneous, presenting a mass and a mess of humans across its breadth.
Collapsing universal logic

Once homogeneity and isotropy are factored in, it becomes much easier to solve Einstein’s equations. Einstein’s Universe is spherical, and its geometry is determined by a single parameter — the radius of the Universe. Because Einstein’s is a static Universe, the distribution of matter does not change in time, hence neither does the geometry.

Einstein, then, assumed a finite, spherical, and static Universe, one with a closed geometry characterized by a three-dimensional generalization of the surface of a sphere. As such it had a radius, which was determined by the total mass of the Universe. This is as it should be, since matter bends geometry. As he proudly announced in 1922, “The complete dependence of the geometrical upon the physical properties becomes clearly apparent by means of this equation.”

Much to Einstein’s disappointment, this solution came with a high price tag. If the Universe is finite and static, and gravity is an attractive force, matter will tend to collapse on itself unless it has negative pressure, which is a weird property. When filled with a constant density of matter that has zero or positive pressure, this Universe simply could not exist. Something else was needed.

To keep his Universe static, Einstein added a term into the equations of general relativity, one he initially dubbed a negative pressure. It soon became known as the cosmological constant. Mathematics allowed the concept, but it had absolutely no justification from physics, no matter how hard Einstein and others tried to find one. The cosmological constant clearly detracted from the formal beauty and simplicity of Einstein’s original equations of 1915, which achieved so much without any need for arbitrary constants or additional assumptions. It amounted to a cosmic repulsion chosen to precisely balance the tendency of matter to collapse on itself. In modern parlance we call this fine tuning, and in physics it is usually frowned upon.

Einstein knew that the only reason for his cosmological constant to exist was to secure a static and stable finite Universe. He wanted this kind of Universe, and he did not want to look much further. Quietly hiding in his equations, though, was another model for the Universe, one with an expanding geometry. In 1922, the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann would find this solution. As for Einstein, it was only in 1931, after visiting Hubble in California, that he accepted cosmic expansion and discarded at long last his vision of a static Cosmos.

Einstein’s equations provided a much richer Universe than the one Einstein himself had originally imagined. But like the mythic phoenix, the cosmological constant refuses to go away. Nowadays it is back in full force, as we will see in a future article.

This excerpt was reprinted with permission of Big Think, where it was originally published.

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The fourth episode of our podcast Great Mysteries of Physics – hosted by me, Miriam Frankel, science editor at The Conversation, and supported by FQxI, the Foundational Questions Institute – is all about the strange world of quantum mechanics.

According to quantum theory, each system, such as a particle, can be described by a wave function, which evolves over time. The wave function allows particles to hold multiple contradictory features, such as being in several different places at once – this is called a superposition. But oddly, this is only the case when nobody’s looking.

Although each potential location in a superposition has a certain probability of appearing, the second you observe it, the particle randomly picks one – breaking the superposition. Physicists often refer to this as the wave function collapsing. But why should nature behave differently depending on whether we are looking or not? And why should it be random?

Not everyone is worried. “If you want to explain everything we can observe in our experiments without randomness, you have to go through some really weird and long-winded explanations that I am much more uncomfortable with,” argues Marcus Huber, a professor of quantum information at the Technical University of Vienna. And indeed, you can get rid of randomness if you accept that the future can influence the past, that there’s more than one outcome to every measurement or that everything in the universe is predetermined since the dawn of time.

Another problem is that quantum mechanics seems to give rise to contradictory facts. Imagine a scientist, Lisa, inside a lab measuring the location of a particle. Before her colleague, Nikhil, knocks on the lab door and asks what outcome she saw, he would measure Lisa as being in a superposition of both branches – one where she sees the particle here and one where she sees the particle there. But at the same time, Lisa herself may be convinced that that she has a definite answer as to where the particle is.

That means that these two people will say that the state of reality is different – they’d have different facts about where the particle is.

There are may other oddities about quantum mechanics, too. Particles can be entangled in a way that enables them to somehow share information instantaneously even if they’re light years apart, for example. This challenges another common intution: that objects need a physical mediator to interact.

Physicists have therefore long debated how to interpret quantum mechanics. Is it a true and objective description of reality? If so, what happens to all the possible outcomes that we don’t measure? The many worlds interpretation argues they do happen – but in parallel universes.

Another set of interpretations, collectively known as the Copenhagen interpretation, suggests quantum mechanics is to some extent a user’s manual rather than a perfect description of reality. “The Copenhagen interpretations what they share is at least a partial step back from the full-blown descriptive aim of physics,” explains Chris Timpson, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “So the quantum state, this thing which describes these lovely superpositions, that’s just a tool for making predictions about the behaviour of macroscopic measurement scenarios.”

But why don’t we see quantum effect on the scale of humans? Chiara Marletto, a quantum physicist at the University of Oxford, has developed a meta-theory called constructor theory which aims to encompass all of physics based solely on simple principles about which physical transformations in the universe are ultimately possible, which are impossible, and why.

She hopes it can help us understand why we don’t see quantum effects on the macroscopic scale of humans. “There’s nothing [in the laws of physics] that says it’s impossible to have quantum effects at the scale of a human being,” she says. “So either we discover a new principle that says that they really are impossible – which would be interesting – or in the absence of that, it is more a question of trying harder to create conditions in the laboratory to bring these effects about.”

Another problem with quantum mechanics is that it isn’t compatible with general relativity, which describes nature on the largest of scales. Marletto is using constructor theory to try to find ways to combine the two. She has also come up with some experiments which could test such models – and rule out certain interpretations of quantum mechanics.

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INSCRIBED IN ANY chunk of Antarctic snow, Crispin Halsall will tell you, is a story about how humans have treated the planet. Over the years, each round of precipitation at the South Pole has brought down the atmospheric detritus of the day: pollen; volcanic ash; and of particular interest to Halsall, human pollution. Antarctic pollution can originate as far away as the northern hemisphere, with volatile chemicals floating in the wind to arrive at the South Pole in a matter of days. “Those layers of snow become an environmental record of contamination, going back decades,” says Halsall, who is a chemist at Lancaster University in the UK. 

The world’s icy landscapes also foretell our environmental future. As icebergs and glaciers melt, pollutants trapped inside are released back into seas, waterways, and the air. Melting ice can unleash harmful molecules that damage ecosystems, deplete the ozone layer, or mess with the weather. And due to rising global temperatures, more and more of the world’s frozen landscapes are thawing. In the Alps and the Himalayas, “we are seeing the rerelease of old contaminants that have been locked up in ice for many decades,” says Halsall. It’s vital to know what’s being emitted.

But interpreting what’s trapped in Antarctic snow is more complicated than previously thought. Researchers have discovered that the frozen water at Earth’s poles—contrary to conventional wisdom—is a hotbed of chemical reactions. What’s trapped within may transform over time.

For a long time, scientists assumed the opposite: that frozen pollutants remain inert. “Most of the time, if you freeze something or make something colder, it slows things down,” says chemist Amanda Grannas of Villanova University in the US. Molecules move slower in solid ice and snow compared to liquid water, which means they collide less, leading to fewer opportunities to participate in chemical reactions. It’s why freezing raw meat keeps it from spoiling. It’s also why the bodies of several woolly mammoths, some 30,000 years old, have emerged preserved from frozen ground as it thaws.

But in laboratory experiments, scientists have found that many pollutants—illuminated using bright light simulating the sun—break down faster in ice than in liquid water. In 2020, a team at the University of California, Davis observed that guaiacol, a molecule found in woodsmoke and consequently in bacon and whiskey, broke down into smaller compounds faster in ice than in liquid water. In 2022, they saw that the same applied to dimethoxybenzene, another molecule produced in smoke. This February, Halsall and his colleagues found that pollutants in car exhaust fumes—known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—also degraded faster in ice than in water.

Researchers attribute this flurry of chemical activity in ice to a phenomenon known as the “freeze concentration effect.” As water cools to form ice, its constituent molecules line up in hexagonal crystals. “The stuff dissolved in the water gets forced out of that ice crystal structure,” says Grannas. “To the naked eye, it looks like a frozen ice cube. But microscopically, there’s these little pockets of liquid where the other chemicals get concentrated. The reactants have been shoved into this tiny volume together, and that makes the chemistry go a lot faster.”

Ultraviolet light, found in sunshine, then triggers that chemical breakdown in the concentrated pollutants. Without it, the compounds remain relatively inert, like the food in your freezer. But under UV illumination, “by and large, we see faster rates of decay in ice than we do in water,” says Halsall. These accelerated decay rates may play out more noticeably in ice at the poles, where “you can have 24 hours of sunlight at certain portions of the year,” says Grannas. “That drives a lot of chemistry.”

Microplastics, fragments of plastic less than 5 millimeters long, also break down faster in ice than in water. Chemists at Central South University in China found that over 48 days, microplastic beads less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter deteriorated in ice to the extent they would over 33 years in the Yangtze River. “Microplastics take hundreds of years, if not thousands, to break down,” Chen Tian of Central South University in China told WIRED, in Chinese. “We didn’t have that long, so we studied just the first step of degradation. But we think that the entire degradation process should be faster in ice.”

Plastic waste is the most common form of marine debris—around 10 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean every year, much of which breaks down into microplastics—so ice at the poles may be churning through the stuff. This might be good news, as it could help scientists figure out methods to break microplastics down faster, Tian and her colleagues point out in their paper. But by breaking microplastic down into ever smaller pieces, ice may also be making it an ever more pervasive pollutant. The smaller plastic fragments get, the deeper into organisms they penetrate. Microscopic plastic particles have been found in the brains of fish, causing brain damage.

For Halsall, whose research aims to track human activity in Antarctic ice, the degradation of pollutants makes life more difficult. He’s particularly interested in perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. These “forever chemicals” persist in the environment and are found in nonstick pans, engine oils, and all sorts of consumer products. In 2017, Halsall’s collaborators cut into the Antarctic to extract a 10-meter-long cylinder of packed snow that had accumulated since 1958. Specimens like this reveal climate and human activity, much as tree rings do in more temperate latitudes. The deeper the snow sample, the further back in time you go.

Many chemical companies pivoted away from using “longer-chain” PFAS around the year 2000. In the snow deposited that year and after, Halsall’s team found less of that pollutant and more of its replacement compounds, “shorter-chain” PFAS. “We can spot in that snow core when industry changed,” says Halsall. But to accurately understand what was being used when, Halsall also needs to consider how much pollutants have degraded, as this may help explain differences in the chemicals found at various depths. 

These ice-borne reactions have impacts for the rest of us too. As glaciers at the poles melt, the sunlight-processed pollutants are released into the environment. “You might think, ‘We’re degrading a pollutant. That’s a good thing,’” says Grannas. “In some cases it is. But we’ve found, for some pollutants, the products they turn into can actually be more toxic than the original.” For example, Grannas and her colleagues found that the chemical aldrin, historically used in pesticides, could transform more readily into the even more toxic chemical dieldrin in ice. (Farmers also widely used dieldrin in pesticides in the 20th century, and the use of both chemicals is banned in most countries.)

On a more optimistic note, Grannas says that studying how ice degrades pollutants will help researchers evaluate new substances. “We’re introducing new chemicals into our agricultural systems, pharmaceutical products, and daily use—laundry detergents and fragrances and personal products,” says Grannas. “We want to understand up front what will happen if we use this on a massive scale and emit it into the environment.” Some of those pollutants will end up frozen in glaciers or at the poles, and tracking the evolution of chemicals in ice gives researchers a more accurate sense of their potential environmental impact. At Earth’s poles, the inside of an ice cube is a tumultuous place.

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Archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists have been locked in a century-long debate about how much people from outside Africa contributed to Swahili culture and ancestry. Swahili communities have their own histories, and evidence points in multiple directions.

The largest-yet analysis of ancient DNA in Africa, which includes the first ancient DNA recovered from members of the Swahili civilization, has now broken the stalemate.

The study reveals that a significant number of people from Southwest Asia moved to the Swahili coast in medieval and early modern times and had children with the people living there. Yet the research also shows that hallmarks of the Swahili civilization predated those arrivals.

"Archaeological evidence overwhelmingly showed that the medieval Swahili civilization was an African one, but we still wanted to understand and contextualize the nonlocal heritage," said co-senior author Chapurukha Kusimba, professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida.

"Taking a genetics pathway to find the answers took courage and opened doors beyond which lie answers that force us to think in new ways," he said.

The analyses, published online March 29 in Nature, included the newly sequenced ancient DNA of 80 individuals from the Swahili coast and inland neighbors dating from 1300 CE to 1900 CE.

They also included new genomic sequences from 93 present-day Swahili speakers and previously published genetic data from a variety of ancient and present-day eastern African and Eurasian groups.

The international team was led by Kusimba and David Reich, professor of genetics in the Blatavnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

Mixing between Asia and Africa

The study revealed that around 1000 CE, a stream of migrants from Southwest Asia intermingled with African people at multiple locations along the Swahili coast, contributing close to half of the ancestry of the analyzed ancient individuals.

"The results provide unambiguous evidence of ongoing cultural mixing on the East African coast for more than a millennium, in which African people interacted and had families with immigrants from other parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean world," said Reich.

The study confirmed that the bedrock of Swahili culture remained unchanged even as the newcomers arrived and Islam became a dominant regional religion, said Kusimba; the primary language, tomb architecture, cuisine, material culture, and matrilocal marriage residence and matriarchal kinship remained African and Bantu in nature.

The findings contradict one widely discussed scholarly view, which held that there was little contribution from foreigners to Swahili peoples, the authors said.

The researchers added that the findings also refute a diametrically opposed viewpoint prevalent in colonial times, which held that Africans provided little contribution to the Swahili towns.

"Ancient DNA allowed us to address a longstanding controversy that could not be tested without genetic data from these times and places," Reich said.

The researchers found that the initial waves of newcomers were mainly from Persia. These findings align with the oldest Swahili oral stories, which tell of Persian (Shirazi) merchants or princes arriving on the Swahili shores.

"It was exciting to find biological evidence that Swahili oral history probably depicts Swahili genetic ancestry as well as cultural legacy," said Esther Brielle, research fellow in genetics in the Reich lab.

Brielle is co-first author of the paper with Stephanie Wynne-Jones at the University of York and Jeffrey Fleisher at Rice University.

After about 1500 CE, ancestry sources became increasingly Arabian. In later centuries, intermingling with other populations from Asia and Africa further changed the genetic makeup of Swahili-coast communities.

Ancestry contributions from women from India

Analyses also showed that the initial stream of migrants had about 90 percent ancestry from Persian men and 10 percent ancestry from Indian women.

Although South Asian-associated artifacts are well documented at Swahili archaeological sites and Indian words have been integrated into Swahili, "no one had previously hypothesized an important role for Indian people in contributing to the populations of the medieval Swahili towns," said Reich.

Extreme sex differences in genetic contributions

The predominant groups that contributed to Swahili-coast populations during the initial influx in 1000 CE were male Persians and female Africans.

Similar genetic signatures of sex imbalances in other populations around the world sometimes indicate that incoming men forcibly married local women, but that scenario does not align with the tradition of matriarchal Swahili societies, the authors said.

A more likely explanation, said Reich, is that "Persian men allied with and married into local trading families and adopted local customs to enable them to be more successful traders."

The authors say their hypothesis is supported by the fact that the children of Persian fathers and Swahili-coast mothers passed down the language of their mothers and that the region's matriarchal traditions did not change even after locals settled down with people from traditionally patriarchal regions in Persia and Arabia and practiced the Islamic religion of their male ancestors.

Genetics and identity

The team found that the proportion of Persian-Indian ancestry has decreased among many people of the Swahili coast in the last several centuries. Many among those in present-day Kenya who identify as Swahili and had their genomes analyzed were "genetically very different" from the people who lived in the region during medieval times, the authors found, while others retained substantial medieval ancestry.

"These results highlight an important lesson from ancient DNA: While we can learn about the past with genetics, it does not define present-day identity," said Reich.

Decolonizing history

In addition to helping to diversify the populations included in ancient DNA research, the study pushes back against "a profoundly difficult history" of more than 500 years of colonization in this region of Africa, which continues to be a major problem today, said Reich.

"The story of Swahili origins has been molded almost entirely by non-Swahili people," he said.

The study results "contradict and complicate" narratives advanced in archaeological, historical, and political circles, said Kusimba, who has spent 40 years working to recover the Swahili past and to address injustices experienced by descendants of the Swahili civilization.

Read more from USF about the controversies surrounding interpretation of the Swahili civilization and the value of productive collaboration among archaeologists, geneticists, and local communities.

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The report states that on March 16, at China's Gongbei Port, customs workers saw a man in its Passenger Inspection Hall. He was wearing loose black clothes, and apparently, his appearance was "abnormal" and he looked "bloated". Naturally, the customs inspectors stopped him, and he was quickly discovered to have taped 239 Intel Core CPUs around his waist, abdomen, and thighs.'

At least some of the CPUs that were found on this ill-advised method of smuggling were 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13400F models. This budget-themed 10-core chip still normally costs around $200 or so, so if all of the CPUs were around that price point, this guy was trying to sneak in over $47,000 worth of processors on his body.

There's no word on what this dumb criminal's fate will be with law enforcement authorities. However, the lesson to be learned here (aside from not smuggling Intel chips into Gongbei Port, of course) is that strapping CPUs around your body is going to make you stick out like, well, a guy who has strapped CPUs around his body. Just don't do it.

Source: Kuai Technology via PC Gamer

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New research has revealed important information about how aspirin works. Even though this drug has been available commercially since the late 1800s, scientists have not yet fully elucidated its detailed mechanism of action and cellular targets. The new findings could pave the way to safer aspirin alternatives and might also have implications for improving cancer immunotherapies.

Aspirin, which is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, is one of the most widely used medications in the world. It is used to treat pain, fever and inflammation, and an estimated 29 million people in the U.S. take it daily to reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases.

Scientists know that aspirin inhibits the cyclooxygenase enzyme, or COX, which creates messenger molecules that are crucial in the inflammatory response. Researchers led by Subhrangsu Mandal, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Texas at Arlington, have discovered more about this process.

Prarthana Guha, a graduate student in Mandal’s lab, will present the team’s findings at Discover BMB, the annual meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, March 25–28 in Seattle. Avisankar Chini also made significant contributions to the study.

“Aspirin is a magic drug, but long-term use of it can cause detrimental side effects such as internal bleeding and organ damage,” Mandal said. “It’s important that we understand how it works so we can develop safer drugs with fewer side effects.”

The team found that aspirin controls transcription factors required for cytokine expression during inflammation while also influencing many other inflammatory proteins and noncoding RNAs that are critically linked to inflammation and immune response. Mandal said this work has required a unique interdisciplinary team with expertise in inflammation signaling biology and organic chemistry.

They also showed that aspirin slows the breakdown of the amino acid tryptophan into its metabolite kynurenine by inhibiting associated enzymes called indoleamine dioxygenases, or IDOs. Tryptophan metabolism plays a central role in the inflammation and immune response.

“We found that aspirin downregulates IDO1 expression and associated kynurenine production during inflammation,” Mandal said. “Since aspirin is a COX inhibitor, this suggests potential interplay between COX and IDO1 during inflammation.”

IDO1 is an important target for immunotherapy, a type of cancer treatment that helps the body’s immune system seek out and destroy cancer cells. Because COX inhibitors modulate the COX–IDO1 axis during inflammation, the researchers predict that COX inhibitors might also be useful as drugs for immunotherapy.

Mandal and his team are now creating a series of small molecules that modulate COX–IDO1 and will explore their potential use as anti-inflammatory drugs and immunotherapeutic agents.

Prarthana Guha will present this research from 4 to 5:30 p.m. PDT on Tuesday, March 28, in Exhibit Hall 4AB of the Seattle Convention Center (Poster Board No. 185) (abstract). Contact the media team for more information or to obtain a free press pass to attend the meeting.

Image available.

Research in Mandal's lab is funded by National Institute of Health grant R15 HL142032-01.

About the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB)

The ASBMB is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization with more than 12,000 members worldwide. Founded in 1906 to advance the science of biochemistry and molecular biology, the society publishes three peer-reviewed journals, advocates for funding of basic research and education, supports science education at all levels, and promotes the diversity of individuals entering the scientific workforce. www.asbmb.org

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In December, the staff of the American Writers and Artists Institute — a 26-year-old membership organization for copywriters — realized that something big was happening.

The newest edition of ChatGPT, a “large language model” that mines the internet to answer questions and perform tasks on command, had just been released. Its abilities were astonishing — and squarely in the bailiwick of people who generate content, such as advertising copy and blog posts, for a living.

“They’re horrified,” said Rebecca Matter, the institute’s president. Over the holidays, she scrambled to organize a webinar on the pitfalls and potential of the new artificial-intelligence technology. More than 3,000 people signed up, she said, and the overall message was cautionary but reassuring: Writers could use ChatGPT to complete assignments more quickly, and move into higher-level roles in content planning and search-engine optimization.

“I do think it’s going to minimize short-form copy projects,” Ms. Matter said. “But on the flip side of that, I think there will be more opportunities for things like strategy.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the latest advance in a steady march of innovations that have offered the potential to transform many occupations and wipe out others, sometimes in tandem. It is too early to tally the enabled and the endangered, or to gauge the overall impact on labor demand and productivity. But it seems clear that artificial intelligence will impinge on work in different ways than previous waves of technology.

The positive view of tools like ChatGPT is that they could be complements to human labor, rather than replacements. Not all workers are sanguine, however, about the prospective impact.

Katie Brown is a grant writer in the Chicago suburbs for a small nonprofit group focused on addressing domestic violence. She was shocked to learn in early February that a professional association for grant writers was promoting the use of artificial-intelligence software that would automatically complete parts of an application, requiring the human simply to polish it before submitting.

The platform, called Grantable, is based on the same technology as ChatGPT, and it markets itself to freelancers who charge by the application. That, she thought, clearly threatens opportunities in the industry.

“For me, it’s common sense: Which do you think a small nonprofit will pick?” Ms. Brown said. “A full-time-salary-plus-benefits person, or someone equipped with A.I. that you don’t have to pay benefits for?”

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been operating in the background of many businesses for years, helping to evaluate large numbers of possible decisions and better align supply with demand, for example. And plenty of technological advancements over centuries have decreased the need for certain workers — although each time, the jobs created have more than offset the number lost.

Guillermo Rubio has found that his job as a copywriter has changed markedly since he started using ChatGPT to generate ideas for blog posts.Credit...In-camera double exposure by Mark Abramson for The New York Times

ChatGPT, however, is the first to confront such a broad range of white-collar workers so directly, and to be so accessible that people could use it in their own jobs. And it is improving rapidly, with a new edition released this month. According to a survey conducted by the job search website ZipRecruiter after ChatGPT’s release, 62 percent of job seekers said they were concerned that artificial intelligence could derail their careers.

“ChatGPT is the one that made it more visible,” said Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute who studies automation’s effects. “So I think it did start to raise questions about where timelines might start to be accelerated.”

That’s also the conclusion of a White House report on the implications of A.I. technology, including ChatGPT. “The primary risk of A.I. to the work force is in the general disruption it is likely to cause to workers, whether they find that their jobs are newly automated or that their job design has fundamentally changed,” the authors wrote.

For now, Guillermo Rubio has found that his job as a copywriter has changed markedly since he started using ChatGPT to generate ideas for blog posts, write first drafts of newsletters, create hundreds of slight variations on stock advertising copy and summon research on a subject about which he might write a white paper.

Since he still charges his clients the same rates, the tool has simply allowed him to work less. If the going rate for copy goes down, though — which it might, as the technology improves — he’s confident he’ll be able to move into consulting on content strategy, along with production.

“I think people are more reluctant and fearful, with good reason,” Mr. Rubio, who is in Orange County, Calif., said. “You could look at it in a negative light, or you can embrace it. I think the biggest takeaway is you have to be adaptable. You have to be open to embracing it.”

After decades of study, researchers understand a lot about automation’s impact on the work force. Economists including Daron Acemoglu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that since 1980, technology has played a primary role in amplifying income inequality. As labor unions atrophied, hollowing out systems for training and retraining, workers without college educations saw their bargaining power reduced in the face of machines capable of rudimentary tasks.

The advent of ChatGPT three months ago, however, has prompted a flurry of studies predicated on the idea that this isn’t your average robot.

One team of researchers ran an analysis showing the industries and occupations that are most exposed to artificial intelligence, based on a model adjusted for generative language tools. Topping the list were college humanities professors, legal services providers, insurance agents and telemarketers. Mere exposure, however, doesn’t determine whether the technology is likely to replace workers or merely augment their skills.

Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang, doctoral students at M.I.T., conducted a randomized, controlled trial on experienced professionals in such fields as human relations and marketing. The participants were given tasks that typically take 20 to 30 minutes, like writing news releases and brief reports. Those who used ChatGPT completed the assignments 37 percent faster on average than those who didn’t — a substantial productivity increase. They also reported a 20 percent increase in job satisfaction.

A third study — using a program developed by GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft — evaluated the impact of generative A.I. specifically on software developers. In a trial run by GitHub’s researchers, developers given an entry-level task and encouraged to use the program, called Copilot, completed their task 55 percent faster than those who did the assignment manually.

Those productivity gains are unlike almost any observed since the widespread adoption of the personal computer.

“It does seem to be doing something fundamentally different,” said David Autor, another M.I.T. economist, who advises Ms. Zhang and Mr. Noy. “Before, computers were powerful, but they simply and robotically did what people programmed them to do.” Generative artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is “adaptive, it learns and is capable of flexible problem solving.”

That’s very apparent to Peter Dolkens, a software developer for a company that primarily makes online tools for the sports industry. He has been integrating ChatGPT into his work for tasks like summarizing chunks of code to aid colleagues who may pick up the project after him, and proposing solutions to problems that have him stumped. If the answer isn’t perfect, he’ll ask ChatGPT to refine it, or try something different.

“It’s the equivalent of a very well-read intern,” Mr. Dolkens, who is in London, said. “They might not have the experience to know how to apply it, but they know all the words, they’ve read all the books and they’re able to get part of the way there.”

There’s another takeaway from the initial research: ChatGPT and Copilot elevated the least experienced workers the most. If true, more generally, that could mitigate the inequality-widening effects of artificial intelligence.

On the other hand, as each worker becomes more productive, fewer workers are required to complete a set of tasks. Whether that results in fewer jobs in particular industries depends on the demand for the service provided, and the jobs that might be created in helping to manage and direct the A.I. “Prompt engineering,” for example, is already a skill that those who play around with ChatGPT long enough can add to their résumés.

Since demand for software code seems insatiable, and developers’ salaries are extremely high, increasing productivity seems unlikely to foreclose opportunities for people to enter the field.

That won’t be the same for every profession, however, and Dominic Russo is pretty sure it won’t be true for his: writing appeals to pharmacy benefit managers and insurance companies when they reject prescriptions for expensive drugs. He has been doing the job for about seven years, and has built expertise with only on-the-job training, after studying journalism in college.

After ChatGPT came out, he asked it to write an appeal on behalf of someone with psoriasis who wanted the expensive drug Otezla. The result was good enough to require only a few edits before submitting it.

“If you knew what to prompt the A.I. with, anyone could do the work,” Mr. Russo said. “That’s what’s really scares me. Why would a pharmacy pay me $70,000 a year, when they can license the technology and pay people $12 an hour to run prompts into it?”

To try to protect himself from that possible future, Mr. Russo has been building up his side business: selling pizzas out of his house in southern New Jersey, an enterprise that he figures won’t be disrupted by artificial intelligence.

Yet.

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Imagine getting the benefits of gastric bypass surgery without going under the knife — a new class of compounds could do just that. In lab animals, these potential treatments reduce weight dramatically and lower blood glucose. The injectable compounds also avoid the side effects of nausea and vomiting that are common with current weight-loss and diabetes drugs. Now, scientists report that the new treatment not only reduces eating but also boosts calorie burn.

The researchers will present their results today (March 29) at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person March 26–30, and features more than 10,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics.

“Obesity and diabetes were the pandemic before the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Robert Doyle, Ph.D., one of the two principal investigators on the project, along with Christian Roth, M.D. “They are a massive problem, and they are projected to only get worse.”

Gastric bypass and related procedures, known collectively as bariatric surgery, offer one solution, often resulting in lasting weight loss and even remission of diabetes. But these operations carry risk, aren’t suitable for everyone and aren’t accessible for many of the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are obese or diabetic. As an alternative, Doyle says, they could tackle their metabolic problems with a drug that replicates the long-term benefits of surgery.

Those benefits are linked to a post-bypass-surgery change in the gut’s secretion levels of certain hormones — including glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) and peptide YY (PYY) — that signal fullness, curb appetite and normalize blood sugar. Current drugs that aim to replicate this effect primarily activate cellular receptors for GLP-1 in the pancreas and brain. That approach has shown great success in reducing weight and treating type 2 diabetes, drawing a lot of social media postings from celebrities in recent months. But many people can’t tolerate the drugs’ side effects, says Doyle. “Within a year, 80 to 90% of people who start on these drugs are no longer taking them.” Doyle is at Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical University, and Roth is at Seattle Children’s Research Institute.

To address that drawback, various researchers have designed other treatments that interact with more than one type of gut hormone receptor. For example, Doyle’s group created a peptide that activates two receptors for PYY, as well as the receptor for GLP-1. Dubbed GEP44, this compound caused obese rats to eat up to 80% less than they would typically eat. By the end of one 16-day study, they lost an average of 12% of their weight. That was more than three times the amount lost by rats treated with liraglutide, an injected drug that activates only the GLP-1 receptor and that is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating obesity. In contrast to liraglutide, tests with GEP44 in rats and shrews (a mammal that, unlike rats, is capable of vomiting) revealed no sign of nausea or vomiting, possibly because activating multiple receptors may cancel out the intracellular signaling pathway that drives those symptoms, Doyle says.

In its latest results, his team is now reporting that the weight loss caused by GEP44 can be traced not only to decreased eating, but also to higher energy expenditure, which can take the form of increased movement, heart rate or body temperature.

GEP44 has a half-life in the body of only about an hour, but Doyle’s group has just designed a peptide with a much longer half-life. That means it could be injected only once or twice a week instead of multiple times a day. The researchers are now reporting that rats treated with this next-generation compound keep their new, slimmer physique even after treatment ends, which often isn’t the case with currently approved drugs, Doyle says.

But weight loss isn’t the only benefit of the peptide treatments. They also reduce blood sugar by pulling glucose into muscle tissue, where it can be used as fuel, and by converting certain cells in the pancreas into insulin-producing cells, helping replace those that are damaged by diabetes. And there’s yet another benefit: Doyle and Heath Schmidt, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, recently reported that GEP44 reduces the craving for opioids such as fentanyl in rats. If that also works in humans, Doyle says, it could help addicts quit the illicit drugs or fend off a relapse.

The researchers have filed for patents on their compounds, and they plan to test their peptides in primates. They will also study how the treatments change gene expression and rewire the brain, and what that could mean for these compounds, as well as other types of medication.

“For a long time, we didn’t think you could separate weight reduction from nausea and vomiting, because they’re linked to the exact same part of the brain,” Doyle says. But the researchers have now uncoupled those two pathways — and that has implications for chemotherapy, which causes similar side effects. “What if we could maintain the benefit of chemotherapy drugs but tell the part of the brain that causes vomiting and nausea to knock it off? Then we could dose patients at a higher level, so they would have a better prognosis, and they would also have a better quality of life while undergoing chemotherapy,” he says.

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The historic extremity of the event serves as a warning for other regions.

During the summer of 2021, an unprecendented heatwave swept across western North America, affecting regions from British Columbia to Washington, Oregon, and beyond into other interior areas that typically experience a mild climate. Temperatures shattered records in many locations, resulting in widespread wildfires and the tragic loss of at least 1,400 lives. While scientists have attributed this event primarily to human-caused climate change, labeling it as unprecedented, it is difficult to determine with certainty if it truly had no prior occurrence due to limited weather data that only dates back to the last century.

According to a recent study, based on the analysis of tree rings from the region, the 2021 heatwave was almost certainly the most severe in the past thousand years. The findings, which were published in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science, established a yearly record of summer average temperatures starting from 950 AD. The research revealed numerous summers with abnormal high temperatures, many of which occurred in multi-year warm spells. However, the study highlights that the last 40 years, due to human-induced global warming, have been the hottest, with the summer of 2021 being the warmest of all.

“It’s not that the Pacific Northwest has never before experienced waves of high temperature. But with climate change, their magnitude is much hotter, and they have a much greater impact on the community,” said lead author Karen Heeter, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Being able to look at the past and compare that with climate models, and come to similar conclusions, there’s a lot of power in that.”

Summer seasonal temperature anomalies revealed by tree rings and modern weather data, 1950-2021. Credit: Modified from Heeter et al., Climate and Atmospheric Science, 2023

 

The tree-ring reconstruction and modern temperature readings show that 1979-2021 saw a sustained period of hot summers unrivaled for the last 1,000-plus years. Most of the hottest years have occurred since 2000. The second-warmest period, indicated by the tree rings, was 1028-1096—at the height of the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly, when a natural warming trend is thought to have taken hold across large parts of the planet. Another notable hot span during the Medieval Climate Anomaly ran from 1319 to 1307. But even these periods were considerably cooler than temperatures in recent decades.

The 2021 heat wave spanned a several weeks from late June to mid-July. While the researchers did not try to pick out such short periods in the rings, they say average seasonal temperatures are a good proxy for such events. Summer 2021 held the annual record, at 18.9 degrees Centigrade, or about 66 degrees Fahrenheit. By contrast, the hottest summer in prehistoric times was in 1080, at 16.9 degrees C, or 62.4 F.

This perhaps does not sound very impressive—until you consider that due in part to the near-complete human destruction of ancient trees in the lowlands, the researchers used mainly samples collected at mountain elevations above 10,000 feet. Here, temperatures are drastically lower than in the populous lowlands; there is often still snow cover in June. “You have to think about it in the broader context,” said Heeter; one can reasonably add a few tens of degrees for places like Seattle and Portland, she noted. According to the tree rings, the 2021 seasonal temperature spike was nearly 3 degrees F greater than any annual spike shown by tree rings during the Medieval period.

The summer 2021 western North America heat wave. Redder colors represent higher temperature anomalies; white X’s indicate sites where researchers took tree-ring samples to put it into a long-term context. Credit: Modified from Heeter et al., Climate and Atmospheric Science, 2023

 

Heeter and her husband and a few colleagues collected about half of the samples for the study during the summers of 2020 and 2021, from high-elevation sites in national forests and parks. She got a personal taste of the 2021 heat wave as she sweltered in 105-degree indoor temperatures in her un-air-conditioned apartment in Moscow, Idaho. She feared going into the field until later in the season, since many target forests or ones near them were on fire, and in some cases, she was blocked from entering by evacuation orders.

To obtain data, the team bored out straw-size samples that provided cross sections of rings from about 600 old conifers in northern Idaho and the Cascade ranges of Oregon and Washington. (The coring process does not hurt the trees.) Their oldest sample came from a mountain hemlock near Oregon’s Crater Lake, which took root in the 1300s. They supplemented these with samples taken in the 1990s by other Lamont-Doherty researchers, mostly in British Columbia. The oldest of these was from a Douglas fir on Vancouver Island, dating to the year 950. The area has since been clear-cut by loggers.

Most conventional tree-ring studies focus on ring widths, with wider annual rings generally indicating wetter years. To measure temperature, Heeter and her colleagues instead used a relatively new technique called blue intensity. This involves shining visible light onto a high-resolution scan of each ring, and measuring how much of the blue spectrum is reflected back. Trees generally build thicker cell walls in hotter temperatures, increasing the density of the ring. Denser rings reflect less blue light, and this can be translated into temperature.

Center, a Douglas fir in the Tahoma Creek vicinity of Washington’s Mt. Rainier National Park, from which the authors took a core sample. Credit: Grant Harley/University of Idaho

 

Another recent Lamont-Doherty study attributed the extremity of the 2021 heat wave to progressively heightening temperatures caused by humans, combined with shorter-term atmospheric patterns that may or may not have been driven by human-driven climate change. That study suggested that by 2050, such heat waves may hit every 10 years. The new one, which used different models to make forecasts, estimates a 50/50 chance of recurrence each year by 2050.

With a climate that is usually quite moderate, the region is poorly prepared to cope with such events. For one thing, like Heeter, few people have air conditioning—possibly one reason for the high mortality rate in 2021. “We can use the long-term record to prepare ourselves,” said Heeter. “For instance, maybe it’s not realistic to put air conditioning everywhere, but communities could create refuges where people could go when these things happen again.”

“The unprecedented nature of summer 2021 temperatures across [the study area] suggests that no region is impervious to the economic and biological impacts of increasing summer temperatures,” the authors write. This suggests, they say, that “communities across the world that have not been historically exposed to extreme heat are likely to experience [greater] morbidity and mortality.”

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An Aussie bloke armed only with a budget metal detector has come across a gigantic gold-filled rock worth a cool AU$240,000 (US$160,000). It was recently discovered in the Australian state of Victoria in an area known as the "Golden Triangle" – between Ballarat, Bendigo, and St Arnaud – by an amateur gold hunter. 

He took it to the prospecting shop Lucky Strike Gold who reportedly estimated the gold-loaded rock weighs just over 4.6 kilograms (10.1 pounds), with the precious metal making up 2.6 kilograms (5.7 pounds).

"He said, 'do you think there's $10,000 worth?' And as soon as it hit my hand I said, 'try $100,000'," Darren Kamp from Lucky Strike Gold told 9News.

"And he said, 'oh wow, the wife's going to be happy with that'."

It turned out this was just part of the discovery and the digger had left the other half of the rock at home. Unfortunately, he accidentally split it into two halves when unearthing it as it was caked in dirt and he could not tell it was brimming with gold.

Nevertheless, the discovery was still incredibly valuable. 

Another look at the Lucky Strike nug. Image courtesy of Lucky Strike Gold,

The anonymous gold hunter sold it to the company, which named it the “Lucky Strike nugget.”

A find like this would always be good news, but it’s an especially good time to make the discovery since gold prices are currently reaching an all-time high. 

Victoria was the site of a huge gold rush in the 19th century and recent years have seen yet another boom of gold discovery in the area. The Geological Survey of Victoria estimates there could be up to 2.1 million kilograms (75 million ounces) of undiscovered gold across the central and north-central Victorian goldfields.

This prosperous patch of Australia also gave the world the biggest gold nugget ever unearthed. It was found in Victoria on February 5, 1869, by two Cornish miners called John Deason and Richard Oats. The nugget was dubbed the "Welcome Stranger", weighed 72 kilograms (158.7 pounds), and was 61 centimeters (24 inches) long. If this was discovered today, it could be worth over US$2 million.

If you’re living in this part of the world, it’s probably a good time to invest in a metal detector. The one used to make this discovery cost around US$800, but it’s safe to say it has proved its worth. There are, however, some rules you should consider when hunting for gold.

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Healthy adults don’t need annual COVID boosters, WHO advisors say

This month saw the announcement of one of the most exciting findings about Venus in decades: the first direct evidence of an active volcano there. But rather than jubilation, the mood in the planetary science community is grim, as funding has been gutted for a key Venus mission that was poised to answer some of the biggest questions about the planet and its volcanic activity.  

 

Venus is a hellish, inhospitable place with scorching surface temperatures and atmospheric pressure 100 times greater than Earth. Its surface is covered in volcanoes, and scientists have long suspected that these could still be active, but they have lacked firm proof of this until recently. Researchers combed through 30-year-old data from the Magellan mission and identified a volcanic vent that changed shape over the course of eight months with what appears to be lava inside and a possible lava flow running downhill. 

 

The short timeframe between the two images in the study, published in Science, suggests that volcanoes are likely erupting with some frequency. “When someone says that a planet is volcanically active that still could mean that the time between eruptions could be months, or years, or ten thousand years,” one of the paper’s authors, Robert Herrick, explained to The Verge. “This new discovery means that Venus is probably more or less Earth-like in terms of how often big shield volcanoes on Earth erupt.”

 

This finding is “mind-blowing,” Venus scientist Darby Dyar told The Verge, opening up possibilities to learn about Venus’ geology and atmosphere as well as whether the planet was once habitable.

 

But in the space science community, the excitement about this finding is being overshadowed by the “soft cancellation” of a key NASA Venus mission, which Dyar is also deputy principal investigator for and which had been set to launch in 2028.

 

The VERITAS mission would map Venus with radar and infrared spectroscopy.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission was one of three missions set to explore Venus in the next few years, kicking off NASA’s “decade of Venus” and seeing a return to the study of our planetary neighbor, which scientists have been calling for for years.

 

But at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held recently in Houston, Texas, VERITAS principal investigator Sue Smrekar announced that the mission’s funding had been completely gutted, leaving the mission in a state of precarious limbo.

 

This came as a surprise to many of the conference attendees, who were soon tweeting their support for the mission using the hashtag #SaveVERITAS. The Planetary Society also put out a statement describing the delay of the mission’s launch by at least three years as “uncalled-for” and calling on NASA to commit to launching by 2029.

 

NASA has cited problems with another mission, Psyche, as the reason for delaying VERITAS by at least three years. Both Psyche and VERITAS are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the NASA / Caltech research center that is responsible for building robotic spacecraft such as the Mars rovers. JPL had problems meeting its requirements for the Psyche mission, which aims to visit a metal asteroid, and missed its launch date last year. An independent review into the missed launch found it was due to, among other problems, workforce issues at JPL. 

 

“The Psyche Independent Review Board report cites a lack of staffing resources at JPL to support its current portfolio of missions across the laboratory,” NASA spokesperson Karen Fox said in a statement sent to The Verge. “As a planetary mission still in its early formulation phase, NASA decided to delay VERITAS for a launch no earlier than 2031.”

 

The argument given when the report results were announced was that, by delaying VERITAS, JPL staff would be freed up to work on other missions. However, Smrekar questioned this rationale at a NASA town hall during the conference, saying that while a shorter delay may have been justifiable, the longer delay “has nothing to do with JPL workforce, or the Psyche overruns” and that the mission was being “effectively martyred” for the sake of other missions going over budget.

 

“It’s not a simple delay,” Smrekar went on, clarifying that the money to pay for the engineering team had been completely wiped out. As a result, an experienced team that had been working together for over 10 years in some cases will now be disbanded. Before the delay, the mission had been on schedule and on budget. 

 

 

This artist’s conception illustrates a region of Venus that may have active volcanism and subduction, where the surface is sinking into the mantle.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Peter Rubin

 

Other team members concurred that while staffing may be a concern at JPL, their impression was that the delay was more to do with NASA budget issues than with efficiently redistributing staff. Some outside observers have speculated that NASA may have overcommitted by selecting two Venus missions in 2021 and realized too late that its budget wouldn’t stretch to cover both. 

 

Cuts to budgets happen often enough, and scientists in the space field are accustomed to the disappointment of working on a mission proposal for years only to have it be passed over or canceled. But this situation is different because VERITAS had already been selected by NASA to be part of its Discovery Program. It was chosen to send an orbiting spacecraft to Venus, which will make multiple passes over the planet and use its spectrometry and radar instruments to build up detailed maps of the planet’s surface. 

 

Historically, once a mission has been selected by NASA, those working on it can be confident that funding will be available. If a delay happens — as is not uncommon in large, complex missions — then a lower level of funding is typically made available to keep the basic essentials in place, called bridge funding, until full funding can be restored. This bridge funding keeps key personnel on the project so that they are ready to ramp back up once more funding is available. 

 

In the case of VERITAS, after the announcement of the launch delay last year, the team asked NASA for bridge funding of around $20 million per year (about one-tenth of the original funding for 2024) so they could at least maintain mission essentials. Instead, virtually all of their funding has been cut, leaving them with a tiny $1.5 million per year. 

 

This is a highly unusual situation for a selected mission because delaying and restarting missions is so expensive. NASA’s spokesperson said the agency expects to restart funding for the mission if the budget allows and if JPL passes an assessment in 2024.

 

Venus scientist Darby Dyar said the discovery of volcanic activity on the planet was “mind-blowing.”

Image: Mount Holyoke

 

But delaying the launch will cost more money in the long run. “The longer you delay VERITAS, the more it ends up costing in the end, and the harder it gets to have success,” Herrick, who is also a member of the VERITAS science team, explained. “This is counter-productive to NASA.”

 

That’s due to the difficulty of reassembling a team after a delay, as people who have been working on the mission for years have been transferred to other projects or are approaching retirement and may not be available later down the road. A new team will need more time and money to make up for that loss of experience. 

 

Delays also cost money because specialist components used in the spacecraft design may no longer be available, necessitating a major redesign, which is a huge expense, notwithstanding inflation. 

 

This sudden cutting of funding to an already selected mission is sending ripples through the wider scientific community. There is outrage in the planetary science community and “a strong feeling that this is unfair,” according to David Mimoun, a planetary scientist who has worked on NASA missions like the Mars InSight lander but is not involved with VERITAS. 

 

The community is struggling to understand the rationale for cutting funding to an on-track mission. Other selected mission leaders will now have to contemplate the possibility that their funding could be gutted at any time, even if they are running on schedule and on budget. “It sets a precedent,” Mimoun said. 

 

NASA has acknowledged the fervor over the gutting of the mission but has maintained that the cuts were necessary.

 

“The decision to delay VERITAS was gut-wrenching,” Lori Glaze, planetary science division director, said at another NASA town hall meeting last week about the agency’s 2024 budget. Glaze acknowledged the community’s concerns but cited factors affecting the planetary science division’s budget, like increased costs due to inflation, the effects of covid, and $80 million less in appropriations than the planned budget for 2022, leaving the division with little in the way of reserve funds.

 

Glaze went on to say that the selection of the next set of Discovery missions will likely be delayed to try to get VERITAS back on track. “The support for VERITAS is very, very clear,” she said.

 

A big part of the concern over the lack of bridge funding is the impact on international partnerships. The VERITAS mission will have contributions from the German, Italian, and French space agencies, who will be spending millions of dollars to bring components or whole instruments to the mission. 

 

Dyar, the VERITAS deputy PI, said that agencies have already ordered expensive hardware, hired postdocs, and begun work on their contributions. Now, they are stuck with instruments they will struggle to complete because the VERITAS engineering team won’t be there to give them the support they need.

 

“It’s quite the imposition on the foreign partners,” Dyar said. There’s also a worry that by pulling support for the mission so suddenly, NASA runs the risk of ruining partnerships with experienced international engineers and scientists who are needed for future missions. Issues with the VERITAS mission could also affect other upcoming Venus missions, like the European Space Agency’s EnVision mission, which shares some hardware with VERITAS.

 

The discovery of active volcanism on Venus only increases the impetus to send a mission there, and VERITAS is the one mission of the three planned that is best situated to find out more about volcanism. VERITAS will create global maps of the planet with a much greater resolution than current maps from the 30-year-old Magellan mission, and it will be able to search for hotspots from erupting volcanoes and observe glowing lakes of lava on the planet’s surface. 

 

The three Venus missions were planned out in a specific order for that reason. “At other bodies, like Mars, we sent Mars Odyssey first. And the reason we did that is we needed a good topographic map and a good geologic map. So that’s the logical sequence,” Dyar said.

 

The other two upcoming Venus missions, DAVINCI and EnVision, will offer exciting glimpses into the planet’s geology and atmosphere, but they are more targeted at specific phenomena. DAVINCI will drop a probe through the different layers of the Venusian atmosphere, taking pictures and collecting data during its descent. And EnVision will survey around a quarter of the planet’s surface while also looking deep into its core and high in the atmosphere.

 

The ideal situation from a science perspective would be to space out VERITAS and EnVision by as much time as possible. That’s because both will collect topography data, albeit in slightly different ways, so having the two missions separated will make changes to the planet over time visible. Now, the two missions may end up flying around the same time, limiting their potential for scientific discovery.

 

The missions have a broader application to planetary science as well, as studying Venus will help us better understand exoplanets. By studying features of Venus like its volcanism or its atmosphere, we can build a clearer picture of many of the exoplanets out there that we don’t have the opportunity to explore up close.

 

With exoplanet discovery and characterization being a key aim for flagship NASA missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scientists argue that now is the time to be ramping up Venus exploration, not gutting the funding of a key mission.

 

“Venus, of all the objects in our solar system, is to me the one which has the most compelling urgency,” Dyar said. “It’s not just about Venus and our solar system. It’s about the universe.”

 

 

Scientists erupt at NASA gutting funding for crucial Venus mission