FOLLOWING YEARS OF concern, the US Environmental Protection Agency moved this week to clean up drinking water, announcing the nation’s first standards for six “forever chemicals” found in tap water. It’s a foreboding and informal name for human-made chemicals that coat nonstick pans, food packaging, and waterproof clothes before ending up in the water you drink. These chemicals, known as PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are pervasive and found in pretty much everyone—even newborn babies.

If the EPA rule is finalized, public water companies will need to monitor for the chemicals and keep two widely studied ones, PFOA and PFOS, below levels of 4 parts per trillion—around the lowest threshold measurable. The rule will also regulate combined amounts of four other types of PFAS chemicals. 

Experts say the proposal is monumental. It marks not just the first US national standard for regulating levels of these chemicals, but would also allow for widespread data collection to see which communities are most affected by contamination. Implementing these much needed fixes could take years and will be costly. Still, experts see this as a significant first step in pushing back against the PFAS problem, and one that could vastly improve water quality across the nation. 

“These are very strong, health protective, and a historic move to really limit exposure to contamination from these chemicals,” says David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit focused on health and environmental advocacy. “There are lots of opportunities to build off of this.” 

The PFAS regulation is not yet a reality; it's a proposed measure that could be finalized this year after a public comment period. If it is formally adopted, it will result in new expenses for many public water systems, requiring not only testing but filtering water when contaminants are detected. The utilities would have three years to comply with the rule, so some communities might not see results until 2026. 

The dangers of PFAS chemicals have become increasingly clear. High levels of exposure can cause fertility issues, developmental delays in children, and reduced immune responses, according to the EPA. They can also elevate the risk of several cancers, including prostate, kidney, and testicular cancer. 

The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report in 2022 saying health care providers should counsel and test patients who are more likely to have elevated PFAS exposure based on where they live or work. And EPA officials estimate that cleaning up the water will prevent thousands of deaths—and tens of thousands of cases of serious illness—in the US. 

Regulating the two commonly studied chemicals, as well as four additional ones, is “a really important first step,” says Katie Pelch, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. But there is more to learn about this vast group of chemicals and their prevalence. “This is still just a proposal to regulate six PFAS out of a class of thousands of chemicals,” she continues. The processes to remove PFAS could also tackle other chemicals found in drinking water, such as those from pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and consumer products.

Still, EPA-mandated testing would provide a valuable close-up look at how prevalent these chemicals are. In the US, PFAS contaminants have been detected in more than 2,800 locations in all 50 states and two territories, according to data from the Environmental Working Group. A 2020 study found that as many as 200 million Americans may be exposed to PFAS in drinking water. 

But there are areas that have not done testing, obfuscating the full extent of the problem, says Laurel Schaider, a senior scientist at the Silent Spring Institute, a nonprofit that researches links between chemicals and women’s health. “That alone is going to be a game changer,” Schaider says.

PFAS are more prevalent in communities near manufacturing plants, airports, and wastewater treatment centers—all of which tend to be lower-income areas. If mandated testing begins, it could uncover vast disparities in PFAS concentrations. 

The EPA proposal is far more aggressive than a patchwork of existing regulations in US states like Massachusetts and Michigan, and experts say it may be the strongest to date around the world. It comes on the heels of action by the European Union, which updated its Drinking Water Directive in 2021 and set a combined PFAS limit of 500 nanograms per liter (equivalent to 500 parts per trillion) for drinking water. Canada recently proposed a new standard that would set the combined limit at 30 nanograms per liter (30 parts per trillion).

The World Health Organization has also released a new recommendation for limits of 100 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water. The EPA’s proposed caps for those chemicals are much stricter, at just 4 parts per trillion. More than 100 scientists signed a letter criticizing the health agency for what they saw as a recommendation that ignored research and set limits too high. The discrepancy between WHO and EPA standards could lead some countries to set limits far above what scientists consider safe. 

Other water quality issues have persisted despite existing regulation. In the US, the Safe Drinking Water Act, passed in 1974 and since amended, regulates more than 90 contaminants found in tap water. But a 2017 report by the NRDC found that 80,000 violations of the act had been reported in 2015, affecting an estimated 77 million people and spanning 18,000 water systems. 

Regulators should also “think upstream,” when it comes to protecting people against forever chemicals, says Schaider. That means stopping their production and reducing their presence in the water system—not just filtering them out. The European Union is evaluating a proposal to ban the production and use of 10,000 PFAS chemicals. That’s the kind of action the US needs to take next, experts say. “Setting a drinking water standard is at the last step,” says Schaider, “after the contamination has happened.” 

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Imagine you’re on England’s eastern coast sometime in the ninth century CE and you see hordes of men and women charging your village, axes and shields in hand, and they all look a bit mean. However, while our imaginations have been saturated with such images through popular shows like the History Channel’s Vikings or video games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, there is one thing missing: the Viking adorned in a horned helmet.

Vikings never wore horned helmets so where did the idea come from?

For years, this titular image of a Viking clad in furs and leather armor wearing a large helmet with bull horns protruding from its top was the representation of these early medieval warriors. The helmet has appeared on everything from toys and mascots to fancy dress costumes and cartoon depictions – but the truth is that this classic symbol is utterly incorrect. 

There is no historical evidence that Vikings wore such helmets, and similar specimens have never been found in any archaeological site.

The image of the horned helmet was first made popular through 19th-century costume designers, especially Carl Emil Doepler who included horned helmets in his costume designs for the 1897 performance of Wagner’s classic saga Der Ring des Nibelungen.

The opera consists of four German-language epic dramas that were loosely based on Germanic heroic legends drawn from Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs) – a Middle High German epic poem that was written around the year 1200 CE. Wagner’s narrative mixed motifs from Norse and German traditions so as to make them indistinguishable – or, more accurately, to tie German heritage to the legendary Norse heroes.   

German nationalism was on the rise at this time, and many intellectuals were looking for ways to bolster ideas about the superiority of German culture. Norse legends were perfect as they represented an ancient origin that was free from that of the Greeks and Romans. The inspiration for horned helmets actually has roots in old Germanic tribes from the medieval period who did indeed produce such ungainly items, but their transmission onto popular images of Vikings was an artificial and historically specific decision. Within no time, this became the representation of these warriors and became part of a wider enthusiasm for all things Viking within late-19th century Europe more generally.   

This was the birth of the “Viking age”, as the historian Roberta Frank described it, a mythical invention that accompanied a historical reality. “Until the viking age was invented, there was no horned-helmeted viking, and vice versa: the two go together like Easter and bonnet”, Frank wrote. The “Viking age” was not mentioned as a historical thing until the 1870s and was, she argues, tied to the late-century fascination for all things related to warfare, expansion, empire-building, and naval prowess.

This is not to say Vikings did not exist. There certainly were people from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark who, from the eighth to the 11th century, explored mainland Europe, Britain, Iceland, Greenland, and even America. They also famously raided and pillaged as they went, before eventually settling in various locations and becoming active traders. However, many stereotypes and misconceptions (such as the horned helmet) were born with the imagined “Viking age”, and some of those myths have endured ever since.

Viking is a verb, not a noun 

Today we are unlikely to use the word “Viking” as a verb (“I’ll be back later mum, I’m going a-viking”), but that’s how the word was first used in Old Norse – to denote an activity, though it is not clear exactly what this activity involved. It is actually the word “vikingr” that was first used to represent someone on an expedition, usually abroad and usually by sea, and in a group (vikingar for the plural). By the 12th century, “vikingar” was being used in Icelandic sagas to describe aggressive, piratical hunters who terrorized the Scandinavian, Baltic, and British waters. These Icelandic Sagas heavily contributed to our perceptions of what a “Viking” was in our modern world.

To contemporaries, mostly Christians in northern and southern Europe, these people were referred to as Norse Men, the North Men, or just “pagans”. Another misleading feature of this history includes the idea that Vikings were a single Scandinavian people, but they really weren’t. In reality, each region had its own leaders and distinct identity. There were indeed times when a ruler may have been able to combine their forces with another to enhance their strength, but to describe them as a homogenous “Viking” people would be inaccurate. 

There is plenty of archaeological evidence to show that Viking warbands were not ethnically exclusive. The mobility of these people led to many fusions of cultures within their groups and their ranks, especially as their trade networks spread from North America to Afghanistan. This is partially why they were so successful – they could adapt and adopt various cultures and people, from Christians on the British Isles to Muslims in Abbasid Caliphate. According to the analysis of the genomes of 442 ancient humans from archaeological sites in modern Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland and elsewhere, Vikings were genetically diverse people and therefore had no concept of ethnic purity. 

Were Vikings illiterate?

It is often believed that Vikings were illiterate and ignorant people, but this is not accurate. They had their own alphabet called futhark (named after the first six letters of the alphabet – f-u-th-a-r-k), which was made up of runes. This written system wasn’t unique to the Vikings either, it was used by others such as the Germanic peoples of northern Europe, Britain, and Iceland. Nor was there a single system, as the use of runes changed over time – the Elder Futhark, with 24 characters, was mostly used from 100 to 800 CE; Younger Futhark, with 16 characters, was used from 800 to around 1200 CE; and the Anglo-Saxon Futhark, with 33 characters were used mostly in England from the fifth century. 

It is currently believed that the runic system emerged among early Germanic peoples who recognized the power and status that came with being able to write in some meaningful and legible way. It is likely they were warbands who came into contact with people living in Italy, which has led scholars to debate whether runes were derived from Old Italic alphabet or from an Etruscan script.

While often associated with magic and mystical beliefs, it is likely these early markings were first used for mundane things such as recording payments and stocks, and keeping track of orders. Although runes would certainly appear on all sorts of devotional and religious objects over time and were used for charms and spells, they also recorded short messages, marked memorials, and even told jokes.

It is interesting to note that many of the runes have shapes that would have made them easier to cut into wood, which suggests they were designed for this purpose. It would also explain why so few examples have survived to this day.

But while Vikings did not produce extensive and lasting written records, that does not mean they were a simple people. They were actually prolific storytellers and produced many sagas and poems. These narratives were passed from person-to-person and from generation to generation through oral transmission. Although it may seem unlikely, this mode of transmission appears to have been more accurate than you might think.

Were Vikings godless savages?

Unfortunately, little is known about the beliefs and rituals practiced by the various people who we now identify as Vikings. But one thing is certainly true: they were far from being “godless pagans” as many contemporary Christians described them. To understand their intricate beliefs, however, we have to do more creative detective work, as there is very little written material to go on – and, what we do have, was mostly written centuries later by Christian commentators. 

As the Vikings were not a homogenous group of people, it makes sense that their practices and beliefs would vary from region to region. So what was believed in Norway would not necessarily be the same as in Demark. Each community had its own ways to honor the gods and practice devotion.

Chieftains and rulers were responsible for religious rites and ceremonies. There is evidence of other religious authorities, such as the völur (seeresses who had magical prophetic abilities) that provide spiritual guidance in Nordic societies. Sacrifice (blót) was an important feature of Viking ritual, and though human sacrifice did take place, it was not as common as Christian writers made it seem. In most cases, the sacrificial ritual was conducted by a priest, and it would involve the offering of either grains or livestock.

These sacrifices were performed to promote fertility and regeneration for society.

Although we do not have any written texts describing Viking beliefs, there are several themes that stand out from the established narratives. Overall, the Vikings believed in a vibrant cosmology filled with gods, giants, elves, dwarves, and various spirits. The world was divided between life on Earth – Midgard – and various other realms which were all connected by the roots of the sacred tree Ysgadrill. The gods, known as the Aesir, lived in the realm of Asgard, and warriors who died good deaths would go to Valhalla.

Were Vikings as violent as we think?

With the recent rise of Vikings in pop culture, the idea that they were all hyper-aggressive masculine warriors has become troubling. Not only is it historically inaccurate, but it is also now a hallmark of multiple ethno-nationalist and white supremacist movements who believe Vikings would have shared their views on race, culture, and gender. The myth of Viking racial purity is as old as the 19th century “Viking age” and was an idea nurtured by Nazi ideology in the 1930s. However, it has been debunked many times and, given their wide-ranging activities across the medieval world, it would have been impractical for Vikings to be hostile to all the various people they mixed with. 

Equally, the common emphasis on Vikings as “plunderers”, “raiders”, and “marauders” has fostered the idea that they were always violent and, more often than not, men. This too is inaccurate. Not only were women sometimes among the war parties, but decades of research has shown that Vikings more generally engaged in numerous forms of activities other than raiding. They were merchants, explorers, diplomats, farmers, settlers, and so on. 

Moreover, many stories concerning their apparent barbarism come from Christian sources who criticized them for their early attacks on Christian settlements, especially monasteries. This activity isn’t likely to endear them to those producing written records.

However, Viking violence should be understood within the wider context of the medieval period where other peoples performed equally (and sometimes more) horrendous acts. A key example here would be Charlemagne’s famous Massacre of Verden in 782 CE, where Christian forces murdered more than 4,500 Saxons. You could argue the only reason we do not regard Charlemagne in the same violent terms as we do Vikings is because he had a Christian biographer.

So while the historical reality concerning Vikings may not be as sensational, it is important to understand where these inaccuracies have come from. Regardless of whether these impressive explorers were as homogeneous or aggressive as popular culture likes to think, their real activities nevertheless had an important influence on history that should be celebrated in its own right.

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However, forces allied to a warlord battling the Libyan government based in the capital of Tripoli claimed on Thursday night that they recovered the material. U.N. inspectors said they were trying to confirm that.

Natural uranium cannot immediately be used for energy production or bomb fuel, as the enrichment process typically requires the metal to be converted into a gas, then later spun in centrifuges to reach the levels needed.

But each ton of natural uranium — if obtained by a group with the technological means and resources — can be refined to 5.6 kilograms (12 pounds) of weapons-grade material over time, experts say. That makes finding the missing metal important for nonproliferation experts.

In a statement, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said its director-general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, informed member states Wednesday about the missing uranium.

The IAEA statement remained tightlipped though on details.

On Tuesday, “agency safeguards inspectors found that 10 drums containing approximately 2.5 tons of natural uranium in the form of uranium ore concentrate were not present as previously declared at a location in the state of Libya,” the IAEA said. “Further activities will be conducted by the agency to clarify the circumstances of the removal of the nuclear material and its current location.”

The IAEA did not identify the site, nor did it respond to questions about it from The Associated Press.

Reuters first reported on the IAEA warning about the missing Libyan uranium, saying the IAEA told members reaching the site that’s not under government control required “complex logistics.”

One such declared site is Sabha, some 660 kilometers (410 miles) southeast of Tripoli, in the country’s lawless southern reaches of the Sahara Desert. Libya’s late dictator Moammar Gadhafi stored thousands of barrels of so-called yellowcake uranium for a once-planned uranium conversion facility that was never built in his decadeslong secret weapons program.

Estimates put the Libyan stockpile at some 1,000 metric tons of yellowcake uranium under Gadhafi, who declared his nascent nuclear weapons program to the world in 2003 to after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

But the 2011 Arab Spring saw rebels topple Gadhafi and ultimately kill him. Sabha grew increasingly lawless, with African migrants crossing Libya, saying some had been sold as slaves in the city, the U.N. reported.

In recent years, Sabha largely has been under the control of the self-styled Libyan National Army, headed by Khalifa Hifter. On Thursday night, Hifter’s forces issued a statement claiming they had recovered the material.

They published a video showing a man in a disposable white suit and respirator in the desert, counting off what appeared to be 18 metal drums. Some of the blue-painted drums bore what appeared to be batch numbers. News footage from 2011 of the facility showed similar drums.

However, the man did not open the drums in the footage.

Hifter’s forces claimed they found the drums some 5 kilometers (3 miles) south of the facility. They tried to accuse Chadian separatist fighters, who operate in the region, of stealing the drums after mistaking them for weapons and ammunition. Hifter’s forces provided no evidence for the accusation.

The video footage resembled features of the desert surrounding the uranium stockpile site, though the AP could not immediately locate it.

Hifter’s forces also claimed the storage site had been found with an “opening” on its side. They claimed that a top IAEA official informed them of the “opening” nearly a week earlier than the agency described discovering the missing uranium. The conflicting timelines could not be immediately reconciled.

Hifter’s forces also asserted the IAEA failed to provide protective equipment and security for the site, though countries with nuclear material themselves bear responsibility for those sites. They also didn’t explain how the site had been secured — or if it was currently.

Asked about the claim by Hifter’s forces, the IAEA said: “We are aware of media reports that the material has been found. The agency is actively working to verify them.”

While inspectors removed the last of the enriched uranium from Libya in 2009, the yellowcake remained behind, with the U.N. in 2013 estimating some 6,400 barrels of it were stored at Sabha. American officials had worried Iran could try to purchase the uranium from Libya, something Gadhafi’s top civilian nuclear official tried to reassure the United States about, according to a 2009 diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks.

“Stressing that Libya viewed the question as primarily a commercial one, (the official) noted that prices for uranium yellowcake on the world market had been increasing, and that Libya wanted to maximize its profit by properly timing the sale of its stockpile,” then-Ambassador Gene A. Cretz wrote.

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Right now, you’re experiencing an atmospheric pressure of around 7 kilograms (14.7 pounds) per square inch (PSI) – but were you to teleport to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, you’d experience pressures of more than 16,000 PSI. This dramatic difference has shaped Mariana Trench animals, and coupled with the extreme darkness, it’s made for some truly wacky deep-sea species. 

Mariana Trench animals like the pressure

To have an idea of what that does to an animal, you need only look to the blobfish. It’s become famous as arguably the ugliest fish in the ocean, but the accolade is perhaps a little unfair considering it’s based on how this fish appears at surface level. 

Down in its natural habitat around 610 - 1220 meters (2,000 – 4,000 feet) below the surface, it looks quite normal – but when you drag it up to a lower atmospheric pressure it basically, very passively, explodes. This demonstrates the extremes that Mariana Trench animals have evolved to thrive in, which is why it’s home to some of the weirdest species on the planet.

Mariana Trench animals: Goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni)

Goblin sharks were first described over one hundred years ago, but still don’t know a huge amount about them because they live so deep that very few specimens have been found for research. Specimens that have been obtained tend to come about as accidental bycatch, but this is rare because they don’t typically live at depths within fishers’ reach. 

These bizarre creatures of the deep are the only surviving representative of the Mitsukurinidae family, which dates back some 125 million years. 

They have a sensory system known as ampullae of Lorenzini along their snouts that can detect weak electrical impulses in the water, like the passing pulses of potential prey. If they pass within reach of a victim, their jaws explosively catapult forward, piercing it with needle-like teeth that have evolved for spearing rather than cutting.

Mariana Trench animals: Black seadevil (Melanocetus)

Finding Nemo fans might recognize the terrifying black seadevil, an alien-like anglerfish with a bioluminescent lure it uses to attract prey in the blackness of the deep sea. In 2014, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) captured footage of a living black seadevil for the first time. While it might look frightening, with barbed teeth lining its gaping mouth, black seadevils typically measure around 20 centimeters (8 inches).

The deep sea dragonfish has evolved to be almost invisible despite using light to draw in prey. Image credit: Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego, CC BY 3.0

Mariana Trench animals: deepsea dragonfish (Stomidae)

Measuring just 15 centimeters (6 inches) in length, the dragonfish (Aristostomias scintillans) has an “enormous” jaw relative to their size, capable of extending and opening beyond the abilities of a conventional jaw. It’s also lined with dozens of fang-like teeth sharper than those found in a piranha. To keep their prey in the dark, the teeth of dragonfish have evolved a transparent structure that essentially makes their fearsome mouth invisible.

Dragonfish have small photophores that generate light for attracting prey, but with such big teeth, they’d risk giving the game away if their spiky gnashers reflected that light. Research has shown that they’ve evolved transparent teeth to overcome this, meaning they’re both excellent predators and master hiders.

The dumbo octopus is remarkably cute for Mariana Trench animal. Image credit: NOAA Ocean Exploration via flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Mariana Trench animals: dumbo octopus (Grimpoteuthis)

The deepest living of all octopuses, the dumbo moves about the deep ocean by flapping ear-like fins as they use their arms to steer. They’ve adapted to the poor dating scene of deep-sea life by becoming the ultimate opportunists, as females will carry eggs in different stages of development. This means should they cross a male, they’re good to go and can hold onto sperm until the environmental conditions are most favorable for producing offspring.

Those glowing green balls are the barreleye’s barrel eyes. Image credit: Kim Reisenbichler, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mariana Trench animals: Barreleye (Macropinna)

Found at depths most light can't reach, these truly bizarre animals are equipped with a see-through head, allowing their eyes to effectively look out of the sunroof as they navigate the pitch-black waters. The barreleye’s eyes aren’t those two indentations you see in the conventional eye position, but are actually the glowy green balls sitting slightly further back. The circles at the front are olfactory organs that can “smell” chemical cues in the water. You can see a living barreleye swimming here.

The function of the eyes’ strange positioning, MBARI says, is to spy prey above them, which they’ll sometimes steal from the dangling tentacles of siphonophores. As ultra-sensitive tubular eyes, they are incredibly well adapted for spotting the silhouettes of edible animals against the minuscule amount of light that travels to such depths. At one point, it was thought the barreleye’s eyes were constantly to the sky, but it’s since been established that they can roll to face forwards when eating.

With a face like that, you can’t help but be a little grateful the frilled shark mostly stays in the deep ocean. Image credit: © Citron, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mariana Trench animals: frilled shark (Chlamydoselachus anguineus)

This primitive shark gets its name from the six frilly gills that sit along its snake-like body, which is the inspiration for its Latin name Anguineus. They’re thought to have remained unchanged for millions of years, having evolved the perfect morphology for deep-sea living.

Frilled sharks’ large mouths are lined with multiple rows of three-pronged teeth that are hooked to better hold onto prey. With around 300 teeth in total, captured animals are unlikely to escape the frilled shark’s grip.

Half-naked hatchetfish have some of the most worried faces in the deep sea. Image credit: User Edd48, Prof. Francesco Costa, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wkimedia Commons

Mariana Trench animals: half-naked hatchetfish (Argyropelecus hemigymnus)

Cover your eyes, children, the half-naked hatchetfish forgot its pants. These peculiar mini fish are perpetual optimists with eyes pointed upwards that have large pupils capable of picking out even camouflaged animals drifting through the water column. 

It’s also a master camouflage itself, with pale blue lights on its belly that help it to diffuse its silhouette by mirroring the light above. This is a common adaptation among twilight zone animals who exist caught between the blackness of the seabed and the faint light from the water’s surface.

Snailfish lack scales and have translucent skin. Image credit: Gerringer M. E., Linley T. D., Jamieson A. J., Goetze E., Drazen J. C. - Gerringer M. E., Linley T. D., Jamieson A. J., Goetze E., Drazen J. C. (2017). Pseudoliparis swirei sp. nov.: A newly-discovered hadal snailfish (Scorpaeniformes: Liparidae) from the Mariana Trench. Zootaxa, 4358 (1): 161—177. doi:10.11646/zootaxa.4358.1.7, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, labels removed

Mariana Trench animals: snailfish (Pseudoliparis swirei)

Meet the world’s deepest fish. The gelatinous snailfish has been found at depths surpassing 8,000 meters (26,200 feet), making it the deepest living fish known to science. Called the Mariana snailfish, it's been spied with the aid of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) multiple times in the Mariana Trench.

Surface specimens look a bit like a chicken breast morphed into a tadpole, but like the blobfish, this is because the animal deforms with the dramatic shift in atmospheric pressure. When swimming at its preferred watery depths, it is a shimmering pearlescent creature with translucent skin and no scales.

Like many other deep sea species, vampire squid produce light to lure in prey. Image credit: Internet Archive Book Images via Wikimedia Commons

Mariana Trench animals: vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis)

The sanguine coloration of vampire squid earned them a nickname inspired by the undead bloodsuckers of lore, with a cape-like webbing of skin between their arms to boot. They aren’t immortal, but their lifespan is longer than most cephalopods because they live at a slower pace, inhabiting the open ocean at depths of 500 to 3,000 meters (1,600 to 9,800 feet).

At this depth, life is less about swimming and more about floating, which means only needing a little oxygen and getting by on a low-calorie diet of zooplankton and miscellaneous detritus. Vampire squid also have a more active sex life compared to most cephalopods, having multiple reproductive cycles while other species have just one.

Several adult female zombie worms on the rib bone of a gray whale calf. Image credit: Rouse, G.W., Goffredi, S.K., Johnson, S. & Vrijenhoek, R.C. 2018. An inordinate fondness for Osedax (Siboglinidae: Annelida): Fourteen new species of bone worms from California. Zootaxa 4377(4): 451–489. DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.4377.4.1, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mariana Trench animals: zombie worms (Osedax)

Zombie worms are big fans of dead bodies – those of whales, specifically. Osedax means “bone eater” and it refers to the way these worms will bore into carcasses and reach the fatty lipids locked inside their skeletons. A thirst for whale sinks and other dead animals means evolving to occupy life on the seafloor, and zombie worms were first identified at an incredible depth of 3,000 meters (10,000 feet).

A successful zombie worm is all about teamwork, with the females doing most of the work. They drill into bone using acids that free up the lipids, which are then processed with the help of symbiotic bacteria. It could be argued that the male isn’t exactly pulling its weight, but considering he’s a microscopic organism stuck inside the female's body – and probably just one of hundreds – it’s perhaps not reasonable to expect much from them other than sperm.

So as you’ve probably surmised, it’s pretty hard to pigeonhole Mariana Trench animals. From terrifying teeth to adorable flapping “ears” and a love story between one big worm and her 100 microscopic mates, these species demonstrate how evolution can give rise to animals capable of living in the extremes of environmental conditions.

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The ruling sent waves of consternation across the state, where many local select board and school committee members have emerged battle-scarred from the coronavirus pandemic and its fierce disputes over masks, vaccines and remote learning. Stemming from a lawsuit filed against the town of Southborough, Mass., by a resident who said selectmen had silenced her unlawfully, the decision pushed back against attempts to mandate good manners.

“On its face it’s very dispiriting,” said Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which until last week had been nudging towns to develop civility guidelines for meetings. “Will it encourage the very few, very vocal individuals whose goal is to be disruptive? The S.J.C. is saying that’s the price of true freedom of speech.”

In a state with a long, proud tradition of grassroots democracy, where people still sit shoulder to shoulder in high school auditoriums each spring to quarrel over budgets at annual town meetings, fierce debate is a hallmark of civic engagement. Still, some observers caution that unchecked unpleasantness could have unintended consequences: fewer volunteers to take on the often thankless work of running town boards, for example, and fewer opportunities for public comment, which are not required by law.

Those concerns were not enough to sway the state’s high court. It struck down as unconstitutional Southborough’s “civility code” for public comment at meetings, which required “respectful and courteous” discourse “free of rude, personal or slanderous remarks.” It reversed an earlier Worcester County Superior Court ruling for the town, which lies between Boston and Worcester and has about 10,000 residents.

Decorum, the new decision concluded, was not a top priority for the cousins John and Samuel Adams when they drafted Article 19 in the Massachusetts Constitution, ratified in 1780. By laying out the right to request “redress of the wrongs done them, and of the grievances they suffer,” the justices noted, they aimed to protect the colonists’ freedom to rail against King George III, disparaged at the time as “the Royal Brute,” in a profane and ungracious manner.

“There was nothing respectful or courteous about the public assemblies of the revolutionary period,” the court wrote in its opinion. “There was also much that was rude and personal, especially when it was directed at the representatives of the king and the king himself.”

Louise Barron, who filed the lawsuit with her husband, Jack, and a Southborough neighbor, said she had sparred with town leaders for years over spending decisions and records requests. But she was stunned to be threatened with removal from a Southborough Select Board meeting in December 2018 for criticizing the board.

“I didn’t go in with any anticipation of a knock-down, drag-out, but surprise, surprise,” Ms. Barron, 71, said in an interview. She described herself as civic-minded and “oppositional.”

“She’s always ladylike,” her husband added.

“I buck the system,” Ms. Barron said.

In her comments to the board that night, she said, she was trying to hold the town accountable for breaking the state’s open meeting law, a violation that the state attorney general’s office had confirmed. “I know it’s not easy to be volunteers in town, but breaking the law is breaking the law,” she said at the lectern in the mostly empty chamber, holding a homemade sign that said “STOP SPENDING” on one side and “STOP BREAKING OPEN MEETING LAW” on the other.

After a board member, Daniel L. Kolenda, cut her off and accused her of “slander” against “town officials who are doing their very best,” Ms. Barron told him, “Look, you need to stop being a Hitler. You’re a Hitler. I can say what I want.”

As seen in a video of the exchange, Mr. Kolenda then stopped the meeting, stood and pointed angrily at her. Ms. Barron said he called her “disgusting” and told her she would be escorted out if she did not leave.

Mr. Kolenda, an Army veteran who has said that his experience in Iraq inspired him to run for office, is no longer on the board. He did not return a call from a reporter on Thursday.

Shaken, Ms. Barron went home and has not attended a meeting of any town board since; she sued the town in 2020. “Now I think I should have stayed,” she said, “and made them call the police.”

The court found that her reference to Hitler was “certainly rude and insulting,” but was protected speech nonetheless. The town’s insistence on civility “appears to cross the line into viewpoint discrimination: allowing lavish praise but disallowing harsh criticism of government officials,” the ruling said.

“Although civility can and should be encouraged in political discourse,” the justices wrote, “it cannot be required.”

An attorney for the town, John J. Davis, said in a statement that the court’s decision “effectively warns local officials against enforcing even modest rules of order and decorum at public meetings.” He predicted it would lead to “less free speech, not more, as public comment sessions may soon become a thing of the past.”

In the years since the Barrons filed their lawsuit, some observers say, public meetings around the country have grown more contentious, fueled by pandemic-related disruption and deepening political division. In Oxford, Mass., near the Connecticut border, the select board chairman called the police during a meeting in 2021 and demanded that they remove the vice chairwoman, after she read a statement calling for more government transparency.

“You want me to remove a selectman?” the officer asked when he showed up, as seen in a video clip. (He did not remove her.)

The now-former board member who was targeted, Meaghan Troiano, said she had lobbied for years to add a regular public comment period at meetings, a move the board chairman opposed. She believes the Supreme Judicial Court made the right call in the Southborough case.

“They shut me down and wouldn’t let me speak because they didn’t like what I was saying,” said Ms. Troiano, who resigned from her town’s board in frustration six months later. “People still have a right to speak and be heard even if you don’t agree with them.”

Experts say the best way to encourage civil behavior is to treat people civilly in the first place, and in a way that they perceive to be fair. “The people in power have to set the tone,” said Lauren Park, a researcher in organizational psychology.

A critical component is how leaders handle criticism, said Jodi R.R. Smith, a longtime etiquette consultant in Boston. Defensiveness is not recommended.

“The difference between a good and bad politician, or executive, is how they handle someone giving negative feedback,” Ms. Smith said.

“Imagine the difference if a board, instead of getting defensive, said, ‘This person is not feeling heard’, and then said, ‘Tell us more’.”

In Southborough, the selectman who became angry after Ms. Barron called him “a Hitler” addressed the episode at a later meeting, where he said he was “sorry that I became visibly upset with the resident.” He explained that her insult was “so inflammatory” that it caused “heightened emotion.”

That was not good enough for Ms. Barron, who said her entire court case might have been prevented by an apology that was more direct.

With such a gesture, she said, “This would have been put to bed.”

The post Residents’ Right to Be Rude Upheld by Massachusetts Supreme Court appeared first on New York Times.

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"Plastic rocks" have been found on a remote volcanic island off of the Brazilian coast in what geologists have described as a “new and terrifying” development. They added that the discovery is yet another sign of how human activity is drastically changing the natural world and even Earth’s geology. 

Dubbed "plastiglomerates," the rocks are a mixture of sedimentary granules and other debris that have been fused together by plastic melted from volcanic activity. 

As first reported by Reuters, geologists from the Federal University of Parana recently made the discovery on Trindade Island, a green turtle refuge with no permanent human settlement, found in the Atlantic 1,140 kilometers (708 miles) from Brazil’s southeastern state of Espirito Santo. 

The scientists couldn’t initially identify the strange blue-ish green rocks, so they ran a number of chemical tests on the samples. This revealed that they are made of both rocky sediment and plastic most likely from fishing nets, a major contributor to plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. 

"This is new and terrifying at the same time because pollution has reached geology," Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana, told the news agency.

"We identified (the pollution) mainly comes from fishing nets, which is very common debris on Trinidade Island's beaches. The (nets) are dragged by the marine currents and accumulate on the beach. When the temperature rises, this plastic melts and becomes embedded with the beach's natural material," Santos added. 

This isn’t the first time plastiglomerates have been unearthed. Initially documented in 2014, it has now been seen in locations across the Earth’s surface.

However, this recent discovery on Trindade Island is particularly shocking as it’s relatively remote and home to a diverse selection of rare wildlife. The island serves as one of the main nesting sites of the green sea turtle in Brazil and has been known to harbor the nurseries of humpback whales.

No humans live on the islands, there is just a very small research station controlled by the Brazilian navy.

Plastiglomerates are a grim reflection of the wider problem of plastic pollution. According to a report released earlier this month, there are now more than 170 trillion pieces floating in the world’s oceans.

When discussing how human activity is impacting the planet, scientists sometimes use the term Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch that’s defined by the impact of humans on Earth's geology and ecosystems. Not everyone agrees we have entered this epoch since geological timeframes usually work in gigantic time scales, not mere centuries. 

However, as this new discovery shows, human-made materials are now having a very literal impact on Earth’s geology. Even long after humans are gone, traces of our activity will be left in the planet's geological record indefinitely. 

"We talk so much about the Anthropocene, and this is it," said Santos.

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The science of atmospheric rivers. Image credit: NOAA

In 2021, it was discovered they can also form atmospheric lakes: a massive aggregation of water vapor in the atmosphere, which is slow-moving and can endure for days. They form when atmospheric rivers pinch off and slow, forming a “lake” that can hold – and eventually rain – an awful lot of water.

Atmospheric rivers have been linked to slowing sea ice recovery, and ongoing research suggests they may become increasingly common under the climate crisis. With the capacity to cause destructive and potentially fatal weather conditions, a new system for categorizing their severity like hurricanes was recently released.

The intensity scale ranks from AR-1 to AR-5, with 5 being the most severe, as a way of measuring their duration and the volume of water they’re carrying. 

“[Atmospheric river] is no longer an obscure meteorological term but brings sharply to mind unending rain and dangerous flooding,” Science Daily explains. “The string of atmospheric rivers that hit California in December and January, for instance, at times reached AR-4. Earlier in 2022, the atmospheric river that contributed to disastrous flooding in Pakistan was an AR-5, the most damaging, most intense atmospheric river rating.”

Active advisory is now in place, requesting that people stay away from the area while severe and unpredictable flash flooding continues. For further advice visit the Bureau Of Land Management’s website.

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It must be frustrating, sometimes, to be a professional archaeologist. Here you are, slogging away on years-long excavations in the scorching desert or freezing English rain, just hoping to find a tiny clue about ancient burial rites or something – only for some rando to wander up a mountain one day and accidentally stumble upon a long-lost shrine to the Ancient Roman mountain gods.

“We do find single Roman coins occasionally in the Alps, but this site is unusual because of the amount of coins and the location,” Regula Gubler, scientific project manager on the archeological team that’s been investigating the site since 2022, told Newsweek. 

“We are only at the beginning of the investigations, but we think it is a holy place,” she explained. “[P]eople went [there] to deposit votive offerings – mainly coins, but also other objects – asking the deities for things or thanking them […] I guess a kind of pilgrimage.”

The first sign that something interesting might have been going on in the area came back in 2020, when a stray hiker happened across a single ancient coin buried amongst the rubble. 

A Roman coin on the site of the excavations. © Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern, Regula Glatz

After reporting the find to local authorities, however, it became apparent that this high-altitude site was hiding a lot more than just a few bits of dropped change. So far, the team has discovered 100 ancient Roman coins, 59 Roman shoe nails, 27 small rock crystals, a brooch, and a fragment of a leaf-shaped votive plaque, per Newsweek.

The votive plaque found at the foot of the Ammertenhorn. © Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern, Markus Detmer

But at 2,590 meters (nearly 8,500 feet) above sea level, and well clear of established passing places, the site proved difficult to reach even for the modern excavation team. “[It] is far from human habitation, today and in Roman times [...] and definitely not a pass,” Gubler told Newsweek. “We had to fly our supplies up there and camped for several days.”

Combined, this all suggests a place of great importance for the ancient folk who left those artifacts behind. The team suspects its importance may have something to do with the naturally occurring rock crystal formations that can be found in the area.

One of 27 rock crystals found at the foot of the Ammertenhorn. © Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern, Regula Glatz

“We often consider this type of object as offerings,” explained Adriano Boschetti, an archaeologist with the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern, in a statement. “It cannot be ruled out that the high plateau between the [peaks of] Ammertenhorn and the Wildstrubel massif, visible from afar, was a sacred place.”

It’s not totally surprising: the site is just 19.3 kilometers (12 miles) away from the town of Thun, where several Roman temples can be found – including an effigy specifically devoted to the goddesses of the Alps.

“The mountains had clearly a religious significance,” Gubler said. “[This] is an interesting site because it shows that the Roman population of the region didn't only worship the mountains from afar, but also went up and close to them to deposit votive offerings.”

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It’s been almost 40 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster saw the evacuation of around 120,000 people from their homes in northern Ukraine and Belarus. While the irradiated surrounding area is still home to very few people, some species of animal have beaten the odds to survive in this most unlikely of places.

Exposure to radiation can damage the DNA of living organisms and cause undesirable mutations. Barn swallows have previously been found to have two to 10-fold higher mutation rates in Chernobyl than in Italy or elsewhere in Ukraine. Meanwhile, voles living in the Exclusion Zone were found to be more likely to develop cataracts, a 2016 study concluded.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Plenty of species are surviving, even thriving, in the shadow of the worst nuclear disaster in history.

Chernobyl dogs

Following the disaster, and subsequent evacuation, on April 26, 1986, many pet dogs were left to fend for themselves in the land surrounding the former power plant. Despite now being without owners and facing the threat of radiation, a sturdy population was established, which still exists today. 

By the most recent estimates, as many as 800 semi-feral dogs are currently living around Chernobyl, including in some of the most contaminated areas. While the dogs largely fend for themselves, workers and researchers are known to feed the animals, and vets occasionally visit to provide vaccines and medical treatment.

The dogs have not been unaffected by the exposure to the radiation they’ve faced in their hostile home: a recent study found it may have made them genetically distinct from other dogs elsewhere in the world. So changed is their DNA profile that it is possible to tell who these dogs are just by looking at it, which the researchers believe is a reflection of the environmental contamination they’ve been exposed to for generations. 

It is not yet known what impact this might have on the dogs’ health, appearance, and behavior, but their resilience in surviving almost four decades in such an unexpected place can’t be knocked.

Chernobyl frogs

Dogs aren’t the only species to have been changed by the harsh environment of Chernobyl. Some animals have developed adaptations to help them survive the radiation, including the Eastern tree frog. 

The species is normally a vivid green color, but Chernobyl tree frogs look a little different. Those found in the Exclusion Zone are generally a much darker color – sometimes pitch black.

Coloring gradient of the Eastern St. Anthony’s frog (Hyla orientalis) in northern Ukraine. Image credit: P. Burraco and G. Orizaola, Evolutionary Applications, 2022, CC BY 4.0 (cropped)

This stark difference is the result of rapid evolution in response to radiation, the researchers responsible for the discovery believe. 

Frogs with a darker color have more melanin, which is known to reduce the effects of ultraviolet, as well as ionizing, radiation. Therefore, darkly colored individuals are less likely to suffer cell damage as a result of radiation exposure and so would have been evolutionarily favored in the aftermath of the accident.

A haven away from humans

For lots of species living in and around Chernobyl, their populations are thriving, in number at least, since the disaster. In fact, Chernobyl is now one of the largest nature reserves in Europe, as well as, possibly, “Europe’s largest experiment in rewilding”. 

Today, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone spans 2,600 square kilometers (1,000 square miles) and is almost void of human life. While the potentially hazardous effects of radiation exposure can’t be denied, some experts argue they pose less of a threat than the potentially hazardous effects of humans.

“Humans have been removed from the system and this greatly overshadows any of those potential radiation effects,” biologist Jim Beasley, who has studied wolves in the Exclusion Zone, told National Geographic back in 2016.

Without humans in the picture, Chernobyl has become a surprising safe haven for all sorts of animals, from deer to wild boar. Wolves, particularly, are thriving: their population density is around seven times higher in the Exclusion Zone than in surrounding reserves.

Wolves seem to be thriving in Chernobyl. Image credit: wildlife_outdoor/Shutterstock.com

One study used camera trap footage to identify 15 different vertebrates, including mice, raccoon dogs, American mink, and Eurasian otters, inside the Exclusion Zone. Tawny owls, jays, magpies, and white-tailed eagles have also been found.

As have beavers, according to National Geographic. “The beaver population is growing,” Marina Shkvyria, of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, said, adding that this will eventually return the land to bog.

“The beaver in Ukraine is exactly like the elephant in Africa: it completely changes the look of the landscape.”

Chernobyl’s Przewalski's horses

Even endangered wild horses have made their home in the Exclusion Zone, using the abandoned structures as shelters.

Around 30 Przewalski’s horses were introduced into the Exclusion Zone in 1998 in an attempt to rescue the species from extinction. Their population is now believed to be about 150 inside the Exclusion Zone, with another 60 horses over the border in Belarus.

The severe environment of Chernobyl has provided something of a sanctuary for “the last truly wild horse”, as well as reams of other animals that have navigated life here in the wake of nuclear disaster.

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The Sun is heading towards the peak of activity in the current cycle, the solar maximum, which means more potentially concerning space weather events but also more stunning features forming on the surface of the Sun. The latest one, a towering Polar Crown Prominence (PCP), has been captured in exquisite detail by an astrophotographer in Argentina. 

Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau snapped the stunning picture on March 9, and it is truly magnificent. The plasma veil towers 100,000 kilometers (61,000 miles) over the surface of the Sun. That’s over a quarter of the distance between Earth and the Moon. He was tipped off of to the presence of this feature by the National Solar Observatory Global Oscillation Network Group and set out to take a good picture battling the heat wave and drought in his area, which makes the atmosphere dusty and turbulent. Using his most powerful telescope, he obtained something spectacular.

“I was determined to get a good shot, so I quickly set up my equipment in my backyard and used my most powerful telescope to get a better view," Schaberger Poupeau told IFLScience.

"The vision I had on my laptop screen was truly incredible, being able to observe those hundreds of plasma threads dripping down a 100,000 km high wall literally left me speechless. I spent about two hours taking pictures, trying to find moments of greatest atmospheric stability to get the best possible result.” 

See more on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CpluyLnuCFx/

PCPs, a subtype of solar prominences, are fairly common features on the Sun. Usually, solar prominences are beautiful loops of incandescent plasma stretching from the photosphere into space and back down again. PCPs, however, don’t tend to loop, and until relatively recently they were believed to be almost static. It was observations from the Japanese Hinode spacecraft taken 15 years ago that showed how active they are.

These features are found between 60 and 70 degrees of latitude on both hemispheres of the Sun and they can end up circling the polar regions, which is why they are referred to as a crown. PCPs, like other prominences, are shaped by magnetic fields.

Following the magnetic field lines, the plasma in this feature flows back down onto the Sun like a waterfall.

“Taking pictures of the sun is always super exciting for me. Every day, I am fascinated by the changing details on the sun's surface, the movement of sunspots as they travel along with the solar rotation, and the transformations of filaments or sudden flares in active regions,” Schaberger Poupeau told IFLScience.

“While gratifying, this pursuit is also complicated and requires a great deal of patience. The quality of the sky plays a crucial role in obtaining good results, and I often must wait for long periods to capture the few moments of stability in the atmosphere necessary to produce the images.”

As Schaberger Poupeau noted, astrophotography is also a matter of having the right equipment with the right filters to capture the right wavelengths of light emitted by the Sun. Consistency is also crucial to get the type of incredible shot Schaberger Poupeau managed here. But nobody can really argue with the results.

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WHEN CITIBANK LOCKED trading platform Swan Bitcoin out of its corporate bank account in October, it did so without warning or explanation. The only confirmation of what had happened came in the form of a paper check for the account balance, delivered to an old home address of Cory Klippsten, Swan’s CEO.

“There was absolutely no notice,” says Klippsten. “We got no phone call, no email, no snail mail letter—nothing. They just shut it down.”

Swan had a secondary account at another bank and so could still make payroll, but for a smaller firm this could have been an “existential threat,” Klippsten says. Citibank did not respond to a request for comment.

The crypto industry needs banking; it needs it badly and always has. Without a banking partner, crypto companies cannot accept dollar deposits in return for services or in exchange for tokens, nor can they pay their employees or vendors. That means the quest to build a parallel financial system free of intermediaries is dependent, inconveniently, on an accord with those same intermediaries—the banks. 

Wall Street has often been reluctant to work with crypto companies, so many in the industry came to rely on just two US banks—Silvergate and Signature—which made themselves invaluable to crypto clients by offering real-time payments outside of traditional banking hours. Over the past week, both banks have closed, Silvergate because of overexposure to the ailing crypto sector and Signature due to a liquidity crisis triggered by a sudden flood of withdrawals. That has left many crypto businesses—particularly smaller ones—back where they began: unbanked and with few alternatives at hand.

“Overwhelmingly, banking is the challenge for crypto companies,” says William Quigley, cofounder of stablecoin issuer Tether. “A lot of people in crypto are denied access to banking services. It’s a real problem.”

When the crypto space began to grow in the early 2010s, mainstream banks were often hesitant to work with a sector they saw as inherently risky. But as the industry began to move closer to the mainstream over the past few years, Wall Street’s level of comfort grew. Big banks such as JPMorgan and BNY Mellon started banking crypto exchanges and letting their clients store and trade coins. Regulators kept an eye on the sector, but besides a few “policy sprints,” they did little. 

Then in 2022, crypto collapsed in spectacular fashion. In May, the failure of the Terra-Luna stablecoin wiped out an estimated $60 billion, prompting a chain reaction that later took down crypto lender Celsius, hedge fund Three Arrows Capitals, and others. This was followed in November by the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, whose founder has since been charged with 12 criminal offenses, including bank fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

The fallout from the destruction of major pieces of the crypto ecosystem didn’t really spread into the mainstream financial sector, but regulators felt compelled to make sure it stayed that way. In a joint statement on January 3, the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the agencies responsible for the stability of the US banking system, claimed that crypto represents a “significant risk” for banks. “It is important that risks related to the crypto-asset sector that cannot be mitigated or controlled do not migrate to the banking system,” the agencies wrote, although they also made it clear that US banks are “neither prohibited nor discouraged” from servicing crypto businesses.

Since the start of the year, statements by the regulators and White House have further warned banks to limit their exposure to crypto. In late January, the Fed also announced that it had denied Custodia, a state-chartered bank that offers cryptocurrency custody services, applications to join the Federal Reserve System and open a master account, which would have made it possible for the firm to compete on a level footing with large national banks. 

Almost all of the household names in crypto—and many smaller ones—gravitated to the two institutions that remained friendly to crypto: Silvergate and Signature. 

Silvergate fell first. The bank had been struggling since the collapse of FTX and its sister company Alameda Research—both of which were also clients—which led customers to withdraw billions of dollars. On March 8, the bank announced it was being wound down. The US Department of Justice is reportedly conducting an investigation into Silvergate over services provided to FTX and Alameda.

The situation at Signature was different. The bank had been attempting since December to diversify its customer base to avoid the same concentration risk that afflicted Silvergate. But it appears that its reputation as a crypto bank, combined with panic in the wake of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), was enough to drive another fatal run on deposits, leading the FDIC to take possession of the bank on March 12. 

In an interview with Bloomberg on Sunday, Signature board member Barney Frank, the former congressman responsible for US banking reforms in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, said that the bank could have survived, but that regulators “wanted to send a message to get people away from crypto.”

The US Treasury did not respond to a request for comment. The Federal Reserve and FDIC declined to comment on the record. Stephanie Collins, media relations manager at the OCC, noted that the agency does not have oversight over Silvergate or Signature but did not address questions around coordination between US banking regulators. But in a statement provided to Reuters, the New York State Department of Financial Services, which handed Signature over to the FDIC, said “the decisions made over the weekend had nothing to do with crypto.”

However, the idea that regulators have it in for crypto carries weight in some parts of the industry. Even before Silvergate and Signature were shut down, members of the crypto community—including the CEO of US crypto exchange Kraken—were crying conspiracy and calling it “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” or a coordinated attempt to cut crypto off from the banking system.

The term, coined by Nic Carter, general partner at VC firm Castle Island Ventures, refers to a program launched by the Obama administration, under which US officials were said to have pressured banks into severing ties with disfavored industries like pornography and payday lending. 

Proponents of the Choke Point 2.0 theory say these moves are a renewed attempt to regulate by stealth—to use influence over the banking sector to create de facto policy without requiring the approval of Congress. “For now, most banks are petrified of serving crypto, so the policy has been a success without requiring a ban,” Carter says. “The objective is to do as much as possible without requiring new laws to be passed.”

A group of Republican senators, led by Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, penned a letter to the banking regulators on March 9, supporting this interpretation. The statements issued by regulators have “caused banks to reevaluate their decision to provide banking services to the crypto sector,” the letter claimed. “This coordinated behavior seems disturbingly reminiscent of Operation Choke Point.”

“Operation Choke Point 2.0 is very real,” says Caitlin Long, CEO at Custodia, the spurned bank. “Many banks have stepped way back in their crypto activities … and a lot of [crypto] companies ranging from small to very large are looking for bank accounts.”

Since January, Custodia has been inundated with enquiries from crypto companies looking for a banking partner, Long says, but without federal supervision it can only offer a limited selection of US dollar services. Custodia is suing the Fed over the denial of its application for membership.

Others are less convinced by the Choke Point theory. Economist Frances Copolla, who worked in risk management for HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland, says she doesn’t think there has been a “coordinated attack on crypto,” but that the failure of Silvergate and Signature is a reflection of fragilities in their operating models. Caleb Franzen, a corporate banking analyst at research firm Cubic Analytics, says talk of underhanded tactics among regulators is “purely speculation.”

But whether by accident or design, crypto is facing a banking crisis in the US.

The closure of Silvergate and Signature has sent crypto businesses hunting urgently for new banking partners. Circle Internet Financial, whose USDC stablecoin was knocked temporarily off its peg to the dollar by word of exposure to Silvergate and SVB, arranged over the weekend to expand an existing relationship with BNY Mellon. But not everyone is home and dry; crypto investment firms MaiCapital and Digital Asset Capital Management have taken the search for new banking partners offshore, while trading platform LedgerX has been forced to find a new bank for a second time, after switching initially from Silvergate to Signature. None of the firms responded to a request for comment.

By virtue of the value they represent to banks, larger crypto businesses are likely to be able to hold on to their existing accounts in the US, says Carter, which means US residents will still have access to crypto exchanges. But smaller firms are “scrambling,” he says. The result is likely to be that some businesses will migrate to countries with more favorable regulatory regimes; some will struggle to raise venture capital, which is contingent on access to banking; and others won’t be started in the first place, says Carter.

With the fall of Silvergate and Signature, the only two banks to offer real-time payments at any hour and on any day, the 24/7 crypto industry will have to get used to operating at a different pace. For traders, this means an inability to exit bets outside of regular banking hours, which is likely to create an additional level of volatility.

Swan Bitcoin’s Klippsten does not buy into the idea that US regulators have initiated a coordinated assault on the crypto industry, driven by “a man behind the curtain pulling the strings.” He’s also more sanguine about the prospects of the companies “orphaned” by Silvergate and Signature finding new banking partners, saying “banks are usually glad to take your money.” 

Klippsten is also sympathetic to regulators’ ambition to defend against fraud in the crypto sector. But the frustration, he says, is that legitimate crypto companies will be collateral damage. 

“Because crypto is so shady and some of the businesses are so poorly run, the whole category is toxic—it’s a pile of dogshit on average,” he says. “So it’s hard to ask a bank with hundreds of thousands of accounts to differentiate between good crypto businesses, run by mature adults, [and bad ones]. We’re stuck being painted with the same brush.”

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Insects are strange, wondrous beings. Butterflies can see parts of the light spectrum that are invisible to human eyes and use these ultraviolet patterns to find their way to tasty plants. Moths use the Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves on journeys of hundreds of miles. Bees waggle their butts to tell their hive-mates where to find a juicy stash of nectar. Insects live in our world—or humans live in theirs—yet we inhabit completely different sensory universes.

But just as we are starting to understand insect senses, something is shifting in the way we treat these creatures. Insect farming is booming in a major way. By one estimate, between 1 trillion and 1.2 trillion insects are raised on farms each year as companies race to find a high-protein, low-carbon way to feed animals and humans. In terms of sheer numbers of animals impacted, this is a transformation of a speed and scale that we’ve never seen before.

It’s a weird twist in our already strange relationship with bugs. We squash them, spray them, eat them, and crush them to make pretty dyes. But we also fret about plummeting wild insect populations and rely on them to pollinate the crops we eat. And with the industrialization of insect farming, bugs are being offered up as a solution to the human-caused climate crisis. But before we go down that route, we need to ask some really basic questions about insects. Can they feel? And if so, what should we do about it?

“We’re at the starting point of a conversation about insect welfare,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics. One of the key questions here is whether insects are sentient and have the capacity to feel pain and suffer. Pigs, chickens, and fish are already widely recognized as sentient. In 2021, Birch wrote a report that led to the UK government recognizing sentience in squid and octopuses, as well as crabs, lobsters, and all vertebrate animals. Research on insect sentience is much more patchy. There are more than a million known insect species and only a handful have ever been studied to see whether they can feel pain.

Finding out whether another being can feel pain is really difficult, even when it comes to humans. Until the mid-1980s babies in the US were routinely operated on with little or no anesthesia, due to the mistaken belief that very young infants were incapable of perceiving pain. In one famous case, a premature baby in Maryland born in 1985 underwent open heart surgery without any anesthesia at all. When Jill Lawson, the boy’s mother, later questioned her doctors, she was told that premature babies couldn’t feel pain—a scientific misunderstanding that was later overturned partly thanks to the campaigning of people like Lawson.

If scientists can misunderstand pain in humans for so long, what hope do we have in figuring it out in insects? When searching for answers, there are a handful of signs researchers look for. One is the presence of nociceptors—neurons that respond to painful stimuli from the outside world. Nociception isn’t quite the same as feeling pain. When you touch a hot stove, your arm automatically jerks away before you feel pain, because nociceptors have sent a nerve impulse that bypasses the brain altogether. But at the very minimum, the presence of nociceptors indicates that a bug has some of the basic biology that makes it capable of experiencing pain.

Almost every time scientists search for insect nociception, they find it, says Lars Chittka, founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Mind of a Bee. There’s evidence for nociception in beetles, flies, bees, and butterflies. We also have good evidence that at least some insects can bring together sensory information in their brains, and that their nociceptors are connected to their brains. Plus, scientists have seen some evidence of insects grooming injured spots on their bodies—another indication of sentience. Some ants even rescue nestmates that have lost limbs after raids on termite mounds. Wound-tending is generally seen as a sentience marker.

For Chittka, the fact that scientists have found multiple indicators of sentience in certain insects is reason enough to argue that these animals can have unpleasant experiences. Chittka puts flies and bees in this category, but it’s not at all clear whether findings can be extrapolated to other species. The most commonly farmed insects include crickets, beetles, and flies, and we know a lot less about their lives than those of bees or ants, which are pretty well-studied in insect terms. Even fewer studies have been done on insects when they’re still larvae. This adds another problem because mealworms and black soldier fly larvae are usually killed before they are adults. Are insect larvae less capable of feeling pain than adults? We really don’t know.

This is the problem with the insect sentience question: It’s one big fractal unknown that breaks down into a thousand smaller unknowns. Everywhere we turn, there’s another question. That’s partly because sentience research has tended to focus on animals a little closer to humans along the evolutionary tree. Non-fish and non-mammalian sea creatures are also overlooked, says Kristin Andrews, a professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto. The same is true of nematode worms, microscopic parasites that are among the most abundant creatures on Earth. When it comes to studying sentience, we need to cast a much wider net. “We should be studying sentience in organisms like this as well. And it’ll be a cheap and easy thing to do, because scientists are already working with them.”

WHILE SCIENTISTS ARE debating insect sentience, the bug-farming industry is growing at speed. Humans have eaten insects for centuries, but generally those insects were caught from the wild or farmed in relatively small farms. Now startups are building megafactories to house tens of millions of bugs in one place. French startup Ÿnsect is building a factory in Amiens that can produce 200,000 metric tons of insect-based products a year—mainly for pet and animal food. Other large facilities are open or being built in the Netherlands, the US, and Denmark. 

If we’re going to farm animals that are candidates for sentience, then there should be welfare standards, says Birch. Right now there are no widely recognized welfare guidelines for farmed insects, and few laws that specifically require insect farmers to meet certain welfare standards. The EU body that represents insect farmers has set out five guidelines borrowed from vertebrate welfare law, but companies are generally left to decide for themselves what high welfare might look like. 

“If there are welfare concerns, you’ve got to intervene at the planning stages, when those facilities are being designed and constructed,” says Bob Fischer, a professor at Texas State University who works on insect welfare. There are many factors that farm designers need to take into account, including temperature, moisture levels, lighting, how crowded the insects are, and what they eat. For insect farmers, these are all engineering problems—they want to make sure as many bugs survive as possible and that the farms are cheap to run—but they’re also intricately tied to animal welfare.

There is some good news here. Some insect larvae seem to like living in crowded conditions, says Fotis Fotiadis, founder of the insect-farming startup Better Origin, which is based in Cambridge in the UK. He rents out containers fitted with trays where farmers can grow their own black soldier fly larvae, squeezed in 10,000 to a tray in dark, moist conditions. “What we think is high welfare for animals might not be high welfare for insects. We need to have a new understanding about what insects want to do,” says Fotiadis.

The rub is that we have only a very limited understanding of what insects like to do. Black soldier fly larvae might like crowded conditions, but what about adults? Chittka recalls visiting one facility where adult black soldier flies were kept without food and in crowded conditions. “It looked strange to me,” Chittka says. Some insect farms—like Better Origin—don’t feed adult black soldier flies that are used to breed larvae, but recent research suggests that female adults live longer and lay more eggs if they’re fed. “Letting the adults lay their eggs and pass away is currently what the industry tends to do, in line with other animal industries, and will likely remain the status quo until there is a market opportunity for a higher welfare insect,” says Fotiadis.

An even bigger quandary is how insects should be slaughtered. In the EU, most animals must be stunned unconscious before they’re killed, but no such regulations exist for insects. Bugs can be microwaved, steamed, boiled, roasted, frozen, or minced to death. Better Origin’s larvae are fed alive to farmed chickens. We have no idea which method of slaughter is least painful for insects, beyond a general sense that a quick death is better than a protracted one. “Trying to make sure that we are killing quickly and efficiently, given the level of uncertainty, is perhaps one of the most important things we can do,” Fischer says.

The issue for Fischer isn’t whether we should farm insects at all—it’s about taking insect welfare more seriously and making sure the industry does too. “Insects as food and feed is happening. It is growing. It is not going to collapse in the next 10 years,” he says. And the numbers we’re talking about are so vast that even a small improvement in welfare standards could make a difference to the lives of trillions of maybe-sentient creatures. That’s why Fischer hopes that rather than splitting off into opposing camps, animal sentience researchers and the insect-farming industry can get together and hash out what higher-welfare insect farming might look like.

And that means two things. One, it’s about more work on animal sentience—in particular the handful of species that are most commonly farmed. “For at least these insect species, we would want to have some certainty of what constitutes humane slaughtering procedures and what are acceptable rearing conditions and so on,” says Chittka. “We need that research now.”

It’s also about widening our sense of which animals deserve our compassion. It’s easy to look into the eyes of a dog, or a chimp, and intuit that these animals have feelings that we can influence. It’s much more difficult to look upon a tray of mealworms and make the same observation. If we’re going to start farming these animals en masse, though, the kindest thing to do might be to err on the side of caution. 

Insect Farming Is Booming. But Is It Cruel?

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INSECTS ARE STRANGE, wondrous beings. Butterflies can see parts of the light spectrum that are invisible to human eyes and use these ultraviolet patterns to find their way to tasty plants. Moths use the Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves on journeys of hundreds of miles. Bees waggle their butts to tell their hive-mates where to find a juicy stash of nectar. Insects live in our world—or humans live in theirs—yet we inhabit completely different sensory universes.

But just as we are starting to understand insect senses, something is shifting in the way we treat these creatures. Insect farming is booming in a major way. By one estimate, between 1 trillion and 1.2 trillion insects are raised on farms each year as companies race to find a high-protein, low-carbon way to feed animals and humans. In terms of sheer numbers of animals impacted, this is a transformation of a speed and scale that we’ve never seen before.

It’s a weird twist in our already strange relationship with bugs. We squash them, spray them, eat them, and crush them to make pretty dyes. But we also fret about plummeting wild insect populations and rely on them to pollinate the crops we eat. And with the industrialization of insect farming, bugs are being offered up as a solution to the human-caused climate crisis. But before we go down that route, we need to ask some really basic questions about insects. Can they feel? And if so, what should we do about it?

“We’re at the starting point of a conversation about insect welfare,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics. One of the key questions here is whether insects are sentient and have the capacity to feel pain and suffer. Pigs, chickens, and fish are already widely recognized as sentient. In 2021, Birch wrote a report that led to the UK government recognizing sentience in squid and octopuses, as well as crabs, lobsters, and all vertebrate animals. Research on insect sentience is much more patchy. There are more than a million known insect species and only a handful have ever been studied to see whether they can feel pain.

Finding out whether another being can feel pain is really difficult, even when it comes to humans. Until the mid-1980s babies in the US were routinely operated on with little or no anesthesia, due to the mistaken belief that very young infants were incapable of perceiving pain. In one famous case, a premature baby in Maryland born in 1985 underwent open heart surgery without any anesthesia at all. When Jill Lawson, the boy’s mother, later questioned her doctors, she was told that premature babies couldn’t feel pain—a scientific misunderstanding that was later overturned partly thanks to the campaigning of people like Lawson.

If scientists can misunderstand pain in humans for so long, what hope do we have in figuring it out in insects? When searching for answers, there are a handful of signs researchers look for. One is the presence of nociceptors—neurons that respond to painful stimuli from the outside world. Nociception isn’t quite the same as feeling pain. When you touch a hot stove, your arm automatically jerks away before you feel pain, because nociceptors have sent a nerve impulse that bypasses the brain altogether. But at the very minimum, the presence of nociceptors indicates that a bug has some of the basic biology that makes it capable of experiencing pain.

Almost every time scientists search for insect nociception, they find it, says Lars Chittka, founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Mind of a Bee. There’s evidence for nociception in beetles, flies, bees, and butterflies. We also have good evidence that at least some insects can bring together sensory information in their brains, and that their nociceptors are connected to their brains. Plus, scientists have seen some evidence of insects grooming injured spots on their bodies—another indication of sentience. Some ants even rescue nestmates that have lost limbs after raids on termite mounds. Wound-tending is generally seen as a sentience marker.

For Chittka, the fact that scientists have found multiple indicators of sentience in certain insects is reason enough to argue that these animals can have unpleasant experiences. Chittka puts flies and bees in this category, but it’s not at all clear whether findings can be extrapolated to other species. The most commonly farmed insects include crickets, beetles, and flies, and we know a lot less about their lives than those of bees or ants, which are pretty well-studied in insect terms. Even fewer studies have been done on insects when they’re still larvae. This adds another problem because mealworms and black soldier fly larvae are usually killed before they are adults. Are insect larvae less capable of feeling pain than adults? We really don’t know.

This is the problem with the insect sentience question: It’s one big fractal unknown that breaks down into a thousand smaller unknowns. Everywhere we turn, there’s another question. That’s partly because sentience research has tended to focus on animals a little closer to humans along the evolutionary tree. Non-fish and non-mammalian sea creatures are also overlooked, says Kristin Andrews, a professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto. The same is true of nematode worms, microscopic parasites that are among the most abundant creatures on Earth. When it comes to studying sentience, we need to cast a much wider net. “We should be studying sentience in organisms like this as well. And it’ll be a cheap and easy thing to do, because scientists are already working with them.”

WHILE SCIENTISTS ARE debating insect sentience, the bug-farming industry is growing at speed. Humans have eaten insects for centuries, but generally those insects were caught from the wild or farmed in relatively small farms. Now startups are building megafactories to house tens of millions of bugs in one place. French startup Ÿnsect is building a factory in Amiens that can produce 200,000 metric tons of insect-based products a year—mainly for pet and animal food. Other large facilities are open or being built in the Netherlands, the US, and Denmark. 

If we’re going to farm animals that are candidates for sentience, then there should be welfare standards, says Birch. Right now there are no widely recognized welfare guidelines for farmed insects, and few laws that specifically require insect farmers to meet certain welfare standards. The EU body that represents insect farmers has set out five guidelines borrowed from vertebrate welfare law, but companies are generally left to decide for themselves what high welfare might look like. 

“If there are welfare concerns, you’ve got to intervene at the planning stages, when those facilities are being designed and constructed,” says Bob Fischer, a professor at Texas State University who works on insect welfare. There are many factors that farm designers need to take into account, including temperature, moisture levels, lighting, how crowded the insects are, and what they eat. For insect farmers, these are all engineering problems—they want to make sure as many bugs survive as possible and that the farms are cheap to run—but they’re also intricately tied to animal welfare.

There is some good news here. Some insect larvae seem to like living in crowded conditions, says Fotis Fotiadis, founder of the insect-farming startup Better Origin, which is based in Cambridge in the UK. He rents out containers fitted with trays where farmers can grow their own black soldier fly larvae, squeezed in 10,000 to a tray in dark, moist conditions. “What we think is high welfare for animals might not be high welfare for insects. We need to have a new understanding about what insects want to do,” says Fotiadis.

The rub is that we have only a very limited understanding of what insects like to do. Black soldier fly larvae might like crowded conditions, but what about adults? Chittka recalls visiting one facility where adult black soldier flies were kept without food and in crowded conditions. “It looked strange to me,” Chittka says. Some insect farms—like Better Origin—don’t feed adult black soldier flies that are used to breed larvae, but recent research suggests that female adults live longer and lay more eggs if they’re fed.

“Letting the adults lay their eggs and pass away is currently what the industry tends to do, in line with other animal industries, and will likely remain the status quo until there is a market opportunity for a higher welfare insect,” says Fotiadis.

An even bigger quandary is how insects should be slaughtered. In the EU, most animals must be stunned unconscious before they’re killed, but no such regulations exist for insects. Bugs can be microwaved, steamed, boiled, roasted, frozen, or minced to death. Better Origin’s larvae are fed alive to farmed chickens. We have no idea which method of slaughter is least painful for insects, beyond a general sense that a quick death is better than a protracted one. “Trying to make sure that we are killing quickly and efficiently, given the level of uncertainty, is perhaps one of the most important things we can do,” Fischer says.

The issue for Fischer isn’t whether we should farm insects at all—it’s about taking insect welfare more seriously and making sure the industry does too. “Insects as food and feed is happening. It is growing. It is not going to collapse in the next 10 years,” he says. And the numbers we’re talking about are so vast that even a small improvement in welfare standards could make a difference to the lives of trillions of maybe-sentient creatures. That’s why Fischer hopes that rather than splitting off into opposing camps, animal sentience researchers and the insect-farming industry can get together and hash out what higher-welfare insect farming might look like.

And that means two things. One, it’s about more work on animal sentience—in particular the handful of species that are most commonly farmed. “For at least these insect species, we would want to have some certainty of what constitutes humane slaughtering procedures and what are acceptable rearing conditions and so on,” says Chittka. “We need that research now.”

It’s also about widening our sense of which animals deserve our compassion. It’s easy to look into the eyes of a dog, or a chimp, and intuit that these animals have feelings that we can influence. It’s much more difficult to look upon a tray of mealworms and make the same observation. If we’re going to start farming these animals en masse, though, the kindest thing to do might be to err on the side of caution. 

Source

On the boundary of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean is the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest in the Atlantic Ocean. Kilometers above it, the ocean's surface is dipped slightly, pulled by an anomaly of Earth's gravity. 

If you drop an object there, it will fall slightly faster than elsewhere on the planet or in the surrounding area. Meanwhile navigation equipment can be thrown off by the anomaly, causing false readings for sailors in the area.

So what is causing the gravity anomaly, and are there any others like it?

How did we first discover gravity anomalies?

In 1671, astronomer Jean Richter traveled from Paris, France, to Cayenne, French Guiana in South America. With him, he took a pendulum clock. While the clock had been accurate in Paris, he noticed that in Cayenne it ran slowly, losing a full two and a half minutes every day. No biggie, the pendulum was shortened to make the clock accurate. However, when he returned to Paris he found that the clock was running too quickly, by two and a half minutes each day.

Though it may feel the same when you jump up and down in Brazil or Canada, the rate at which you fall is not uniform. What mathematician Christiaan Huygens realized after hearing of Richter's clock was that it was experimental evidence that the Earth was rotating. Later, Newton showed using data from a similar pendulum clock and Jupiter's equatorial bulge, that the Earth bulged at the equator due to the centrifugal force of its rotation, and estimated by how much. 

Near the equator gravity acts upon you less than it does near the poles, as you are further away from the bulk of the Earth's mass.

However, the gravity at the Puerto Rico Trench differs from the area surrounding it. It, along with several others like it around the planet, are what are now referred to as gravity anomalies.

What is a gravity anomaly? 

Gravity anomalies are where an object observed in free fall accelerates at a rate different to the rate models of gravity for that location would predict. 

At the Puerto Rico Trench, gravity has been found to be -380 milliGal, making it the biggest negative gravity anomaly on Earth. Another in the Indian Ocean is where gravity has been found to be lowest, compared to what was expected.

What is causing the Puerto Rico Trench gravity anomaly? 

In 1977, geophysicist Peter Molnar attempted to find out what was causing this unexpected downwards force. Just as slightly higher gravity at the poles is due to being closer to the bulk of Earth's mass, he knew a likely source: something huge and dense must be under the surface.

In a paper published in Geophysical Journal International, he explained that previous models of gravity had assumed that the thickness of the Earth's crust (the lithosphere) was pretty uniform. Looking at the area, he realized that wasn't the case, and that the anomaly was likely caused by a large "hanging flap" of the Atlantic lithosphere.

"The residual gravity anomalies are then consistent with the existence of a subcrustal dense mass, that could be the hanging slab of lithosphere," Molnar wrote in the study.

"The value of this excess mass depends upon more arbitrary assumptions for the crustal mass in the Puerto Rico Trench and its landward wall, but if the other assumptions above are realistic, the dense mass is required and is adequate to bend the surface down at the trench."

Though not the first to propose the slab of crust as an explanation, Molnar was able to provide estimates of the mass and size of the object causing the gravity anomaly above.

Source

Remember 2012? That was the year that Lonesome George died, NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars, and Felix Baumgartner skydived from the edge of space. It was also the year of the biggest anti-climax in history as the world failed to end on December 21 – the date that, according to some, the Maya had foreseen the apocalypse.

In truth, the ancient Mesoamerican civilization made no such prediction, and archaeological findings suggest that the Maya actually expected the world to continue to exist indefinitely. Their calendar, though, did come to the end of a major cycle in late 2012, leading to New Age misinterpretations about the end of days.

The End Of The Mayan Calendar?

The Maya were expert timekeepers and, like us, divided the passage of time into recurring periods. Rather than counting in neat centuries and millennia, though, the Mayan calendar consisted of two interlocking systems known as the Haab – which consisted of 365 days – and the 260-day Tzolkin. 

Making modern imperial units of measurement seem positively straightforward, the Mayan calendar tracked both of these timetables simultaneously until they finally aligned every 52 years. Scheduling events further ahead than this was therefore not possible, which is why the Maya also devised the so-called Long Count calendar.

Each Long Count consisted of 5,126 years and was split into 13 equal segments of roughly 394 years, known as Bak’tuns. The Maya began counting the previous Long Count on August 11, 3114 BCE, which means the 13th Bak’tun of that cycle was due to end on December 21, 2012.

As with our own timekeeping systems, the end of Long Count was immediately followed by the start of the next, and there is no indication in the archaeological record that the Maya expected time to grind to a halt when any given cycle came to a close.

However, in 1987, author Jose Arguelles published a book in which he wrongly interpreted the Mayan calendar as a countdown to the end of time, sparking a worldwide fascination with the Mayan apocalypse theory.

As the date approached, people in Russia became so worried about the forthcoming global extinction that the Minister of Emergency Situations had to issue a statement telling everyone to chill out. Meanwhile, authorities in the French village of Bugarach stepped in to stop crowds gathering on a mountain where some said an alien spacecraft would come to rescue them.

Yet while all of this nonsense was clearly rooted in a basic misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar, apocalyptophiles were given a shred of actual hope by the discovery of an ancient monument in southern Mexico.

The Tortuguero Prophecy

Dated to the seventh century CE, Tortuguero was a shrine or tomb dedicated to a local ruler called B’ahlam Ajaw in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. Excavations at the site revealed an inscription – known as Tortuguero Monument 6 – which contains a cryptic reference to Bak’tun 13.

The only significant reference to the end of the Long Count ever found, the text has never been fully interpreted, partly because some of the glyphs have faded. However, the remaining figures mention the return of Bolon Yokte, a Mayan god associated with war and creation.

In 1996, archaeologists David Stuart and Stephen Houston published a rough interpretation of the text, which they labeled ‘The Tortuguero Prophecy’. Though the pair never said the inscription predicted the end of the world, their work was unsurprisingly seized upon by peddlers of the Mayan apocalypse idea, fuelling the hysteria surrounding the 2012 finale.

When re-analyzing Tortuguero Monument 6 a few years later, both Stuart and Houston concluded that the inscription probably wasn’t referring to any event succeeding the end of the Long Count after all, but was simply documenting the dedication of the shrine on January 11, 669. The scribe, they say, identified the date by counting backward from the 13th Bak’tun.

The monument, therefore, does not describe the end of the world, but simply references the conclusion of the Long Cycle as a means of keeping track of time.

So What Did The Maya Believe?

The Maya fully expected a new Bak’tun to begin when the previous one came to an end. No judgement day, no planetary implosion, and certainly no alien rescuers are referenced in any of their surviving artifacts – and they had no doubt that the sun would rise as normal on December 22, 2012.

Luckily, researchers found definitive proof for the continuation of life as we know it just in time to put people’s minds at rest. In May 2012, archaeologists in Xultun, Guatemala, unearthed the oldest and most complete Mayan astronomical tables ever discovered. These calendars stretched at least 7,000 years into the future, indicating that the Maya didn’t simply stop counting at 2012.

Like all other Mayan timekeeping systems, the newly discovered calendars are likely to represent cycles that repeat ad infinitum. In other words, the ancient civilization that is most synonymous with apocalyptic predictions actually thought the world would never end.

Source

Men who consume colorful fruits and vegetables on a regular basis are less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer (PC), according to new research by University of South Australia scientists.

A rainbow of foods rich in certain micronutrients helps to prevent prostate cancer (PC) as well as speed up recovery among men who undergo radiation treatment for the disease.

The findings, from two studies published in the journal Cancers, highlight the importance of a Mediterranean or Asian diet that includes these foods.

Researchers compared micronutrient plasma concentrations of prostate cancer patients with a healthy control group, revealing low levels of lutein, lycopene, alpha-carotene, and selenium in PC patients and high levels of iron, sulfur, and calcium in the same group, relative to controls.

Increased DNA damage after radiation exposure was also associated with low lycopene and selenium in blood plasma.

Men with plasma concentrations lower than 0.25 micrograms (ug) per milliliter (mL) for lycopene and/or lower than 120ug/L for selenium have an increased risk of prostate cancer and are likely to be more sensitive to the damaging effects of radiation.

Foods that are rich in lycopene include tomatoes, melons, papayas, grapes, peaches, watermelons, and cranberries. Selenium-rich foods include white meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, and nuts.

Study co-author  Dr. Permal Deo says eating foods that are naturally rich in lycopene and selenium is preferable to taking supplements, where the benefits are limited, according to previous studies.

“Our recommendation is to adopt a Mediterranean diet enlisting the help of a dietician because people absorb nutrients in different ways, depending on the food, the digestive system, the person’s genotype, and possibly their microbiome,” Dr. Deo says.

Prostate cancer remains one of the most common and fatal cancers in men, but the nutritional deficiencies associated with it remain largely unknown, hence this study.

Other risk factors, such as ethnicity, family history, and age have previously been linked to prostate cancer.

“There is strong evidence that being overweight and tall increases the risk of prostate cancer. Diets high in dairy products and low in vitamin E may also increase the risk but the evidence is less clear.”

Vitamin E is found in plant-based oils, nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables.

The research is the first to evaluate plasma concentrations of micronutrients and trace elements with respect to prostate cancer in the South Australian population.

Source

A new study finds that houses within a half-mile of a utility-scale solar farm have resale prices that are, on average, 1.5 percent less than houses that are just a little farther away.

The research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory helps to refute some of the assertions of solar opponents who stoke resistance to projects with talk of huge drops in property values. But it also drives a hole through the argument made by people in the solar industry who say there is no clear connection between solar and a drop in values.

The authors analyzed 1.8 million home sales near solar farms in six states and found diminished property values in Minnesota (4 percent), North Carolina (5.8 percent), and New Jersey (5.6 percent). The three other states—California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts—had price changes that were within their margins of error, which means the price effects were too close to zero to be meaningful. The paper was published in the journal Energy Policy.

The authors accounted for differences in property features, inflation, and other factors in order to isolate the effect of proximity to solar.

Ben Hoen, a co-author and research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, said the numbers are clear but additional research is needed to understand what’s happening on the local level to lead to these price effects.

“We have a sense of the ‘what,’ but we don’t know the ‘why,’” he said.

For example, he doesn’t have a thorough explanation for why the price differences are higher in some states than others.

The researchers chose this group of states because they were, except for Connecticut, the top five in the country for the number of solar installations of at least 1 megawatt as of 2019. They included Connecticut because it is an example of a state with a high population density near solar projects.

Hoen emphasized that the results show a period in time, with transactions that occurred from 2003 to 2020, and may not reflect prices right now.

Also, he noted that the paper’s analysis doesn’t take into account any of the financial benefits of solar for landowners and communities, which may include payments from the developer and a decrease in local taxes.

The study is being released at a time of rapid expansion in the number and size of solar projects, which is a key part of the country’s push to reduce the emissions that contribute to climate change.

The scale of growth in solar development has been met with an intensifying resistance in local communities where some people argue that the projects are ugly and pose a threat to property values and human health. Solar opponents amplify these concerns on social media.

Of all the arguments against solar, the idea that it will hurt property values has been among the most potent, based on prior reporting by Inside Climate News about the local debates. At public hearings and in comments filed with regulators, some residents talk about how they fear reductions of 40 percent or more.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Source

I’VE NEVER HAD a lucid dream, but I’d love to start. Every night my eyes grow weary and my passive consciousness arrives in that ethereal realm without a lick of agency. I saw Inception in a theater forever ago and remain fascinated by the concept of dream control, despite its personal elusivity.

What, exactly, is lucid dreaming? The experience is a metacognitive state in which you become aware of your existence inside of a dream and sometimes grab the reins from Morpheus to control aspects of what transpires. 

Rafael Pelayo, a doctor and sleep medicine professor at Stanford University, says that as a teenager an unforgettable lucid dream ignited his initial fascination with sleep. “It's the kind of experience where, if you've ever had it happened to you, you know that it's true,” says Pelayo. “If you've never had it happen to you, you are very skeptical it could actually occur.” Multiple experts we interviewed described this state of lucidity as something many people can achieve with continued practice. 

Whether you’re trying to have your first lucid dream or attempting to increase their frequency, remember these tips the next time you show up nude to your high school reunion and desperately need something to cover up. (Hypothetically. It’s not as if this ever happened to me!)

Prior to controlling your dreams, you need to remember them. “You can think of it like building up a repertoire of skills that reinforce each other,” says Benjamin Baird, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin who focuses on human cognition. “At the base of that is training up your dream recall.” The first step toward dream recall is quite simple: Have a desire for it to happen.

When you’re all snuggled up under the covers, right before you doze off, focus your intentions on remembering any dreams that come your way overnight. When you wake up in the morning, instead of reaching for your smartphone to check for notifications, grab a pen and a pad of paper to capture the residual vapors of information still swirling around in your head from la-la land. “Have a routine of waking up and writing down whatever comes to mind,” says Rebecca Robbins, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a sleep scientist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. You don’t need to buy a fancy dream journal or write down anything in particular, you just need to stick to it. With repetition, you may begin to remember more of your dreams.

After you start a free-form dream journal, the next step is to look for peculiar patterns or overarching themes across your dreams. Are you battling giant squids in Times Square multiple times a month? Sprinting across the Pacific Ocean while a rabid Tom Brady chases you? Or maybe you spot a bunch of blue balloons, or blue iguanas, or indoor waterfalls. “When you recognize those common themes, it then gives you a specific target for your memory,” says Baird. Once you’re aware that an outlandish number of blue balloons appear in your dreams, the next time you see a blue balloon take a second to consider whether you’re in a dream. Can you pop it?

Stairs that go nowhere. A sinkhole in the living room floor. Lava pouring from the mouth of your lover. Even though it can be difficult to notice in the heat of the moment, dreams rarely follow the logic of reality. “We don't question the reality of these things, because the logical part of our brain is less active at that point,” says Pelayo. In addition to spotting dream patterns, use the reality-bending nature of the experience to your advantage. Try to openly acknowledge the experience as unreal whenever a dream starts to transgress against reality.

Still struggling to achieve lucidity inside your dreams? Baird recommends waking up an hour early in the morning, staying awake for 30 minutes, then falling right back to sleep. In the brief window you’re awake, spend that time writing in the dream journal and focusing on what you want to achieve. “After you go back to sleep, you're much more likely to have a lucid dream,” he says. “The reasons for that we don't totally understand, but we know that it’s effective.” Although it’s not ideal to mess with your sleep schedule in this manner often, the wake-up-and-back-to-bed trick may help you have a breakthrough moment if the other strategies are not fruitful.

For a more in-depth look at the techniques to induce lucid dreams, check out Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold. While the seminal work published decades ago may feel a little outdated, LaBerge was one of the first academics to fully explore lucid dreaming as a trainable skill, and he laid the groundwork for much of the contemporary research on the topic.

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ROUTINES, EVEN WHEN not fully followed, provide a guiding structure to the chaos of human life. I shower in the morning right after my cup of coffee. I sit at the same office desk every day, even though we technically have unassigned seating. I go on long, meandering walks around lunchtime. I sleep every single night. Always.

From bubble baths to pajama time, children often have a regular bedtime routine set by their parents in an effort to get the little balls of energy to wind down. “We do all this stuff so beautifully for our children,” says Rebecca Robbins, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a sleep scientist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “And then forget to do it for ourselves, as adults.” She’s right: Upon further examination, so many of the “routines” in my life are just habits unconsciously and unceremoniously formed over time.

Whether you’ve never given much thought to what you do before bed or you want to overhaul your entire routine, here are seven tips to help you achieve that perfect, tranquil end to a hectic day. 

Robbins recommends ritualizing the entire lead-up to bedtime. Maybe you drink hot tea, put on face lotion, and talk about events from the day with your partner in bed. Or maybe you do some stretching, followed by a quick bath and a cozy robe. Whatever the routine is, the repetitive nature is important. 

“Your body and brain then understand what comes after those activities is sleep,” she says. “So, we can kind of classically condition ourselves to understand that the end of our bedtime routine is the time for sleep.” Intentionality can shift what was a thoughtless habit into an impactful routine.

Evie Junior’s life has been defined by pain. He was born with sickle cell disease, which causes red blood cells to be sticky and C-shaped, not smooth and round. These cells are supposed to move freely through blood vessels, carrying oxygen to the body. But in people with this inherited form of anemia, they clump together and block blood flow. This triggers excruciating episodes known as pain crises, which can happen anywhere in the body and last for hours or even weeks. The disease damages organs over time and can cause strokes and early death. 

People with sickle cell are often fatigued because their red blood cells die fast, cutting off oxygen to the body. Strenuous exercise, sudden temperature changes, and dehydration can also trigger a pain crisis. Growing up in the Bronx, in New York City, Junior recalls getting winded easily and having to be careful when playing sports or swimming. The pain was so bad that he often missed school.

As an adult, it didn’t get easier. Sometimes he could ward off the pain with ibuprofen and get back to work the next day. But every few months, a severe crisis sent him to the hospital. Things got so bad that in 2019, he enrolled in a clinical trial at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has been testing a gene therapy to cure sickle cell. It involves genetically modifying patients’ blood-forming stem cells in the lab so that they can produce healthy red blood cells. The procedure is experimental. Junior knew there was a chance it wouldn’t work. “I felt like it was time for a Hail Mary,” he says. “My entire life up until that point was being sick.”

In July 2020, he received a one-time infusion of his own altered stem cells. Three months after the treatment, tests showed that 70 percent of his blood cells had the intended change—far above the threshold needed to eliminate symptoms. He hasn’t had a pain crisis since. He can do more outdoor activities, and he doesn’t have to worry about missing work. He plans to go skydiving soon—something he never would have dreamed of doing before. “My quality of life is so much better now,” he says.

Junior, who's now 30 years old, is one of dozens of sickle cell patients in the US and Europe who have received gene therapies in clinical trials—some led by universities, others by biotech companies. Two such therapies, one from Bluebird Bio and the other from Crispr Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, are the closest to coming to market. The companies are now seeking regulatory approval in the US and Europe. If successful, more patients could soon benefit from these therapies, although access and affordability could limit who gets them.

“I’m optimistic that this will be a game-changer for these patients,” says Cheryl Mensah, a hematologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who treats adults with sickle cell disease. “If more patients undergo curative therapies, especially at younger ages, there will be fewer adults who have chronic pain and fatigue.”

Sickle cell disease affects around 100,000 people in the US, and millions around the world. The vast majority are of African ancestry, but the disease also affects Hispanic people from Central and South America and those of Middle Eastern, Asian, Indian, and Mediterranean descent.

In the 1970s, few children with sickle cell disease survived to adulthood. Today, the average life expectancy is 54 years in the US, but that’s still 20 to 30 years less than most people. “This disease disrupts life significantly,” says Markus Mapara, professor of medicine and director of the Blood and Marrow Transplantation Program at Columbia University Medical Center, one of the sites of the Bluebird Bio trial.

The disease arises from a genetic mutation in the HBB gene, which makes hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen to organs. We all inherit two copies of the HBB gene—one from each parent—and people with sickle cell disease received a mutated copy from both. People who inherited the mutation from just one parent typically have no symptoms, since the other provided a healthy backup copy of the gene that produces normal blood cells. 

The genetic root of the disease was discovered in the 1950s, and as early as the 1960s, scientists started speculating that adding working copies of genes to patients’ cells could treat—or perhaps even cure—sickle cell and other genetic diseases. But first they had to solve the problem of how to shuttle genetic material into cells. In the 1970s, researchers realized they could use viruses to do this; by their nature, viruses are good at infecting cells. 

Then, in 1984, doctors inadvertently cured a child of sickle cell while trying to treat her for another disease: leukemia. They used a bone marrow transplant, also known as a stem cell transplant. The procedure involves extracting stem cells from a healthy donor’s marrow and infusing them into the recipient’s bloodstream. The stem cells migrate to the bone marrow, where they gradually form new, healthy blood cells. To this day, it remains the only FDA-approved cure for sickle cell disease, but it requires a full sibling donor with compatible bone marrow, and only about 20 percent of patients have one. It’s also risky. A transplant can cause infection or graft-versus-host disease, a condition in which the donor stem cells attack the recipient’s organs and tissues.

In the intervening decades, researchers kept chipping away at gene therapy. They tried different ways of modifying the hemoglobin gene, and used different engineered viruses, known as viral vectors, to sneak it into cells. “No one knew what was going to work,” says Donald Kohn, a physician and professor of microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics and pediatrics at UCLA, who developed the treatment Junior received. Early versions of gene therapy didn’t work because the new gene often didn’t make its way into enough stem cells. 

But a breakthrough came in 2001, when a team from Harvard and MIT reported that they cured a mouse using gene therapy. It would take another 16 years for gene therapy to do the same for a person.

Today, a handful of these therapies have reached human clinical trials. Both UCLA’s and Bluebird Bio’s approaches add a modified version of the HBB gene to patients’ own stem cells. The altered cells are then infused back into the patient, like in a bone marrow transplant, so they can take up residence and start making normal hemoglobin.

UCLA researchers have so far treated three patients, including Junior. In the two other patients, not enough corrected cells took hold to eliminate pain crises. The team plans to treat a fourth patient this summer with a modified protocol. “It is our hope that these changes will improve the condition of the patients’ cells at the time they are collected, increase the amount of vector that gets into the cells, and thus increase the amount of corrected cells the patients receive,” Kohn says.

Bluebird Bio, which plans to file for FDA approval this month, showed that its gene therapy produced normal red blood in all 35 patients who were treated in a clinical trial. It also eliminated pain episodes in all 25 of those who could be evaluated. The results appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in December 2021. “It is quite amazing to see how quickly patients’ hemoglobin numbers come up after gene therapy,” says Mapara, a study author.

Another therapy, developed by Crispr Therapeutics in partnership with Vertex Pharmaceuticals, uses the gene-editing tool Crispr to directly alter patients’ stem cells so that they produce healthy hemoglobin. In trial results announced in June 2022, all 31 patients reported becoming free of pain crises after receiving a single dose of edited cells. The companies have filed for approval in Europe and plan to do so in the US by the end of March.

Even with such clear-cut findings, the decision to undergo gene therapy may not be an easy one for patients. Although it’s a one-time infusion, it is also a complex and lengthy process. Patients must first take a drug to release stem cells from their bone marrow, allowing them to migrate into the blood. Doctors then use a machine to remove the blood and separate out the needed stem cells, which are sent off to be modified in a lab. In the meantime, patients undergo harsh chemotherapy to eliminate their remaining stem cells and make space for the newly modified ones. Chemotherapy depletes the immune system, and can cause hair loss, fatigue, and trouble swallowing. It can also affect fertility. 

If gene therapy is eventually approved for children, it could create difficult choices for parents, since there are limited fertility preservation options for kids. “For many of our families, that’s a line in the sand for them,” said Alexis Thompson, chief of hematology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, speaking at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing in London on March 6.

The recovery process is also long. Patients must spend about a month in the hospital while their body produces new blood cells. When they’re discharged, they can’t go back to work for about three months, Mapara says. For Junior, the lengthy hospital stay was the hardest part. “Mentally, it was a struggle,” he says. He also experienced post-chemo fogginess and memory issues. Scientists are working on drugs that could wipe out bone marrow without the side effects of chemo, but that research is in early stages.

Gene therapy also carries inherent risks. With the gene addition approach that Bluebird Bio and UCLA are using, the viral vectors tend to insert randomly in the genome, and there’s a longstanding concern that inserted genetic material could accidentally activate a nearby cancer gene, spurring disease. (Bluebird’s trial was temporarily halted by the FDA in February 2021 when two patients developed cancer, but the company determined that the cases were not related to the therapy.)

And while the curative potential of gene therapy is huge, it comes at a steep price. Last year, CSL Behring won FDA approval for a gene therapy to treat beta thalassemia, a related blood disorder. Called Hemgenix, it’s the most expensive drug in the world at $3.5 million for a one-time infusion. Other gene therapies have debuted at more than $2 million. 

In the US, about two-thirds of sickle cell patients are covered under Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for people with limited incomes. But Medicaid budgets are different from state to state and vary in what they cover. And while private insurance covers other gene therapies, patients with those plans may face high deductibles, co-pays, or other medical costs. 

If both the Bluebird Bio and Crispr therapies are approved, competition could help drive down prices. And more options may be close behind. Beam Therapeutics is enrolling patients in a trial using a more precise version of Crispr called base editing to alter blood cells. 

“In the sickle cell world, we’re very happy to see that these therapies are coming soon,” says Melissa Creary, an assistant professor of health and policy at the University of Michigan. “But even when it comes to market, it’s not going to be everywhere right away.” That’s because of the complexities of administering the therapy, which can be done only at bone marrow transplant centers. In a February financial update, Stuart Arbuckle, Vertex’s chief operating officer, said the companies plan to offer their Crispr therapy at 50 centers in the US and 25 in Europe. 

Creary, who has sickle cell, also worries that many patients may not be able to access the therapy because they can’t travel or take time off work, or don’t have financial or family support for the long recovery period.

One of gene therapy’s biggest unknowns is whether a single infusion will truly be a lifelong cure. Trials haven’t followed patients for a long enough time to show whether sickle-shaped blood cells eventually come back. Junior tries not to think about this possibility, although any hint of pain makes him anxious that a crisis may be coming on. Researchers will follow him for 15 years after his initial treatment to learn whether the therapy is still working. So far, so good.

Still, he has complicated feelings about the word cure. “I still have all the scars of sickle cell,” he says. Gene therapy didn't erase the emotional toll of living with the disease, or the bone and joint damage it had caused. That said, he hopes more people will get the same opportunity he’s had: “It would mean that they would have the right to a normal life, where nothing was off the table.”

A Gene Therapy Cure for Sickle Cell Is on the Horizon

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By switching the dielectric constant of a metamaterial, physicists have time-reflected electromagnetic waves being carried within it. The didn’t turn back time Cher-style, but the signal carried by the waves underwent both a reversal in order and frequency lengthening. Besides confirming a possibility theoreticians have been toying with for 60 years, the work could allow greater control over the way waves and matter interact. It could prove useful in photonics, the quest to replace electricity in information technology with light, allowing for an astonishing increase in speed.

Ordinary wave reflection off a suitable boundary is a familiar part of life. We witness it every day when we look in the mirror, hear it in echoes, and can watch ocean waves bounce off a breakwater if we want to see the process on a more graspable scale.

Time reflections, also known as temporal reflections, are something different, requiring an abrupt shift not just in the wave, but in the medium through which it is traveling. As occurred so often in the mid-20th century, theoretical physicists ran ahead of their experimental counterparts, discussing the workings of the phenomenon before it had been observed. In Nature Physics, a team at City University of New York announce they have caught up.

Time reflections produce a shift in frequency, which is relatively easy to understand, and a wave reversal in time, which is not. The first involves something like the Doppler shift, where wavelengths are stretched or contracted, most familiar in the redshift seen from distant galaxies. Light that is blue before the reflection becomes yellow, green light becomes red, and so on. Harder to get one’s head around is the way the end of a signal is reflected first, so that we hear the signal backwards, like old-style conspiracy theorists who thought they could detect satanic messages by spinning rock records the wrong way.

The phenomenon of time reflection is associated with time crystals, whose atoms form patterns that repeat in time as ordinary crystals do in space. The surprising discovery of examples of these objects has raised interest in related concepts. However, time reflection requires the properties of the medium to change at more than twice the frequency of the wave. The exceptionally high frequencies of visible light, let alone anything in the UV or X-ray part of the spectrum, make this a challenge, although it has been demonstrated in water waves.

"The key roadblock that prevented time reflections in previous studies was the belief that it would require large amounts of energy to create a temporal interface," said Dr Gengyu Xu in a statement. "It is very difficult to change the properties of a medium quick enough, uniformly, and with enough contrast to time reflect electromagnetic signals because they oscillate very fast.”

In a spatial reflection (a) we see our face reversed left to right. In a temporal reflection (b) we would see the back of our head because the wave order is reversed, and the colors would be changed thanks to frequency shifting. (C) Schematic of the experimental set up, with a control signal changing the medium through which a wave passes fast enough to induce time reflection. Image credit: Andrea Alu

The team turned to metamaterials, substances with properties never seen in nature.

“Our idea was to avoid changing the properties of the host material, and instead create a metamaterial in which additional elements can be abruptly added or subtracted through fast switches," Xu said. 

The team confirmed their achievement by combining time-reflected and time-refracted versions of the same signal and observing the interference. 

The study is published in Nature Physics. 

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It looks like it’s all over for the exceptional “triple-dip” La Niña weather event that cooled the Pacific Ocean and shaped the Earth’s weather for the past three years. However, scientists have already warned that an El Niño warming phase could be brewing. If true, then it could have some worrying implications for the warming of the planet. 

On March 14, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology announced that international climate models suggest the El Niño–Southern Oscillation is currently neutral following three years of La Niña conditions. 

They added that they are already shifting straight to a so-called El Niño WATCH, as the odds of El Niño conditions emerging later in 2023 is over 50 percent. 

If this prediction is on point, then El Niño has the potential to drive heat waves and push the global temperature even higher than in the past few years. 

A strong El Niño can add up to 0.2°C (0.36°F) to the average temperature of the Earth. Since the planet has already warmed by around 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels, El Niño could raise the global average temperature over the much-hyped 1.5°C (2.7°F) threshold, which would mark a depressing milestone in the planet’s climate crisis. 

As ever though, nothing is certain. 

"The 3-year La Niña event has come to an end, but it’s not clear yet what comes next,” Dr Nandini Ramesh, Senior Research Scientist in Natural Hazards at CSIRO and the University of Sydney, said in a statement. 

“Predicting how the Pacific Ocean and atmosphere will evolve from this time of year (March-May) is notoriously difficult [...] So while most forecast models now predict an upcoming El Niño, I wouldn’t place any bets just yet," she added.

This is how La Niña affects weather in North America. Image credit: NOAA

What is La Niña and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation?

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a complex cycle that describes how a pattern of temperature fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean has a global impact – from wind, temperature, and rainfall patterns to the intensity of hurricane seasons, and even the distribution of fish in the seas. 

The cycle flips between El Niño and La Niña phases every few years, with neutral phases in between. 

During El Niño, ocean water becomes warm around the central Pacific, resulting in a knock-on effect across the world. The warmer waters cause the Pacific jet stream to move south and extend, causing drier and warmer weather to hit northern parts of the US and Canada, but wetter weather in southern states. 

Over in the Atlantic Ocean, El Niño actually weakens hurricane seasons, while strengthening hurricane activity in the central and eastern Pacific basins. 

La Niña is the other side of the coin, and describes the Pacific’s cooling phase, which also has a far-reaching impact on the world’s climate. 

So, What's A “Triple-Dip” La Niña?

The past three years have been particularly unusual, as the world has been in the midst of a rare “triple-dip” La Niña that’s persisted since around September 2020.

One of the most significant impacts of this “triple-dip” La Niña has been seen in the Atlantic coast of the Americas, which saw a record-breaking hurricane season in 2020 and the third most active hurricane season in 2021.

The wild hurricane seasons have a link to La Niña, as it removes the conditions that suppress storm formation seen in El Niño, and hurricanes are encouraged to form. 

Man kayaking along the flooded streets of Brisbane, Australia - February 28, 2022. Image credit: Alex Cimbal/Shutterstock.com

On the other side of the world, the lingering La Niña impacted Australia, which was hit by freakishly wet weather in 2022 and subsequent flooding. 

"The Bureau’s declaration that La Niña has ended heralds the official end of the ‘big wet’, a rare triple-dip La Niña that was only the fourth since 1900 and the first in 22 years,” explained Dr Tom Mortlock, a Senior Analyst at Aon and Adjunct Fellow at the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre.

“This period saw Sydney’s wettest year on record, and led to what turned out to be Australia’s largest insured loss event ever in the February – March NSW and QLD floods. Current insurance industry reported losses for this event sit at AUD 5.76 bn, which now surpass the 1999 Sydney hailstorm (AUD 5.57 bn) as Australia’s largest,” he added.

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Many psychological studies rely on participants to give up their time to take part in experiments or complete questionnaires. They take part because they get paid or because they are required to as part of their university course. But, beyond this, not much is known about what motivates people to take part in these studies.

Some participants may be looking for help – perhaps seeking a diagnosis for a mental health issue they’re struggling with. A team of researchers in Poland theorised that taking part in a psychological study might be “perceived as a cheap substitute or alternative to acquire some professional help”. To this end, they set out to discover if participants in psychological studies were more likely to have a personality disorder or be experiencing depression or anxiety.

Their results are published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

“Researchers often take for granted that the way they advertise their studies and who they recruit do not appreciably affect their outcomes,” the study authors write. “In our studies, we have shown that those who have more personality pathologies are more drawn to studies where they can express their trauma and may be simply more likely to volunteer for studies.”

Izabela Kaźmierczak and colleagues at Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, Poland, conducted several studies, involving 947 participants in total (62% of whom were women), comparing people who had previously taken part in psychology studies with those who had never taken part in such studies.

They found that participants who had previously taken part in studies exhibited symptoms found in those with personality disorders, depression or anxiety. There are many different types of personality disorder – including borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder – but, in short, a person with a personality disorder thinks, feels, behaves or relates to others differently from those without it. They may, for instance, blame people for things, or behave aggressively and unpredictably.

Why it matters

What this new study has revealed is a potentially worrying issue of self-selection. Since participants in research choose which studies to take part in, the results of the research may be unduly influenced by a large number of participants of a particular type taking part. Study bias is a serious issue.

Like many other scientific disciplines, psychology research is designed and carried out mainly in universities. Unlike many disciplines, though, psychology requires human participation and, as such, students form a handy subject pool from which to draw. This has led many in the field to wonder how research carried out on predominantly 18 to 22-year-old western students can provide findings that are in any way relevant to any population other than 18 to 24-year-old western students.

Research needs to be valid, and if we cannot claim that our findings relate to the wider population (so-called “generalisability”) we have a serious issue. What this new study shows is that our findings may well be influenced by the psychological nature of the very people we are testing.

We cannot, however, control the students who give their time to sit through our procedures. For instance, we cannot provide instructions on recruitment posters that say: “Those with symptoms of personality disorders need not apply.” But we can and must be more careful in how we select our participants.

What we need to do is carry out research with large enough numbers of people, work that can be repeated, that can allow us to be more confident that our findings have relevance off campus.

Bumpy road

All sciences have their bumpy roads to travel, and psychology has certainly been travelling on one in recent years. Experiments that were once deemed to be groundbreaking, have failed to produce the same results when they were repeated by other psychologists. This is known as the “replication crisis” or “reproducibility crisis”.

The reproducibility crisis in science explained.

And the shockwaves caused by the scientific treason of Diederik Stapel, a Dutch psychologist who invented his data and even fabricated entire experiments, are still being felt. Psychology’s reputation has certainly taken a battering.

But psychologists are working carefully on developing transparency and techniques we hope will help us regain the faith of the wider scientific community. What this latest paper has shown is that the participants themselves may well be self-selecting – and, as a result, our findings may again be called into question. We may think we are drawing from as general a population as possible to make the results generalisable to the wider population, but that may not be the case.

This finding will set alarm bells ringing in those working to develop the reliability and reputation of psychology. It needs to be taken seriously.

The results tell us more formally something we should have already known. Those of us involved in psychological research involving participants drawn largely from a pool of psychology students need to be very careful in our recruitment strategies. We might, for instance, need to take care to design research that may not be influenced by the personality or mood of the participant, or we may need to assess the participants taking part in our research. For example, the authors of this latest study suggest winnowing out participants who have taken part in previous psychology studies.

Most importantly, we need to be very careful in the grand claims we make after we publish how our “groundbreaking” research relates to the wider population we look to be investigating. Such a claim may not, it seems, stand up to scrutiny.

Nigel Holt, Professor of Psychology, Aberystwyth University

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

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