Underwater archaeology can be a grueling job, but magnetometry data can make it much easier. Image credit: Vittorio Bruno/Shutterstock.com

Magnetic fields are promising to be a useful tool in the hunt for human settlements that have been lost to the sea off the coast of the UK. An upcoming project is set to use magnetometry data to scour Doggerland, the flooded chunk of land that connected Britain to mainland Europe until the end of the ice age, but there's hope this technique could be used to find long-lost civilizations all over the world.

The study comes from the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences at the University of Bradford in the UK. Their plan is to closely look at magnetometry data gathered from a portion of the North Sea and attempt to identify any strange anomalies that could suggest the presence of archaeological structures. 

The team is especially keen to use these techniques to look for traces of human activity beneath the North Sea since it's thought to have been home to some of the largest prehistoric settlements in Europe.  

Before it was flooded over 8,000 years ago, Doggerland was a rich and diverse habitat that likely attracted prehistoric humans – and others. Dredging of the North Sea has revealed an array of archaeological discoveries, including the remains of a mammoth, red deer antlers, hunting weapons, stone tools, and even the skull of a Neanderthal. 

Map showing the hypothetical extent of Doggerland (c. 10,000 BCE), which connected Great Britain and continental Europe. Image credit: Max Naylor via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Despite its potential that lays beneath the North Sea, we know relatively little about the people and culture that once thrived here. 

"As the area we are studying used to be above sea level, there's a small chance this analysis could even reveal evidence for hunter-gatherer activity. That would be the pinnacle,” Ben Urmston, PhD student at the University of Bradford, said in a statement. 

"We might also discover the presence of middens, which are rubbish dumps that consist of animal bone, mollusc shells and other biological material, that can tell us a lot about how people lived,” he added. 

Time is ticking. The expansion of wind farms in the North Sea is helping wean Europe off fossil fuels, but it also has the potential to disrupt prehistoric sites that have yet to be found.

“Exploring the submerged landscapes beneath the North Sea represents one of the last great challenges to archaeology.  Achieving this is becoming even more urgent with the rapid development of the North Sea for renewable energy,” added Professor Vince Gaffney, academic lead for the project.

Remarkably little of the world’s oceans have been explored, let alone for the purposes of archaeology. Nevertheless, advances in technology are continuing to show that the coastlines are hiding countless traces of ancient human activity, even evidence of long-lost civilizations.

Thanks to projects like the one at the University of Bradford, as well as many others, the future of marine archaeology is looking promising. Just don’t expect to stumble across the sunken city of Atlantis anytime soon.

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In this photo illustration, insulin pens manufactured by Novo Nordisk are displayed on March 14, 2023, in Miami, Florida.

Getty | Joe Raedle

 

Heavyweight insulin maker Novo Nordisk said Tuesday that it will lower list prices for some of its insulin products by up to 75 percent by the end of the year, following in the footsteps of Eli Lilly, which made a similar announcement at the start of the month. Experts expect the third top insulin maker in the US, Sanofi, will follow suit.

 

The price cuts come after years of escalating public backlash to the companies' steep price hikes on insulin, which many advocates have described as price gouging. An analysis from 2018 found that insulin list prices were set five- to ten-times higher in the US than in other high-income countries, with average standardized units of insulin going for nearly $100. The cost of producing the products, even the newer insulins, generally falls under $10.

 

In its announcement Tuesday, Novo Nordisk said that it will cut the prices of several products, including Levemir, Novolin, NovoLog, and NovoLog Mix 70/30. With the 75 percent cut, a 10mL vial of NovoLog will drop from $289.36 to $72.34. A NovoLog Mix 70/30 FlexPen will drop from $558.83 to $139.71.

 

Amid public outrage over the prices, lawmakers have also been working on ways to force prices down. The companies' voluntary price cuts closely track a federal price cap that went into effect this year via the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The law limits out-of-pocket insulin costs to $35 per month for Medicare Part D beneficiaries. When Eli Lilly slashed its prices earlier this month, it also announced programs that cap monthly insulin costs to $35 for people with commercial insurance as well as the uninsured. Novo Nordisk did not offer such a cap in its announcement today, though it noted a hodgepodge of deals and programs.

 

But, while the price cuts may seem linked to last year's Inflation Reduction Act, health policy experts and lawmakers note that a slightly older law may be the real impetus behind the dramatic cuts—the American Rescue Plan of 2021. The law contained a number of provisions to improve healthcare access and affordability, including one that eliminates a cap on rebates that drug companies are required to pay Medicaid. If the cap was lifted with insulin list prices set as they are now, insulin makers might have had to pay Medicaid programs more than the price of their insulin products every time a Medicaid program had to cover one, likely totaling tens of millions of dollars in payments to Medicaid. But, with the lower list prices, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk will dodge those extra payments. The rebate cap is set to lift January 1, 2024—which is also when the companies' price cuts will fully kick in.

 

The rebate program cap is a little complicated, so here's a breakdown of how it works. It all stems from the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program (MDRP), passed by Congress under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990. The straightforward goal of the MDRP was to make sure that Medicaid paid the lowest or best possible price for prescription drugs. As such, drug makers who want their drugs covered by Medicaid have to enter into a rebate agreement, under which Medicaid agrees to cover and purchase their products as long as the drug makers pay them back a rebate to keep costs as low as possible. The cost of the rebate is based on a set of formulas that consider things like the type of drug—brand or generic—and market prices.

Cold calculations

For a brand drug, the basic rebate that a drug maker will pay Medicaid is 23.1 percent of the average manufacturer price or the difference between the average price and the best (lowest) price, whichever is higher. In an example laid out by the federal Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), if a brand drug has an average manufacturer price of $100, and the best market price is $88, the drug maker will pay the standard percentage, equaling $23.10, for the basic rebate. But, if the average price is $100 and the best price is $70, the basic rebate would be $30.

 

There's one more key element to the rebate calculation, though: inflation. If a drug maker raises its prices faster than inflation, then the drug maker has to also pay back the difference between the current average price and the price the drug would have been if price increases had simply matched inflation. This is calculated based on a "baseline" average manufacturer price—which is whatever the drug's average price was right before the rebate program started, or, for new drugs, the drug's initial average manufacturer price. With that baseline price, Medicaid programs calculate what a current price would be based on general inflation, i.e. the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). Then, Medicaid subtracts the baseline-trended price from the current average price and drug makers pay the difference on top of the basic rebate—but, only to a point.

 

Under current law, the rebate was capped at the current average price. That is, drug makers wouldn't be required to pay a rebate that exceeded 100 percent of their drug's average manufacturer price. But, with drug prices skyrocketing well past inflation, that meant a lot of money was left on the table. A federal analysis of drug rebates in 2012, for instance, found that 54 percent of brand drug rebates were from the inflationary component. And in 2019, the rebate cap allowed drug makers to avoid paying a whopping $3 billion in rebates, according to a Congressional budget office estimate.

 

Based on the current prices for insulin, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would easily end up paying Medicaid rebates that exceed the average manufacturer price of their drugs, thanks to the companies' steep price increases that blew past rates of inflation over the years. For instance, Sean Dickson, a drug-pricing expert at the nonprofit West Health Policy Center, told Politico that Medicaid would have ended up generating an estimated $150 in revenue for every vial of Humalog it covered, amounting to about $140 million in annual Medicaid payments from Eli Lilly.

 

With the list prices now set to fall, Medicaid may end up paying more than it did before for insulin products, though it's unclear by how much.

 

Here’s why slashing insulin prices will actually save Big Pharma money

War is a lucrative business, which also means that mistakes can be costly. One of the priciest screw-ups in recent military history comes from the US army, which reportedly wasted heaps of dollars developing a stylish-looking new camouflage, only to discover it didn’t effectively hide their soldiers. 

The Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP) was designed in 2004, taking “inspiration” from the pixelated pattern from the computer-generated camouflage of the Canadian Armed Forces (called CADPAT). 

Using grey, beige, and green square pixels, the idea was that the pattern hid people in all warfare environments, whether it be urban streets, forests, or deserts. Since the US was currently at war with Iraq and Afghanistan, it was especially important that it concealed soldiers in harsh, arid environments. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t. While the digital camo excelled through lab tests and selection processes, there’s no evidence that the UCP had ever undergone field testing before it was rolled out in 2004/2005. 

US soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan quickly started to question the effectiveness of the UCP, arguing that the new camouflage was actually making them stand out against their enemies. 

A sample of material with Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP). Image credit: Doubleailes via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

It turned out, the design failed to consider an optical effect known as "isoluminance".

If human eyes are shown visual stimuli from a distance that have sharp variations in colour without any contrasts in lightness – such as a pixelated pattern made of just three different colors – then we tend to just perceive the patterns as a single mass. In other words, from a distance, the pixels just blurred into a single blob that stuck out against the surrounding environment.

As the War in Afghanistan stumbled along, criticism towards UCP mounted. In 2012, a government watchdog reportedly issued “a scathing report” against the pixel camo, arguing it put troops at risk and had potentially wasted $5 billion of taxpayers' money. 

By 2014, the US Army announced it was discontinuing the UCP, replacing it with the new Operational Camouflage Pattern by the end of September 2019. Unlike the UCP, the updated Operational Camouflage Pattern was part of a “family” of camouflage with different color palettes, including a dark variant for jungle-woodland environments and a lighter pattern for arid climates.

The moral of the story: the digital-print camo might have looked slick, but its promise of being a “universal” uniform was overstretched. 

This wasn’t the only costly uniform blunder that occurred during the years of the Afghanistan War, however. As part of their effort to train up Afghanistan’s security forces after invading the country, the US reportedly overspent $28 million on the new uniforms of the Afghan National Army.

The reason for the waste of money was that the Afghan minister of defense, Abdul Rahim Wardak, picked a forested camouflage without acknowledging that Afghanistan is pretty damn dry. 

“They picked the pattern based on a fashion preference, not by experts,” said John F Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

“That was a dumb decision.”

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“Face blindness” could be the latest addition to the already long list of long COVID symptoms, new research has suggested. The study is very small and has its limitations, but it seems that for some people, COVID-19 infection may result in difficulty recognizing faces, as well as possibly navigational problems.

COVID has previously been linked to a multitude of neurological symptoms, such as “brain fog” and the loss of smell and taste. Now, for the first time, face blindness, or prosopagnosia, has been associated with COVID infection.

Researchers from Dartmouth College outline the case of Annie, a 28-year-old who was diagnosed with COVID in March 2020. Following a relapse of symptoms two months later, Annie reported experiencing difficulty recognizing faces, including those of her family, and issues with navigation.

Meeting her parents for the first time after having COVID, she walked right past them. When her father called out to her, “It was as if my dad's voice came out of a stranger's face," she recounted in a statement. Annie now relies on voices in order to recognize people that she knows.

As well as face recognition, her navigational abilities are also much worse than before she became ill, which the authors say, is often seen following brain trauma.

“The combination of prosopagnosia and navigational deficits that Annie had is something that caught our attention because the two deficits often go hand in hand after somebody either has had brain damage or developmental deficits,” said senior author Brad Duchaine. 

“That co-occurrence is probably due to the two abilities depending on neighboring brain regions in the temporal lobe.”

In a series of tests designed to establish the severity of her facial recognition issues, it became clear that Annie had particular difficulty recognizing familiar faces and learning the identities of unfamiliar ones. 

For the first test, Annie was shown 60 images of celebrity faces and asked to name them, before being given a list of the celebrities to see if she did in fact know them. Annie correctly identified 29 percent of the 48 celebrities she was familiar with, compared to controls, who could identify almost 84 percent of familiar celebrities.

In another test, when told a celebrity's name and presented with an image of them alongside an image of a doppelganger, Annie identified that correct face 69 percent of the time, compared to 87 percent in the control group.

Annie also struggled to learn and then recognize a previously unfamiliar face in a third test.

“Our results from the test with unfamiliar faces show that it wasn’t just that Annie couldn’t recall the name or biographical information of a famous person that she was familiar with, but she really has trouble learning new identities,” said lead author Marie-Luise Kieseler.

Annie’s test scores were normal for face detection, face identity perception, and object recognition, suggesting that her problems recognizing faces may be due to face memory deficits.

To see if prosopagnosia following COVID has been experienced by others, the team obtained self-reported data from 54 people who had long COVID symptoms for 12 weeks or more, and 32 people who had reported that they had fully recovered from the infection.

“One of the challenges that many respondents reported was a difficulty with visualizing family and friends, which is something that we often hear from prosopagnosics,” said Duchaine.

While the small sample size and self-reporting of symptoms do limit the findings, the study still highlights the need for future research into potential perceptual problems associated with COVID-19.

“As far as we know, nobody's measured the sorts of high level, visual processing abilities that are affected by COVID-19 that we focused on here in this paper,” Duchaine concluded. “If it's happening in the visual system, it’s likely that selective deficits due to problems in other brain areas are occurring in some people as well.”

The study is published in Cortex.

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As clocks march ahead and daylight saving time begins, there can be anxiety around losing an hour of sleep and how to adjust to this change.

Usually an hour seems like an insignificant amount of time, but even this minimal loss can cause problems. There can be significant health repercussions of this forcible shift in the body clock.

Springing forward is usually harder than falling backward. Why?

The natural internal body clock rhythm in people tends to be slightly longer than 24 hours, which means that every day we tend to delay our sleep schedules. Thus, “springing forward” goes against the body’s natural rhythm. It is similar to a mild case of jet lag caused by traveling east – in which you lose time and have trouble falling asleep at an earlier hour that night.

Even though it’s technically just one hour lost due to the time change, the amount of sleep deprivation due to disrupted sleep rhythm lasts for many days and often throws people off schedule, leading to cumulative sleep loss.

We lead a sleep evaluation center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and regularly see patients who are dealing with sleep loss and internal clocks that are not synchronized with external time. Our experience has shown us that it’s important to prepare, as much as possible, for the time shift that occurs every spring.

Sleep loss from springing forward has been associated with not only sleepiness at work but also an increase in work accidents. Image Credit: fizkes/Shutterstock.com

Consequences of sleep loss vary

Many studies have demonstrated that there is an increased risk of heart attack, stroke and high blood pressure associated with sleep deprivation. Workplace injuries increase and so do automobile accidents. Adolescents often find it harder to wake up in time to get to school and may have difficulties with attention and school performance or worsening of mental health problems.

Is there something to be done to help to deal with this loss of sleep and change of body clock timing?

Of course. The first step is increasing awareness and using the power of knowledge to combat this issue. Here are some quick tips to prepare yourself for the upcoming weekend.

1. Do not start with a “sleep debt.” Ensure that you and, if you’re a parent, your child get adequate sleep on a regular basis leading up to the time change each year. Most adults need anywhere from seven to nine hours of sleep daily to perform adequately. Children have varying requirements for sleep depending on their age.

2. Prepare for the time change. Going to bed – and for parents, putting your kids to bed – 15 to 20 minutes earlier each night in the week preceding the time change is ideal. Having an earlier wake time can help you get to sleep earlier. Try to wake up an hour earlier than is customary on Saturday, the day before the time change. If you have not been able to make any changes to your sleep schedule in advance, then keep a very consistent wake time on weekdays as well as weekends to adjust to the time change more easily.

3. Use light to your advantage. Light is the strongest cue for adjusting the internal body clock. Expose yourself to bright light upon waking as you start getting up earlier in the week before daylight saving time. If you live in a place where natural light is limited in the morning after clocks change, use bright artificial light to signal your body clock to wake up earlier. As the season progresses, this will be less of an issue as the sun rises earlier in the day.

4. At night, minimize exposure to bright light and especially the blue light emitted by the screens of electronic media. This light can shift your body rhythm and signal your internal clock to wake up later the next day. If your devices permit, set their screens to dim and emit less blue light in the evening.

5. In some geographic locations, it might be helpful to have room-darkening curtains at bedtime depending on how much sunlight your room gets at bedtime. Be sure to open the curtains in the morning to allow the natural morning light to set your sleep-wake cycle.

6. Carefully plan your day and evening activities. The night before the time change, set yourself up for a good night’s sleep by incorporating relaxing activities that can help you wind down, such as reading a book or meditating.

7. Incorporate exercise in the morning or early in the day. Take a walk, even if it is just around the house or your office during the day.

8. Consider starting with a protein-heavy breakfast, since sleep deprivation can increase appetite and craving for high-carbohydrate foods and sugars.

9. Stop using caffeine after noon. Use of caffeine too late in the day can lead to trouble falling asleep and even disrupted sleep.

10. Adults, decline that wine at bedtime. Wine and other kinds of alcohol can also disturb sleep.

11. If you’re a parent or caregiver, try to be patient with your kids as they adjust to the new times. Sleep deprivation affects the entire family, and some kids have a harder time adjusting to the time change than others. You may notice more frequent meltdowns, irritability and loss of attention and focus. Set aside more quiet, electronic media-free time in the evening. Consider a brief 20-minute nap in the early afternoon for younger children who are having a difficult time dealing with this change.

[Over 150,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Prioritizing sleep pays off in the short term and over the years. A good night’s sleep is a necessary ingredient for a productive and fulfilling day all year long.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 7, 2019.

Deepa Burman, Co-Director Pediatric Sleep Evaluation Center and Associate Professor of Pediatrics, University of Pittsburgh and Hiren Muzumdar, Director of the Pediatric Sleep Evaluation Center, UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh

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

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The Texas Department of State Health Services has launched a search after a camera containing radioactive material went missing in the Houston area. 

According to the department, the camera went missing on March 9, 2023, with the last confirmed location being 4040 Little York Road in Houston. The Statewide Maintenance Company lost the camera, which is commonly used in construction to produce radiographic images, which are then used to detect flaws not visible to the naked eye.

Texas has not released information about the type of radioactive source inside the camera, though producers of radiography equipment Source Production & Equipment Co. advertise that it can use iridium-192 or selenium-75. The product uses depleted uranium (DU) as a shield. Depleted uranium – a less radioactive version of naturally occurring uranium – is often used as shield against radiation from X- or gamma rays, due to its high density. 

"This type of radioactive source is called a 'sealed source' because the radioactive material is sealed inside a capsule, which is in turn sealed inside the camera with protective shielding and other safety features," the Department of State Health Services say in their press release.  

"The outside of the camera has radiation markings. Levels of radiation outside the camera, itself, are not dangerous."

The only way the camera could pose a threat to the public is if the camera were dismantled and the radioactive material removed its housing. At that point,  "it’s pretty dangerous pretty quickly", said department spokesperson Lara Anton, according to The New York Times.

So far the authorities have searched a five mile radius using radiation-sensitive equipment that can detect a radioactive source from about 15.24 meters (50 feet). The camera was reportedly found to be missing when workers returned from lunch at a fast food restaurant.

Statewide Maintenance Company are offering a reward for the return of the camera. 

Just last month, a tiny radioactive capsule was lost on a highway in Australia, before – by some miracle – being found a few days later.

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Disney have demonstrated a retractable lightsaber at tech, film, and music festival South by Southwest (SXSW). Videos from the talk show Chairperson of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Josh D'Amaro fire up and then retract the device in front of the crowd.

“I have the coolest job in the world,” D’Amaro told the audience, adding “I’m holding a real lightsaber.”

Several Twitter users pointed to a patent presumed to be for this version of the device, filed by Disney. According to the patent, the "sword device with retractable, internally illuminated blade" uses motors to unroll a "blade" filled with a strip of flexible lights hidden within its handle.

"The device includes two long plastic semi-cylinders, and these two blade body members are rolled perpendicular to their length, which creates compact cylinders of material of small volume that can be provided on a pair of spools in a hilt," the patent explains, alongside designs for the device. 

"To extend the blade, a motor provided in the hilt unrolls the blade body members from the spools. Each blade body member passes through a blade forming guideway that nests the semi-cylindrical blade body members together as they leave the hilt. To retract the blade, the process is reversed."

The lightsaber is used in shows at Disney World, but is not currently on sale to the public.

Due to safety concerns, and likely a whole host of other equally important concerns, the lightsaber will also not slice you through you like they do in the Star Wars movies. However, one amateur YouTuber did create a retractable working lightsaber, entering the Guinness Book of World Records last year.

Alex Burkan, who runs the YouTube channel Alex Lab, created a device which can produce a 1-meter (3.28-foot) long plasma blade when initiated. The 2,800 degrees Celsius (5,072 degrees Fahrenheit) blade can even cut through steel.

"The key component of my lightsaber is an electrolyser," Burkan explained to Guinness World Records. "An electrolyser is a device that can generate a huge amount of hydrogen and oxygen and compress the gas to any pressure without a mechanical compressor."

However, unlike a real lightsaber or the ones shown off by Disney, the blade only works for about 30 seconds on full power, making lightsaber battles short-lived unless they take place near charging points.

Also, Burkan added, "sometimes the lightsaber just blows up in your hand because of hydrogen flashback."

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Centuries before freight ships and telecommunications, the far-flung corners of Eurasia were hooked together by a network of trade routes known as the Silk Road. It ran from some 1,500 years from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century CE and became a hugely influential force in the modern world. After all, it wasn't just goods that were ferried along these routes, but also ideas, people, and diseases. 

What was the Silk Road?

As per UNESCO, its name stems from the luxurious textiles that are woven from the protein fiber of silkworms, a process that was pioneered in China around 2700 BCE.  

China kept silk a closely guarded secret for thousands of years, even sentencing people to death if they revealed how to make silk goods to a foreigner. However, their secrets started to spill and knowledge of silk production leaked into India and Japan. 

The initial foundations for the Silk Road were laid by the expansion of China’s Han Dynasty into Central Asia in the second century BCE. This prompted China to send out an envoy to this unexplored and "untamed" part of the world to gain information, as well as find potential trading partners and allies. The person in charge of this mission was General Zhang Qian who is sometimes considered as the "pioneer of the Silk Road".

Also around this time, in the first century BCE, the Roman Empire was emerging as a global superpower that just so happened to have taste for silk, viewing it as a must-have “exotic” accessory.

Where was the Silk Road?

The Silk Road consisted of numerous routes that stretched from East Asia, across the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa, and ended in Europe. The numerous paths took slightly different routes, but the whole road roughly spanned around 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles).

This included some harsh terrains that were previously avoided by travelers and tradespeople, such as the Gobi Desert and the Pamir Mountains. The promise of wealth changed this and the route started to attract middlemen and opportunists, eventually giving rise to a chain of small settlements and trading posts along the way.

A simplified map of the historical Silk Road. Image credit: Dimitrios Karamitros/Shutterstock.com

What was traded along the Silk Road?

Silk kickstarted the trade routes, but East Asia was also keen on shipping out other fine goods, such as tea, dyes, perfumes, spices, and porcelain. Likewise, Europe was known to export commodities to Asia, including artwork, honey, wine, animal skins, fur, and precious metals. 

Arguably the most important goods to be exported out of China were paper and gunpowder. While paper held the potential to change the way information and knowledge were spread, gunpowder would go on to revolutionize warfare, ultimately changing the trajectory of world history (for better or worse). 

It wasn't all fine wines and beautiful clothes, though. Scientists have found evidence that parasitic infections, such as the Chinese liver fluke (Clonorchis sinensis), were also being "traded" across the Silk Road among the people of Eurasia.

The trade routes may have even played a role in the spread of the Black Death in the 1300s, helping the pathogen travel out of remote Central Asia towards Europe, culminating in the deaths of 75 to 200 million people.

Why was the Silk Road so important?

Ideas, culture, and people also flowed backward and forward across the Silk Road. For the first time, people across Eurasia were becoming exposed to a wealth of new ideas and religions. Buddhism spread from India into China, while Christianity and Islam flourished across Eurasia. 

One of the most famous Europeans to travel the Silk Road was Marco Polo (1254-1324), a Venetian merchant who documented his travels across the Middle East, Central Asia, and China. Although he wasn't the first person from Europe to visit this part of the world, his writings are held up as one of the earliest European insights into East Asian culture. 

The Silk Road continued to thrive until the Middle Ages, even surviving a blip in activity around the Black Death and the Mongol conquests in the 14th century CE. 

By the 15th century CE, the Silk Road ultimately met its end. The Ottoman Empire was gaining power and managed to block the corridor between Europe and Asia, essentially marking an end to the flourishing trade across the continent. 

Meanwhile, the empires of Europe were ramping up their efforts through the Age of Discovery. New knowledge and technology were allowing Europeans to reach India, China, and beyond without the need for the Silk Road. 

The glory days of the Silk Road were over, but its legacy was undeniably profound. Even today, it continues to inspire culture and geopolitics. China is currently working on the so-called Belt and Road Initiative, which looks to lay down infrastructure that will allow easier trade between China, the rest of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Given the vast ambition of this project and its potential to shape the world, it’s been dubbed the "New Silk Road".

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A Japanese astronomer has captured a video of a meteorite slamming into the Moon. Curator in charge of astronomy at the Hiratsuka City Museum, Daichi Fujii, recorded the moment of impact from his home in Hiratsuka. 

"I was able to catch the biggest lunar impact flash in my observation history," Fujii wrote on Twitter, as translated by Google. "This is a picture of the lunar impact flash that appeared at 20:14:30.8 on February 23, 2023, taken from my home in Hiratsuka (replayed at actual speed). It was a huge flash that continued to shine for more than 1 second. "

"Since the moon has no atmosphere, meteors and fireballs cannot be seen, and the moment a crater is formed, it glows."

Fujii was able to capture the impact from a second telescope. He notes that the video is played back at normal speed.

This meteoroid (the name for meteors that are still in space) hit the moon near the Ideler L and Pitiscus craters, according to Fujii.

The moon, as you may have guessed from its extremely cratery appearance, gets hit by meteors quite a bit. In fact, thanks to our protective atmosphere, the moon is hit by around 20 asteroids for every one that hits Earth. Capturing them on film is still rare, though it does happen, sometimes during a lunar eclipse.

Capturing impacts like this, and studying the craters left by previous impacts, can help tell us everything from what kind of environment astronauts may face on the moon to how asteroid strike abundance has changed over time.

[H/T: Space.com]

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This acquisition will provide significant relief to the U.K. technology sector, which was particularly vulnerable to the collapse of both SVB and its U.K. arm. The rapid completion of the deal will be perceived as a sign of the government's endorsement of the technology industry and its trust in the financial system as a whole.

According to a statement released by HSBC, the transaction has been completed immediately, and the acquisition will be financed using existing resources. The bank further stated:

‘As at 10 March 2023, SVB UK had loans of around £5.5 billion and deposits of around £6.7 billion. For the financial year ending 31 December 2022, SVB UK recorded a profit before tax of £88 million. SVB UK’s tangible equity is expected to be around £1.4 billion. Final calculation of the gain arising from the acquisition will be provided in due course.’

The Bank of England has assured the safety of all depositors' funds with SVB UK, as the acquisition guarantees the continuity of banking services. As a result, SVB UK will not be subjected to insolvency proceedings.

U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the government, in collaboration with the Bank of England, has facilitated a private sale of Silicon Valley Bank UK to HSBC. He further stated that depositors' funds will be protected without the need for any financial assistance from taxpayers.

The Bank of England has confirmed that Silicon Valley Bank UK's business operations will continue as usual under the ownership of HSBC. All services will remain unchanged, and customers should not anticipate any disruptions to their banking experience.

Customers are encouraged to contact SVB UK through the regular communication channels, and loan repayments should continue to be made to SVB UK as usual. SVB UK's employees will remain employed by the bank, and the institution will retain its authorization from the PRA/FCA.

The Bank's statement also supersedes its previous declaration on March 10 that, in the absence of any significant additional information, it intended to seek a court order to place SVBUK into a Bank Insolvency Procedure. The emergence of a credible purchaser for SVBUK has led the Bank to exercise its resolution powers for stabilizing failing banks, rendering the previous statement moot.

The Bank of England also confirmed that no other U.K. banks will be materially affected by these actions or the resolution of SVBUK's U.S. parent bank, and that the wider U.K. banking system remains secure, robust, and adequately capitalized.

Noel Quinn, the CEO of HSBC Group, has expressed his enthusiasm for the acquisition of Silicon Valley Bank UK and extended a warm welcome to its customers in a statement. He affirmed that the deal aligns with the bank's strategic vision for the U.K. market and will reinforce its commercial banking capabilities, particularly in serving innovative and rapidly growing firms, including those in the technology and life science sectors, both in the U.K. and internationally.

Quinn further assured SVB UK customers that they could continue to bank with the same level of convenience and safety they are accustomed to, with the added assurance that their deposits are backed by the strength and security of HSBC. The CEO also expressed his eagerness to collaborate with SVB UK colleagues and strengthen the bank's position in the U.K. financial sector.

Dom Hallas, the Executive Director of Coadec, a non-profit organization that advocates for the interests of tech startups, has lauded the efforts of the U.K. government in facilitating the acquisition. He acknowledged the significant role played by various government bodies, including HM Treasury and the civil servants who worked tirelessly to secure the deal. Hallas also highlighted the importance of the government's intervention in protecting hundreds of the U.K.'s most innovative companies.

The sale of SVB UK to HSBC has spared the U.K. from the need to provide system-wide support to safeguard depositors' funds, a measure that the U.S. Treasury was forced to introduce in similar circumstances. Additionally, the acquisition has reduced the likelihood of the so-called 'moral hazard' risk, which occurs when failed banks and depositors expect to be bailed out by the government.

Source

In 2021, more than 100,000 Danes were invited to participate in the largest questionnaire survey ever conducted on spiritual and existential needs.

They were asked 20 questions, all related to these topics. Over 80 percent of those who responded reported experiencing at least one strong or very strong spiritual need in the past month.

The first study based on the survey has just been published in The Lancet Regional Health—Europe.

"We live in a society where religion and spirituality are taboo and something we rarely talk about with each other. What we believe in, why we are here, what happens when we die. And we might be led to believe that it's not important, or something we shouldn't concern ourselves with in the healthcare system. But our study convincingly shows that these topics are important to Danes," says Tobias Anker Stripp, a medical doctor and Ph.D. student who is the lead author of the study.

Flowchart of study sampling and participants. Credit: The Lancet Regional Health - Europe (2023).

Intuitively important needs

In the study, participants were asked about their need for finding inner peace and doing something for others, with these two topics being the most highly valued.

"Experiencing inner peace and giving something of oneself to others are classic existential or spiritual needs. And even though we don't always verbalize it that way, most of us intuitively feel that this is important. About one-fifth of Danes have also reported a religious need—that is, a need directly related to belief in something greater. All of this we have now shown in numbers."

"When you think about how healthy it is to believe in something greater and experience meaning in life, I think it's important that we as healthcare professionals are interested in whether our patients have needs in these areas that we can address, especially when dealing with serious illness. Biomedical treatment is not enough. We must remember that we humans are more than just our physical bodies," says Stripp.

Jens Søndergaard, who is a professor in the Research Unit for General Practice and a practicing physician, agrees with this.

"This study supports the holistic approach that general practice sees as central and has been educating practicing physicians in for years. This approach should be disseminated and supported by the entire healthcare system."

"It is also a shift in the right direction for medical research that a respected journal like The Lancet addresses this topic," which is otherwise atypical, he believes.

How do we get better at communicating?

Professor Niels Christian Hvidt is the last author of the article and the one who initiated the study several years ago. He conducts research specifically on the care of existential and spiritual needs that the study uncovers. He views the feedback from practitioners as highly encouraging, since, "Danes do not talk much about their beliefs and personal values and have a low degree of religious practice. But as the study shows, we in Denmark have the same needs for inner peace, meaning, faith, and hope as seen in more religious countries."

"Therefore, the study raises the question of how we can become better at talking about these needs, also in the healthcare system, especially when life gets tough, because it can have a direct impact on how we face life and the challenges it may bring us. "

Source

Geoff Shaw cracked open a beer, savoring the simple freedom of having a drink on his porch on a sweltering Saturday morning in mid-February in Australia’s remote Northern Territory.

“For 15 years, I couldn’t buy a beer,” said Mr. Shaw, a 77-year-old Aboriginal elder in Alice Springs, the territory’s third-largest town. “I’m a Vietnam veteran, and I couldn’t even buy a beer.”

Mr. Shaw lives in what the government has deemed a “prescribed area,” an Aboriginal town camp where from 2007 until last year it was illegal to possess alcohol, part of a set of extraordinary race-based interventions into the lives of Indigenous Australians.

Last July, the Northern Territory let the alcohol ban expire for hundreds of Aboriginal communities, calling it racist. But little had been done in the intervening years to address the communities’ severe underlying disadvantage. Once alcohol flowed again, there was an explosion of crime in Alice Springs widely attributed to Aboriginal people. Local and federal politicians reinstated the ban late last month. And Mr. Shaw’s taste of freedom ended.

From the halls of power in the nation’s capital to ramshackle outback settlements, the turmoil in the Northern Territory has revived hard questions that are even older than Australia itself, about race and control and the open wounds of discrimination.

For those who believe that the country’s largely white leadership should not dictate the decisions of Aboriginal people, the alcohol ban’s return replicates the effects of colonialism and disempowers communities. Others argue that the benefits, like reducing domestic violence and other harms to the most vulnerable, can outweigh the discriminatory effects.

For Mr. Shaw, the restrictions are simply a distraction — another Band-Aid for communities that, to address problems at their roots, need funding and support and to be listened to.

“They had nothing to offer us,” he said. “And they had 15 years to sort this out.”

The liquor restrictions prohibit anyone who lives in Aboriginal town camps on the outskirts of Alice Springs, as well as those in more remote Indigenous communities, from buying takeaway alcohol. The town itself is not included in the ban, though Aboriginal people there often face more scrutiny in trying to buy liquor.

One recent day at Uncle’s Tavern, in the center of Alice Springs, patrons — almost all of them non-Indigenous — drank beneath palm trees strung with lights. In the town of 25,000, it seemed as if everyone had a friend, relative or neighbor who had been the victim of an assault, a break-in or property destruction.

As night fell, Aboriginal people who walked the otherwise empty streets were separated from the pub’s patrons by a fence with tall black bars, like something out of a prison. Sometimes, those outside pressed up against the bars; children asked for money for food, and adults for cigarettes or alcohol. The pub’s gate was open, but there were unspoken barriers to entry for the people outside.

Many Aboriginal people travel into town for basic services from the remote communities where they live, in conditions more akin to those of a developing country. Some Indigenous leaders in and around Alice Springs attribute the spike in crime to these visitors.

In the daytime, they were often the only people sitting in public spaces, with nowhere to go to escape the blistering heat. One Aboriginal visitor to Alice Springs, Gloria Cooper, said she had traveled hundreds of miles for medical treatment and was camping in a nearby dry creek bed because she couldn’t afford a place to stay on her welfare income.

“Lots of people in the creek,” she said. “Lots of children.”

The roots of the 15-year alcohol ban were a national media firestorm that erupted in 2006 over a handful of graphic and highly publicized allegations of child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory.

Many of the allegations were later found to be baseless. But just months before a federal election, the conservative prime minister at the time used them to justify a draconian set of race-based measures. Among them were the alcohol restrictions, along with mandatory income management for welfare recipients and restrictions on Indigenous people’s rights to manage land that they owned.

Now, the debate has flared up again at another politically charged moment, as Australia begins to discuss constitutionally enshrining a “voice to Parliament” — an Indigenous body that would advise on policies that affect Aboriginal communities.

Opponents have used the Alice Springs debate to argue that the proposal distracts from practical issues facing Indigenous communities.

Supporters say that such a body would have allowed more consultation with affected residents and prevented the problem from escalating.

Indigenous leaders say that the roots of the dysfunction in their communities run deep. A lack of job opportunities has left poverty entrenched, which in turn has exacerbated family violence. Soaring Indigenous incarceration rates have left parents locked away and children adrift.

Government controls on Aboriginal people’s lives, imposed without consultation, have bred resentment and hopelessness. Add alcohol to the mix, and the problems only mount.

“We’ve never had our own choice and decision making, our lives have been controlled by others,” said Cherisse Buzzacott, who works to improve Indigenous families’ health literacy. Because of this, she added, those in the most disadvantaged communities “don’t have belief changes can change; they don’t have hope.”

Some Indigenous leaders oppose the alcohol ban on these grounds, arguing that it continues the history of control of Aboriginal communities. Others say that their own contributions to the community show why blanket bans are unfair.

“Some of my mob, some are workers and some are just sitting down, haven’t got a job,” said Benedict Stevens, the president of the Hidden Valley town camp, using a colloquial term for an Aboriginal group. “And what I’m saying is it wouldn’t be fair for us workers to not be able to go back home during the weekends, relax, have some beers.”

Before the alcohol ban expired last year, a coalition of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal organizations predicted that a sudden free flow of alcohol would produce a sharp rise in crime. They called for the restrictions to be extended so affected communities could have time to develop individualized transition plans.

The predictions proved accurate. According to the Northern Territory police, commercial breaks-ins, property damage, assaults related to domestic violence and alcohol-related assaults all rose by about or by more than 50 percent from 2021 to 2022. Australia does not break down crime data by race, but politicians and Aboriginal groups themselves have attributed the increase largely to Indigenous people.

“This was a preventable situation,” said Donna Ah Chee, the chief executive of one of these organizations, the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress. “It was Aboriginal women, families and children that were actually paying the price,” she added.

The organization was among those that called for a resumption of the ban as an immediate step while long-term solutions were developed to address the underlying drivers of destructive drinking. Ms. Ah Chee said she considered the policy to be “positive discrimination” in protecting those most vulnerable.

What Indigenous leaders on all sides of the debate agreed on was that long-term strategies were needed to address the complex disadvantages facing Indigenous communities.

The problems in Alice Springs were caused by decades of failing to listen to Indigenous people, said William Tilmouth, an Aboriginal elder. The answers, he added, would be found when “politicians and the public looked beyond the alcohol. What they will find is people with voice, strength and solutions waiting to be heard.”

Source

Jan Lieser had just started going through the dozens of satellite images he looks at every day when he realised something was missing. As a glaciologist at the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, he knew the shape of every ice shelf sticking out from the coast of East Antarctica. And on 17 March 2022, there was a gap where most of the Conger glacier's ice shelf had broken off into an iceberg the size of Vienna and drifted away.

Lieser was stunned. He had been keeping an eye on Conger since the last few pieces of the neighbouring Glenzer ice shelf had broken up 10 days before, but he had not expected to see it disintegrate so quickly. "All of a sudden the rest of the land-fast ice collapsed, and the ice shelf moved northward and turned 90 degrees sideways. Two features we had been monitoring for years weren't there anymore," he says. "In my 15 years of looking at it, I have not expected to see that in East Antarctica."

Glaciers flow toward the ocean, and an ice shelf is the part that floats on the water, rubbing up against islands, underwater ridges or other glaciers. Ice shelves are often called Antarctica's "safety band". When they break up, the glaciers behind them can start flowing faster into the sea, contributing to sea level rise. The Conger glacier is relatively small and slow, but the swift demise of its safety band nonetheless had scientists worried. This was the first ice shelf on record to collapse in East Antarctica, the vast frozen dome separated from the more travelled West Antarctica by the tortuous sandstone ridges of the Transantarctic Mountains. While the melting West Antarctic ice sheet may have already reached a tipping point, scientists had long thought that its eastern counterpart, the coldest place on Earth, was resistant to global warming. In 2012 the East Antarctic ice sheet had even been found to be gaining mass overall.

Have we crossed a tipping point? That's the million-dollar question – Jan Lieser

But new research is revealing chinks in East Antarctica's icy armour. Some glaciers in what one explorer called the "home of the blizzard" are melting and might be at risk of sudden collapse. Even small changes to the East Antarctic ice sheet, which contains four-fifths of the world's ice, could have a colossal impact. It holds an estimated 52m (170ft) of potential sea level rise, as compared with 3-4m (10-13ft) in the West Antarctic sheet. Experts fear it could start raising sea levels already this century. "It's a big bear you don't want to poke," says University of Minnesota glaciologist Peter Neff, who's leading a project to drill an ice core that's 1.5 million years old in East Antarctica. "When you see things that give you a sense that you might be underestimating what's going on in East Antarctica, that gives you pause and certainly motivates further research."

Antarctic heat wave

Usually, glaciers move at a glacial pace. The speedy collapse of the Conger's ice shelf came after some of the most dramatically warm weather ever observed in Antarctica. For the first time since satellite monitoring began in 1979, the sea ice extent around Antarctica dropped below 2 million sq km (770,000 sq miles). Less sea ice means more waves battering the ice shelves in front of the glaciers. Massive fields of sea ice off of Adelie Land, Wilkes Land and Princess Elizabeth Land in East Antarctica completely disappeared.

When the Conger glacier ice shelf disintegrated, it did so spectacularly (Credit: Jan Lieser)

The lack of ice startled scientists. Unlike in the Arctic, Antarctic sea ice had been slightly increasing over the period that satellites had been able to monitor it,  and some suggested that circumpolar winds and ocean currents were isolating it from global warming. A study later blamed the 2022 sea ice low on ocean heating, as well as intense winds driven by La Niña and other weather patterns.

Then in March, when the brief austral summer had already waned, a heat wave brought mind-boggling temperatures to East Antarctica. An extreme atmospheric river of water vapour stabbed into the heart of the continent, followed by a high-pressure "heat dome" that kept this warmth from dispersing. In the middle of the ice sheet, Russia's Vostok station, which once recorded the lowest temperature ever seen on Earth (-89.2C/-128.6F) in midwinter, enjoyed a comparatively balmy autumnal -17.7C (-0.1F).

At Dome C, the easterly apex of the sloping ice sheet, European researchers from the Concordia base staged a photo in swimwear under blow-up palm trees. The -10.1C (13.8F) temperature on March 18 was 38.5C (69.3F) higher than average, the biggest rise above normal observed by any weather station in history. Antarctica experts described the heat wave as "impossible", even "inconceivable".

While the heat may have contributed to the Conger ice shelf's collapse, Lieser thinks significant swell from two nearby storms probably struck the fatal blow. But concern that Antarctica may be entering an uncertain new era has only grown. This year, sea ice around the continent fell to a new record low. On 13 February 2023, the sea ice shrank to just 1.91 million square km (737,000 sq miles). "Will it turn around? Have we crossed a tipping point? That's the million-dollar question," Lieser says.

'Accursed place'

For centuries, the remoteness and cold of East Antarctica preserved its solitude. Although this was the first part of the continent to be discovered, by a Russian expedition in 1820, attempts to reach the South Pole used the far shorter route through West Antarctica.

In 1911-14, the Australasian Antarctic expedition finally explored 4,000km (2,480 miles) of the East Antarctic mainland, giving us not only scientific findings like Antarctica's first meteorite but also one of the greatest polar survival stories. A member of one of the exploratory parties disappeared into a deep crevasse with most of their food and equipment, leaving his two companions to eat their sled dogs one by one as they tried to reach the expedition's hut 500km (310 miles) away. Only one of the two, Douglas Mawson, survived. "We had discovered an accursed country," wrote Mawson. "We had found the home of the blizzard."

The ice locked into East Antarctica's ice sheets holds enough water to cause catastrophic sea level rise, should it all melt (Credit: Shuai Yan)

During the Cold War research bases like the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station and a short-lived Soviet station at the pole of inaccessibility were established. But otherwise East Antarctica has received less scrutiny than West Antarctica because it didn't seem to be changing as much and was even more challenging for research. At the start of the 21st Century, much of the bedrock under the ice sheet still hadn't even been surveyed.

To fill in that last blank spot on the map of the Earth's land surface, glaciologist Martin Siegert and colleagues organised the Icecap and Icecap 2 projects starting in 2008 to fly over more than 150,000 sq km (58,000 square miles) of East Antarctic territory in modified WWII-era DC-3 ski planes. As computer models became more precise, scientists needed to know the contours of the bedrock to predict the flow of glaciers – and thus sea level rise – in different warming scenarios.

"If you're going to apply a really sophisticated model over a topography that's just flat because you've got no data, it's pointless," Siegert says.

Antarctica's ice is melting not from above but from below. As relatively warm ocean water eats away at the sloping underside of an ice shelf, the grounding line where it meets the seafloor recedes. That process should stop at the coast – unless the bottom of the glacier there is below sea level. The Icecap planes' ice-penetrating radars helped discover a "weak underbelly" below East Antarctica's largest glacier Totten, which holds about as much potential sea level rise as all of West Antarctica.

Most of the uncertainty about how much and how fast future sea levels will rise comes from how the East Antarctic ice sheet is going to behave – Laura Herraiz Borreguero

The Aurora Basin, a giant bowl of ice feeding the Totten glacier, was much deeper and wider than expected, and it was connected to the coast via channels lying below sea level. If Totten's grounding line were to retreat through these channels, ocean water could eventually start flowing down into the basin and kickstart runaway melting. That's happened several times there in the distant past, research has suggested. Sure enough, Totten's grounding line is now retreating as its ice shelf melts.

In summer 2015, an opening in the sea ice allowed scientists on the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis to reach the towering white face of the Totten ice shelf for the first time. Lowering an assembly of sampling bottles into the ocean there, they found 220,000 cubic metres (7.8 million cubic ft) per second of relatively warm water were flowing toward the base of the ice shelf through a kilometre-deep trough, melting up to 80 billion tonnes of ice each year. Increasing precipitation inland, where snow turns to ice could compensate for that loss – but not forever. If another 4.2% of the Totten ice shelf melts, it could collapse and allow the glacier behind it to surge into the ocean, one study found.  "We don't discount at all that East Antarctica can start realising mass into the ocean within this century," Siegert says.

Big surprise

To measure how much warm water was getting to Totten year-round, Australian scientists began parking 360 yellow, torpedo-shaped robots called Argo floats in the ocean there to overwinter under the sea ice. But when the sea ice broke up in 2020 and the floats surfaced to start transmitting temperature and salinity data, it turned out one had drifted 700km (430 miles) along the coast to the Denman ice tongue. This is where the Denman glacier crashes through the Shackleton ice shelf to reach the sea in what one member of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition described as "cascades of shattered ice, so broken that it stood out [as] a great white scar on the ice cap".

The float's location was a stroke of luck, as scientists had almost no information about the ocean near Denman, besides a few readings from a sensor strapped to a wide-ranging elephant seal in 2011."It was a big surprise," says Laura Herraiz Borreguero, an oceanographer at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Tasmania. "I got very excited. I went and downloaded all the data from the float."

Published late last year, the data revealed even more concerning heat transport here than at Totten. Over four months, the float found that an immense amount of warm water was flowing into a deep trough beneath the Denman ice tongue, enough to melt 70.8 billion tonnes of ice per year. This offered a possible explanation why the grounding line where the ice meets the seafloor had receded more than 5km (3.1 miles) in the previous two decades. The retreat is likely to continue, as changing wind patterns around Antarctica have been bringing warm water from the deep ocean closer to the continent.

Ship-based sensors can study the seafloor to find out how currents carry warm water to the base of the ice (Credit: CSIRO)

Most worrying is the shape of the land underneath the Denman glacier. A more detailed map of Antarctic bedrock in 2019 discovered that it flows over a canyon that drops 3.5km (2.1 miles) below sea level, the deepest point on continental Earth. Furthermore, this canyon reaches all the way to the coast, and unlike Totten, Denman has already begun retreating into it. As the glacier withdraws backward down the slope, more and more of its ice will be exposed to seawater. That could accelerate into a rapid and irreversible retreat, researchers fear.

If all of Denman melted, it would raise global sea levels 1.5m (4.9ft). That would leave low-lying countries like Bangladesh mostly underwater and displace hundreds of millions of people. How soon could it happen? It's hard to say without knowing, for instance, how much of the warm water flowing under the ice tongue is making it all the way to the grounding line."Most of the uncertainty about how much and how fast future sea levels will rise comes from how the East Antarctic ice sheet is going to behave under a warming climate," Borreguero says.

'Sleeping giant'

Further research is needed to answer this, especially at sea. Ocean troughs are key, as they can allow the warm, dense deep water surrounding Antarctica to flow onto the continental shelf and melt ice shelves. But only around 23% of the ocean floor in East Antarctica has been mapped. A Geoscience Australia voyage to Cape Darnley is currently charting swathes of the bottom with a multibeam echo sounder.

The expedition is also taking water and sediment samples to look at changes in the production of Antarctic Bottom Water, the cold, salty water that sinks and drives the "great ocean conveyor belt", which carries crucial warmth to places like Europe. Freshwater from melting glaciers may be putting a brake on that conveyor belt. "We want to understand, in the past, has that deep water production slowed when it's been slightly warmer," marine geoscientist Alix Post says via satellite phone from aboard the Geoscience Australia voyage.

To measure the properties of East Antarctica's glaciers and the land beneath them, planes carrying sensitive measuring equipment monitor the ice from above

(Credit: Shuai Yan)

In 2023-24, the German icebreaker Polarstern will take water and sediment samples near the Amery and Shackleton ice shelves and the Denman ice tongue, and in 2025, the Australian icebreaker Nuyina will also go to Denman. The Australian Antarctic Division has also started a camp of huts and tents in the windswept Bunger Hills so scientists can drill ice cores, collect sediments and set up autonomous monitoring stations at the Denman glacier.

Research efforts like these reflect a growing realisation that East Antarctica could start affecting sea levels and the climate system within decades rather than centuries, says University of Texas at Austin researcher Shuai Yan, who last year discovered a lake 3.2km (2 miles) under the ice that may hold a sedimentary record of the ice sheet’'s formation.

“It's a sleeping giant,” he says, “and if we keep going down the way we're going now, I'm afraid it can wake up someday.”

Source

THE BIODIVERSITY CRISIS is a math problem. Unlike most math problems, however, this is one where getting hung up on the precise numbers can lead you astray. Maybe 1 million species are at risk of extinction. Or if you’re going by species that scientists have specifically identified as threatened, it’s 42,100. But neither of these is exactly right. At least we can agree that extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than historical averages. Or is it 100 times higher?

Here’s the thing: Whichever numbers you plug into the calculation, you get the same result. The planet is in a dire state. There are many, many more species faced with extinction than we can realistically save. We’re in an emergency, and in emergency situations we need to triage our victims. 

Picking which species to protect and which to sideline is right at the heart of conservation, but we don’t talk enough about how these decisions are made. Do we pick species that are culturally significant, like the bald eagle? Or maybe we should focus on medicinally useful plants? What about species that are critical parts of their ecosystem? Or the ones that are most under threat? Then there are creatures that grab our attention because they are cute, charismatic, or—in the case of meerkats—the cheery, anthropomorphized face of a long-running British ad campaign to sell car insurance. Simples.

There is another way of thinking about animals that can help us decide which species to protect. Rikki Gumbs, a conservationist at the Zoological Society of London, argues that we should be focusing more on species that are both evolutionarily distinct and endangered. This approach can lead us toward all kinds of strange and wonderful creatures. Take solenodons, for example. This shrew-like animal is one of the very few venomous mammals that exist today. The two living solenodon species diverged from other mammals around 76 million years ago. That is a lot of evolutionary history on those very small, very hairy, shoulders.

Luckily, scientists have a way of measuring just how unique and at-risk certain species are. In 2007, conservationists devised a metric called EDGE. It stands for “evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered,” and it was developed as a way to prioritize species for conservation that represented a large chunk of evolutionary history. To rank highly in terms of EDGE scores, a species has to be evolutionarily distinct, have very few close living ancestors, and be extremely endangered. 

According to new research from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, the Nile River Delta, which is crucial for the survival of 60 million Egyptians who rely on it for all aspects of life, is facing an existential threat from extensive heavy metal pollution, coastal erosion, and seawater intrusion. Additionally, the delta serves as a vital pitstop for migratory birds along the East African flyway.

The research, headed by Essam Heggy of the USC Viterbi Innovation Fund Arid Climates and Water Research Center, was in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Earth’s Future.

The impact of the pollution is especially pronounced in Egypt, the most populous and arid nation downstream of the Nile, which depends entirely on the river as its only source of water for drinking and crop irrigation. The country currently faces one of the highest water budget deficits in Africa after decades of compensating for dwindling water supplies with intensive, large-scale wastewater reuse, the consequences of which have been understudied until now.

“You have roughly the combined populations of California and Florida living in a space the size of the state of New Jersey that is increasingly polluted by toxic heavy metals,” said Heggy. “Today, the civilization that thrived in a scenic waterscape for over 7,000 years must face the reality of this irreversible large-scale environmental degradation.”

For the study, researchers from the U.S. and Egypt analyzed grain size and pollution levels of eight heavy metals in samples of bottom sediment collected from two branches of the Nile River Delta. Key findings included:

• Sediment at the bottom of the Nile River is highly polluted by heavy metals like cadmium, nickel, chromium, copper, lead and zinc.

• Contaminants primarily come from untreated agricultural drainage and municipal and industrial wastewater. Without proper treatment of recycled water, concentrations of heavy metals increase and are permanently embedded in the riverbed unlike organic pollutants which naturally degrade over time.

• Heavy metal concentrations could be exacerbated by increased damming of the Nile. Mega-dams built upstream disrupt the river’s natural flow and sediment flux and thus adversely affect its ability to flush contaminants out into the Mediterranean Sea, leaving toxins to build up in bottom sediment over time.

Much of the heavy metal contamination is irreversible, the researchers said, but science-based conservation measures suggested by the study can slow environmental degradation and hopefully recover the Nile River Delta ecosystem.

“The aggravating water stress and the rapid population growth in Egypt, reaching above 100 million, have put local authorities in a dilemma whether to provide sufficient fresh water for the thirsty agricultural sector to secure the food supply through reusing untreated agricultural drainage water or to preserve the health of the Nile River,” said Abotalib Z. Abotalib, a postdoctoral researcher at USC Viterbi and co-author of the study. “The balance is challenging, and the consequences of both choices are measurable.”

“Our study underscores the need for more research on the environmental impacts of untreated water recycling and the change in river turbidity under increased upstream damming of the Nile,” Heggy said.

“Continued research with more sampling campaigns in this area could inform future conversations and collaborations among nations of the Nile River Basin, who have a shared interest toward maintaining a healthy Nile River system.”

Source

You’re walking down a busy street on your way to work. You pass a busker playing a song you haven’t heard in years. Now suddenly, instead of noticing all the goings on in the city around you, you’re mentally reliving the first time you heard the song. Hearing that piece of music takes you right back to where you were, who you were with and the feelings associated with that memory.

This experience – when music brings back memories of events, people and places from our past – is known as a music-evoked autobiographical memory. And it’s a common experience.

It often occurs as an involuntary memory. That is, we make no effort to try to recall such memories, they just come to mind spontaneously.

Research has recently begun to uncover why music appears to be such a good cue for invoking memories. First, music tends to accompany many distinctive life events, such as proms, graduations, weddings and funerals, so it can play an important role in reconnecting us with these self-defining moments.

Music also often captures our attention, due to the way it affects our minds, bodies and emotions.

When music draws our attention, this increases the likelihood that it will be encoded in memory together with details of a life event. And this then means it is able to serve as an effective cue for remembering this event years later.

Positive memories

In recent research my colleague and I found that the emotional nature of a piece of music is an important factor in how it serves as a memory cue.

We compared music with other emotional memory cues that had been rated by a large group of participants as conveying the same emotional expression as the music excerpts we used. This included comparing music with “emotional sounds”, such as nature and factory noises and “emotional words”, such as “money” and “tornado”.

Music can evoke memories and creates magical moments. pexels/sebastian ervi

When compared with these emotionally matched cues, the music didn’t elicit any more memories than the words. But what we did find was that music evoked more consistently positive memories than other emotional sounds and words. This was especially the case for negative emotional stimuli. Specifically, sad and angry music evoked more positive memories than sad and angry sounds or words.

It seems then that music appears to have the ability to reconnect us with emotionally positive moments from our pasts. This suggests that using music therapeutically may be particularly fruitful.

How and when

The familiarity of a piece of music also, perhaps unsurprisingly, plays a role. In another recent study, we found that more familiar music evokes more memories and brings memories to mind more spontaneously.

So part of the reason music may be a more effective cue for memories than, for instance, our favourite film or favourite book, is that we typically reengage with songs more often over our lifetimes compared to films, books or TV shows.

The situations when we listen to music may also play a role. Previous research shows that involuntary memories are more likely to come back during activities where our mind is free to wander to thoughts about our past. These activities tend to be non-demanding in terms of our attention and include things like commuting, travelling, housework and relaxing.

These types of activities align almost perfectly with those recorded in another study where we asked participants to keep a diary and note when music evoked a memory, along with what they were doing at the time it happened. We found that daily activities that often go hand in hand with listening to music – such as travelling, doing chores or going for a run – tend to lead to more involuntary memories in the first place.

When we listen to a piece of music from years ago, we seem to travel back to that moment. pexels/cottonbro studio

This contrasts with other hobbies, such as watching TV, which can require our mind to be more focused on the activity at hand and so less likely to wander to scenarios from our past.

It seems then that music is not only good at evoking memories but also the times when we are more likely to listen to music are the times when our minds may naturally be more likely to wander anyway.

Music is also present during many life events that are distinctive, emotional or self-defining – and these types of memories tend to be more easily recalled.

Indeed, the power of music to connect us with our past shows how music, memories and emotions are all linked – and it seems certain songs can act as a direct line to our younger selves.

Kelly Jakubowski, Assistant Professor in Music Psychology, Durham University

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

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The California-based SVB bank, which was closed by US authorities on Friday, manages the money of some of the UK's most promising businesses, Hunt said.

"There is a serious risk to our technology and life sciences sectors, many of whom bank with this bank," Hunt said in an interview with British television channel Sky News.

"Most people won't have heard of the Silicon Valley Bank but it happens to look after the money of some of our most promising and exciting businesses."

The bank is expected to reopen on Monday under a new name with the US deposit guarantee agency, the FDIC, taking control.

Hunt said the governor of the Bank of England had made it "very clear" that there was no systemic risk to the UK's financial system due to the SVB's collapse.

The government would bring forward plans "very soon" to ensure people are able to meet their cash flow requirements and pay staff.

It would also put a longer term solution in place to minimise or completely avoid losses to British companies, he added.

The British Treasury said Saturday that the problems of the failed SVB bank were "specific to the firm" and had no "implications for other banks operating in the UK".

The bank failed after its customers, mainly from the tech sector, made massive withdrawals, and after its latest attempt to raise new money proved unsuccessful.

Little known to the general public, SVB specialised in financing start-ups and had become the 16th-largest US bank by assets.

Its demise is not only the largest bank failure since Washington Mutual in 2008, but also the second-largest retail bank failure in the US.

The Bank of England said it intended to pursue insolvency with regards to the bank's British subsidiary.

"It was looking inevitable that the dramatic loss of confidence in SVB would also sweep its UK arm into insolvency," said Susannah Streeter of financial firm Hargreaves Lansdown.

"The run on the US bank spooked customers banking with the British subsidiary, despite protestations that it was ring-fenced from its parent," she added.

Sky News reported that the Bank of London, which launched just two years ago, is among those mulling a bid for SVB's British arm.

© 2023 AFP

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Twice a year, Americans shift the clock — an hour forward in the spring, an hour back in the fall — in a well-known practice known as daylight saving. Originally introduced during World War I as a means of conserving fuel and power by extending the amount of daylight each day, the tradition has persisted in some capacity since 1966. This year, most of the country (except for Hawaii and Alaska) shifts from standard time — which runs from early November through mid-March — to daylight saving time on Sunday, March 12.

The premise is simple: shift the clocks so people can get the maximum amount of daylight. In the spring, the one-hour change means more daylight in the evening and darker mornings; in the fall, the sun sets earlier while mornings are lighter. But this transition can be more disruptive beyond just losing one hour of sleep. Whether you’re a parent (to humans or pets) or an early riser who hardly enjoys waking in the dark, you can make the transition into daylight saving a little less painful.

“It’s not just a loss of an hour asleep, but we’re getting our light at a whole different time of day,” says Beth Malow, the director of the Vanderbilt Sleep Division at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “Everything is off by an hour.”

Changing the clock confuses the body

Every process within the body, from sleep to metabolism, runs on an internal clock, known as circadian rhythm. Various cues, like light, trigger the release of hormones alerting the body to wake up, feel sleepy, get hungry. Even if you wake at the same time every day, the shift from standard to daylight saving time means it’s suddenly dark in the morning and your circadian rhythm is disrupted. “The body releases sleep-time and wake-time hormones at a particular time,” says Nilong Vyas, a board-certified pediatric sleep coach, founder of family sleep consulting service Sleepless in NOLA, and medical reviewer for SleepFoundation.org. “When the clock time is different than what the body is feeling or experiencing, we tend to feel a bit off until the body’s hormones re-regulate in a few days.”

Compared to the gradual change in daylight hours leading up to daylight saving time, the abrupt shift is a jolt to the body. All of a sudden, you’re eating, sleeping, and socializing at different times, and the body needs to play catchup. This sudden change has material impacts: Studies have shown that deadly car accidents, workplace injuries, and heart attacks increase following the springtime change.

Usually, people who work during the day and have consistent schedules can adjust within a week, says Jade Wu, author of Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications. Those on the western edges of time zones see later sunrises than people on the eastern areas of time zones, which may make the adjustment more difficult, Malow says, since it’s darker longer in the morning.

Some people are more sensitive to the time change than others. Older people, people with autism, and adolescents may have more difficulty adjusting, Malow says. Genetics can play a role as well. Young children, pets, and others who aren’t aware of the time change are also thrown out of whack.

In the name of consistency, last March, the Senate unanimously voted in favor of making daylight saving time permanent starting this year. This would mean eliminating the “fall back” time change in November (and every other hour shift thereafter). Most of the country would experience sunsets after 5 pm — but later sunrises, too (it would be dark at 7 am most of the year). The bill died in the House last year, but has recently been reintroduced in the Senate. The bill would need to be passed by the Senate, House, and signed by the president to become law.

For those who enjoy more light in the evening, the move toward permanent daylight saving time is ideal, but it may not be the best for human functioning. Between standard time and daylight saving time, Malow has a preference for standard time. “It’s a healthier choice,” she says, because mornings are lighter during standard time. “We know that morning light is really important for our sleep and our moods,” she says. “Light in the afternoon isn’t as effective as light in the morning. If you want people to have natural light, you want them to have more light in the morning and that’s what standard time does.”

How to make the transition from standard time to daylight saving time less jarring

Since the country is stuck with daylight saving time for at least the immediate future, there are ways to ease into the time change. In the weeks leading up to daylight saving time, prioritize your sleep, Malow says, and make sure you’re not sleep deprived before losing an hour of sleep. (The necessary number of hours of sleep varies from person to person, but the CDC recommends adults get between seven and nine hours a night.)

Then, try to go to bed 10 to 15 minutes earlier each night the week before the time changes. “A 10-minute shift is a lot less of a jolt to the system than an hour,” Malow says. But if you’re not sleepy enough for an advanced bedtime, prioritize waking up 10 to 15 minutes earlier, Wu says, since you can more easily control when you rise, not when you fall asleep.

Parents can implement this subtle change in their children’s sleep schedules as well. If they’re resistant to waking up earlier, don’t worry, Wu says — they’ll adjust on their own. “Kids tend to be morning people anyway,” she says. “If the clock shifts one hour, it doesn’t really mess with them that much because they’re still getting up early.” For teens, who are natural night owls and are often sleep deprived, Wu advises parents to guide their teenagers toward less screen time at night and a long wind-down time prior to bed. “If you can, try your best to plan for at least eight hours of sleep knowing that you’re gonna have to wake up at X hour in the morning in the new time,” Wu says.

While infants and pets who aren’t as regimented with their sleep might not be as amenable to a change in when they wake up, parents (to both humans and pets) should still acclimate themselves to a slightly earlier bedtime for an easier transition. Try feeding your pets a few minutes ahead of schedule each day leading up to daylight saving time so they’ll be properly adjusted.

On Sunday morning, fight the urge to sleep in an hour later to compensate for the lost time — wake up around the same time you usually do on Sunday mornings, Malow says. If you typically attend a 9 am yoga class or religious service, keep those plans. Try to get outside in the morning, too, “because that will also reset your clock,” Malow says. Get the family together and go for a walk to ensure everyone gets their dose of daylight. If you have a sunrise alarm clock or a light box, these artificial light sources are also sufficient sources of light and can help get your circadian rhythm back on track, Vyas says.

“The remedy,” Vyas says, “is to ease into the time change so that it is not as jarring for the body when it happens.”

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On March 12, most of the US and Canada will wake up to an hour stolen. Europe will suffer the same loss two weeks later—a victim of the persistent and unpopular practice of switching to daylight saving time. Much of the world has avoided or abandoned the practice, but in the US and Europe, lawmakers have been unable to stop the clocks from changing.

Nations started switching between standard time in winter and daylight saving time in summer during the First World War, as they sought to cut energy costs—an extra hour of daylight in the evening meant less time with the lights on. In the US and Europe, the practice caught on and persisted. But it’s facing more and more pushback.

“Globally, the debate is fixed—there are more countries not changing the clocks,” says Ariadna Güell Sans, co-coordinator of the Barcelona Time Use Initiative for a Healthy Society, an organization focused on time-related policy. Research has shown how moving the clocks forward and back, even by just one hour, negatively affects the economy, road safety, and health. Still, the US, Europe, and a few other nations are finding it hard to break the habit. The issue, says Güell Sans, is whether we stay on standard time or daylight saving time forever.

A year ago, the US Senate passed a bill to move the clocks forward an hour permanently. But it was not taken up in the US House of Representatives, which would also need to pass the bill before sending it to the president’s desk. A group of senators reintroduced the measure in early March 2023 to try again.

Europe is also trying to end the clock changes, but crises have halted the move: First it was Covid-19; then, for the past year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has commanded the bloc’s attention. The European Parliament voted in 2019 to stop changing clocks, but it didn’t get the approval it needed from the European Union’s other legislative body, the European Council. The Council then shoved the issue to the EU’s executive, the European Commission, for an impact assessment.

Progress has been slow—and that’s bad for a number of reasons. More light at night leads to fewer collisions on roads during the evening rush hour. That’s why Steve Calandrillo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law who has studied the economics of daylight saving time, says he’s an advocate for permanently adopting it. “Darkness kills,” Calandrillo says. “And sunshine saves.” There are economic benefits to this too. A study published last November argued that an extra hour of daylight in the evening could reduce collisions enough to save around $1.2 billion annually in the US alone.

Extra daylight while people are awake may also make them spend more money. “Americans are less willing to go out and shop in the dark,” says Calandrillo. A 2016 report from JPMorgan Chase & Co looked at spending in Los Angeles at the beginning and end of the daylight saving time period and compared it to Phoenix, Arizona, which doesn’t change its clocks. The research found a 0.9 percent increase in daily credit card spending per capita in Los Angeles in March after clocks jumped forward relative to Phoenix, and a 3.5 percent decrease in November once they fell back.

But other researchers argue it makes more sense to permanently settle on standard time instead—including Güell Sans. Spain, where she lives, is an outlier in its time zone; it syncs its clocks with central Europe instead of the UK, which sits directly above it and is an hour behind. Spaniards sleep nearly an hour less on average each night than other Europeans, in part thanks to this time zone quirk, which originated during World War II to put Spain on time with Nazi Germany. A permanent switch to daylight saving time would mean darker mornings in Spain in winter—posing the same road collision risk darker evenings can bring in other places.

Plus, extra evening daylight can mess with people’s sleep. A 2019 US study compared sleep patterns of people living on opposite edges of the same time zone, where the sun rises and sets at  different times. It found that an hour of later daylight decreased sleep by an average of 19 minutes.

While the US and Europe are stuck—over both abolishing the seasonal resetting and which time to settle on—shifts have happened elsewhere.

Argentina stopped switching to daylight saving time in 2009. In Mexico, lawmakers decided to do away with clock changes after 2022 (though its law exempted some cities along the northern border that may still change to sync with the US). Arizona and Hawaii already do not switch clocks to daylight saving time, and some parts of Canada also don’t make the switch.

In the US, lawmakers in individual states have tried to take things into their own hands. Delaware passed a law in 2019 to permanently adopt daylight saving time, but this was contingent on bordering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland doing the same. Ontario passed similar legislation in 2020, but the shift only takes effect if its neighbors, Quebec and New York, do the same. British Columbia is waiting for Washington, Oregon, and California to make a switch with it. At the state level, there’s the same hunt for consensus.

An extra hour of daylight might be welcome news for many, but unless US states and neighboring countries can work together to reach an agreement, people will continue to face a return to darkness.

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California banking regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday after a run on the lender, which had $209 billion in assets at the end of 2022, with depositors pulling out as much as $42 billion on a single day, rendering it insolvent.

"Start-ups are an important part of the new India economy. I will meet with Indian Startups this week to understand impact on them and how the government can help during the crisis," Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the state minister for IT said on Twitter.

India has one of the world's biggest start-up markets, with many clocking multi-billion-dollar valuations in recent years and getting the backing of foreign investors, who have made bold bets on digital and other tech businesses.

SVB's failure, the biggest in the U.S. since the 2008 financial crisis, has roiled global markets, hit banking stocks and is now unsettling Indian entrepreneurs.

Two partners at an Indian venture capital fund and one lender to Indian start-ups told Reuters that they are running checks with portfolio companies on any SVB exposure and if so, whether it is a significant part of their total bank balance.

Consumer internet startups, which have drawn the bulk of funding in India in recent years, are less affected because they either do not have an SVB account or have minimal exposure to it, the three people said.

"Spoke to some founders and it is very bad," Ashish Dave, CEO of Mirae Asset Venture Investments (India), wrote in a tweet.

"Especially for Indian founders ... who setup their U.S. companies and raised their initial round, SVB is default bank. Uncertainty is killing them. Growth ones are relatively safer as they diversified. Last thing founders needed."

Software firm Freshworks (FRSH.O) said it has minimal exposure to the SVB situation relative to the company's overall balance sheet.

"As we grew, we brought on larger, diversified banks such as Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and UBS. The vast majority of our cash and marketable securities today is not held at SVB," Freshworks said in a blog post, adding that the company does not foresee any disruption to employees or customers.

Freshworks said it is working with customers and vendors who were using its SVB account to migrate to alternate bank accounts.

India's Nazara Technologies Ltd (NAZA.NS), a mobile gaming company, said in a stock exchange filing that two of its subsidiaries, Kiddopia Inc and Mediawrkz Inc, hold cash balances totalling $7.75 million or 640 million rupees with SVB.

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You probably know someone with a cat or dog allergy, but can pets also be allergic to us? Allergies are caused by an overreaction of the immune system to a substance, such as pollen, peanuts, or pet saliva.

Just like humans, animals can have allergies to a variety of substances, and although it’s rare, some pets are allergic to our dead skin cells, known as dander. Different pets can even be allergic to each other’s dander!

Common allergy symptoms include breathing difficulties or skin irritation. If you think your pet may have an allergy, seek advice from your vet.

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On March 9, the physics journal  Physical Review Letters (PRL) launched an investigation into a June 2021 paper coauthored, among others, by Ranga Dias, following allegations of data manipulation, in the same week that Dias and others reported in a different journal that they had discovered room-temperature superconductivity in a material compressed by a few thousand atmospheres of pressure.

The new claim has thrust Dr. Dias and his colleagues back into the spotlight, where they have been before for claiming the discovery of superconductivity in similar circumstances, in europium in 2009 and carbonaceous sulphur hydride in 2020.

Now, Dias et al. have reported in Nature that nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride becomes superconducting at 21º C and under 20,000 atmospheres (atm).

The claim has set the condensed-matter physics community aflutter because the discovery of superconductivity at or near room temperature and ambient pressure (i.e. 1 atm) is one of the field’s greatest pursuits. Researchers have found other materials that superconduct at or near room temperature but only when they’re compressed by 100-1,000-times more pressure.

Data manipulation

However, even though the Dias et al. paper has been published in Nature, a respectable journal, many other physicists have already said they will hold off on believing the study data until they can independently verify it. This is partly because of data availability and Dr. Dias’s previous track record – record that now includes the new investigation PRL has launched.

“This certainly appears to be a momentous advance,” Vijay B. Shenoy, an associate professor at the Centre for Condensed Matter Theory, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, told The Hindu. “My personal concern is that the lead investigator has not been without controversy.”

After Dias et al. reported in 2009 that europium becomes a superconductor at very low temperature and very high pressure, at least one scientist acquired the raw data from the experiments from one of the study’s coauthors and found evidence of manipulation. Once the issues came to light, PRL – which had published the paper in 2009 – retracted it in December 2021.

In October 2020, Dr. Dias and others reported in  Nature that carbonaceous sulphur hydride (CSH) becomes superconducting at around 14º C and 2.6 million atm of pressure. Soon, independent scientists who synthesised the material according to the original recipe and conducted the same tests on it that Dias et al. had reached different results. The finding didn’t replicate.

Two days after the europium paper was retracted, Dr. Dias and his colleague Ashkan Salamat released the raw data of the CSH paper. There, independent scientists quickly found anomalies in the magnetic susceptibility data. (When a material transitions to a superconducting state, its magnetic susceptibility should plummet to zero. This is one of the checks for superconductivity.) The CSH paper was retracted in September 2022.

PRL investigation

Earlier this month, James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida, told  Physics magazine that Dr. Dias’s 2013 PhD thesis had plagiarised from Hamlin’s 2007 thesis. Dr. Hamlin has also informed PRL that a resistivity plot in Dr. Dias’s thesis, for germanium selenide, resembles the same plot for manganese sulphide in a 2021 PRL paper. These two materials aren’t supposed to have the same resistivity plots.

Lilia Boeri, at the Sapienza University of Rome, told  Physics that the latest finding reported by Dias et al. is contrary to what physicists know about the behaviour of nitrogen-doped lutetium. For similar reasons, Mikhail Eremets, at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, told  Physics World that independent replication of the results will be of “paramount importance”.

Dr. Eremets is celebrated for his group’s discovery of superconductivity in a metallic hydrogen alloy in 2015, at –70º C K and 1.5 million atm. Dr. Dias and Isaac Silvera at Harvard University (and Dr. Dias’s postdoctoral mentor) reported in 2017 that they had made metallic hydrogen (unalloyed) under a much higher pressure of 4.9 million atm. This result has been received unfavourably as well.

For now, reports in specialist publications indicate that the wider community’s confidence in the new results remains low. One issue is that the new paper favourably cites a disputed technique in the retracted 2020 CSH paper. Another is that, per the  New York Times, Dr. Dias isn’t ready to share a precise recipe that others can follow to make the nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride for independent tests because he plans to commercialise the material.

But because the new result reportedly requires much less pressure to become superconducting than hydrogen or CSH, physicists expect more labs will be able to independently test the results than before.

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The results, released Saturday, are encouraging for men who want to avoid treatment-related sexual and incontinence problems, said Dr. Stacy Loeb, a prostate cancer specialist at NYU Langone Health who was not involved in the research.

The study directly compared the three approaches—surgery to remove tumors, radiation treatment and monitoring. Most prostate cancer grows slowly, so it takes many years to look at the disease's outcomes.

"There was no difference in prostate cancer mortality at 15 years between the groups," Loeb said. And prostate cancer survival for all three groups was high—97% regardless of treatment approach. "That's also very good news."

The results were published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at a European Association of Urology conference in Milan, Italy. Britain's National Institute for Health and Care Research paid for the research.

Men diagnosed with localized prostate cancer shouldn't panic or rush treatment decisions, said lead author Dr. Freddie Hamdy of the University of Oxford. Instead, they should "consider carefully the possible benefits and harms caused by the treatment options."

A small number of men with high-risk or more advanced disease do need urgent treatments, he added.

Researchers followed more than 1,600 U.K. men who agreed to be randomly assigned to get surgery, radiation or active monitoring. The patients' cancer was confined to the prostate, a walnut-sized gland that's part of the reproductive system. Men in the monitoring group had regular blood tests and some went on to have surgery or radiation.

Death from prostate cancer occurred in 3.1% of the active-monitoring group, 2.2% in the surgery group, and 2.9% in the radiation group, differences considered statistically insignificant.

At 15 years, cancer had spread in 9.4% of the active-monitoring group, 4.7% of the surgery group and 5% of the radiation group. The study was started in 1999, and experts said today's monitoring practices are better, with MRI imaging and gene tests guiding decisions.

"We have more ways now to help catch that the disease is progressing before it spreads," Loeb said. In the U.S., about 60% of low-risk patients choose monitoring, now called active surveillance.

Hamdy said the researchers had seen the difference in cancer spread at 10 years and expected it to make a difference in survival at 15 years, "but it did not." He said spread alone doesn't predict prostate cancer death.

"This is a new and interesting finding, useful for men when they make decisions about treatments," he said.

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Sunday, March 12

• The first launch of the upcoming week is a Russian Proton-M rocket carrying the second Olimp-K satellite. Apparently, the aim of this satellite will be to get up close to other space satellites and eavesdrop on the contents being sent from them. The satellite could also provide navigation correction signals for the GLONASS system, but it’s all speculation as its mission isn’t disclosed. The rocket will take off at 10:12 p.m. UTC from Kazakhstan.

Wednesday, March 15

• On Wednesday, we’ll see two launches. The first is a Falcon 9 carrying the Dragon 2 spacecraft which will take operational cargo to the International Space Station. The mission is part of the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA and should be streamed on the SpaceX website. The launch will take place at 12:30 a.m. UTC from Florida.
• The next launch will be a Long March CZ-11 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 11:44 a.m. UTC. The payload is unknown at the time of writing so nothing more can be said about this mission.

Friday, March 17

• The only launch on Friday will also be coming from China. The government will launch a Long March CZ-3B/E rocket carrying the Zhongxing 6E communications satellite. The satellite will be operated by China Satcom to provide users with an uplink and downlink for radio and TV stations. The mission is due to launch at 10:00 a.m. UTC from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

Saturday, March 18

• The first launch on Saturday will be an Indian GSLV rocket carrying the NVS 1 navigation satellite. The satellite will replace the IRNSS 1G satellite in the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System which provides positioning services for the Indian subcontinent. This mission will launch from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh but the time of the launch isn’t known.
• The launch will be a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the SES 18 and SES 19 communications satellites. The rocket will fly at 12:35 a.m. UTC from Cape Canaveral and can be viewed on SpaceX’s website live.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was Japan’s H3 rocket carrying the Daichi-3 Earth observation satellite. While we got to see the rocket taking off, a destruct command had to be sent and the mission was ultimately a failure.

• Next, a Falcon 9 carried OneWeb satellites to orbit where they will provide internet services from space. You can see the launch below and the landing of the rocket’s first stage.

• The final launch we saw last week was of a Long March-4C carrying the TianHui-6 A/B satellites from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. They will be used for Earth observation tasks.

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

TWIRL 105: SpaceX, China, Russia, and India all planning rocket launches this week