Pfizer said it expected the drug, marketed under the name Zavzpret, to be available in pharmacies in July 2023.

"The FDA approval of Zavzpret marks a significant breakthrough for people with migraine who need freedom from pain and prefer alternative options to oral medications," Pfizer chief commercial officer Angela Hwang said in a statement.

A Phase 3 study of the drug found that it delivered pain relief to some migraine sufferers in as little as 15 minutes.

"As a nasal spray with rapid drug absorption, Zavzpret offers an alternative treatment option for people who need pain relief or cannot take oral medications due to nausea or vomiting," Pfizer quoted Kathleen Mullin, associate medical director at the New England Institute for Neurology and Headache, as saying.

The treatment for a condition generally tackled with orally taken medicines was double-blind tested on a sample of 1,405 people, with half taking a single spray dose and the remainder receiving a placebo.

The spray was found to reduce pain significantly when assessed two hours after the onset of a migraine, which as well as causing often severe headaches can include nausea and sensitivity to light or noise.

Pfizer acquired Zavzpret, also known as Zavegepant, last year for some $10 billion from Biohaven, along with other migraine treatments from the firm.

Some 39 million Americans experience migraine headaches, according to the American Migraine Foundation.

© 2023 AFP

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Colon cancer symptoms usually don't appear in early stages of the disease and when they do, they are often at an advanced stage. Dr. Johanna Chan, a Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist, says it's important to recognize colon cancer symptoms and to seek medical attention if you experience them.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and the American Cancer Society recommend patients of average risk start screening for colorectal cancer at age 45.

"Colon cancer is an incredibly common cancer, routinely one of the top five causes of cancer annually. And really anyone is at risk, at any age," says Dr. Chan.

She says that age is more often under 55.

"We are seeing younger patients present with colon cancer. And unfortunately, they also tend to present at a more advanced stage," says Dr. Chan.

Ongoing stomach discomfort and unexplained weight loss can be colon cancer symptoms.

"In fact, a lot of the warning symptoms such as rectal bleeding, anemia, change in bowel habits, these are very common symptoms that happen across all ranges of age groups," Dr. Chan says.

Most young healthy patients with rectal bleeding won't have colon cancer.

"It's still on the possible list of diagnoses. And it's really important that young patients seek care for any of these symptoms that occur," says Dr. Chan.

Many of the colon cancer symptoms may be symptoms of other health issues so it recommended to talk with your health care team to find out the cause of the problem

Alaska Native, American Indian and African Americans have a greater risk of colon cancer than people of other races, says the American Cancer Society.

Factors that may increase your risk of colon cancer include:

•     Family history

•     Bowel disease

•     Diabetes

•     Obesity

•     Environmental exposures like smoking or heavy alcohol use

Dr. Chan says certain specific factors such as family history may require a more individualized approach for colorectal cancer screening. She encourages patients to talk to their health care team to make sure they are individualizing recommendations for them.

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Published in Heart, Lung and Circulation, the Monash University-led project examined awareness during and following the Heart Foundation's Warning Signs Campaign, which ran from 2010-2013.

The Warning Signs campaign improved people in Australia's awareness of heart attack symptoms, confidence to act and to call an ambulance if symptoms were experienced. This aligns with other evaluations of the campaign, which showed patients who had a heart attack and who saw the campaign acted fast.

The new cross-sectional study compared awareness across 2010-2014, during and immediately after the campaign, and 2015-2020. In total, 101,936 adults in Australia were surveyed. Looking at the ability of those aged 30-59 to name heart attack symptoms, awareness declined significantly in the years following the Warning Signs campaign.

Awareness of chest pain as a heart attack symptom fell from 80 percent in 2010 to 57 percent in 2020. The proportion of respondents who could not name a single heart symptom increased from four percent to 20 percent.

Lead author Associate Professor Janet Bray, of the Monash University School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, said the findings were "very alarming" and new approaches were needed to ensure people acted appropriately if symptoms occurred.

Associate Professor Bray said time was critical. "Every minute, more heart muscle dies and the chance of complications like cardiac arrest increases," she said. "Every Australian should be able to recognize heart attack symptoms and the need to respond quickly and call Triple Zero for an ambulance (000)."

The findings helped prompt the Heart Matters study, a partnership among Monash University, the Heart Foundation, Ambulance Victoria and the Victorian Government Department of Health. The trial is working to improve heart attack awareness in eight high-risk local government areas.

Heart Foundation Manager Clinical Evidence, Dr. Amanda Buttery, said Heart Matters aimed to improve personal risk awareness, heart symptom awareness and ambulance use in areas with known high heart attack rates and low ambulance use. "It involves community education sessions and reaching groups with known low warning sign awareness and ambulance use," she said.

Associate Professor Bray said some people in Australia were "definitely" at risk of serious illness or death due to their lack of heart attack knowledge. She said awareness was unlikely to have improved in the time since study finished in 2020, as public health messaging has been focused on COVID.

"A heart attack occurs due to a blockage in an artery in the heart, which means blood and oxygen can't get to part of the heart and that part starts to die," she said. "We have treatments in hospital that can reopen the blocked artery, and the quicker this can be done the less heart muscle that dies.

"This is why we need the public to know heart attack symptoms and to call an ambulance. Calling an ambulance allows treatment to start immediately and ensures that they can be taken to a hospital that offers the right treatment."

Ambulance Victoria Paramedic and Acting Director of Research and Evaluation, Dr. Ziad Nehme, welcomed the findings of the study.

"Our paramedics attend almost 60,000 patients every year with suspected heart attack symptoms, such as chest pain. Paramedics are best placed to diagnose and treat heart attacks in the community and are equipped to administer life-saving medications that can open a blocked artery in the heart," said Dr. Nehme. "Recognizing your symptoms early and calling Triple Zero (000) can make all the difference to your recovery."

Heart attacks at a glance

A heart attack is a sudden blockage of the blood supply to an area of the heart. This means that the heart muscle isn't getting the oxygen it needs to effectively pump blood to the rest of the body.

• Every year 56,700 Australians have a heart attack or angina, equating to 155 events every day. Twice as many men experience heart attacks as women, and considerably more men die.

• 93 percent more men are admitted to hospital for heart attacks than women.

• Heart attacks cause almost one in 25 deaths. This equates to one person every 81 minutes, or on average 18 people every day (6500 a year).

• Every day 157 people need hospital treatment due to a heart attack, or one every nine minutes.

• Positively, the prevalence of heart attacks has been decreasing over time.

Warning signs of a heart attack

• Pain, pressure or tightness in one or more of these areas: chest, arm(s), shoulder(s) or back, neck or jaw. You may also feel short of breath, dizzy, sweaty or sick.

• Tell someone how you feel. If feeling worse or not better after 10 minutes, call an ambulance.

Men vs. women

While chest pain is the most common heart attack symptom in both women and men, women are more likely than men to experience non-chest pain symptoms.

Women are more likely to experience heart attack warning signs such as nausea, fatigue, shortness of breath, cold sweats and pain or discomfort in the jaw, shoulders, arms or back. These are symptoms that can be mistaken for conditions such as the flu, overexertion, indigestion or just feeling run down rather than a life-threatening heart attack.

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The US Food and Drug Administration is pushing for you to get an annual Covid booster. The problem is, the data isn’t clear on whether you need one. 

Covid isn’t going anywhere. In the US and many European countries, SARS-CoV-2 is still circulating at significant levels, with Covid settling into being a major, ongoing cause of illness. Boosters may protect against its worst effects, but these are shots in the dark: insurance against severe disease, but possibly not necessary. This is because we don’t know how long their protection against severe illness actually lasts. 

It’s time we found out, but that means switching focus. At the level of basic biology, it means paying less attention to the antibodies vaccines generate and focusing more on another very important but overlooked part of the immune system: memory T cells. “The way you’re going to know who needs boosters is to know how long memory cells last,” says Paul Offit, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and a vaccine advisor to the FDA.

The immune system is complex, but fundamentally it has three parts. There’s innate immunity, the physical or chemical barriers—such as your skin or the mucus in your nose—that are constantly working to keep disease-causing microbes at bay. 

For germs that get past this, there’s then short-term or humoral immunity: the rapid response tailored to a particular invading threat, such as a virus, that dominates early after it has arrived to try to keep an infection from taking hold. This defensive wave is led by neutralizing antibodies made specifically to fight whatever has invaded the body. 

But when this antibody response fails to stop Covid from gaining a foothold and the virus gets inside cells so it can reproduce, a third protective strand comes into play: long-term, cellular immunity. Memory T cells, which are also tailored to the specific threat, are a key part of this. 

“Once a virus infects cells, T cells can then limit the amount of viral replication,” says Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and editor at large at KFF Health News. When a virus like Covid reproduces, it parks parts of itself in the outer membrane of the cell, which announces to the host that the cell is infected. T cells—primed, through vaccination or prior infection, to notice these odd parts—then kick into gear, killing infected cells and directing the production of more antibodies. “That’s preventing the disease from progressing,” Gounder says. 

So while cellular immunity doesn’t stop an initial infection, it’s what keeps people out of the hospital, out of the intensive care unit, and out of the morgue, says Offit. “The second thing that’s good is that T cells often live for years, decades, or lifetimes,” he says—meaning the protection they offer against severe illness can be long-lasting. 

And there’s a third major benefit. In Covid, some of the viral bits that wind up on cell membranes and attract T cells are “highly conserved” interior parts of the coronavirus—bits that are much less likely to mutate and become invisible to the immune system. The proteins that coat the outside of the virus, which are what typically end up being targeted by antibodies, are much more likely to mutate, leaving those antibodies less effective.

Cellular immunity is clearly important—it protects against Covid’s worst, doesn’t fade as quickly as humoral immunity, and is harder for the virus to mutate away from. Yet when testing and approving Covid vaccines, developers and regulators didn’t look closely at it. They relied on studies of the humoral response. Think of all the times you’ve heard about a vaccine’s ability to create an antibody response or about how long antibody levels last. Thankfully, studies into this showed quick sharp increases in antibodies that could neutralize SARS-CoV-2 following vaccination. 

Not looking at T cells might feel like an oversight, but it made sense at the time. With the pandemic accelerating up to full force, regulators wanted to find out quickly if vaccines would be useful in fighting the virus and neutralizing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 peak within a couple of weeks. The T-cell response, on the other hand, can take months to mature. Additionally, lab tests for T cells are more complicated than those for antibodies, and they differ from lab to lab, making large-scale comparisons harder. 

Plus, regulators are used to seeing neutralizing antibody measurements and making calls off of these. Even if neutralizing antibodies fail to halt an infection completely, they generally limit it while they are present in good quantities—so seeing them spike after vaccination suggested the Covid vaccines would help protect people. Trials then backed this up by showing far lower rates of hospitalization and severe disease in the vaccinated in the first few months after they had received their jabs, when the humoral response was strongest.

But we now know that these antibodies fade over time, and that the coronavirus can mutate to evade antibodies made against its earlier forms. “Focusing on short-term antibody response is really missing the boat,” says Dan Barouch, a professor at Harvard Medical School and head of the vaccine research division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Looking so intently at antibodies has left us none the wiser about the strength and durability of protection against severe illness offered by T cells. 

So to try to better understand this, researchers have started comparing T-cell responses among the major vaccines. Scientists from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, for example, reported in the journal Cell last summer that the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna (as well as two other vaccines that work by different mechanisms) produced relatively consistent levels of a key T cell in the six months after vaccination. Over the same period, antibodies generated by the Pfizer and Moderna shots faded—offering an initial rough sketch of the picture of long-term Covid immunity.   

But this is just the beginning. We still need to know how the strength of the T-cell response corresponds to protection against the disease: Can even relatively low levels be sufficient? And are some T cells more effective than others? Part of the difficulty is picking one voice out of the immune system’s chorus. “It’s hard to prove one component of the immune system is responsible for protection when all the components work together,” says Barouch. There’s also still no robust estimate of how long these T cells last, even if we do know they’re longer-lasting than antibodies. 

Our understanding of cellular immunity has been hampered by a lack of attention, says Rick Bright, an immunologist, former director of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and former senior vice president of R&D at Novavax, a biotech firm that makes a Covid vaccine. “Funding to support and accelerate this critical area of vaccine development has been—and remains—weak and is waning along with the overall interest in Covid,” he says.

There are pockets of interest. Barouch and his colleagues are also trying to measure how well the current vaccines build cellular immunity, while others are trying to make vaccines that specifically focus on generating a T-cell response. Researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany, for example, have a trial going to test the safety of a vaccine made of SARS-CoV-2 proteins that are known to spark T-cell immunity. And at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an mRNA vaccine that generates T cells by targeting highly conserved parts of the coronavirus has shown promise in mice.

But there are also doubters. “Nobody denies that cellular immunity is important,” says John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine. But in the eyes of many researchers, he says, T cells play a subsidiary role in protection compared to antibodies.

Moore points to something called “affinity maturation,” where the immune system learns to build more precise antibodies against a pathogen over time, the more it is exposed to it. Researchers from New York and California have shown that this happens with SARS-CoV-2. So if you know you already have vaccines that generate good levels of antibodies, and that every time a vaccine is given, the antibodies created will be stronger than before, then perhaps that’s enough—you don’t need to worry about T cells. Plus, Moore says, preliminary studies have shown that neutralizing antibodies do a good job of protecting against severe Covid. And if that’s the case, then keeping these regularly topped up with occasional boosters would keep everyone safe. 

Offit, though, is confident enough in T cells that he thinks boosters might not be needed in anyone but the most vulnerable (such as the elderly or immunocompromised), at least until it can be seen that the T-cell response has disappeared. “If it turns out memory cells last only a year, for example, you may need a yearly booster,” he says. “If they last two years, three years, four years, then you might not need a booster.” Yet there aren’t yet any signs of T-cell levels declining over time: In addition to the La Jolla research, a report in Science Immunology has shown that T-cell responses to various vaccines remain stable and aren’t improved by boosters.

Regardless, the FDA has proposed its annual booster schedule for Covid, the idea being that boosters can be updated each year to handle the latest variants of the virus, to ensure that the antibodies created are well matched to whatever form of the virus is circulating. This essentially mirrors how the world handles changes to flu viruses.

For Bright, it’s the wrong way of doing things: He would like to see more of a focus instead on building vaccines that target those bits of the virus that don’t change. “We can follow the limitations of influenza vaccine development,” he says. “Or we can create vaccines that trigger a full arsenal of both cellular and humoral immunity.” If we go the way of the flu vaccine and keep focusing on antibodies, he argues, we’ll just be chasing SARS-CoV-2 forever. Right now, it’s looking like this is the way we’re headed.

No One Knows if You Need Another Covid Booster

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In a study conducted by The University of Texas at Austin, researchers found that the oceans’ capacity to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) would reach its maximum by 2100 and decrease to half of its current efficiency by 2300, based on a climate simulation that was configured for a worst-case emissions scenario.

The decline happens because of the emergence of a surface layer of low-alkalinity water that hinders the ability of the oceans to absorb CO2. Alkalinity is a chemical property that affects how much CO2 can dissolve in seawater.

Although the emissions scenario used in the study is unlikely because of global efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the findings reveal a previously unknown tipping point that if activated would release an important brake on global warming, the authors said.

“We need to think about these worst-case scenarios to understand how our CO2 emissions might affect the oceans not just this century, but next century and the following century,” said Megumi Chikamoto, who led the research as a research fellow at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics.

The study was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Choppy seas over the Gulf of Mexico, 2017. Research led by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics found that future warming could trigger chemical changes in the ocean surface that accelerate global warming. Credit: Jackson School of Geosciences/Tiannong “Skyler” Dong

 

Today, the oceans soak up about a third of the CO2 emissions generated by humans. Climate simulations had previously shown that the oceans slow their absorption of CO2 over time, but none had considered alkalinity as an explanation. To reach their conclusion, the researchers recalculated pieces of a 450-year simulation until they hit on alkalinity as a key cause of the slowing.

According to the findings, the effect begins with extreme climate change, which supercharges rainfall and slows ocean currents. This leaves the surface of the oceans covered in a warm layer of fresh water that won’t mix easily with the cooler, more alkaline waters below it. As this surface layer becomes more saturated with CO2, its alkalinity falls and with it, its ability to absorb CO2. The end result is a surface layer that acts as a barrier for CO2 absorption. That means less of the greenhouse gas goes into the ocean and more of it is left behind in the atmosphere. This in turn produces faster warming, which sustains and strengthens the low-alkalinity surface layer.

Co-author, Pedro DiNezio, an affiliate researcher at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and associate professor at the University of Colorado, said that the discovery was a powerful reminder that the world needs to reduce its CO2 emissions to avoid crossing this and other tipping points.

“Whether it’s this or the collapse of the ice sheets, there’s potentially a series of connected crises lurking in our future that we need to avoid at all costs,” he said. The next step, he said, is to figure out whether the alkalinity mechanism is triggered under more moderate emissions scenarios.

Coauthor Nikki Lovenduski, a professor at the University of Colorado who contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021 climate report, said that the study’s findings would help scientists make better projections about future climate change.

“This paper demonstrates that the climate change problem may be exacerbated by things that are as yet unknown,” she said. “But the ocean climate feedback mechanism this particular study revealed will open up new avenues of research that will help us better understand the carbon cycle, past climate change and perhaps come up with solutions for future problems.”

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Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel on Monday pushed back on criticism of the company's plans to raise the price of its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines by 400 percent, arguing that the billions of dollars in federal funding the company received played little role in the vaccine's development.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal Health Forum, Bancel suggested that the vaccine's development is thanks to private investors and that the federal funding merely hastened development that would have occurred regardless. The comments came in response to a question of whether the company has a "moral obligation" to give back to the taxpayers who helped develop the life-saving immunization—presumably by not dramatically hiking the vaccine's price as it moves from federal distribution to the commercial market this year.

While the government most recently paid $26 per dose of Moderna's updated booster, the company is planning to raise the price of its shots to $110 to $130 per dose.

"The platform was funded by private investors. The platform was not funded by the government," Bancel argued. "What the government did—and we're very grateful for it and I think they got a lot of value out of it—is to accelerate the development of a vaccine. We would have funded the vaccine, it would just have taken longer," he said. The company also "didn't get a penny" from the government to help with manufacturing, he added.

Amid the pandemic, Moderna received nearly $10 billion in federal funding to develop, test, and provide vaccine doses for the US population. That includes approximately $1.7 billion from an April 2020 agreement with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which supported late-stage clinical development. Worldwide, the company also made roughly $36 billion in vaccine sales, according to The New York Times.

But federal support for the lucrative vaccine began before the pandemic. Moderna developed its vaccine with federal researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Moderna partnered with the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 2016 to create a general design for mRNA vaccines. In December, Moderna paid the NIH $400 million for borrowing a molecular technique developed by NIH researchers for the design of the company's vaccine.

The NIH is currently in a bitter patent dispute with Moderna after the company purposefully excluded three NIAID researchers from the principal patent for the vaccine.

Bancel's comments are sure to rile critics. And they come just two weeks ahead of a congressional hearing by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on the proposed price hike for the vaccine. The hearing, scheduled for March 22, is titled "Taxpayers Paid Billions For It: So Why Would Moderna Consider Quadrupling the Price of the COVID Vaccine?" Bancel has agreed to testify.

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New research indicates that the average intelligence quotient (IQ) in the US has declined for the first time in nearly 100 years. But does this mean that the population of the US is actually getting dumber? Not necessarily.

Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Oregon looked at the results of online IQ tests taken by 394,378 adults in the US from 2006 to 2018.

The team was looking to see whether they could find evidence of the Flynn effect, the idea that the IQ of a population generally appears to increase each generation. As the study authors noted: IQ scores have “substantially increased since 1932 and through the 20th century, with differences ranging from 3.0 to 5.0 IQ points”.

Instead, however, they found the opposite. Overall, the results suggest IQ points had declined over the study period, although the researchers didn't state exactly how many IQ points have dropped. 

Declines were seen widely across the board regardless of age and gender, but the steepest slump was found among people with lower levels of education and younger participants aged 18 to 22.

While certain skills, like 3D spatial reasoning tests, had increased from 2011 to 2018, other skills like verbal reasoning, visual problem solving, and numerical series tests had all dropped. 

The researchers didn’t explicitly look to explain the trend they sniffed out. However, they did speculate that it might have something to do with changes in education in the US.

“It could be the case that our results indicate a change of quality or content of education and test-taking skills within this large United States sample. As scores were lower for more recent participants across all levels of education, this might suggest that either the caliber of education has decreased across this study's sample and/or that there has been a shift in the perceived value of certain cognitive skills,“ the study authors write in their conclusion.

The US isn’t alone, however. A number of studies in Europe over the last two decades suggest that the Flynn effect had already stagnated or begun to reverse. 

For instance, research on people in Finland suggested that IQ scores had dropped by 2 IQ points from 1997 to 2009, while in France scores declined by 3.8 IQ points from 1999 to 2009. Similar findings have also been reported in the UK, Norway, Denmark, Australia, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

No single factor can explain these complex trends, although some researchers have argued it's down to environmental factors, as opposed to genetics. These environmental factors include things such as education, nutrition, reading less, and the rise of technology.

When looking through all these statistics, it’s important to consider that IQ points aren’t perfect measures of intelligence. IQ tests attract a load of criticism because they're only concerned with a narrow set of skills and intelligence is far too complex to be precisely measured.

In 2012, a huge study of over 100,000 people concluded that most intelligence tests are fundamentally flawed as they do not take into account the complex nature of the human intellect. Their findings suggested that no single human trait, such as IQ, could explain all the variations in intelligence revealed by tests.

With all of that in mind, this latest study does still provide some food for thought. 

The new study is published in the journal Intelligence.

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Mozambique was lashed by cyclone Idai (pictured) back in 2019; now it’s battling with what could well be the longest cyclone on record. Image credit: Lavizzara / Shutterstock.com

Cyclone Freddy first came into the world on February 6 and has since been causing carnage across the Indian Ocean, making landfall in Madagascar and Mozambique. The deadly tropical storm has already broken some grim records, including being the only storm in the Southern Hemisphere ever to have intensified more than three times, and is on track to become the longest cyclone ever recorded.

The storm first made ground in Madagascar, near Mananjary, after travelling 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles) across the Indian Ocean and now threatens multiple African nations. At its peaks it’s reached a Category 5 hurricane status on the Saffir Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, reaching top speeds of 257 kilometers per hour (160 miles per hour).

This is the first time experts have observed a storm taking the peculiar route Freddy’s tracked across the Indian Ocean, crossing its entirety from east to west, and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) believes that Freddy is on track to becoming the longest-lived tropical cyclone in the Southern Hemisphere. Ironically, declaring the record broken can’t be done until the storm has died out.

"The WMO Weather and Climate Extremes Archive are currently assembling a blue-ribbon international committee of scientists,” said Prof. Randall Cerveny, WMO Weather and Climate Extremes rapporteur, in a statement. “Once the tropical cyclone has dissipated, these experts will begin a detailed examination of the raw data to determine if Freddy has indeed established a record as the longest-duration tropical cyclone on record.” 

The key question that remains in declaring the record is whether or not the intermittent dips we’ve seen in cyclone Freddy have been significant enough to strip Freddy of the title. The competition is Typhoon John, a tropical cyclone that became the longest-lasting (at 31 days) and farthest-travelling cyclone ever observed. It ripped through Hawaii, Johnston Island and Alaska back in 1994. 

However, Freddy has already busted some harrowing world records for storm activity.

“Freddy does hold the record for all-time accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), a measure of the storm’s strength over time, for the Southern Hemisphere, as well as globally, since Cyclone Ioke in 2006,” said the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service.

“Additionally, Freddy was the first tropical cyclone in the Southern Hemisphere to undergo four separate rounds of rapid intensification, which occurred due to repeated bursts of wind shear that weakened the storm and then subsided.”

According to The Washington Post, only three storms in the Northern Hemisphere have undergone four surges in intensification during their weeks-long lifetimes, including Norman 2018, Emily 2005, and John 1994. These events are characterized by an increase in wind speeds of around 56 kilometers per hour (35 miles per hour) or more in a day.

The WMO are urging that early warnings have been key to minimizing the loss to human life caused by the catastrophic storm.

"Freddy is having a major socio-economic and humanitarian impact on affected communities. The death toll has been limited by accurate forecasts and early warnings, and coordinated disaster risk reduction action on the ground - although even one casualty is one too many," said Dr Johan Stander, WMO Services Director, in a statement.

"This once again underlines the importance of the UN Early Warnings for All initiative to ensure that everyone is protected in the next five years. WMO is committed to working with our partners to achieve this and tackle extreme weather and climate change related risks - one of the biggest challenges of our times.”

Find updates on Tropical Cyclone Freddy via ReliefWeb.

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There are now over 171 trillion pieces of plastic floating around in the world's oceans, according to a new estimate. The news comes less than a week after the signing of the historic United Nations (UN) High Seas treaty, which sought to safeguard the world’s oceans. By the looks of this new study, they’ve got a lot of work to do.

An international team of researchers led by the 5 Gyres Institute in Los Angeles reached the findings that looked at almost 12,000 datasets on plastic pollution from around the world. 

In total, they estimate that the weight of all the plastic in the world’s oceans is approximately 2 million tonnes, consisting of at least 171 trillion pieces.

When looking at trends in ocean plastic from 1979 to 2019, the researchers noticed a massive uptick emerged from 2005 onwards. Things have the potential to get even worse too. If current trends continue, they estimate that the rate of plastic entering aquatic environments could increase 2.6-fold from 2016 to 2040. 

“Cleanup is futile if we continue to produce plastic at the current rate, and we have heard about recycling for too long while the plastic industry simultaneously rejects any commitments to buy recycled material or design for recyclability. It's time to address the plastic problem at the source,” Dr Marcus Eriksen, lead study author and co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, said in a statement.

“The exponential increase in microplastics across the world’s oceans is a stark warning that we must act now at a global scale, stop focusing on cleanup and recycling, and usher in an age of corporate responsibility for the entire life of the things they make,” added Eriksen. 

Plastic pollution is terrible news for marine life. Image credit: Rich Carey/Shutterstock.com

Recent years have seen a growing body of research highlight how plastic pollution is taking its toll on marine environments and the array of life they harbor. Just this week, scientists identified a new condition –dubbed "plasticosis" – that affects the stomachs of seabirds and impacts their ability to obtain nutrients from their food.

“The increasing accumulation of plastic particles in our environments and bodies will eventually lead to the inability for the planet to sustain life as we know it. Now is the time for governments worldwide to unite in their efforts to reduce plastic production and further prevent its escape into the environment,” added Dr Scott Coffin, Research Scientist at the California State Water Resources Control Board.

Late on Saturday March 4, 2023, the UN High Seas Treaty was signed, whereby member states agreed on a legal framework for a treaty designed to protect the high seas. Along with tackling issues like ocean acidification and climate change, the treaty will look to address the problem of plastic pollution.

In March 2022, the UN Environmental Agency also committed to developing a legally binding agreement to end plastic pollution. 

The authors of this latest study argue that it’s crucial these agreements result in robust action and address the full life cycle of plastic, from extraction and manufacturing to its end of life, as opposed to just focusing on clean-up operations. 

“To tackle plastics pollution effectively, we must address it in a systemic way," explained Patricia Villarrubia Gomez, PhD candidate at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.

The new study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

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In 2018, a pair of Australian film-makers were doing runs with metal detectors in remote Western Australia as they prepared to shoot a documentary about the French exploration of Australia. The film was supposed to feature a hunt for scientific equipment believed to have been left in the area by the Baudin expedition of 1800-1803.

There was no trace of Napoleonic-era exploration, but what they did find was something perhaps even more unusual.

It was 15cm-tall bronze Buddha figure, weighing just over 1kg and – according to experts – likely made in China hundreds of years ago.

In the years since their 2018 find, the film-makers, Leon Deschamps and Shayne Thomson, have been working to uncover the mystery of how the figurine ended up on a roadside in Shark Bay. They believe the Buddha might be a clue that could rewrite history, potentially suggesting that Ming dynasty explorers visited Australia hundreds of years ago.

Shayne Thomson and Leon Deschamps say they have spent $50,000 trying to work out the statue’s origins since finding it in 2018. Photograph: FINN films

‘World treasure’

Hoping to find out more about the object, the pair sought out expert advice on the British TV show, Antiques Roadshow.

In an episode that screened in the UK on Sunday, the show’s Asian art expert, Lee Young, the managing director of Dore and Rees auctioneers in Somerset, confirmed the figurine was made during China’s Ming dynasty and declared it a “world treasure”.

“Let’s clear it up straight away. Yes, it is Ming,” Young said. “And yes it is the infant Buddha. He was brought out in ceremonies to celebrate Buddha’s birthday, which is why it’s portrayed as the infant Buddha.”

According to Young, the figurine would have belonged to “someone of some standing”.

The Infant Buddha ‘must be the oldest [Chinese] object that has been discovered in Australia’,

Prof Jocelyn Chey said. Photograph: FINN films via Facebook

Young said the Ming dynasty piece would carry a presale estimate of £3,000 to £5,000 (A$5,000 to A$9,000). But the location it was found made it “historically incredibly important” and he would not be surprised if the hammer fell at £100,000 at an open market auction “because there is only one of these with that story”.

Ian MacLeod, a fellow of the WA Museum who has examined over 35,000 bronze objects for museums, confirmed through microscopic analysis the Buddha was “unequivocally not a forgery”.

MacLeod found that the Buddha had been buried at the spot where it was discovered between 100 and 150 years prior, and that it had been used for a considerable period of time before the burial – consistent with it dating back to the Ming period.

Deschamps said the Buddha could have been left behind by the Ming dynasty treasure fleet of 1421, which was sent out by the third Ming emperor in a display of Chinese might. Seven expeditions made up of hundreds of ships travelled through south-east Asia – even reaching the coast of Africa – but there is no documented evidence of them reaching Australia.

Most historians say it is unlikely that Chinese ships visited Australia during the Ming dynasty – which would be hundreds of years before the first European explorers in the 1600s – but the prospect has nevertheless been a source of enduring fascination.

Oldest Chinese object in Australia?

Jocelyn Chey, a visiting professor in the department of Chinese studies at the University of Sydney, said it was unlikely that the Chinese treasure fleet visited the Gascoyne area of Western Australia, if it visited Australia at all.

“It doesn’t mean because it’s 500 years old, that it came here 500 years ago,” Chey said.

“Regardless of when it came here, it must be the oldest [Chinese] object that has been discovered in Australia. That is assuming that its authenticity is confirmed.”

Paul Macgregor, a historian and curator with Our Chinese Past Inc, said he believed the two most likely scenarios were that the object arrived with the Chinese pearlers or fishermen in the 1870s or that it was deposited by someone as a hoax. Macgregor said there was no firm evidence of any Ming dynasty treasure fleet arriving in Australia.

He said that any evidence of the Buddha’s origins needs to be published so that it can be tested by other experts.

Deschamps still hasn’t found a home for the Buddha. The WA Maritime Museum didn’t want to display it when the film-makers offered it to them and their local Shark Bay Discovery Centre museum was not a suitable location due to the lack of funds to properly insure and protect the Buddha.

“Sacred objects belong with the communities they are sacred to,” Deschamps wrote in a statement on behalf of him and Thomson. “We do not consider ourselves owners of the Infant Buddha but rather custodians and we have done our utmost to show this sacred object the respect it deserves.”

Deschamps said that the pair’s film company has spent at least $50,000 on travel, laboratory research and interviews with scientists and academics trying to get to the bottom of the object’s origin.

“It is our hope the Australian government will work with the Chinese community and local Indigenous custodians to co-fund an archaeological dig at the site to help further investigate the origins of the Buddha,” Deschamps wrote.

He said they have made ongoing efforts to consult with police, local and state government, the WA Maritime Museum, various Chinese organisations, Australian archaeologists and local Indigenous elders.

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For years, researchers have believed that human ancestors in Ethiopia were the first beings to use crude stone tools, about 2.6 million years ago. But a recently-published study introduces new findings that suggest tool-making occurred over 300,000 years prior, in a completely different location, and by a species that isn't even an ancestor to modern humans.

So-called Oldowan tool-making is often portrayed as something of a landmark in history, allowing for efficient processing of food. The advent of these advanced (at the time) tools is widely seen as a milestone in the development of culture, and has remained a touchstone in scientists’ investigations into the timeline of the emergence of human intelligence.

The paper in Science—which was co-authored by researchers spanning various institutions—describes a site in Nyayanga, Kenya that dates to 3.032 to 2.581 million years ago. Archeologists have been excavating the site since 2015 and discovered 330 artifacts (including tools), 1776 bones, and two hominin molars—but not belonging to any direct human ancestors.

“With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine can,” Rick Potts, senior author of the study and the National Museum of Natural History’s Peter Buck Chair of Human Origins said in a press release. “Oldowan technology was like suddenly evolving a brand-new set of teeth outside your body, and it opened up a new variety of foods on the African savannah to our ancestors.”

The researchers were able to date the tools back to about 2.9 million years ago, much earlier than previous records of stone tool use.

“This is one of the oldest if not the oldest example of Oldowan technology,” Thomas Plummer, an anthropology professor at Queen’s College and the study’s lead author, wrote in a press release. “This shows the toolkit was more widely distributed at an earlier date than people realized.”

While it’s an impressive feat that the tools were made so long ago to begin with, they were also fully functional. Alongside the tools, researchers discovered the bones of two hippos, demonstrating that the hominins were able to utilize the tools to process and eat large animals.

Most incredibly, the paper also chronicles the team’s discovery of Paranthropus molars. The Paranthropus genus is not an ancestor to modern Homo sapiens, but rather a kind of evolutionary cousin. The molars are the oldest fossilized Paranthropus remains ever found.

While it is widely believed that Oldowan tools were first used by human ancestors in the Homo genus, the discovery of the tools in conjunction with the molars suggest that our evolutionary relatives may have also wielded these stone tools—and that the real history of the early hominins is more nuanced than we thought.

“The association of these Nyayanga tools with Paranthropus may reopen the case as to who made the oldest Oldowan tools,” Plummer said in a press release. “Perhaps not only Homo, but other kinds of hominins were processing food with Oldowan technology.”

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Beijing will set up a new department to implement its “Digital China” plan to improve the country’s information technology infrastructure and regulation over the next decade.

Although the new body is known as the National Data Bureau, its mandate will not be limited to the management of data flow in China.

It will replace the Cyberspace Administration of China to implement Beijing’s long-term digitization plan and encourage the development of so-called “smart cities”, the State Council said on Tuesday.

It will also take up some of the State Council’s responsibilities, such as the planning of China’s Big Data strategy and digital infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Science and Technology will also be restructured. Most of its functions will be taken by other departments, including the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Health Commission. 

The Ministry of Science and Technology will then have a stronger role in strategic planning, resource allocation and regulation. It will continue to manage China’s laboratories, international technology projects and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The changes will be discussed and approved by the National People’s Congress during its ongoing annual meeting, which will end on March 13.

All this came to light after Vice Premier Liu He said on March 2 that China should boost its semiconductor sector with a “whole nation” approach, which will allow the government to mobilize the resources of the nation’s research institutions and companies to achieve technological breakthroughs.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and State Council on February 27 published the Overall Layout Plan for the Development of a Digital China, calling for the integration of the nation’s digital and real economies. 

The plan aims to promote the use of digital technologies in economic, political, cultural, social and environmental areas. 

By 2025, China will form a nationwide system to achieve its “Digital China” goal, according to the plan. By 2035, China will be among the world’s top countries in terms of its digitalization level, if all goes to plan.

The plan said new infrastructure projects will include 5G and gigabit optical networks, computing and data centers in the country’s western region and facilities related to the mobile internet of things. It said it will also encourage the launch of more internet and Beidou satellite applications.

About 10,000 Chinese businesses including 6,000 factories have already installed dedicated 5G networks that support artificial intelligence (AI) applications to enhance productivity, according to industry sources involved in the rollout.

They include Huawei Technologies, which since 2018 has faced several rounds of sanctions from the United States – its 5G technology is banned by the US and by some countries in Europe and North America due to security concerns. In recent years, the company has diversified its business to smart ports and mines in China.

More infrastructure needed

There are still many stubborn obstacles to China’s digital vision.

“There are a lot of unresolved systemic problems that hinder the data flow,” said Pan Helin, co-director of the Digital Economy and Financial Innovation Research Center at Zhejiang University. “For example, government departments do not have the mandate to share their databases while there is not enough infrastructure to support the development of the data sector.” 

Pan believes the establishment of the National Data Bureau will help resolve the problems. He said the collection and categorization of data will create new demand for China’s Big Data, AI and cloud companies and data center operators, as well as chip and IT equipment makers.
 
Yang Chang, chief analyst at Zhongtai Securities Co, said data is a key production factor after land, labor, capital and technology while its strategic value is increasing. Yang said the National Data Bureau will encourage state-owned and private companies to use their data to create commercial value.

Zhang Ying, a deputy director at the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatisation, said the new bureau will enable smooth data flows across China’s borders. Zhang said as there is no standardized platform for mainland-based and overseas companies to exchange their data, the transferred data is usually fragmented and unusable.

Besides, she pointed out that if foreign firms are allowed to export their mainland units’ data, they will be more interested in investing and developing their businesses in China.

On October 31, 2019, the CPC for the first time categorized “data” as a production factor, along with traditional ones including manpower, capital, land, knowledge, knowhow and management. Since then, the term “data factors,” which refers to data with economic value, has been frequently used in official statements. 

Between late 2020 and mid-2022, the government launched a series of new antitrust and privacy rules to regulate the technology sector. It also required Chinese technology companies to gain approval from Chinese regulators if they want to go public overseas.  

In June 2021, the NPC standing committee passed the Data Security Law, which says social media platforms should support user data exchange between different instant messaging apps and prohibit blocking cross-platform access and file transfers.

China aims to create more ‘smart cities’ under the Digtial China plan. Photo: AFP / Pablo Camacho / AltoPress

Well-organized and regulated data flow will also help the central and local governments generate new income, said some commentators.

In October 2021, former Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan said companies should pay a “data tax” if they traded any of their users’ data. He said the tax rate could be set at about 20-30% of the revenue companies obtain from data transactions.

He said the central government could set up a center to manage all local data activities and allow several key cities to set up data transaction bourses. He said all these data transactions should be traceable with the use of AI and blockchain technologies.

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As comedian Spike Milligan famously quipped, “Money can't buy you happiness – but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.”

The first half of that, of course, is total bunk: having money can, in fact, make you much happier than not having it. But what about the rest of it? Are the super-rich really just as likely to be miserable as the rest of us – albeit in a comfier setting? Or does the “more money, more happy” equation hold true even in the upper echelons of income?

A new report out of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Princeton may have the answer – and frankly, the cynics have it. “For most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness,” confirmed Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Penn’s Wharton School and lead author of the paper, in a statement.

But with that conclusion comes an important caveat: it kind of depends on whether you’re happy in the first place.

“The exception is people who are financially well-off but unhappy,” Killingsworth explained. “For instance, if you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help. For everyone else, more money was associated with higher happiness to somewhat varying degrees.”

It’s a result that ties together what previously seemed to be rather conflicting results. Work published back in 2010 concluded that money can indeed buy you happiness, but only up to about $75,000 worth of it – after that amount, being richer didn’t really correlate with being happier. Roughly the same result was found in a later study, this time from 2018: that once you have around $75,000 per year, your happiness seems to stop being linked to your wealth.

And yet, other studies seemed to contradict those findings. In fact, Killingsworth’s own work, published in 2021, concluded precisely the opposite: that happiness rises steadily with income well beyond $75,000, without evidence of a plateau. So which is true?

The answer, it turned out, was in the already-existing literature. Taking another look at those studies from 2021 and 2010, the authors built a hypothesis that people would fall into one of two categories: either a larger, happy group, or a smaller, unhappy one.

For those in the first cohort, they theorized, happiness would keep rising as more money came in; for those in the latter, happiness would improve with income only up to a point, and then plateau.

If that’s the case, then it puts a different light on those $75,000 figures from before. “The 2010 data showing a plateau in happiness had mostly perfect [happiness] scores,” Killingsworth explained, “so it tells us about the trend in the unhappy end of the happiness distribution, rather than the trend of happiness in general.”

“Once you recognize that, the two seemingly contradictory findings aren’t necessarily incompatible,” he continued. “When we looked at the happiness trend for unhappy people in the 2021 data, we found exactly the same pattern as was found in 2010; happiness rises relatively steeply with income and then plateaus.”

So, what were the final results? Well, as suspected, emotional well-being is connected to income – not by a single relationship, but by three.

“The function differs for people with different levels of emotional well-being,” noted the I. George Heyman Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Barbara Mellers, who co-authored the new paper. For the least happy among us, she explained,

happiness rises with income up until a limit of $100,000, then plateaus, while for those with a higher emotional well-being, the association is linear, even after that threshold. And for the happiest of all among us, the relationship between income and happiness actually accelerates after $100,000.

So, can money buy you happiness? It seems the answer is yes – but you have a pretty big advantage if you’re already emotionally healthy to begin with. And even so, Killingsworth pointed out, it’s still perfectly possible to be rich and miserable.

“Money is just one of the many determinants of happiness,” he concluded. “Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.”

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The mission to return humans to the Moon is moving on to its next phase, NASA has announced. While reporting the current analysis of the successful uncrewed Artemis I mission, the agency revealed when the first crewed mission will take place. 

Artemis I was the first test flight for NASA's megarocket Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft and spent 25.5 days in space. Artemis II will be the first crewed flight to the Moon before Artemis III actually lands on the lunar surface.

NASA revealed that as the Orion capsule successfully survived Earth reentry without burning up, the next launch is now expected for November 2024. The four-astronaut crew, including one Canadian, will be announced later this year.

"We're looking forward to that crew flying on Artemis II," Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said during the press conference Tuesday. "Right now there's nothing holding us up based on what we learned on Artemis I."

Despite the many delays, the SLS rocket – the most powerful rocket ever to launch – outperformed many expectations while the Orion spacecraft completed more than 161 test objectives, 20 of them added during the flight because it was all going so well. The European-built service module generated 20 percent more power and used 25 percent less energy than predicted.

As it starts the preparation for Artemis II, NASA is still going through all the data from the first foray.

“We’re learning as much as we possibly can from Artemis I to ensure we fully understand every aspect of our systems and feed those lessons learned into how we plan for and fly crewed missions,” explained Free in a statement.  “Safely flying crew is our top priority for Artemis II.”

Assuming the success of Artemis II, Artemis III will see humans land at the Moon's South Pole potentially in November 2025.

"Our plan has always been 12 months [between missions], but there are significant developments that have to occur," Free cautioned. "We're still sticking with that 12 months, but we're always looking at the development of all the hardware that has to come together for that."

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It may be a difficult pill to swallow, but the use of maggots and leeches in medicine is making a comeback. These practices, which are often thought to be consigned to the medical methods of yesteryear, are now being used in the fight against antibiotic-resistant infections and in the treatment of various other conditions. 

The history of creepy cures

The use of maggots in medicine has a long history. The earliest recorded use of these wriggling larvae dates back to the ancient Egyptians who used them to treat abscesses. There is also evidence that various ancient cultures relied on them during the last 1,000 years, such as the aboriginal Ngemba tribe of New South Wales, the Hill tribes of Myanmar, and the Maya people of Central America. Anthropologists have found that the Maya would soak dressings in cattle blood and expose them to the Sun before applying them to certain wounds. They would then wait to see if the dressings wriggled with maggots. 

This method of treatment became more widespread during the 18th and 19th centuries when war surgeons observed that wounds contaminated with maggots appeared to recover faster. Then, during the First World War, the orthopedic surgeon William Baer was the first to apply them systematically to non-healing wounds. This led to a sudden fashion of relying on maggots in wound treatment, but the practice more or less disappeared after the 1940s, presumably because of the arrival of effective antibiotics. 

The use of leeches in medicine has an equally ancient lineage. In the Egyptian medical text known as the Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550 BCE), leeches are mentioned in the treatment of various conditions. During the medieval period, these parasites were often used in conjunction with bloodletting practices, as the purging of blood was believed to remove harmful fluids from the body, according to Hippocratic medicine.

The practice of applying leeches to purify blood is an old one, dating back to ancient times. Image Credit: Bossche, Guillaume van den via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

An old practice made new

With the growth of new superbugs – bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi that are resistant to most antibiotics and other medications – some doctors have turned to these old treatments for their efficacy, safety, and simplicity. It may be a bit disgusting to think about, but once you get around that fact, it appears these methods may be as brilliant as they are gross. 

Maggot therapy, sometimes referred to as debridement therapy or biosurgery, is an increasingly popular method for treating necrotic wounds. As maggots only eat dead tissue, they are a cost-effective and non-invasive method that not only cleans wounds quickly but also seems to speed up the healing process. In fact, it has been estimated that between 2007 and 2019, the number of NHS patients in the UK treated with maggots increased by 47 percent.

There is even a company dedicated to producing these crawling cleaners. BioMonde has a sterile maggot-production factory in Wales, UK, and is currently the only provider of medical maggots to the NHS. The factory houses about 24,000 flies, which produce maggots that are shipped in aseptic polyester nets known as BioBags, which are designed with the individual patient’s needs in mind. At present, BioMonde ships about 9,000 bags to UK healthcare providers each year.

Equally, leech therapy, also known as hirudotherapy, has continued to be practiced into the present day. Leeches are used in fields including microsurgery, plastic and reconstructive surgery, dermatology, and in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. 

Once a leech latches onto a host, its blood-sucking action helps increase blood circulation and flow, which can speed up the healing process. They also produce a series of helpful chemical compounds that serve as a local anesthetic, anticoagulant, and antibiotic that kills harmful bacteria. 

As with the maggots, there is a farm another farm in Wales that produces leeches for the NHS and other healthcare providers. BioPharm is a 211-year-old company that has seen the demand for its medical leeches grow over the last 20 years. During the 1990s, they may have produced a few hundred leeches a year, but now they supply 60,000 of the critters each year. 

Leech therapy can last anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. Once the leech has gorged on blood, they naturally drop off their host. They are then disposed of in BioPharm’s purpose-made disposal kit, called Nos Da, “goodnight” in Welsh.  

Patients who have been treated with maggots and leeches have shown a range of reactions to them, but it seems that, once you’re over the more grim aspects of this treatment, the benefits outweigh the discomfort. So while it may be unpleasant to think about, it seems our brave medical future will likely continue to benefit from the presence of these old friends. 

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If you throwa polyester sweatshirt in the washing machine, it doesn’t emerge as quite its former self. All that agitation breaks loose plastic microfibres, which your machine flushes to a wastewater treatment facility. Any particles that aren't filtered out get pumped to sea. Like other forms of microplastic—broken-down bottles and bags, paint chips, and pellets known as nurdles—microfibre pollution in the oceans has mirrored the exponential growth of plastic production: Humanity now makes a trillion pounds of the stuff a year. According to the World Economic Forum, production could triple from 2016 levels by the year 2050.

A new analysis provides the most wide-ranging quantification yet of exactly how much of this stuff is tainting the ocean’s surface. An international team of researchers calculates that between 82 and 358 trillion plastic particles—a collective 2.4 to 10.8 billion pounds—are floating across the world … and that’s only in the top foot of seawater. 

That’s also only counting the bits down to a third of a millimeter long, even though microplastics can get much, much smaller, and they grow much more numerous as they do so. (Microplastics are defined as particles smaller than 5 millimeters long.) Scientists are now able to detect nanoplastics in the environment, which are measured on the scale of millionths of a meter, small enough to penetrate cells—though it remains difficult and expensive to tally them. If this new study had considered the smallest of plastics, the numbers of oceanic particles would no longer be in the trillions. “We're talking about quintillions, probably, that's out there, if not more,” says Scott Coffin, a research scientist at the California State Water Resources Control Board and a coauthor of the study, which was published today in the journal PLoS ONE. 

“That’s the elephant in the room,” agrees Marcus Eriksen, cofounder of the 5 Gyres Institute and the study’s lead author. “If we're going to talk about the number of particles out there, we're not even looking at the nanoscale particles. And that really dovetails into all the research on human health impacts.” Scientists have only just begun to study these effects, but they are already finding that the smallest microplastics readily move through the body, showing up in our blood, guts, lungs, placentas, and even infants’ first feces.

Eriksen and Coffin did their quantification by gathering reams of previous data on plastic samples from across the world’s oceans. They combined this with data they collected during their own ocean expeditions. All told, the researchers used nearly 12,000 samples of plastic particle concentrations, stretching between the years 1979 and 2019. That allowed them to calculate not only how much may be out there, but how those concentrations have changed over time. 

They found that between 1990 and 2005, particle counts fluctuated. That may have been due to the effectiveness of international agreements, like 1988 regulations limiting plastic pollution from ships. “That's the first time that we've ever had any sort of evidence that those international treaties in plastic pollution have actually been effective,” says Coffin.

Courtesy of 5 Gyres

But that 1988 rule change wasn’t enough to stave off the effects of the astonishing increase in plastic production over the past few decades. The researchers found that beginning in the mid-2000s, the number of particles shot up dramatically, and it continues skyrocketing. They further project a 2.6-fold increase in plastic flowing into aquatic environments by 2040 unless there’s drastic action.

There may have also been a sort of time-delayed pollution bomb: Larger trash takes a while to fully degrade into little pieces. Another group of researchers has termed this the “global plastic toxicity debt”: Even if we were to stop all plastic pollution tomorrow, what’s already out there will keep breaking into ever smaller bits. “You've got these microplastic ‘factories’ in places where plastic is trapped on coastlines at the high tide line, that's just shedding constantly,” says Eriksen. “When the next storm happens, it's washed back to the ocean.”

Along the surface, these particles contaminate the very base of the food web: microscopic plants called phytoplankton, and the tiny animals that consume them, known as zooplankton. Scientists are finding that zooplankton regularly eat microplastics, reducing their appetite for actual food. And when predators like fish larvae eat the zooplankton, they take on toxic plastic particles. 

More subtly, microplastics could be messing with the carbon cycle: Phytoplankton absorb carbon and are eaten by zooplankton, whose fecal pellets sink to the sea floor, sequestering greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. But fecal pellets loaded with microplastics sink differently, perhaps giving scavengers in the depths more time to consume them—and letting them intercept the carbon before it can sink to the bottom.

Seabirds, too, are suffering from eating plastic. A new paper from a separate team of researchers describes a novel affliction among flesh-footed shearwaters on Lord Howe Island, Australia: plasticosis. The scientists discovered that birds with more plastic pieces in their guts had more severe tissue damage in their stomachs. This, they write, shows “the ability of plastic to directly induce severe, organ-wide scar tissue formation or ‘plasticosis’ in wild, free-living animals, which is likely to be detrimental to individual health and survival.”

Coffin and Eriksen’s new quantification only counted plastics floating near the surface. But microplastics are in fact swirling throughout the sea and riding in currents across oceans. They’re settling in deep sea sediments and corrupting the Mariana Trench. Off the coast of Southern California, scientists were able to look through sediment layers going back nearly a century and found that deposition rates have doubled every 15 years since the 1940s, when plastics production began in earnest. 

And microplastics in the ocean don't necessarily stay offshore. When a bubble ascends from the depths, it collects bacteria and organic matter, then flings them into the air when it pops. Now, bubbles are doing the same with microplastics. These blow back onto land in sea breezes, as described in a 2020 study. If more microplastics are gathering at the water’s surface, that means more are available to go atmospheric. “Even though we as scientists know that it's all very bad, you need this sort of qualification for the politicians and the policymakers—and often the general public—to get an idea of the true scale of what we've been doing,” says microplastics scientist Steve Allen, who coauthored the bubble paper but wasn’t involved in this new research. “It's one thing to show that it's here, it's over there. We need to show the ramp-up.”

In a separate study, Allen found such a ramp-up in peat, where more atmospheric microplastics were deposited over the decades as plastic production increased. But there was an exception: “What we could show with ours was a little drop during the economic downturn in 2009, and that was super interesting,” says Allen. As economic activity fell, so too did plastic production—at least briefly. “It means that you can have an almost immediate change in plastic by changing the way we use it. And that, I think, is what's showing in this oceanic paper, that things do have an impact.”

Eriksen and Coffin say it’s critical that United Nations negotiators agree on a global treaty to put limits on plastics production. (Talks began in November and are expected to continue for a few years.) “I'm convinced,” says Eriksen. “If we have a really strong treaty that caps production, reduces the single-use plastic output—and countries get good at waste management and capturing waste in their rivers and their streets, I bet you'll see a precipitous drop in the amount of trash that makes its way to the open ocean.”

Microplastics Are Polluting the Ocean at a Shocking Rate

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Room-temperature superconductor works at lower pressures

Kindness is a powerful force that can change the world. A simple act of kindness can have a ripple effect, touching not only the recipient but also those who witness it.

It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture, just a smile or a word of encouragement can brighten someone’s day and make a positive impact.

When we practice kindness, we create a more empathetic and compassionate society, and we inspire others to do the same. Kindness can break down barriers, heal wounds, and bring people together.

It is a reminder that, despite our differences, we are all human and we all deserve love and respect. So let’s choose kindness every day and make the world a better place, one small act at a time.

As the school year is back in full swing, Anel Annandale, an Educational Psychologist with a passion for Early Childhood Development, unpacks the psychology of kindness and provides five tips to encourage kindness in our children.

Create a culture of kindness

Kindness doubles when we share it – a ripple effect that transforms our community into a happier place.

Whether rich or poor, young or old, the beauty of being kind is that anyone can do it. Creating a culture of kindness begins in childhood. Teach your children to ask themselves daily: “How can I be kind today?”

For young children, sharing a sweet is the most basic demonstration of kindness, and this behaviour should be acknowledged and encouraged.

“Our products are often central to acts of kindness, and as such, we have made it our brand’s purpose to inspire kindness,” says Monique Spandeel, Manhattan Brand Manager. “So far, we have encouraged over 43 000 learners to be kind through school engagement and toolkits. But kindness starts at home, and we need a collective effort to change behaviour,” she adds.

Praise character; discipline behaviour

Teaching kindness can change who a child becomes and gently moulds them into happier, empathetic, more likeable people.

When you praise a child for good behaviour, make it part of their character. For instance, you want to say something like: “You are a very kind person,” as opposed to “that was a kind thing to do.” Eventually, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and lead children to spread their kindness in the future.

On the other hand, when disciplining a child, focus on their behaviour rather than their character, e.g. “That was a hurtful thing to do,” not “you’re being a hurtful brat.” Never accept rude behaviour, even if your child is going through difficult times.

Model the behaviour you want to see

We know that children are more likely to mimic our behaviours than listen to our advice. They do as we do and will learn to be either kind or unkind from us.

As you go about your day, ask yourself: Am I modelling to my children how to show respect to everyone I interact with, no matter their social status? Am I tolerant of others? Do I demonstrate cooperation, empathy and generosity?

Also, remember to thank your children when they are kind to you. Connect with them by holding eye contact when they tell you a story and talk to them about their day at dinner or bedtime – be sure not just to hear but really listen to what they have to say.

Kindness = boundaries and discipline

The happiest children are those with set boundaries and discipline instilled by their caregivers.

Discipline is about teaching and guiding behaviour; it is not about punishment. It is a way to teach our children to cope better with life and be more regulated, better-adjusted members of society. Be sure to always set boundaries before disciplining a child. That way, your child knows what is expected of them.

Never discipline your child out of anger but rather with the intent to teach better ways of behaving. Keep the three “R’s” of discipline in mind: Remove, Reflect and Reconnect.

Destructive feelings are a normal part of growing up; being a strong role model and mentor will help them to navigate and manage BIG emotions.

Encourage random acts of kindness

Performing random acts of kindness helps children develop empathy and internalise moral principles. It creates a sense of pride in themselves and feelings of belonging and optimism.

There are many easy ways to incorporate random acts of kindness into our daily lives, and they need not cost much.

•     Volunteer to clean up, whether you are clearing the table or sweeping an elderly neighbour’s driveway.
•     Give a kind word or a sweet treat (I love Manhattan’s ‘Be Kind’ gums).
•     Invite someone sitting on their own over to have lunch with you.
•     Offer a smile or a compliment.
•     Freeze water in empty bottles and hand them out to street vendors on hot days.
•     Pick up litter, put back your trolley, and give up your seat to someone who needs it more.
•     Let someone know that you’re thinking of them.
•     Volunteer at a soup kitchen or animal shelter.
•     Read to a younger child.
•     Leave an encouraging comment on a post that you like.

“Encouraging kindness in children helps them understand the world from a broader viewpoint. It builds empathy and increases their frame of reference, encouraging them to cooperate with others to reach shared goals. In the bigger picture: teaching children to be kind eventually makes the world a better place,” concludes Annandale

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Habitat destruction, pesticide use, and other human impacts are often blamed for the well-documented decline of insects in recent decades. But even in forests where few humans tread, some bees and butterflies are declining, researchers have found. Over the past 15 years, populations of bees shrank 62.5% and those of butterflies dropped 57.6% in a forest in the U.S. southeast. In addition, the number of bee species there fell by 39%, the team reports this month in Current Biology.

Five times between 2007 and 2022, researchers surveyed the insects in three forested areas in the Oconee National Forest in northern Georgia. The sites were relatively undisturbed by humans and didn’t have common invasive plants such as Chinese privet.

The team suspects climate change may be warming the region and affecting bee and possibly butterfly survival. Invasive insects may also be to blame, especially for the decline of bees such as small carpenter (above) and leaf-cutting bees, which nest in hollow stems, under loose bark, or inside rotting wood. These species were hit the hardest, the researchers report, possibly because exotic wood-nesting and leaf-cutter bees may outcompete them for nest sites or because their nests fail to protect them against higher temperatures.

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It is well known that in adults, elevated blood pressure and hypertension are "silent killer diseases" that result in kidney, heart, vascular, and brain damage, and subsequently in death. Annually, hypertension treatment costs billions of dollars in health care worldwide and is associated with rising health emergencies such as heart attack and stroke. The European Society of Cardiology/European Society of Hypertension classifies blood pressure 130/85 mmHg as high-normal and 140/90 mmHg as hypertension. Whereas the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association classifies blood pressure of 130/80 mmHg as hypertension.

In 2020, the United States Preventive Services Task Force concluded "that the evidence to support screening for high blood pressure in children and adolescents is insufficient and that the balance of benefits and harms cannot be determined."

However, it was reported last year (2022) that increased systolic blood pressure during childhood was associated with the risk of premature death in the mid-forties. Nonetheless, the earliest time revealing potential high blood pressure-related heart damage in a general population of children and adolescents remains unknown. In addition, whether high blood pressure greater than 130/85 mmHg has a causal role in premature heart damage in the young population is unclear due to the lack of repeated echocardiography measurements.

The current study was conducted among 1,856 adolescents of whom 1,011 were female. The adolescents were 17 years old at baseline, and they were followed up for seven years until young adulthood at age 24 years. Elevated blood pressure and hypertension, and evidence of heart damage were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Signs of heart structure damage are left ventricular hypertrophy and high relative wall thickness, whereas signs of heart function damage are left ventricular diastolic dysfunction and increased left ventricular filling pressure.

During the 7-year follow-up period, the prevalence of elevated blood pressure and hypertension and heart damage among adolescents doubled.

With extensive control for fat mass, muscle mass, glucose, lipids, smoking status, sedentary time, physical activity, and family history of cardiovascular disease, and using adults' cut points for diagnosing heart damage, it was observed that high blood pressure and hypertension caused premature heart damage in both males and females.

Importantly, there were specific characteristics of elevated blood pressure and hypertension-related heart damage observed in each sex. For example, among males, high systolic blood pressure and hypertension were associated with approximately 10%–30% increased risk of heart function damage but there was no risk of heart structure damage. However, among females high systolic blood pressure and hypertension were associated with approximately 60%–217% increased risk of heart structure damage and 35%–65% increased risk of heart function damage.

"This novel evidence on the deleterious effect of high blood pressure and primary hypertension on the heart of the young population is alarming. Delay in initiating blood pressure screening in adolescence is unjustifiable considering the amount of heart damage and potentially premature death that could be prevented.

"Therefore, public health experts, health policymakers, health journalists and bloggers, pediatricians, and caregivers are encouraged to significantly raise awareness of the critical danger high blood pressure and hypertension pose to young people. There should be a push for legislative changes that enforce blood pressure screening in adolescents, because this may significantly lower hypertension-related emergencies in adulthood," says Andrew Agbaje, a physician and clinical epidemiologist at the University of Eastern Finland.

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On the morning of December 1, 2022, a modified F-16 fighter jet codenamed VISTA X-62A took off from Edwards Air Force Base, roughly 60 miles north of Los Angeles. Over the course of a short test flight, the VISTA engaged in advanced fighter maneuver drills, including simulated aerial dogfights, before landing successfully back at base. While this may sound like business as usual for the US’s premier pilot training school—or like scenes lifted straight from Top Gun: Maverick—it was not a fighter pilot at the controls but, for the first time on a tactical aircraft, a sophisticated AI.

Overseen by the US Department of Defense, VISTA X-62A undertook 12 AI-led test flights between December 1 and 16, totaling more than 17 hours of autonomous flight time. The breakthrough comes as part of a drive by the United States Air Force Vanguard to develop unmanned combat aerial vehicles. Initiated in 2019, the Skyborg program will continue testing through 2023, with hopes of developing a working prototype by the end of the year. 

The VISTA program is a crucial first step toward these goals, M. Christopher Cotting, director of research at USAF Test Pilot School, explains. “This approach, combined with focused testing on new vehicle systems as they are produced, will rapidly mature autonomy for uncrewed platforms and allow us to deliver tactically relevant capability to our warfighter,” he says. 

With Ukraine’s use of semiautonomous drones, the US military’s first autonomous flight of a Black Hawk helicopter last November, and the successful testing of AI algorithms in US U-2 spy planes in 2020, it’s clear that autonomous combat represents the next front in modern warfare. But just how completely will AI take over our skies, and what does it mean for the human pilots left on the ground?

The VISTA X-62A (short for Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft) has always been ahead of its time. Built in the 1980s and based on an F-16D Block 30 Peace Marble Il, the plane previously held the designation NF-16D and became the US Airforce Test Pilot School’s go-to simulation machine in the early 1990s. A versatile and adaptable training tool boasting open systems architecture, the VISTA can be fitted with software that allows it to mimic the performance characteristics of multiple aircraft, from heavy bombers to ultra-light fighter jets. 

Prior to last year’s autonomous flight tests, the VISTA received a much-needed update in the form of a “model following algorithm” (MFA) and a “system for autonomous control of the simulation” (SACS) from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. Combined with the VISTA Simulation System from defense and aerospace company Calspan Corporation, these updates facilitated an emphasis on autonomy and AI integration. 

Utilizing General Dynamics’s Enterprise-wide Open Systems Architecture (E-OSA) to power the Enterprise Mission Computer version 2 (EMC2, or Einstein Box), the SACS system also integrates advanced sensors, a set of Getac tablet displays in both cockpits, and multilevel security features, all of which enhance VISTA’s capabilities, including its rapid-prototyping advantage, which allows for speedy software updates to meet the accelerating pace of AI development.

During testing in December, a pair of AI programs were fed into the system: the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Autonomous Air Combat Operations (AACO) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Air Combat Evolution (ACE). AACO’s AI agents focused on combat with a single adversary beyond visual range (BVR), while ACE focused on dogfight-style maneuvers with a closer, “visible” simulated enemy.

While VISTA requires a certified pilot in the rear cockpit as backup, during test flights, an engineer trained in the AI systems manned the front cockpit to deal with any technical issues that arose. In the end, these issues were minor. While not able to elaborate on the intricacies, DARPA program manager Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron explains that any hiccups were “to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live.” All in all, it was a significant step toward realizing Skyborg’s aim of getting autonomous aircraft off the ground as soon as possible.

The Department of Defense stresses that AACO and ACE are designed to supplement human pilots, not replace them. In some instances, AI copilot systems could act as a support mechanism for pilots in active combat. With AACO and ACE capable of parsing millions of data inputs per second, and having the ability to take control of the plane at critical junctures, this could be vital in life-or-death situations. For more routine missions that do not require human input, flights could be entirely autonomous, with the nose-section of planes being swapped out when a cockpit is not required for a human pilot.

“We’re not trying to replace pilots, we’re trying to augment them, give them an extra tool,” Cotting says. He draws the analogy of soldiers of bygone campaigns riding into battle on horses. “The horse and the human had to work together,” he says. “The horse can run the trail really well, so the rider doesn’t have to worry about going from point A to B. His brain can be freed up to think bigger thoughts.” For example, Cotting says, a first lieutenant with 100 hours of experience in the cockpit could artificially gain the same edge as a much higher-ranking officer with 1,000 hours of flight experience, thanks to AI augmentation.

For Bill Gray, chief test pilot at the USAF Test Pilot School, incorporating AI is a natural extension of the work he does with human students. “Whenever we [pilots] talk to engineers and scientists about the difficulties of training and qualifying AI agents, they typically treat this as a new problem,” he says. “This bothers me, because I have been training and qualifying highly non-linear and unpredictable natural intelligence agents—students—for decades. For me, the question isn’t, ‘Can we train and qualify AI agents?’ It’s, ‘Why can we train and qualify humans, and what can this teach us about doing the same for AI agents?’

Gray believes AI is “not a wonder tool that can solve all of the problems,” but rather that it must be developed in a balanced approach, with built-in safety measures to prevent costly mishaps. An overreliance on AI—a “trust in autonomy”—can be dangerous, Gray believes, pointing out failures in Tesla’s autopilot program despite Tesla asserting the need for the driver to be at the wheel as a backup. Cotting agrees, calling the ability to test AI programs in the VISTA a “risk-reduction plan.” By training AI on conventional systems such as the VISTA X-62—rather than building an entirely new aircraft—automatic limits and, if necessary, safety pilot intervention can help prevent the AI from endangering the aircraft as it learns.

The USAF’s technology is advancing rapidly. This past December, trial flights for ACE and ACCO were often completed within hours of each other, with engineers switching autonomy algorithms onboard the VISTA in minutes, without safety or performance issues, according to Cotting. In one instance, Cotting describes uploading new AI at 7:30 am and the plane being ready to test by 10 am.

“Once you get through the process of connecting an AI to a supersonic fighter, the resulting maneuvering is endlessly fascinating,” says Gray. “We have seen things that make sense, and completely surprising things that make no sense at all. Thanks to our safety systems, programmers are changing their models overnight, and we’re engaging them the next morning. This is unheard of in flight control system development, much less experimentation with unpredictable AI agents.”

Despite these successes, it will take some time before the curriculum at the USAF Test Pilot School undergoes an AI overhaul. Cotting explains that the newness of the AACO and ACE platforms means students will require a greater level of understanding before trying them out in the cockpit of the VISTA. “We’re basically building the bridge as we’re driving over,” Cotting says.

In the meantime, students will undergo a broader test this fall in which they’re exposed to a set of AI and have to figure out how to test it, then execute that test.

As for wider military applications, Cotting says that while he has no visibility into these areas, AI is already ubiquitous in image recognition technology used across the military. While AI-driven tanks may not be on the horizon just yet, the skies, it seems, are set to be home to a new kind of intelligence.

The US Air Force Is Moving Fast on AI-Piloted Fighter Jets

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These juvenile snapping shrimp have the fastest claws in the sea

Streaming out of the sun at a million miles an hour, the solar wind—a blistering plasma of electrons, protons, and ions flowing through space—is a decades-old enigma. Scientists know it once stripped Mars of its atmosphere, and some think it put ice on the moon. Today, it causes the glimmering Northern Lights displays and messes with satellite communication systems. But researchers haven’t been able to nail down how the solar wind gets made, heats up to millions of degrees, or accelerates to fill the entire solar system. 

Now, a team of researchers think they’ve figured it out: The solar wind, they say, is driven by jetlets—tiny, intermittent explosions at the base of the sun’s upper atmosphere, or corona. The theory, which was just published in The Astrophysical Journal, emerged from data taken by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a car-sized satellite that has repeatedly flown by the sun since 2018. It measures properties of the solar wind and traces the flow of heat and energy in the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere that begins about 1,300 miles above its surface. The team’s idea is strengthened by data from other satellites and ground-based telescopes showing that jetlets could be ubiquitous and powerful enough to account for the mass and energy of the solar wind. Uncovering its origins will help scientists better understand how stars work, and predict how the gusty flow of plasma affects life on Earth.

Higher resolution data is needed to prove this hypothesis, but the evidence so far is tantalizing. “We sensed from early on that we were onto something big,” says Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory who led the study. “We were thinking that we might be solving the 60-year-old puzzle of the solar wind. And I believe we are.” 

The existence of solar wind, first proposed by the late Eugene Parker—namesake of the Parker Solar Probe—was confirmed by NASA in the early 1960s. Since then, scientists have been perplexed by how that plasma can move as far and as fast as it does. The sun’s corona is hot—millions of degrees on any temperature scale—but not hot enough to push the solar wind to those speeds. 

Jetlets, on the other hand, weren’t discovered until 2014, in a study led by Raouafi showing that these mini explosions drive coronal plumes, bright funnels of magnetized plasma near the solar poles. Looking closely at the base of the plumes, he found that jetlets arise when the sun’s churning surface forces two regions of repelling magnetic polarity together until they snap. But after that paper, Raouafi moved on to other projects. “And we basically left it there,” he says. 

Then in 2019, while Raouafi was working as a project scientist on the Parker Solar Probe, the craft saw something weird. As it skimmed the top of the corona, it observed that, quite often, the direction of the magnetic field it was flying through would flip. Then it would flip back. Raouafi assembled a team to hunt down a source of these intermittent “switchbacks” lower in the atmosphere. His mind immediately went to jetlets. If they could be found elsewhere in the corona, and not just in its plumes, he reasoned, they might be numerous enough to generate enough material and power to be the solar wind itself. 

But the probe can only take samples at the very top of the corona—if it gets too close, it’ll melt. More remote satellites are better at seeing deeper into the sun, closer to the bottom of the corona. So the research team analyzed high-resolution images of the lower corona from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite, and the Solar Ultraviolet Imager instrument aboard a super-high-altitude weather satellitethat orbits Earth. “And sure enough, we found what we think is the smoking gun for the origin of the solar wind,” says study co-author Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, colourado. 

The data revealed that jetlets were everywhere. They were also present as far back in time as the researchers searched—to data from 2010. Unlike solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which wax and wane in a natural 11-year cycle, the jetlets’ presence didn’t vary. Like the solar wind, they seemed to be a stable feature, persistently hurling plasma into space. 

To prove the jetlets go off with enough power and are prevalent enough to account for the solar wind, the researchers did a rough calculation. Up to 1035 protons can be ejected per jetlet, and the sun loses around 6 x 1035 protons per second to the solar wind. That means it would take six jetlets per second, or about 500,000 per day, to power the wind. 

They compared this number to maps of the sun’s surface that indicate where jetlets might be. These maps were imaged by the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California, and show variations in the magnetic polarity over fine scales, with negative poles in darker patches and positive poles in lighter ones, giving the images a salt-and-pepper appearance.  The team concluded that there were enough sites with neighboring opposite poles to potentially produce the number of jetlets needed to fuel the solar wind. “We haven’t sealed the case beyond a reasonable doubt yet,” DeForest says. “But this is a major step forward.”

Learning about the solar wind is important, DeForest says, because it’s an integral part of our own environment. “Solar physics is the only field of astrophysics that has actual applications on Earth,” he says. The wind perturbs our planet’s magnetic field, which protects us from potentially harmful space radiation. It also causes space weather that can affect the orbits and operations of satellites, including GPS networks. Understanding how the solar wind works can also help scientists figure out how stars slow down as they age, and how that influences the atmospheres of their orbiting planets—which could make them more or less habitable. 

The idea that intermittent explosions could generate a steady stream of plasma challenges the notion that the solar wind’s driving mechanism must be a single, continuous source. But it’s not inconceivable: Parker did once hypothesize that something like this could fuel the wind—though he called them “nanoflares.” And DeForest points out that many small bursts can collectively act like one smooth flow. “You drive a car down the road, and what you feel is a smooth thrust,” he says. “But really, what’s going on is zillions of little explosions inside the gas engine.” 

Charles Kankelborg, a solar physicist at Montana State University, finds the theory plausible—but the idea itself surprises him. Tiny explosions, like those created by other kinds of small solar events, have never been shown to meaningfully contribute to the energy of the sun’s atmosphere. “To see this paper suggesting that these could very well be supplying the full solar wind as we know it—my jaw kind of dropped,” says Kankelborg, who was not involved in the work. It’ll take more data for him to believe that jetlets alone can supply the wind’s energy, but he feels it’s an exciting idea worth considering. 

Raouafi and his colleagues are on it. Higher resolution data already shows that they’ve underestimated the speed of the jetlets, meaning they have more energy than originally accounted for. “Which is a very good sign. That’s what we need,” he says. Two follow-up studies are in the works, and Raouafi hopes to publish them this summer. Those will include more observations from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, new data taken by the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, and magnetic field information from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, which has three times the magnetic field resolution of Big Bear Solar Observatory. 

In the future, linking this data with direct measurements by the Parker Solar Probe, as well as more global observations of the solar wind from NASA’s upcoming Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission, will help scientists glean even more precise information about its nature. “Bringing these two tools together”—remote imaging and at-the-source measurements—“means we’ll really get a handle on the system as a unified whole,” says DeForest, who is the principal investigator for the PUNCH mission. 

The team is confident that they’re on the brink of a big discovery. “I wish Gene Parker was still with us,” Raouafi says. “I believe he would have been pleased that we are, in a way, confirming his theory.”

Tiny, Explosive ‘Jetlets’ Might Be Fueling the Solar Wind

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After nearly a decade in development, Japan’s new rocket fails in debut