Using geochemicalanalyses, the researchers were able to prove that stone stelae on the Iberian peninsula that date back to the Final Bronze Age feature complex engravings that could only have been done using tempered steel. This was backed up by metallographic analyses of an iron chisel from the same period and region (Rocha do Vigio, Portugal, ca. 900 BCE) that showed the necessary carbon content to be proper steel.

The result was also confirmed experimentally by undertaking trials with chisels made of various materials: Only the chisel made of tempered steel was suitably capable of engraving the stone.

Until recently it was assumed that it had not been possible to produce suitable quality steel in the Early Iron Age and certainly not in the Final Bronze Age, and that it only came to be widespread in Europe under the Roman Empire.

"The chisel from Rocha do Vigio and the context where it was found show that iron metallurgy including the production and tempering of steel were probably indigenous developments of decentralized small communities in Iberia, and not due to the influence of later colonization processes. This also has consequences for the archaeological assessment of iron metallurgy and quartzite sculptures in other regions of the world," explains Araque Gonzalez.

The study, "Stone-working and the earliest steel in Iberia: Scientific analyses and experimental replications of final bronze age stelae and tools,"' has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Iberian pillars of siliceous quartz sandstone could only be worked with tempered steel

The archaeological record of Late Bronze Age Iberia (c. 1300-800 BCE) is fragmentary in many parts of the Iberian Peninsula: Sparse remains of settlement and nearly no detectable burials are complemented by traces of metal hoarding and remains of mining activities. Taking this into account, the western Iberian stelae with their depictions of anthropomorphic figures, animals and selected objects are of unique importance for the investigation of this era.

Until now, studies of the actual rocks from which these stelae were made to gain insights into the use of materials and tools have been the exception. Araque Gonzalez and his colleagues analyzed the geological composition of the stelae in depth. This led them to discover that a significant number of stelae was not as had been assumed made of quartzite, but silicate quartz sandstone.

"Just like quartzite, this is an extremely hard rock that cannot be worked with bronze or stone tools, but only with tempered steel," says Araque Gonzalez.

Chisel discovery and archaeological experiment confirm use of steel

Analysis of an iron chisel found in Rocha do Vigio showed that Iberian stonemasons from the Final Bronze Age had the necessary tools. The researchers discovered that it consisted of heterogeneous yet astonishingly carbon-rich steel. To confirm their findings, the researchers also carried out an experiment involving a professional stonemason, a blacksmith and a bronze caster, and attempted to work the rock that the pillars were made of using chisels of different materials. The stonemason could not work the stone with either the stone or the bronze chisels, or even using an iron chisel with an untempered point.

"The people of the Final Bronze Age in Iberia were capable of tempering steel. Otherwise they would not have been able to work the pillars," concludes Araque Gonzalez as a result of the experiment.

Source

In October of last year, an enormous new creature appeared on the seabed of the Pacific Ocean, about 1,400 miles southwest of San Diego. It was a remote-controlled, 90-ton machine the size of a small house, lowered from an industrial ship on a cable nearly 3 miles long. Once it was settled on the ocean floor, the black, white, and Tonka-truck-yellow contraption began grinding its way forward, its lights lancing through the darkness, steel treads biting into the silt. A battery of water jets mounted on its front end blasted away at the seafloor, stirring up billowing clouds of muck and dislodging hundreds of fist-sized black rocks that lay half-buried in the sediment.

The jets propelled the lumpy stones into an intake at the front of the vehicle, where they rattled into a steel pipe rising all the way back up to the ship. Air compressors pushed the rocks up in a column of seawater and sediment and into a shipboard centrifuge that spun away most of the water. Conveyor belts then carried the rocks to a metal ramp that dropped them with a clatter into the ship’s hold. From a windowless control room nearby, a team of engineers in blue and orange coveralls monitored the operation, their faces lit by the polychromatic glow from a hodgepodge of screens.

The ship, called the Hidden Gem, was a former oil-drilling vessel nearly 800 feet long, retrofitted for sea mining by the Metals Company, an international firm officially headquartered in Canada. This was the first test of its system to collect the ancient black stones. They are officially known as polymetallic nodules, but the Metals Company’s CEO, Gerard Barron, likes to call them “batteries in a rock.” That’s because the stones happen to be packed with metals that are essential for manufacturing electric cars—a market that is surging worldwide. Barron’s company is at the front of a pack of more than a dozen enterprises slavering over the billions of dollars that could be reaped from those little subsea rocks.

The world’s long-overdue, fitful transition to renewable energy is hobbled by an Achilles’ heel: It requires staggering quantities of natural resources. Manufacturing enough electric vehicles to replace their fossil-fueled counterparts will require billions of tons of cobalt, lithium, copper, and other metals. To meet the exploding demand, mining companies, carmakers, and governments are scouring the planet for potential mines or expanding existing ones, from the deserts of Chile to the rain forests of Indonesia. Meanwhile, what might be the richest source of all—the ocean floor—remains untapped. The US Geological Survey estimates that 21 billion tons of polymetallic nodules lie in a single region of the Pacific, containing more of some metals (such as nickel and cobalt) than can be found in all the world’s dryland deposits.

“Here’s one of them,” Barron said when we met recently in the lobby of a chic Toronto hotel, as he casually pulled one of these geologic oddities out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. Barron is a fit, muscular Australian in his mid-fifties, with swept-back dark hair, a nautical beard, and craggy Kurt Russell-esque looks. His jeans, black boots, and wristloads of leather bracelets lend him a roguish air. He has just flown in from London for a big mining conference. For years, he’s been traveling the world to talk up deep-sea mining to investors and government officials. He and other would-be sea miners argue that collecting nodules from the deep will be not only cheaper than traditional mining but also gentler on the planet. No rain forests uprooted, no Indigenous peoples displaced, no toxic tailings poisoning rivers.

Barron may finally be on the brink of achieving his goal of mega-scale mining on the ocean floor. The Metals Company has tens of millions of dollars in the bank and partnerships with major maritime companies. The Hidden Gem’s foray last October marked the first time since the 1970s that any company had successfully trialed a complete system for harvesting nodules.

The main thing holding the company back is international law, which currently forbids deep-ocean mining. That may be about to change, however. Last year, the Metals Company teamed up with the tiny South Pacific island nation of Nauru to trigger an obscure process that could let them bypass the international prohibition and get a license to start full-scale operations as early as July 2024.

That prospect has sparked an outraged backlash. Environmental groups, scientists, and even some corporations in the market for battery metals fear the potential havoc of seabed mining. The oceans provide much of the world’s biodiversity, a significant chunk of humanity’s food, and the planet’s biggest carbon sink. No one knows how such an unprecedented incursion would affect the many life-forms that live in the abyssal depths, the marine life farther up the water column, or the ocean itself. The European Parliament and countries including Germany, Chile, Spain, and several Pacific island nations have joined dozens of organizations in calling for at least a temporary moratorium on deep-sea mining. Several banks have declared they won’t loan to ocean-mining ventures. Corporations including BMW, Microsoft, Google, Volvo, and Volkswagen have pledged not to buy deep-sea metals until the environmental impacts are better understood. Even Aquaman is opposed: Jason Momoa narrated a recently released documentary denouncing sea mining.

“This has the potential to transform the oceans, and not for the better,” says Diva Amon, a marine scientist who has worked extensively in the main area of the Pacific targeted for mining, including as a contractor for one of the sea-mining companies. “We could stand to lose parts of the planet and species that live there before we know, understand, and value them.”

None of that deters Barron. “The biggest challenge to our planet is climate change and biodiversity loss. We don’t have a spare decade to sit around,” he declares. By the end of the Hidden Gem’s trial last October, the vehicle had delivered more than 3,000 tons of the stones, mounded up in a glistening black pyramid nearly four stories high. “This,” Barron promised the press, “is just the beginning.”

The nodules have been growing, in utter blackness and near-total silence, for millions of years. Each one started as a fragment of something else—a tiny fossil, a scrap of basalt, a shark’s tooth—that drifted down to the plain at the very bottom of the ocean. In the lugubrious unfolding of geologic time, specks of waterborne nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese slowly accreted onto them. By now, trillions lie half-buried in the sediment carpeting the ocean floor.

One March day in 1873, some of these subaqueous artifacts were dragged for the first time into sunlight. Sailors aboard the HMS Challenger, a former British warship retrofitted into a floating research lab, dredged a net along the sea bottom, hauled it up, and dumped the dripping sediment onto the wooden deck. As the expedition’s scientists, in long trousers and shirtsleeves, eagerly sifted through the mud and muck, they noted the many “peculiar black oval bodies” that they soon determined were concretions of valuable minerals. A fascinating discovery, but it would be almost a century before the world began to dream of exploiting these stones.

In 1965, an American geologist published an influential book called The Mineral Resources of the Sea, which generously estimated that the nodules contained enough manganese, cobalt, nickel, and other metals to feed the world’s industrial needs for thousands of years. Mining the nodules, he speculated, “could serve to remove one of the historic causes of war between nations, supplies of raw materials for expanding populations. Of course it might produce the opposite effect also, that of fomenting inane squabbles over who owns which areas of the ocean floor.”

In an era when population growth and an embryonic environmental movement were fueling concerns about natural resources, seabed mining suddenly got hot. Throughout the 1970s, governments and private companies rushed to develop ships and rigs to pull up nodules. There was so much hype that in 1972, it seemed completely plausible when billionaire Howard Hughes announced that he was dispatching a custom-built ship into the Pacific to search for nodules. (In fact, the CIA had recruited Hughes to provide cover for the ship’s Bond-esque mission: to covertly retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine.) But none of the actual sea miners managed to come up with a system that could do the job at a price that made sense, and the fizz went out of the nascent industry.

By the turn of the 21st century, advancing marine technology made sea mining seem plausible again. With GPS and sophisticated motors, ships could float above precisely chosen points on the seafloor. Remotely operated underwater vehicles grew more capable and dove deeper. The nodules now seemed to be within reach, just at the moment when booming economies such as China’s were ravenous for metals.

Barron saw the potential bonanza decades ago. He grew up on a dairy farm, the youngest of five kids. (He now has five of his own.) “I knew I didn’t want to be a dairy farmer, but I loved dairy farm life,” he says. “I loved driving tractors and harvesters.” He left home to go to a regional university and started his first company, a loan-refinancing operation, while still a student. After graduating, he moved to Brisbane “to discover the big, wide world.” Over the years, he has been involved in magazine publishing, ad software, and conventional car battery operations in China.

In 2001, a tennis buddy of Barron’s—a geologist, former prospector, and early web-hosting entrepreneur named David Heydon—pitched him on a company he was spinning up, a sea-mining outfit called Nautilus Minerals. Barron was fascinated to learn that the oceans were filled with metals. He put some of his own money into the venture and rounded up other investors.

Nautilus wasn’t going after polymetallic nodules, but rather what seemed like an easier target: underwater formations called seafloor massive sulfides, which are rich in copper and other metals. The company struck a deal with the government of Papua New Guinea to mine sulfides off the country’s coast. (Under international law, countries can do basically whatever they want within their Economic Exclusion Zones, which extend up to 200 miles from their coastlines.) It sounded good enough to attract half a billion dollars from investors, including Papua New Guinea itself.

But in 2019, after spending some $460 million, Nautilus went bust. Neither Barron nor Heydon lost any of their own money: Both had sold their shares about a decade earlier, with Barron clearing about $30 million in profit. Papua New Guinea, where more than half the population lives in poverty, was out $120 million. “It wasn’t my business,” Barron tells me. “I was just supporting David, really.”

Heydon, meanwhile, was building a company called DeepGreen—rebranded in 2021 as the Metals Company—this time pursuing polymetallic nodules. By then, the growing demand for electric vehicles had added both a new potential market and an extra environmental justification for the project. Barron came on as CEO, and several other Nautilus alums joined up, including Heydon’s son Robert. Along with other would-be miners, they started knocking on the door of the International Seabed Authority.

Based in Kingston, Jamaica, the ISA has the contradictory tasks of protecting the ocean floor while organizing its commercial exploitation. Back in the 1980s, most of the world’s nations—notably excluding the United States—signed a kind of constitution for the oceans, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Among many other things, the document established the International Seabed Authority to represent what are now its 167 member nations. The organization was charged with devising rules to govern the then-nonexistent deep-sea-mining industry. The testudinal pace of subsea geology is rivaled only by that of international bureaucracy, and the ISA has been working to develop those rules ever since. Until regulations are agreed upon, full-scale mining is prohibited. But in the meantime, the agency can grant miners the rights to explore specific areas and reserve them for commercial exploitation. The ISA also declared that private companies must partner with a member country. Even the tiniest member country will do.

By now, the Seabed Authority has granted permits to 22 companies and governments to explore enormous swaths of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean seabeds. Most are targeting nodules lying roughly 3 miles underwater in the Clarion Clipperton Zone, an expanse of the Pacific between Mexico and Hawaii measuring 1.7 million square miles. Holding the rights to three of the choicest parcels is Gerard Barron and the Metals Company. The company’s chief financial officer recently told investors that those expanses could yield metals worth $31 billion.

Here’s what makes all of this urgent. The mining ban has a loophole: the two-year trigger. A section of the treaty known as Paragraph 15 states that if any member country formally notifies the Seabed Authority that it wants to start sea mining in international waters, the organization will have two years to adopt full regulations. If it fails to do so, the treaty says the ISA “shall none the less consider and provisionally approve such plan of work.” This text is commonly interpreted to mean mining must be allowed to go ahead, even in the absence of full regulations. “Paragraph 15 was appallingly drafted,” says Duncan Currie, a lawyer for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an international umbrella organization of dozens of groups. “Several countries dispute the idea that it means they need to automatically approve a plan of work.”

In the summer of 2021, the president of Nauru formally notified the Seabed Authority that the country, along with the Metals Company’s wholly owned subsidiary, Nauru Ocean Resources, planned to begin sea mining. The two-year trigger has been pulled. The Metals Company’s audacious gambit may have opened the door to deep-sea mining for the first time.

“As an environmentalist,” Barron says, he finds the opposition to his plans frustrating. “‘Save the oceans’ is a really easy slogan to get behind. I’m behind it!” he says. “I want to save the oceans, but I also want to save the planet.” It might be true that getting metals from the seafloor is less damaging than getting them from land. But so far, few outside the industry are convinced.

Very little is truly known about the deep ocean. Gathering data hundreds of miles from land and miles below the water’s surface is extraordinarily difficult. A single day’s work can cost up to $80,000, and sophisticated tools such as remotely operated vehicles have only recently become available to many scientists. In 2022, 31 marine researchers published a paper that reviewed hundreds of studies on deep-sea mining. The authors also interviewed 20 scientists, industry members, and policy-makers; almost all said the scientific community needed at least five more years “to make evidence-based recommendations” for regulating the industry.

Every phase of the mining process entails serious risks for the world’s oceans, which are already severely stressed by pollution, overfishing, and climate change. Start at the bottom. A massive piece of machinery-tank-treading over the pristine ocean floor, prying loose thousands of nodules from the beds where they have lain for millennia, is inevitably going to cause some damage. Corals, sponges, nematodes, and dozens of other organisms live on the nodules themselves or shelter beneath them. Other critters float around them, including anemones with 8-foot tentacles, rippling squidworms, glass sponges, and ghostly white Dumbo octopuses. “It’s like Dr. Seuss down there,” says Amon, the marine scientist. The nodules, Amon believes, are a critical part of the ecosystem that supports all those creatures. And since they formed over millions of years, any harm that results from removing them “is in effect irreversible.” Some scientists are also concerned that the huge amounts of carbon embedded on the ocean floor could be released, potentially interfering with the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon.

Silt and clay stirred up by the collector vehicles will also rise up into the water, creating plumes of sediment that could cloud the water for miles, linger for weeks or more, and suffocate creatures farther up the water column. Those plumes might also contain dissolved metals or other toxic substances that could harm aquatic life.

Moving upward, the noise and light emitted by the harvester vehicles and riser systems could affect any number of creatures that have evolved to live in silence and darkness. A recent study found that the racket from just one seabed mining operation could echo for hundreds of miles through the water, potentially interfering with aquatic organisms’ ability to navigate and find food and mates.

Once the nodules have been carried up to a ship, the silt-infused water that accompanied them will have to be dumped back into the sea, creating another potentially dangerous sediment plume. “We are talking about massive volumes. Fifty thousand cubic meters a day,” says Jeff Drazen, an ocean scientist at the University of Hawaii who has also worked extensively in the Clarion Clipperton Zone, including on a research mission funded by the Metals Company. “That’s like a freight train of muddy seawater every day.”

A 2022 report from the United Nations Environment Programme sums up the grim picture. Bottom line, according to the authors: “Current scientific consensus suggests that deep-sea mining will be highly damaging to ocean ecosystems.” More than 700 marine science and policy experts have signed a petition calling for a “pause” on sea mining until more research has been conducted.

Barron insists that his company is committed to getting the science right and points out that it has funded 18 research expeditions (to fulfill the requirements of the Seabed Authority). “Last year I spent $50 million on ocean science,” he tells me. “I don’t see anyone else doing that.”

By now, he argues, we know enough. “The lack of full scientific knowledge should not be used as an excuse not to proceed when the known impacts of the alternative—land-based mining—are there for us all to see,” he says. It is a “certainty,” he says, that sea mining will be less destructive. Whoever authored the Metals Company’s own registration filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission wasn’t so categorical. That document notes that nodule collection in the Clarion Clipperton Zone is “certain to disturb wildlife” and “may impact ecosystem function” to an unpredictable extent. The filing adds that it may “not be possible to definitively say” whether nodule collection will do more or less harm to global biodiversity than land-based mining.

The Metals Company’s critics say the company basically isn’t interested in what the science shows. One environmental scientist quit a contract job with the company, complaining in a since-deleted LinkedIn post in 2020 that “the company has minimal respect for science, marine conservation, or society in general … Don’t let them fool you. Money is the game. It’s business in their eyes, not people or the planet.” (Barron says this person is just a disgruntled ex-employee and that his charges aren’t true. My efforts to contact the scientist were unsuccessful.)

The metals company is the only deep-sea mining outfit that is not backed by a major corporation or national government. It’s a startup, wholly dependent at this point on fickle investor capital. That could certainly help explain why Barron seems to be in a hurry to start mining. When I ask him why the company triggered the two-year rule, he interrupts to clarify: “Well, Nauru did. We didn’t. Nauru did.”

You’d have a hard time finding a more extreme example of despoliation of a tropical paradise, of a fall from Eden, than Nauru. When the first European ship came across this 8-square-mile island in the South Pacific, in 1798, the captain was so charmed by the locals’ friendly welcome, the fair weather, and the lovely beaches that he dubbed it Pleasant Island. But once an Australian geologist discovered that the spot was loaded with high-grade phosphate, much in demand as fertilizer, the outside world rushed in. Over the course of the 20th century, the nation of 12,000 people was strip-mined to the brink of oblivion. Its once-lush interior was reduced to what The Guardian described as a “moonscape of jagged limestone pinnacles unfit for agriculture or even building.” As the phosphate began running low in the 1990s, Nauru tried to set itself up as a no-questions-asked offshore banking haven, but so much ill-gotten cash poured in that Nauru was forced to tighten its regulations. The island’s next moneymaker was to rent some of its territory to Australia to use as an immigrant detention center. Detainees there have rioted, staged hunger strikes, and sewn their lips shut.

Given all that, it’s easy to see the economic appeal of teaming up with the Metals Company—especially since the mining zone is nowhere near Nauru. “Our people, land, and resources were exploited to fuel the industrial revolution elsewhere, and we are now expected to bear the brunt of the destructive consequences of that industrial revolution,” including sea-level rise, wrote Margo Deiye, Nauru’s representative to the UN, in a December newspaper op-ed explaining why her country is supporting sea mining. “We’re not sitting back, waiting for the rich world to fix what they created.”

Barron, who has never set foot on the island, insists that the relationship is a respectful partnership, not a modern version of colonial exploitation. “It’s horrible what happened to Nauru,” he says. “They were absolutely fucked over by the Germans, the English, the Australians, and the Kiwis.” The Metals Company says it has doled out more than $200,000 to support community programs of various sorts in Nauru, Kiribati, and Tonga, the two other island nations with which it has business arrangements. “The real contribution,” he adds, “will be when we start paying royalties”—the partner nations’ yet-to-be-decided percentage of mining revenues.

The Metals Company’s own finances, however, are a bit shaky. Barron took the company public in September 2021, a few months after the two-year rule was triggered, claiming it had commitments of $300 million from investors. Its stock topped $12 per share a few days after it hit the market. But two key investors never delivered, leaving Barron and his team with only a third of their expected capital. The stock price plummeted and has remained stuck at around $1 for months. The company is suing the faithless investors and is being sued itself by other investors who claim they were misled. Meanwhile, it has burned through $300 million. A substantial chunk of that cash wound up in Barron’s pocket. He and his partner, Erika Ilves, a former executive at a company aiming to mine water on the moon whom Barron brought on as chief strategy officer, were together paid more than $20 million in salary and stock options in 2021.

Bloomberg reporters and some environmental organizations have suggested that the company holds unfair leverage over its partner nations, and critics have drawn attention to the seemingly cozy ties between the Metals Company and the International Seabed Authority—in particular its secretary general, Michael Lodge. A recent New York Times investigation alleged that the ISA gave the company’s executives access to data indicating where the most valuable seabed tracts were located, then helped it secure the rights to those areas. Both the agency and the company say that all their dealings have been legal and appropriate. (Lodge also made his stance on environmentalists pretty clear, telling the Times: “Everybody in Brooklyn can say, ‘I don’t want to harm the ocean.’ But they sure want their Teslas.”)

Between Barron’s outspokenness and his company’s legal and financial pyrotechnics, the Metals Company has drawn most of the media coverage around sea mining. “TMC is very bold, but the other companies are piggybacking on them,” says Jessica Battle, who heads the World Wildlife Fund’s campaign against sea mining. “Once one mining license is given, others will follow.” There’s an eager lineup. Belgian maritime giant Deme, high-tech hardware colossus Lockheed Martin, ship-builder Keppel Offshore & Marine, and the governments of South Korea, India, Japan, Russia, and China have launched dozens of research expeditions in recent years. China has two outfits licensed to explore for polymetallic nodules in the Pacific.

Deme’s sea-mining subsidiary, Global Sea Mineral Resources, may be best positioned to take the lead if the Metals Company stumbles. “They’ve got the backing of a multibillion-dollar company and access to European resources for design,” says Currie, the environmental lawyer. “They can wait 10 or 15 years and it wouldn’t be the end of the world for them. Whereas with the Metals Company, look at their stock price. If their license isn’t approved, it’s hard to see how they survive.” Global Sea Mineral Resources has also been running extensive tests in the Pacific—and learning its own lessons in how badly things can go wrong.

a frantic knocking on the metal door of his cabin jolted Kris De Bruyne awake. It was early in the morning of April 25, 2021, and De Bruyne, a Belgian engineer with Global Sea Mineral Resources, was aboard an industrial ship far out in the Pacific. De Bruyne was helming a team of researchers testing the Patania II, a bright green prototype nodule collector similar to the one deployed by the Metals Company. Now one of his team was shouting through the door: “Something really bad happened. The umbilical disconnected!”

It was, indeed, reallybad. The umbilical is a Kevlar-jacketed cable stuffed with fibre-optic and copper wires. Nearly 3 miles long and as thick as a person’s arm, it was the only thing tethering the Patania to the ship.

“Is it going down?” De Bruyne called back.

“Yes!”

De Bruyne scrambled into his red coveralls and ran up on deck. The crew had been hauling up the vehicle after a test drive. When it was just 50 feet from the surface, the umbilical snapped. The 35-ton vehicle went spiraling back down to the bottom of the Pacific. De Bruyne stared helplessly over the side.

Luckily, the Patania landed with its locator system intact, sending acoustic pings up to the ship. It took a couple of days, but crew members eventually maneuvered down a small submersible robot equipped with three-fingered Doctor Octopus tentacles to reattach the repaired umbilical. “It was relatively easy. Well, I say it was very easy, but it was also like ‘AAAAHHH!’ and ‘NOOOO!’” De Bruyne recounted when I met him at Deme’s headquarters near Antwerp, Belgium. “It was an emotional roller coaster.”

When they hauled the Patania up, they found it almost completely undamaged. To De Bruyne, the snapped cable was just one of the “teething problems” that typically come with launching such a complex piece of equipment. Earlier in the expedition, he’d also had to contend with Greenpeace activists who had painted “RISK!” on his ship in huge yellow letters.

De Bruyne is fit, clean-shaven, and small in stature, with a fanboy’s enthusiasm for his job. He’s acutely conscious of the criticism directed at his industry, and he seems to take it personally. De Bruyne’s parents were traveling veterinarians, and they raised him and his brother in Rwanda and Vietnam. “I grew up in nature. I’m not the nature destroyer they want me to be,” he says. “The nongovernmental organizations and the environmentalists, they forget that we also have our stories and that we want to do something good for the world as well.”

The Patania mission, he points out, was accompanied by a separate boatload of independent marine scientists who monitored the machine’s impact on the ocean (as was the Metals Company’s foray). Still, the more we talked, the more qualms he confesses. “Once in a while, I’ll ask myself, am I still doing the right thing?” he says. “I still think we’re doing the right thing, because we’re still doing research.” He says he’s not even convinced deep-sea mining should go ahead. “We need to know what the impact would be of deep-sea mining, and I’m contributing to getting answers to that question. That’s how I feel about it.”

Global Sea Mineral Resources has already sunk at least $100 million into developing its subsea mining system, and it recently announced a partnership with Transocean, a major offshore oil-drilling outfit. The sea-mining company is now designing the much larger Patania III—the first of what the company hopes will be a fleet of full-scale mining robots that will hit the ocean floor around 2028.

The five years between now and then might be enough to develop the scientific understanding needed to craft regulations to safely mine the seafloor—or to determine whether it should be done at all. Or it might be time for alternatives, such as reducing private car ownership or recycling metals, to gain enough traction to make seabed mining superfluous. But frankly, none of these possibilities seem likely.

Gerard Barron is not planning to wait. “Got the boat, got the machine, announced the partnerships on how we’re going to process the nodules,” he says confidently. Assuming the Metals Company gets the go-ahead from the Seabed Authority, he says, everything is on track to start harvesting nodules by late 2024. The company’s goal for its first year is 1.3 million tons, scaling up to 10 times that amount in the next decade.

The two-year deadline expires this summer. After Nauru put the Seabed Authority on notice, the agency hurriedly convened several meetings, but results have been scant. The pressure seems to be generating something of a backlash. At the authority’s most recent meetings last November, several member states called for a “precautionary pause” on seabed mining, echoing the moratorium petition. According to Bloomberg, France’s representative declared that his country did not consider itself obligated to approve mining until it was satisfied with the regulations, and several other countries indicated they felt similarly. The UK, India, and Japan, however, want to try to hit the 2023 deadline. Some activists are even calling for the Seabed Authority to be overhauled or replaced.

“The general feeling is, there’s a lot of work to do and a lot of complex issues to be addressed. So when some country says, ‘Just gimme a contract, I’m gonna get on with it,’ it rankles enormously,” says Currie, who attended the most recent round of Seabed Authority meetings. There’s a widespread feeling that it is too soon to be giving out permission to start mining, he says, but it’s not clear how the organization might stop that from happening. “No one,” says Currie, “is sure how this will play out.”

The Mining Industry’s Next Frontier Is Deep, Deep Under the Sea

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The suspected health harms of artificial sweeteners are piling up – and now a new study has linked one kind of sugar substitute to higher risks of heart health problems.

Physician-scientist Stanley Hazen and colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute wanted to see if they could find any signs that could warn people they were at greater risk of heart attack and stroke.

They found it in blood levels of organic compounds used as sweeteners, specifically erythritol; a sweetener commonly used in low sugar, sugar-free, and no-carb foods.

Among a group of 1,157 patients undergoing tests at a cardiovascular clinic, those with the highest levels of these compounds in their blood had twice the risk of dying from or experiencing a major cardiovascular event in the three years that followed.

"Our findings suggest the need for further safety studies examining the long-term effects of artificial sweeteners in general, and erythritol specifically, on risks for heart attack and stroke, particularly in patients at higher risk for CVD," the researchers write in their published paper.

Artificial sweeteners are thought to be chemically inert, but scientists are finding these low-calorie compounds are not necessarily free from health consequences.

While naturally present in very small amounts in fruit and vegetables, levels of sweeteners like erythritol can be 1,000-fold higher in processed foods.

Research shows artificial sweeteners can muck with the microbes in our gut in a way that leads to weight gain and diabetes, and may increase the risk of developing cancer.

Part of the problem is that while artificial sweeteners have fewer calories than the sugars they are replacing – and that may help some people cut down their intake – they taste sweeter and encourage our bodies to want even more of the sugary taste.

"There is an ongoing discussion of the safety of sweeteners – partly because some studies show an increased risk for chronic diseases among those who consume sweeteners, especially in soft drinks," explains Gunter Kuhnle, a professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Reading in the UK.

This new study found a link between levels of erythritol in the blood and future risk of heart attack or stroke – an association that also appeared in two other cohorts of nearly 3,000 people, combined, from the US and Denmark.

This led Hazen and colleagues to investigate potential mechanisms by which erythritol might increase risk, with lab studies using blood samples from a small group of eight healthy volunteers.

Blood erythritol levels peaked and remained high for two to three days after volunteers downed an erythritol-sweetened drink, before returning to normal. Adding erythritol to whole blood samples also increased blood stickiness and other measures linked to blood clotting, with similar effects seen in animal studies.

It goes some way to showing how consuming high levels of artificial sweeteners could possibly trigger a cascade of changes in the blood that may lead to a cardiovascular event.

"[T]his paper effectively shows multiple pieces of a jigsaw exploring the effects of erythritol," says Aston University dietitian Duane Mellor.

But he says the study does not rule out other sources of erythritol in the blood, which can also be made from other sugars inside our bodies, particularly if we eat lots and move little.

The amount of added erythritol that volunteers consumed was also significantly higher than quantities permitted in store-bought drinks in the UK. But the study authors argue their chosen amount reflects the daily intake of some Americans.

Regulatory agencies are alert to the potential health risks of artificial sweeteners; their job is to figure out what levels of food additives are safe to consume based on the available evidence.

Just last year, a study involving more than 100,000 volunteers from France flagged an increased risk of heart disease with greater dietary intake of artificial sweeteners, which participants recorded daily.

Observational studies such as this better reflect people's usual diets, but aren't without their shortcomings. The challenge is sifting through the many other lifestyle factors that also affect heart health in big ways, such as physical activity, and trying to isolate the possible effects of one particular food or food additive from entire diets.

Nutritional epidemiologist Nita Forouhi of the University of Cambridge says the latest study extends previous research on the potential health harms of artificial sweeteners and its findings warrant further investigation.

However, because people in the study already had a lot of cardiovascular risk factors, it's hard to generalize the study findings to healthy populations. Three-quarters of the study participants had high blood pressure or coronary artery disease, and one-fifth had diabetes.

Until we know more about the long-term health effects of erythritol and other artificial sweeteners, it's probably best to stick to what we know is good for our general health: reducing our sugar intake by cutting down on sweetened drinks and highly processed foods of all varieties.

"Individual artificial sweeteners are not currently reported upon which makes their tracking difficult as well as limit the ability to readily research their health impacts," says Forouhi.

The research has been published in Nature Medicine.

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By this point in the long slog of the pandemic, many people know the telltale symptoms of a Covid-19 infection: a ragged ache in your throat, a pernicious cough, congestion, fever and full-body exhaustion. But a tiny subset of people also develop less common symptoms, ones that can sound like hexes from a children’s story: hairy tongues, purple toes, welts that sprout on their faces.

“Every infectious disease has common and uncommon manifestations,” said Dr. Mark Mulligan, an infectious disease specialist at NYU Langone Health. And as we learn more about the coronavirus, he said, we may better understand the underlying causes behind these infrequent symptoms — but until then, it’s largely guesswork.

Confounding symptoms have been a component of Covid since the start of the pandemic — the loss of taste and smell has become a disturbing sign of the disease. Covid also has the potential to disrupt menstrual cycles, a side effect some women also reported after vaccination.

A study of over 60,000 people who tested positive for Covid and reported their symptoms found that a small percentage experienced ringing in their ears, sore eyes, rashes, red welts on their faces or lips, hair loss and unusual joint pains. A larger analysis of more than 600,000 people in Britain showed that a fraction of those with Covid also developed purple sores and blisters on their feet and numbness across their bodies, among other maladies.

Doctors aren’t sure why only some people develop these unusual symptoms. Genetics might play a role, Dr. Mulligan said; vaccination status could also have something to do with it, as an unvaccinated person might have a more severe infection, which could generate a different course of symptoms. Scientists have also found that the coronavirus can enter the bloodstream in a minority of people, he said, which means that it’s possible that the virus could enter various organs across the body and cause symptoms beyond the respiratory system.

Antiviral treatments like Paxlovid may potentially alleviate symptoms like a Covid-related rash, perhaps because they can reduce the amount of virus in your blood, said Dr. Kelly Gebo, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Medicine. But it’s unclear whether these symptoms are directly caused by the virus, or by the body’s response to it.

Inflammation could also be a culprit, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. If the virus gets into the bloodstream and impacts multiple parts of the body, immune cells flock to those areas, Dr. Chin-Hong said. That means an ear, for example, which the virus would typically not impact, may become inflamed, not function as well and potentially ache.

Covid also leaves patients in a weakened state, he said, which means pathogens lingering around their bodies from previous infections — like herpes or the virus that causes shingles — can reactivate, causing rashes or cold sores in the wake of Covid.

A third theory is that the stress that can come with a Covid infection — the anxiety of quarantine, the loss of income, the fear of long-term health implications — can also trigger symptoms like hair loss and hives, Dr. Chin-Hong said.

Each of these symptoms, when associated with Covid, typically resolves in a matter of weeks, often without treatment, he added. And there aren’t set rules for how doctors treat them, said Dr. Gebo. “We have definitive guidelines on how to treat shortness of breath,” she said, “but we don’t have definitive guidelines on these.”

Here’s what else we know about the causes of — and potential treatments for — some of these symptoms.

Hairy tongue

Healthy tongue cells rapidly replace themselves, Dr. Chin-Hong said, but if older cells linger and build on top of one another, it forms a dark, thick, fuzzy overgrowth, often called hairy tongue. Even before Covid, doctors saw patients with hairy tongue related to viral infections, smoking, antibiotic use and poor hygiene, he said, adding, “It’s more common than people think.”

“I know it looks really scary to people,” he said, but the affliction is generally temporary. Some people may also feel a burning sensation inside their mouths. Those with this symptom shouldn’t be “freaked out,” Dr. Chin-Hong said. People with hairy tongue can use a tongue scraper or toothbrush to scratch away those tongue cells, and they can make sure to practice good oral hygiene to prevent additional buildup.

In rare cases, people with Covid may also develop thrush, otherwise known as oral candidiasis, which occurs when a fungus infects your mouth. It has been linked to a suppressed immune system or the use of antibiotics, Dr. Chin-Hong said. Doctors typically diagnose thrush by examining the white lesions that can sprout on your cheek, tongue or mouth; the treatment is usually 10 to 14 days of an antifungal medication.

Tingling nerves

When people develop the sensation of pins and needles on their skin, it may be because their nerves are inflamed by immune cells as they fight off infection, Dr. Chin-Hong said. It’s also possible that the virus itself could damage peripheral nerves, like those that go to your hands and feet, Dr. Gebo said; this also occurs with the shingles infection.

“What we don’t know is what’s a direct impact of the virus itself, or what’s inflammation,” she said. “These are things we’re trying to figure out.”

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that people who tested positive for Covid were roughly three times as likely to report pain, tingling and numbness in their hands and feet than those with negative tests.

For many people, that tingling sensation goes away in a matter of days, Dr. Gebo said. If patients are in pain, she added, they should consult their doctors, who may recommend taking Tylenol or Motrin.

People with persistent nerve pain, even after they recover from the virus, should consult their doctors, said Dr. Marc Sala, co-director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Covid-19 Center.

Rashes

It’s well-established that viruses can induce rashes, Dr. Sala said, and he noted that he has seen a wide variety of skin afflictions in patients with Covid. The American Academy of Dermatology Association cites itchy bumps, chickenpox-like blisters, rashes that form lacy patterns on the skin and raised bumps as potential skin conditions linked to Covid. If you develop a rash that lingers after you recover from Covid, Dr. Sala recommends consulting a dermatologist.

Hair loss

Any type of physical or emotional distress can cause your hair to fall out, said Dr. Shilpi Khetarpal, a dermatologist at Cleveland Clinic. It’s not totally clear whether an infection with Covid itself, or the stress related to it, leads some people to experience hair loss, she said. If you find yourself among those who lose some hair during or after a Covid infection, don’t panic, she said, adding: “It’s not scarring — it comes back. It just needs time.”

Covid toe

Scientists are still conflicted about what causes “Covid toe,” the frostbite-like rash and blisters that form on some people’s feet and fingers after they become infected, causing toes and the tips of fingers to become swollen and purple. One theory is that people with Covid may experience microvascular clots, which occur in the smallest blood vessels in your body and block the blood supply, causing that discoloration, Dr. Sala said.

Patients who develop Covid toe usually do so during the acute phase of an infection, he added, and the symptoms tend to resolve soon after.

The American Academy of Dermatology Association recommends using a hydrocortisone cream to treat it. Like most rare Covid symptoms, as unnerving as it might be, the swelling typically resolves on its own — for reasons doctors aren’t entirely sure of.

“We’re still learning about Covid,” Dr. Mulligan said. “We don’t understand everything.”

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Dicks! Big ones, small ones, absolutely colossal ones – it seems humanity just can’t get enough of these funny little dangly bits. As a species, we’re obsessed: why isn’t it hard? Why isn’t it floppy? Oh god, is it even summer ready?

But for some people, it’s more than just a fascination. It’s a problem. Men the world over fear their most private of parts are simply not good enough – or, to be more accurate, not big enough. 

And yet, at the same time, we know that penises are bigger than ever – and as any urologist will tell you, dude, you’re almost certainly normal-sized. So why are so many people hung up on this one piece of anatomy? How big is big enough? And what actually is “normal”, anyway?

Why are men so hung up on penis size?

This may not come as a surprise, but a lot of men – and, to a lesser extent, other people too – really care about penis size. 

“It is very common for men to worry about the size of their penis,” noted Kevan Wylie, specialist in sexual health and erectile dysfunction and author of a six-decade strong review into attitudes towards penis size published in 2008. “It is important that these concerns aren't dismissed as this can heighten concerns and anxieties.”

And when we say common, we mean it: the size of the prize comes up in the top three most-worried-about aspects of men’s bodies, with studies finding that around two out of three of men are not satisfied with their personal largess. It’s such a widespread problem, in fact, that it even has its own name in the literature: “small penis syndrome” – referring not, as it may sound, to an undersized member, but to a normal one attached to somebody convinced otherwise.

Part of that is undoubtedly due to media exposure – although not as much as you might think. “Although effect sizes were small, […] exposure [to sexually explicit material] negatively affected the overall body satisfaction and genital state self-esteem of our male participants,” concluded one 2019 study into the causes of genital anxiety in men. 

“We are not yet fully cognizant of the effect – if any – that easy accessibility to SEM [sexually explicit material] has on the body expectations and body ideals of consumers,” the authors add, although they note that their results “also suggest […] the influence of SEM on state self-esteem is perhaps less ubiquitous than SEM opponents claim – with no similar significant effect found among women.”

But if not porn, what is causing this widespread anxiety over penis size? One intriguing possibility, put forward in a study from 2019, suggests it may come from how men think about their dicks in relation to themselves.

“Mean (±SD [standard deviation]) self-reported penis length […] among sexually experienced men was 6.62 ± 1.11 inches,” the authors point out – while “mean (± SD) penis size reported by sexually inexperienced men (5.67 ± 0.85 inches) was significantly smaller.”

“We speculate that the difference between the two groups is due to a greater sense of masculinity and sexual competence and prowess by experienced men,” they suggest. In other words: the more macho you consider yourself, the larger you may think your penis ought to be. 

“The whole issue is how much men actually look at their penis size as a stand-in or surrogate for their degree of masculinity,” agreed Abraham Morgentaler, a urologist at Men’s Health Boston who treats issues of male sexuality, back in 2015. “And we can argue that it shouldn't – that we should be more highly evolved than that – but whatever we may think, we're left with what guys actually do, and they are concerned about it.”

So what actually is the average penis size?

There are some four billion penises on this planet, and so to find a true indication of the average length between them all would be, let’s face it, a mammoth undertaking.

Luckily for us, somebody out there had the gumption to do it. In 2014, a review dropped that took data from more than 15,000 men across the world – measured by a health professional using a standard procedure, rather than using self-reporting – to calculate the dimensions of the average penis.

So what were the results? You may be surprised: “The average length of a flaccid penis was 9.16 cm [3.6 inches], the average length of a flaccid stretched penis was 13.24 cm [5.21 inches], and the average length of an erect penis was 13.12 cm [5.165 inches],” the authors concluded in a statement. 

Moreover, “the average flaccid circumference was 9.31 cm [3.66 inches], and the average erect circumference was 11.66 cm [4.59 inches],” they noted. “There was a small correlation between erect length and height.”

If you’re shocked by how, well, small those numbers are, you’re probably not alone: most people with penises think the average is at least 15.2 centimeters (6 inches) when erect. And yet, even these littler averages might be overstated: after all, you can’t exactly force someone to let you measure their dick, and that means even the best studies relied on volunteers – volunteers who, you have to assume, were confident enough in their size to bare all in front of a stranger.

“Most men tend to believe they're smaller than average, and there's some distortion about what reality is,” Morgentaler said – adding that he hasn’t seen “probably […] a single [patient] who hasn't paid attention to his penis size on some level.”

In fact, anxiety over being “big enough” is so prevalent that it can literally warp the data: studies into mean penis length which rely on self-reporting tend to come up with a result more than an inch larger than those which use actual, you know, tape measures. In a particularly cruel twist of fate, these reports are often then used as evidence of a person’s penile petiteness, just compounding the problem further. 

“It is helpful to normalise the situation,” Wylie advised. “Many men either lack any information or have been misinformed.”

But as any statistician will tell you, the raw mean is only half the information. It’s also important to look at things like the standard deviation and distribution of a dataset – and it’s here that we can see something even more reassuring. 

“What's interesting is, when you look at the curves, you see that most penises actually are fairly similar in size,” Morgentaler, who was not involved in the research, pointed out. “You really have to go to the extremes – the top or bottom 5 or 10 percent – to really see some big differences. And truthfully, in my practice, I would say that's exactly right. Most men have penises roughly the same size.”

And yet – does it matter?

Hopefully, there are some readers out there who are feeling quite relieved right now, having found out they’re packing a heftier punch than they previously believed. But for others, we bet you’re not feeling all that different at all.

“Seeing a graph of the distribution of shapes written in centimeters is nowhere near as compelling and as persuasive as the penises you see in porn,” countered sex researcher and educator Emily Nagoski. “So until I see an array of average, normal-size penises right there in front of me, how am I going to know what it actually means that the average penis is however many centimeters it is?”

In fact, even those convinced by the graphs may not feel too reassured. For many men, it seems, the problem isn’t that they’re poorly endowed, but that they’re not Ron Jeremy: one 2014 study found that even those who thought of themselves as “average sized” wished they were larger, stating an average ideal length of 18.47 centimeters (7.27 inches).

Now, we can see in the graph that such a length would put anybody firmly in the “monstrous” category of dick size – it’s practically off the chart. And yet, as one scholar put it back in 1978, “it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that penises in [men’s] fantasyland come in only three sizes – large, gigantic, and so big you can barely get them through the doorway.”

Perhaps that’s why so many men are turning to professional – even surgical – “solutions” for their genital unhappiness. “Urologists are constantly approached by men who are concerned about the size of their penis, despite the fact that the majority of them are normal sized” said Paolo Gontero, Associate Professor of Urology at the University of Turin, back in 2011.

But such procedures are not advised by experts, he added. “Surgery is characterized by a risk of complications and unwanted outcomes and lack of consensus among the medical profession on the indications for surgery and the techniques used.”

Instead, many specialists hope that with better information and understanding, doctors will be able to counsel those with so-called “small penis syndrome” – offering them a better idea of what is normal, rather than a complex over a non-existent problem. Others point to the severely lacking sexual education in the West, particularly in the US, as a reason some men – particularly, these days, younger people – are forced to rely on porn for their “facts” about what is normal.

“I think information is powerful,” Morgentaler concluded. “I think there's value in the data.” 

“It's worthwhile for men to know that the amount of variation for about 85 or 90 percent of the male population for penis size is all centered around pretty much the same number.”

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After a brief stint of Tesla stock trouble, Elon Musk has reclaimed his title as the world's richest person. The Twitter Tsar was unseated from the top spot by Bernard Arnault, CEO of French luxury brand LVMH, in December last year after Tesla stock slumped in value by around 60 percent in 2022. 

It’s estimated that the net worth of the SpaceX CEO fell by over $200 billion between November 2021 and December 2022, one of the largest losses of personal wealth in history.

However, spells of bad luck have a habit of quickly blowing over for the world’s hyper-rich. 

Thanks to a surge in Tesla shares, Musk’s net worth reached $187 billion on Monday, February 27, topping the $185 billion fortune of Arnault, as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

As of Tuesday, February 28, Musk is still second to Arnault on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaire List, which tallies their net worth to be higher than Bloomberg. Nevertheless, the Forbes tracker shows that Musk’s wealth is currently accelerating at a faster pace than Arnault, so who knows what’s in store. 

What is clear is that the wealth of the richest 1 percent of the world is growing at a shockingly rapid pace. 

An Oxfam report in January 2023 showed that the richest 1 percent of people grabbed almost two-thirds of all new wealth created since 2020 – a whopping $42 trillion – which was almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population. Furthermore, the richest 1 percent had seized around half of all new wealth created during the past decade. 

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A new moai statue has been found buried in a dry lake bed on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. The team who discovered the stone head believes that there could be even more in the lake bed waiting to be revealed after climate change led to it drying up.

The statue was found earlier this week, according to Ma'u Henua, the group that oversees Rapa Nui's national park. 

"For the Rapa Nui people, it's [a] very, very important discovery," vice president of Ma'u Henua, Salvador Atan Hito, told Good Morning America. "Because it's here in the lake and nobody knows this exists – even the ancestors, our grandparents don't know [about] that one."

The sculpture – made of solidified volcanic ash – is smaller than many of the nearly 1,000 statues found across the island. The figures were transported across the island from their building site by unconfirmed means. There are accounts by islanders that the statues "walked" or were “endowed with power to walk about in the darkness". While this sounds absurd, there is a pleasing theory posed in a 2013 paper that the statues were indeed walked across the island and into position.

It's unknown why this particular moai was placed within the lake bed, but the discovery could mean that it may not be the last statue found.

"Under the dry conditions that we have now, we may find more," professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, Dr Terry Hunt, told Good Morning America. "They've been hidden by the tall reeds that grow in the lake bed and prospecting with something that can detect what's under the ground surface may tell us that there are in fact more moai in the lakebed sediments.

"When there's one moai in the lake, there's probably more."

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Hundreds of scientists around the world are looking for ways to treat heart attacks. But few started where Hedva Haykin has: in the brain.

Haykin, a doctoral student at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, wants to know whether stimulating a region of the brain involved in positive emotion and motivation can influence how the heart heals.

Late last year, in a small, windowless microscope room, she pulled out slides from a thin black box, one by one. On them were slices of hearts, no bigger than pumpkin seeds, from mice that had experienced heart attacks. Under a microscope, some of the samples were clearly marred by scars left in the aftermath of the infarction. Others showed mere speckles of damage visible among streaks of healthy, red-stained cells.

The difference in the hearts’ appearance originated in the brain, Haykin explains. The healthier-looking samples came from mice that had received stimulation of a brain area involved in positive emotion and motivation. Those marked with scars were from unstimulated mice.

“In the beginning we were sure that it was too good to be true,” Haykin says. It was only after repeating the experiment several times, she adds, that she was able to accept that the effect she was seeing was real.

Haykin, alongside her supervisors at the Technion — Asya Rolls, a neuroimmunologist, and Lior Gepstein, a cardiologist — are trying to work out exactly how this happens. On the basis of their experiments so far, which have not yet been published, activation of this brain reward centre — called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) — seems to trigger immune changes that contribute to the reduction of scar tissue.

This study has its roots in decades of research pointing to the contribution of a person’s psychological state to their heart health. In a well-known condition known as ‘broken-heart syndrome’, an extremely stressful event can generate the symptoms of a heart attack — and can, in rare cases, be fatal. Conversely, studies have suggested that a positive mindset can lead to better outcomes in those with cardiovascular disease. But the mechanisms behind these links remain elusive.

Rolls is used to being surprised by the results in her laboratory, where the main focus is on how the brain directs the immune response, and how this connection influences health and disease. Although Rolls can barely contain her excitement as she discusses her group’s eclectic mix of ongoing studies, she’s also cautious. Because of the often-unexpected nature of her team’s discoveries, she never lets herself believe an experiment’s results until they have been repeated multiple times — a policy that Haykin and others in her group have adopted. “You need to convince yourself all the time with this stuff,” Rolls says.

For Rolls, the implications of this work are broad. She wants to provide an explanation for a phenomenon that many clinicians and researchers are aware of: mental states can have a profound impact on how ill we get — and how well we recover. In Rolls’s view, working out how this happens could enable physicians to tap into the power of the mind over the body. Understanding this could help to boost the placebo effect, destroy cancers, enhance responses to vaccination and even re-evaluate illnesses that, for centuries, have been dismissed as being psychologically driven, she says. “I think we’re ready to say that psychosomatic [conditions] can be treated differently.”

She is part of a growing group of scientists who are mapping out the brain’s control over the body’s immune responses. There are multiple lines of communication between the nervous and the immune systems — from small local circuits in organs such as the skin, to longer-range routes beginning in the brain — with roles in a wide range of diseases, from autoimmunity to cancer. This field “has really exploded over the last several years”, says Filip Swirski, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

Some parts of the system — such as the vagus nerve, a huge highway of nerve fibres that connects the body to the brain — have inspired treatments for several autoimmune diseases that are currently being tested in clinical trials. Other studies, investigating how to recruit the brain itself — which some think could provide powerful therapies — are still nascent. Rolls, for one, has just begun examining whether the pathways her team has found in mice are also present in humans. And she has launched a start-up company to try to develop treatments based on her findings.

Although these developments are encouraging to researchers, much is still a mystery. “We often have a black box between the brain and the effect we see in the periphery,” says Henrique Veiga-Fernandes, a neuroimmunologist at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon. “If we want to use it in the therapeutic context, we actually need to understand the mechanism.”

A tale of two systems

For more than a century, scientists have been finding hints of a close-knit relationship between the nervous and the immune systems. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, scientists demonstrated that cutting nerves to the skin could curb some hallmarks of inflammation.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that researchers in this field began drawing connections to the body’s master conductor, the brain. Neurosurgeon Kevin Tracey, then at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, and his colleagues found something unexpected while investigating whether an experimental anti-inflammatory drug could help to tame brain inflammation caused by stroke.

When delivered into the brains of rodents that had experienced strokes, the drug had the expected effect: it reduced neuroinflammation. As a control, the team injected the drug into the brains of animals that had inflammation throughout their bodies, thinking the drug would work exclusively in the brain. To their surprise, it also worked in the body. “This was a real head-scratcher,” says Tracey, now president and chief executive of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset.

After months of trying to determine the path of the drug from brain to body, the researchers decided to cut the vagus nerve, a bundle of some 100,000 nerve fibres that runs from the brain to the heart, lungs, gastrointestinal tract and other major organs. With the vagus nerve snipped, the anti-inflammatory effect of the brain-administered drug disappeared.

Inspired by this discovery, Tracey’s group and others have continued to explore other ways in which the vagus nerve — and the rest of the nervous system — directs immune responses. A driving force for these developments, says Swirski, has been the advent of scientific tools that enable scientists to begin to chart the interactions between the nervous and the immune systems in an unprecedented way.

Some researchers are focusing on particular body systems. For instance, a team led by Andreas Habenicht, a cardiologist at LMU Munich, Germany, reported last year that the interaction between immune cells and nerves in the outermost layer of artery walls modulated the progression of atherosclerosis, an inflammatory disease in which vessels become clogged with cholesterol and other substances.

Meanwhile, Veiga-Fernandes and his group have documented clusters of neuronal and immune cells in various tissues and discovered how they work together to sense damage and mobilize immune reactions. His team is now looking at how these little switchboards can be controlled by the brain.

The brain itself is also beginning to give up its secrets. Neuroscientist Catherine Dulac and her team at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have pinpointed neurons in an area called the hypothalamus that control symptoms including fever, warmth-seeking and loss of appetite in response to infection. “Most people probably assume that when you feel sick, it’s because the bacteria or viruses are messing up your body,” she says. But her team demonstrated that activating these neurons could generate symptoms of sickness even in the absence of a pathogen. An open question, Dulac adds, is whether these hypothalamic neurons can be activated by triggers other than pathogens, such as chronic inflammation.

Just above the hypothalamus sits a region called the insula, which is involved in processing emotion and bodily sensations. In a 2021 study, one of Rolls’s doctoral students, Tamar Koren, found that neurons in the insula store memories of past bouts of gut inflammation — and that stimulating those brain cells reactivated the immune response.

Rolls, Koren and their colleagues suspect that such a reaction might prime the body to fight potential threats. But these reactions could also backfire and start up in the absence of the original trigger. This could be the case for certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, that can be exacerbated by negative psychological states.

Mind over matter

Many scientists hope to pin down how such mental states influence immune responses.

Rolls and Fahed Hakim, a paediatrician and director of the Nazareth Hospital EMMS in Israel, were inspired to investigate this question after coming across a 1989 study reporting that, among women with breast cancer, those who underwent supportive group therapy and self-hypnosis in addition to routine cancer care survived longer than those who received only the latter. Several other studies have documented a similar link between survival and the mental states of people with cancer.

To test the link, Rolls, Hakim and their team zoomed in on the VTA — the same region they targeted in the heart-attack study and in a previous experiment looking at bacterial infection. This time they focused on mice with lung and skin tumours. Activating neurons in the VTA noticeably shrank the cancers. It turned out that VTA activation subdued cells in the bone marrow that would usually repress immune activity, freeing the immune system to fight the cancer.

Clinicians have known about the effect of positive thinking on disease progression for a long time, Hakim says. But this evidence has been largely anecdotal or correlational, so being able to identify a pathway through which such an effect occurs — and manipulate it experimentally in animals — makes it much more real, he says.

Negative mental states can also influence the body’s immune response. In a study published last year, Swirski and his team identified specific brain circuits that mobilize immune cells in the bodies of mice during acute stress. The researchers found two pathways, one originating in the motor cortex that directed immune cells to the site of injury or infection, and another beginning in the hypothalamus — a key responder in times of stress — that reduced the number of immune cells circulating in the blood. The group is now investigating the role of stress-mediated circuits in chronic inflammatory diseases.

Neuroscientist Jeremy Borniger at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and his colleagues have also found that activating neurons in the mouse hypothalamus can generate an immune response — and are now examining how manipulating these cells can alter the growth of tumours.

Some groups are hoping to replicate their findings in humans. Swirski’s team, for instance, plans to use tools such as virtual reality to manipulate people’s stress levels and see how that changes the immune response.

Koren and Rolls are working with Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, to see whether boosting the reward system in people’s brains before they receive a vaccine can improve their immune response. Rather than stimulating the brain directly, they are using a method called neurofeedback, in which individuals learn to observe and control their own brain activity; this is measured using methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The road to the clinic

Over the years, Rolls would chat with her good friend Tehila Ben-Moshe about her research. Ben-Moshe is the chief executive of Biond Biologics, an Israel-based biopharmaceutical company that focuses on using immune cells to target cancer. During one such discussion last year, Ben-Moshe realized that Rolls’s brain-stimulation experiments were acting on some of the same immune cells that her company was trying to target, and immediately saw the therapeutic potential. “When I saw Asya’s data, I couldn’t believe what I saw,” says Ben-Moshe. “The question then became — how can I translate what she’s doing with mice into patients?” The two are working on launching a company.

Ben-Moshe and Rolls hope to harness existing brain-stimulation technologies, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which uses magnetic pulses to alter brain activity, or focused ultrasound, which uses sound waves, to modulate the immune systems of people with cancer, autoimmune diseases or other conditions. As a first step, their team has been reaching out to companies that have developed such technologies.

Before starting clinical trials, Ben-Moshe and Rolls want to examine blood samples from trials already performed with these techniques, to see whether there are signs of immune-system alterations before and after treatment.

Potential therapies targeting the vagus nerve are nearer the clinic. A company co-founded by Tracey — SetPoint Medical in Valencia, California — is testing pill-sized vagus-nerve stimulators, implanted in the vagus nerve in the neck, in autoimmune diseases including Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. The rheumatoid-arthritis trial is farthest along — the team has shown in a small trial in Europe that its device can reduce disease severity. The technique is currently undergoing a randomized, sham-controlled trial (in which the control group will receive an implant but no active stimulation) in 250 patients in various centres across the United States.

Rolls’s hope is that this work will ultimately help physicians to understand, and act on, the mind–body connections that they see in their practices.

The need is clear: when Rolls put out a call to speak to psychologists from the hospital where her lab is based, the meeting room was packed.

People from departments ranging from dermatology to oncology were eager to share their stories. Many clinicians pass people with seemingly psychosomatic issues on to psychologists, saying there is nothing physically wrong, said one attendee. This can be distressing for the person seeking treatment. Even being able to simply tell people that there is a brain–immune connection that is responsible for their symptoms can make an enormous difference.

It’s time that both researchers and clinicians take the link between psychology and physiology seriously, says Rolls. “You can call something psychosomatic, but in the end, it’s somatic. How long can we ignore what is there?”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on February 22, 2023.

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An eye drop a day could keep myopia at bay — at least temporarily.

Using nightly eye drops with 0.05 percent atropine, a medication that relaxes the eye muscle responsible for focusing vision, may delay myopia onset in children, researchers report February 14 in JAMA.

Myopia, also called nearsightedness, is an irreversible condition in which the eyeball grows too long front to back, causing blurred distant vision.

It typically begins in childhood, and the earlier it starts, the worse eye health can become later in life. Elongated eyes increase the risk for ocular complications including cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration.

The prevalence of myopia has risen rapidly over the last few decades. About one-fourth of the global population currently has the condition. It is expected to affect half of people worldwide by 2050.

Genetics plays a large role in the condition. A 2020 study found that myopia risk is more than 10 times as high in children of two highly myopic parents as in children of nonmyopic parents, says ophthalmologist Jason Yam of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

But he and other scientists speculate that environmental factors such as less time outdoors and more intensive education are causing the recent boom (SN: 1/24/13). “It’s happening too quickly to be a purely genetic or inherited issue,” says optometrist Kathryn Saunders of Ulster University in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, who was not involved in the new study.

Low-dose atropine eye drops are already used to slow myopia progression in several countries in Asia. Yam and colleagues wanted to see if the medication could also delay myopia onset.  

The team recruited nonmyopic children ages 4 through 9 who lived in Hong Kong. Each participant received nightly eye drops but was randomly assigned to receive drops with 0.05 percent atropine, 0.01 percent atropine or a placebo. Families and clinicians didn’t know which treatment group the children were in.

A total of 353 children used their assigned eye drops for two years. Only about 25 percent of children who took 0.05 percent atropine eye drops, roughly 30 kids, developed myopia in at least one eye, compared with about 50 percent of those who used 0.01 percent atropine or placebo eye drops, around 60 kids in each group. The percentages in each group were similar for eye elongation not severe enough to be considered myopia.

“It’s a great first step to encourage us to explore more,” Saunders says.

Scientists will need to conduct studies in more diverse populations and environments to reach generalizable conclusions since the trial took place in only Hong Kong. Eye color may also influence dosing, as lighter-pigmented eyes might be more susceptible to side effects, including sensitivity to light.

How atropine slows myopia onset and progression remains a mystery. The medication might improve blood circulation in the eye, Yam says, but that’s just one existing hypothesis.

The new study was too short to suggest that atropine eye drops can prevent myopia. But an ongoing follow-up period in which participants continue taking the medication through their teenage years — when eye length stabilizes — will help the team understand if atropine eye drops can ward off the condition altogether.

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SINGAPORE - Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest threats facing healthcare, and is projected to kill more people by 2050 than cancer, say experts.

In lower- to middle-income countries during the Covid-19 pandemic, one in four deaths among seriously ill patients who had been in the intensive care unit (ICU) for five days or more was caused by AMR, said Professor David Paterson of the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health.

The problem also exists in rich countries but to a lesser extent.

Said Prof Paterson: “When carbapenems (a class of strong antibiotics reserved for use in multi-drug-resistant bacterial infections) don’t work, we’re in a really difficult situation.”

He is the director of a new network called Advance-ID, which brings together more than 60 hospitals from 15 countries and hopes to be the “go to” place when pharmaceutical companies want to evaluate new antimicrobials and new diagnostic or preventive strategies.

The network’s mission is to run “high-quality clinical trials that have a global impact on the management of infections”.

Dr Timothy Jinks, head of infectious disease interventions at Britain’s charitable foundation Wellcome Trust, said at the two-day Advance-ID Launch Symposium that it is important to focus on communities “most vulnerable to the impacts of infectious diseases”. He added: “So we’re focusing resources on sources of drivers of infectious disease.”

Wellcome Trust is supporting the network with more than $10 million. Five institutes here – the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Duke-NUS Medical School, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University, and the National Centre for Infectious Diseases – have each contributed $500,000, adding another $2.5 million. This money is for the 2022 to 2024 period, after which more funding is expected.

Prof Paterson said it makes sense to have clinical trials for new antibiotics or preventive strategies carried out in Asia, as almost half of the five million AMR deaths in 2019 were in this region. Hospitals that participate in the trials have the opportunity to gain access to new drugs.

Professor Kenneth Mak, Singapore’s director of medical services, who gave the opening address at the symposium on Monday, described AMR as “a slow-burn pandemic”.

He said: “Its impact on our healthcare systems and communities can be profound. Pathogens resistant to the already limited antibiotic options we have today can lead to poorer patient outcomes and greater difficulty in treatment. This could result in a longer hospital stay and higher overall healthcare costs.”

Prof Mak said the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that infectious diseases, including the threat of AMR, “easily transcend borders in today’s highly connected world”.

Infectious pathogens can emerge in one place and ride on humans, animals and other vectors such as food and surfaces, ending up in a vastly distant location compared with its original source, he added.

“An outbreak can be seeded in such a manner, and where scientific developments have not caught up with a new and emerging pathogen, this is when epidemics and pandemics can occur.”

Prof Paterson said that at some hospitals in the new network, half of the bacterial infections in patients in the ICU are resistant to carbapenem. Such resistance is also found here but accounts for less than 10 per cent of those infected, he added.

When that happens, doctors have to fall back on a very old antibiotic called colistin, which infectious diseases doctors have stopped using for about 40 years because of its high toxicity that commonly causes kidney and neurological problems.

Bacteria have no resistance to colistin because it has not been in use for decades. But its toxicity makes it a drug of last resort that doctors would prefer not to use.

That is why it is so important to develop new antibiotics, which have to be tested. This is what the network hopes to facilitate.

“We desperately need alternatives. That’s our No. 1 priority for trials of alternatives to colistin,” said Prof Paterson. “Already, we’ve got such a pipeline of people wanting to do projects with us. It’s quite amazing.”

The great interest in the network is fuelled by the war in Ukraine. Prof Paterson said: “Companies used to do a lot of their trial work in Ukraine and Russia, and they now need new venues for their trials. I know it’s a horrible circumstance to have this opportunity. But it is a huge opportunity for us to take.”

The network will pick two or three out of the dozen potential drugs to test, with the first multi-hospital trial expected to start later in 2023.

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"If we miss this emission goal, the ice sheets will disintegrate and melt at an accelerated pace, according to our calculations," explains climate physicist Axel Timmermann from the Institute for Basic Science in Korea.

Global sea levels have already risen about 20 centimeters on average over the last century. The calculated acceleration would put one in 10 people at direct risk from rising sea levels, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres explained at a Security Council debate in New York.

"For the hundreds of millions of people living in small island developing states and other low-lying coastal areas around the world, sea-level rise is a torrent of trouble," he said.

"We would witness a mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale."

By including feedback mechanisms that have been missing from previous modeling, Pusan National University climate scientist Jun Young Park and colleagues predict a major tipping point is approaching faster than expected.

"Computer models that simulate the dynamics of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica often do not account for the fact that ice sheet melting will affect ocean processes, which, in turn, can feed back onto the ice sheet and the atmosphere," explains Park.

As ice on land and sea continues to thaw at increasingly rates, meltwater flowing into the ocean concentrates towards the surface, decreasing the exchange of heat from the depths and driving up temperatures of the subsurface even further. This added heat risks further eroding the frozen buttresses holding back Antarctica's ice shelf, causing even more meltwater to flow into the ocean.

While the team is yet to achieve as high a resolution as other leading climate models, including data from these processes allows researchers to see how meltwater and calving impacts the stability of ice sheets.

We're already seeing some of these effects in real time, with previously unheard of events like rain in Greenland and clearly observable increases in meltwater fluctuations on the Antarctic ice shelf, the team points out.

But Park and team's new calculations suggest this irreversible process could be triggered at just 1.8 °C.

It was only in their most aggressive mitigation scenario, keeping temperatures below 1.5 °C, that the model showed we could avoid this rapid acceleration in sea level rise.

"If we don't take any action, retreating ice sheets would continue to increase sea level by at least 100 centimeters within the next 130 years," explains Timmermann.

"This would be on top of other contributions, such as the thermal expansion of ocean water."

Such a scenario would seriously impact mega-cities on every continent, including urban centers such as Cairo, Mumbai, Shanghai, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Buenos Aires notes Guterres.

As alarming as the potential might be, there are plenty of features affecting our complex ecological systems that the new modeling hasn't included, such as the impacts of narrow coastal currents.

"It's crucial that developments such as theirs are brought into our state of the art climate models," explains atmospheric scientist Robin Smith, who was not involved in the study.

"Even though more work needs to be done to reduce the uncertainty in projections like these, this study clearly shows the importance of taking rapid action to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible to minimize the risks associated with the loss of major ice sheets."

That doesn't mean we have the luxury of waiting to find out. Every increment of warming we can avoid gives us a far better chance of helping future societies avoid the worst of a rapidly warming planet.

This research was published in Nature Communications.

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Powerful solar wind is blowing from the sun these days, setting the sky ablaze with auroras as far south as London, and forecasters predict that more such displays are on the way, as another solar eruption is set to arrive later Monday (Feb. 27). 

Stunning aurora borealis displays were reported overnight from Sunday (Feb. 26) to Monday, from all over the U.K., even from as far south as the iconic Stonehenge monument(opens in new tab) in Wiltshire.

Stunned skywatchers took to Twitter in droves to share their photos, with reports of aurora sightings pouring in from Scotland, northern Wales, Ireland and southern England.

Northern Irish photographer Evan Boyce experienced a memorable night of aurora chasing, which, despite being his first polar lights adventure, produced some stunning results. 

"I first picked up a camera during the COVID lockdown and have wanted to capture the aurora ever since," Boyce told Space.com in an email. "It's quite difficult living in Northern Ireland, given how far south we are in comparison to where the aurora can normally be viewed."

He added that all his earlier attempts at aurora chasing were ruined by cloudy weather. On Sunday night, Boyce drove to a beach between the towns of Bangor and Donaghadee, a short drive from Northern Ireland's capital Belfast. There he captured an eerie green and red glow above a historical building with a backdrop of a star-studded sky. 

"I can't believe how lucky I've been," Boyce said. "Judging by the reaction from other local photographers, the strength & colors last night were a rare event."

Stuart Atkinson, who lives in the popular Lake District natural park in northwestern England, is a much more seasoned astrophotographer than Boyce. A contributor to Space.com's sister magazine All About Space, Atkinson managed to capture a series of infernal red auroras after what he described as a "frustrating aurora-hunt" sabotaged by weather. 

"I took the images last night from a place called Shap, probably one of the highest locations in my area and far enough further north of where I live to give me a better view of the aurora than I would have at home," Atkinson told Space.com "Last night conditions were pretty poor at first, almost total cloud, but after an hour or so a big gap appeared and I managed to get a few photos. Very pleased with how they turned out."

Astrophotographer Stuart Atkinson captured this image of aurora borealis in the Lake District natural park in the U.K. (Image credit: Stuart Atkinson)

He added, however, that the natural colors visible in the sky were much more subdued compared to the photos he produced. 

"The long exposure, sensitive sensor and high ISO all enhanced the colors," Atkinson said. "Visually the aurora was pale gray green at the bottom, and pale pink at the top."

Reports of aurora sightings also came from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Aside from the traditional aurora photography hotspots in Canada and Alaska, some minor sightings were reported from Ohio and New York state. 

Solar wind is a stream of charged particles that constantly flows from the sun's upper atmosphere into the surrounding space. These particles interact with particles in Earth's atmosphere, triggering aurora displays. When the flow of the solar wind is low, auroras may only be visible above the polar circles where the planet's magnetic field funnels the particles deeper into Earth's atmosphere. CMEs and fast streams of solar winds from coronal holes, however, can trigger aurora displays much farther away from the poles.

Colors visible in aurora displays are caused by particular reactions between the solar wind particles and chemical compounds present in air.

"Different gases glow a different color," Affelia Wibisono, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, told Space.com in an email. "Oxygen glows green, and blue and purple colors are emitted by nitrogen. If those incoming charged particles are particularly energetic, then high altitude oxygen can also give off a deep red color and nitrogen can glow pink."

Aurora chasers are on standby for tonight as another, even more powerful CME is set to arrive today. The Met Office forecasts a strong G3 geomagnetic storm, which should produce more stunning aurora displays, but could also cause minor problems to satellite operators and power grids at northern latitudes.

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FREE SPEECH ADVOCATES focused on the Supreme Court this week, as nine justices spent nearly three hours hashing out the meaning of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Tuesday’s argument in Gonzalez v. Google marked the first time that the Supreme Court might interpret the 26 words that protect online platforms from liability for user content.

But a potentially greater threat to free speech was taking place more than 800 miles to the south in Tallahassee, where a Florida state legislator proposed a bill to make it easier for plaintiffs to bring defamation lawsuits. To the north, a federal judge recently struck down a New York law that regulates online hate speech. To the west, a judge nixed a California Covid misinformation law. And in DC, the justices are also considering whether to rule on the constitutionality of Texas and Florida laws that restrict the ability of social media platforms to moderate user content. 

For the past century, the Supreme Court has taken an expansive view of the First Amendment’s free speech protections, narrowly defining the categories of unprotected speech, and fiercely guarding everything else that is within the First Amendment’s scope.

Since 1997, when it struck down most of the Communications Decency Act, the court has held that the full force of the First Amendment applies online. Hailing “dramatic expansion of this new marketplace of ideas” on the internet, the court wrote in that decision that “governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it.”

We are at a potential turning point for the Supreme Court’s strong protections for free speech and the internet. Only one justice who decided the 1997 case remains on the court. And online speech is now far more controversial than it was in the internet’s nascent years, with some arguing that too much harmful speech remains online while others contend that platforms are too heavy-handed in their content moderation. Internal and external forces could pressure the Supreme Court to allow the government to take a more hands-on role with free speech. 

Indeed, the internet age may prompt the court to reconsider one of its landmark free speech rulings, New York Times v. Sullivan. The 1964 opinion requires public officials to demonstrate actual malice—knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard of the truth—in order to sue for defamation. (The court later extended this requirement to public figures.) In setting this high bar, the court recognized “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

But some justices are unconvinced that Sullivan remains necessary for that commitment. Justice Clarence Thomas has written three times that he wants the Supreme Court to revisit Sullivan, pointing to “real-world effects” such as the proliferation of PizzaGate and other online falsehoods.  Justice Neil Gorsuch has joined his call, in part due to the changes brought by social media. “Now, private citizens can become ‘public figures’ on social media overnight,” Gorsuch wrote. “Individuals can be deemed ‘famous’ because of their notoriety in certain channels of our now-highly segmented media even as they remain unknown in most.”

The Florida bill attempts to weaken defendants’ protections in defamation lawsuits, including by making it easier to sue if the plaintiff has been accused of discriminating by race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. The bill also would help plaintiffs more easily establish actual malice.

I question whether parts of the Florida bill, if passed, would withstand a constitutional challenge, because the actual malice requirement is rooted in the First Amendment and cannot be overridden by a state legislature. But if Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have their way, the court could reconsider the constitutional protections in defamation cases, leaving the door open for Florida and other states to make it far easier to sue not only news organizations but individual critics on social media. Although the debate about Sullivan often focuses on large news organizations like The New York Times and Fox News, it protects all speakers and is essential to open online discourse.

Also looming over the Supreme Court are requests to consider the constitutionality of Texas and Florida laws that restrict the ability of social media companies to moderate user content. Last May, the Eleventh Circuit blocked a Florida law that limits the ability of platforms to moderate political candidates’ content or stories from news organizations. “Put simply, with minor exceptions, the government can't tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it,” Judge Kevin Newsom wrote. But in September, the Fifth Circuit upheld a Texas law that prohibits social media platforms from “censoring” user content based on viewpoint. “Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote. Although the court has not yet agreed to hear the cases, it probably will do so in the next year.

A Supreme Court ruling on those laws has the potential to overhaul how online platforms have operated since the dawn of the internet. If the court agrees that platforms do not have a First Amendment right to moderate as they see fit, the platforms could soon face a state-by-state patchwork of restrictions and edicts to carry user content even if it violates the platforms’ internal policies.  Platforms have made some bad content-moderation decisions, but even this imperfect system is better than allowing courts and legislators to decide when platforms can block content. 

And states are not only passing social media laws that require platforms to carry content, but also attempting to limit harmful but constitutionally protected speech. For instance, after last year’s Buffalo supermarket shooting, New York enacted a law that requires platforms to provide “a clear and easily accessible mechanism for individual users to report incidents of hateful conduct,” and to have policies on their response to complaints about hateful conduct. This month, a New York federal district judge struck down the law, concluding that it “both compels social media networks to speak about the contours of hate speech and chills the constitutionally protected speech of social media users.” And last month, a California federal district judge blocked a California law that prohibited physicians and surgeons from disseminating “misinformation or disinformation” about Covid-19 to patients. The New York and California judges reached the correct decisions under current Supreme Court First Amendment precedent, but it is unlikely to be the last time that a state tries to limit constitutionally protected online speech. Eventually those cases may well end up in the Supreme Court, giving it another chance to reevaluate the scope of its free speech protections.

And the courts probably will face other tough online speech questions. For instance, although the First Amendment has long protected anonymous speech, a Texas lawmaker recently introduced a bill that would not only ban children under 18 from using social media, but would require platforms to obtain copies of driver’s licenses from all users, along with photos of the users with the licenses.

Although Gonzalez v. Google involves Section 230 and not the First Amendment, Tuesday’s argument was our best glimpse at how the current Supreme Court views online speech. The case requires the justices to decide whether Section 230 protects Google from liability in a lawsuit brought by an ISIS victim’s family over YouTube’s algorithmic presentation of ISIS content. It is impossible to predict with certainty how the justices will rule, but we can fairly assume that they recognized the importance of their ruling.

The argument was scheduled for 70 minutes, and it lasted more than two and a half hours. 

The justices acknowledged the arguments that radical changes to interpretations of Section 230 might have a significant impact not only on online speech, but on the business models of platforms. “Are we really the right body to draw back from what had been the text and consistent understanding in courts of appeals?” Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked.

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PEOPLE HAVE LONG stoked an urban-versus-rural rivalry, with vastly different cultures and surroundings. But a burgeoning movement—with accompanying field of science—is eroding this divide, bringing more of the country into the city. It’s called rurbanization, and it promises to provide more locally grown food, beautify the built environment, and even reduce temperatures during heat waves. 

It’s also reversing the longstanding assumption that growing food is straight-up bad for biodiversity because clearing land for agriculture necessitates removing native plants and animals. Ecologist Shalene Jha of the University of Texas, Austin says this idea was based on observations of rural agriculture, where growing industrialized swaths of corn or wheat can be catastrophic for existing ecosystems. But that doesn’t hold for the urban farms, gardens, and even smaller green spaces.

In a recent paper in the journal Ecology Letters, Jha and her colleagues showed that urban gardens can actually boost biodiversity—particularly if residents prioritize planting native species, which attract native insects like bees. “The gardener actually has a lot of power in this scenario,” says Jha. “It doesn't matter how large or small the garden is. It's the practice of cultivating the landscape—and the decisions they make about the vegetation and the ground cover—that ultimately decide the plant and animal biodiversity there.”

Jha’s team characterized the biodiversity of 28 California urban gardens over the course of five years. Far from the mono-cropped monotony of a wheat field, they found rich ecosystems humming with activity that, in turn, increased species diversity. The researchers found predators like birds and ladybugs, which prey on crop-munching insects and thus help increase yields, and an abundance of pollinators like bees, which also benefit from crop diversity and increase plant productivity. That means urban gardens aren’t just producing food for people, but for other species as well. “They’re actually supporting incredibly high levels of plant and animal biodiversity,” Jha says. 

This biodiversity is largely due to a strategic trade-off. One of the challenges of urban gardening is that it requires intensive manual labor: You can’t drive a combine through a city at harvest time. But that limitation turns out to be an ecological blessing. Because everything is done by hand, urban farmers can grow all sorts of plants right next to each other, packed in tightly to increase yields. 

In another study published this month in the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development, a separate team of researchers looked at 72 urban agriculture sites in France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. “We see pretty diverse growing spaces that often are growing a huge variety of crops, as well as non-food products,” says study author Jason Hawes, an environmental sustainability researcher at the University of Michigan. On average, the sites grew 20 different crops. “Lots of folks were also just growing flowers for fun in their visual gardens, and the community gardens have flowers planted to make the space more pleasant,” he says. “These sorts of things do contribute to local biodiversity.”

That biodiversity hardens urban ecosystems against pests that would have a field day with a monocrop. “You all of a sudden have a mimic of what naturally occurs in terms of insect predation. Because if you build it, they will come,” says Colorado State University horticulturalist Jennifer Bousselot, who studies the practice of growing crops on rooftops and wasn’t involved in either of the new papers. Aphids may descend on your garden, for instance, but so too will the ladybugs that keep their population in check.

An additional benefit is that gardeners can stagger the growth of flowering plants throughout the year—known as succession planting—essentially extending the food supply for local pollinators. While native plants are best at attracting native animals, she says, pollinators can make do with something like an imported tomato plant. “I am a big fan and advocate for native plants, but I’m an even bigger advocate for planting a plant with purpose,” says Bousselot. “And believe it or not, most pollinators can adapt.” 

Bees in particular love a good urban garden, especially if it’s loaded with ornamental flowers. Previous research has shown that bee diversity can actually be higher in cities than in surrounding rural areas. It’s counterintuitive, but the flower diversity in an urban garden can be greater than that of a corn or wheat field. 

And while brown patches of dirt may not look nice to you, bees literally dig them. Unlike honey bees that live in swarming hives, the vast majority of species are actually solitary, and many burrow into dirt for shelter. Having open ground in a garden provides them habitat. Bees also hate open spaces because that’s where birds, dragonflies, and other predators patrol. “It’s like putting a giant target on their back saying ‘Come and eat me,’” says biologist Gerardo Camilo, who studies urban bees at Saint Louis University but wasn’t involved in the papers. “They like messiness.” If you leave your yard looking a little shabby, bees will have places to hide as they bounce from flower to flower.

“There’s a take-home message here for everyday gardeners: With relatively minimum effort, you can make a big change,” says Camilo. “You don’t need to be consciously improving the environment. You can just concentrate on your one little thing—which is the growth of some food—and do it in the right way, and you can have significant impacts.” 

But there are still limits to what an individual gardener can do. A bee has to get to your backyard in the first place. That means cities need chains of green spaces—with some open dirt and messy vegetation—so the insects can travel safely. “The neighborhood that surrounds your garden must be inviting to bees, to afford them essentially a road to travel to work,” says Camilo.

That kind of solution requires group action and city planning, but it comes with a whole host of knock-on benefits. Greenery absorbs stormwater, for instance, mitigating urban flooding. Plants also “sweat” water vapor, dramatically lowering temperatures, which get much higher in cities than in rural areas because of the preponderance of concrete. Green spaces are great for mental health. Food waste can go straight into urban gardens as compost, reducing dependence on synthetic fertilizers, which are terrible for the planet. And producing food closer to where it’s consumed could reduce the emissions associated with shipping produce.

There’s also mounting evidence that growing crops in urban areas can be far more productive than on rural farms. Yields for certain vegetables, like cucumbers, can be up to four times greater. That’s due in large part to urban farmers tending their crops by hand, which requires a lot of work but also creates jobs. 

Deploying more gardens in cities, though, comes with challenges. Real estate is expensive, so it won’t be cheap to set aside land. And urban agriculture needs water, which is always at a premium. Ideally, it could come from rain catchment systems, but cities might also be able to build infrastructure to funnel stormwater into green spaces, where it can soak into the ground. “I think we saw in the recent flooding in California that there is a huge amount of public support for finding new ways to deal with runoff that don’t just involve letting it run out to sea,” says Hawes.

There’s real urgency behind doing whatever it takes to bring more agriculture into urban areas: More than half of humanity now lives in towns and cities, a figure expected to rise to 5 billion people by the end of this decade. “Urban gardens are producing 15 to 20 percent of our food supply globally, and that number is just increasing,” says Jha. “And so their value—not only in terms of food production, but also in terms of the plants and animals they support—is increasingly important.”

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While addressing the roundtable, Yellen said:

"Out people-to-people ties affirm the closeness of our relationship. 200,000 Indians are studying in America and enriching our schools and universities. We depend on each other on a daily basis: Indians use WhatsApp to communicate and many American companies rely on Infosys to operate"

India is already an essential partner to the US, with bilateral trade totaling over $150 billion in 2021. The tech sector is critical to both countries' economic growth and innovation, making it a natural area to deepen ties. Companies like Google and Apple have already expanded their phone production in India, and Yellen says that the United States is keen to explore further opportunities for collaboration.

Yellen added:

“Under PGII, we have announced investments in agri-tech to enable climate-smart agricultural production, and in digital payments systems for microentrepreneurs. These stand alongside investments in renewable energy, health, and other infrastructure sectors in India”

 

The roundtable was attended by top tech honchos from both countries, including Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani, IBM India managing director Sandip Patel, Intel India country head Nivruti Rai, Foxconn India Country Head Josh Foulger and Wipro chairman Rishad Premji.

The tech leaders shared their views on how to strengthen the US-India trusted technology partnership through proactive policy measures on critical and emerging technologies. They also highlighted their contributions to both countries’ economies and societies through job creation, skill development and innovation.

Tech companies like Apple and Foxconn are already working on expansion in India. In the next couple of years, Apple will be expanding its retail business in the country by opening more than 100 new stores. Foxconn has also announced investment plans to boost iPhone production, while also significantly increasing its workforce in the next two years.

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Jordan Garcia, a deputy utilities manager in Los Alamos, New Mexico, is facing an energy crunch that is typical in the American West. For decades, the county-run utility relied on a cheap and steady mix of coal and hydroelectric power. But the region’s dams are aging and drought-parched, and its coal plants are slated to retire.

The county is aiming to fully decarbonize its grid by 2040, and the city has been tapping more solar lately, but batteries are arriving slowly, and Garcia worries about heat waves that strain the grid after the sun goes down. Wind power? He’d take more of it. But there aren’t enough wires stretching from the state’s windy eastern plains to the mesa-top community. “For us it’s pretty dire,” he says.

For the past few years, Garcia has been counting on a unique nuclear experiment to come to the rescue. In 2017, Los Alamos signed up to join a group of other local utilities as an anchor customer of the first small modular reactors, or SMRs, in the US, created by a company called NuScale. The design, which calls for reactors only 9 feet in diameter, had never been built before, but the initial cluster planned in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was promised to be much cheaper than a full-scale reactor and to offer affordable carbon-free energy 24/7.

NuScale Power ModuleTM

 Courtesy of NuScale Power

To Garcia, this felt like a homecoming. Los Alamos, a town with the motto “Where discoveries are made,” is the birthplace of the atom bomb, and experimental reactors ran not far from downtown for much of the 20th century. But it had never actually used nuclear power to keep the lights on.

This month, Los Alamos and other local utilities across the West were facing a weighty decision: whether to pull the plug on their nuclear dream. NuScale had informed members of the group, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS, that the estimated costs of building the six 77-MW reactors had risen by more than 50 percent to $9.3 billion. For Garcia, that translated into a jump in the cost of energy from $58 to $89 per megawatt-hour.

The price jump was not rooted in the arcana of nuclear physics, but the mundane details of big construction projects: copper wire up 32 percent, steel piping up 106 percent. Higher interest rates made everything more expensive over the course of construction, which is scheduled to wrap up in 2030. Without extra subsidies from the new Inflation Reduction Act—on top of $1.4 billion already committed to the project by the US Department of Energy—the price to energy users in places like Los Alamos would have doubled.

The sticker shock put the small towns in a tricky position. The higher price means towns can choose to walk away from their contracts. But in a region where power officials are keenly aware of a future that includes more heat waves and drought, and less coal power, some see few alternatives for quickly replacing that always-on electricity. The new price tag may put the project on track to exceed the cost of renewables and natural gas, but the past year’s supply chain disruptions have made nuclear more appealing, showing just how volatile energy prices can be, regardless of the source.

Some utilities say the SMRs look like their only option for “firm” power that can be ramped up or down as needed. Other towns worry that exiting the project could stomp on the first green shoot of a nuclear energy renaissance, causing a “domino effect,” as an official in Hurricane, Utah, put it at a recent council meeting. The project’s power output is only 20 percent subscribed, and UAMPS says it will need to reach 80 percent for planning and construction to proceed next year.

NuScale’s reactor is not so much a revolution in the way nuclear energy is produced, but in the way it is built. The design calls for a light water reactor—essentially the same atom-splitting engineering found within the majority of big nuclear power plants around the world. While the costs of operating these large designs are often reasonable, utilities spend decades paying off enormous upfront construction costs, which consistently soar far over budget. Only two reactors are being built in the US: a pair of 1100-MW units at the Vogtle plant in Georgia, now seven years delayed and $20 billion over their $14 billion budget. 

NuScale hopes its smaller reactors can avoid that fate. They are small enough to manufacture in factories, assembly-line-style, and ship to project sites on trains or trucks. Requiring less land and water should make it easier to find suitable places to put them. Last month, the company was the first of dozens of companies working on SMRs to have a design approved by US regulators. That makes NuScale first in the race to leap from a “paper napkin” reactor, as critics sometimes deride SMRs, to a real one, though the Idaho project involves a revised design that will need its own approval.

The project has hit roadblocks before. It began with 36 utilities signed on, but that number has fluctuated and dropped to 27 last year. In 2020, several municipal utilities dropped out in response to a construction delay and cost increases. Some later rejoined the project after the US Department of Energy upped its commitment to offset some of the costs.

Critics say those price revisions are a sign SMRs are heading down the same path as projects like Vogtle. For nearly a century, the nuclear power industry’s mantra was that building bigger plants would drive down costs. While existing plants aged and new construction withered, SMR companies began promoting a different philosophy, says David Schlissel, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Fiscal Analysis, claiming that constructing many small reactors would teach builders how to make them more cheaply.

But the evidence for progress is flimsy, says Schlissel, who notes that his 50-year career has spanned many a “nuclear renaissance” that fizzled. When that philosophy was applied in France, where dozens of reactors were built in the 1980s, costs still increased. Claims that “modularity” will help make construction more efficient are also suspect, he adds. The new Vogtle reactors involved nearly 1,500 “modular” components that were largely constructed offsite.

Schlissel also believes that NuScale’s current estimates are rosy because they rely on the approval of its newer design that uses less steel, one of the materials driving the cost increases. But regulators may not back that approach, he says. Towns should get out while they can, he advises, before costs climb higher still, and seek out alternatives like geothermal and battery storage. “Let the buyer beware,” he says.

NuScale says it stands by cost estimates based on its new design, and that it has long been in touch with regulators about the revisions. “We don't expect any surprises,” says José Reyes, NuScale’s CTO and cofounder. UAMPS spokesperson LaVarr Webb acknowledges the uncertainties of the design approval process, but says that the $89 price for power from the planned Idaho reactors is still competitive, given spiking natural gas prices and because always-on power can help stabilize the grid. Interest rate hikes and supply chain crunches have increased the costs of all power plants, he points out, not just those that split atoms.

Despite that optimism, officials in Morgan, Utah, a small town in the Wasatch Mountains north of Salt Lake City, decided to make a quick exit from the project. City manager Ty Bailey says he is worried about where the community’s energy will come from in the future due to the retirement of coal and the rise of electric vehicles. “It’s been so disruptive to the way things used to be,” he says. “The system was stable year after year. And policies changed that—no comment on the politics.”

This year, the city realized it had new alternatives to the rising costs of nuclear power. While the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to help offset the costs of the Idaho plant, it also includes funds to help rural communities start their own energy projects. Bailey wants the city to become more self-reliant, installing its own solar panels and batteries that reserve power overnight.

In this round, Morgan was the only defector, though another Utah city, Parowan, reduced its commitment from 3 MW to 2 MW—just enough to cover the loss of its coal power. But the new agreement with utilities, negotiated during a two-day meeting with UAMPS members this winter, sets the project under a ticking clock. It includes requirements that the price hold steady at $89 per megawatt-hour, and—most worrying to utilities that want the project to succeed—that the project be at least 80 percent subscribed by next year. If it doesn’t hit that threshold, towns will get a refund on most of their expenses so far.

At this point, the utilities have sunk relatively little of their own money into the project, but that will change in 2024 as the project begins to seek site-specific building approvals followed by actual construction. To get the project fully subscribed, the group is talking with utilities elsewhere in the Northwest, where NuScale is competing with other SMR startups, including the Bill Gates–backed TerraPower, which recently signed a feasibility agreement with PacifiCorp, a private utility. Webb of UAMPS says he is optimistic about where the negotiations are headed. 

In Los Alamos, Garcia hopes that confidence is well placed. As the end date of the county’s coal power contracts approaches, he has a deal for 15 MW of “firm” energy from a combination of wind and solar at less than half the price of the nuclear project. But that’s only about a sixth of the county’s needs, and he doesn’t expect to see similar prices again.

Without nuclear, he worries the county would have to slow down its decarbonization plans. “We may have to actually invest in a natural gas unit to bridge the gap until something else comes along,” he says. For now, the county council voted to formalize a long-planned increase of their share of the NuScale plant’s power, from 1.8 MW to 8.6 MW. Garcia hopes it will help encourage other utilities to take a chance on sparking a nuclear renaissance.

The Dream of Mini Nuclear Plants Hangs in the Balance

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A sheriff's office in Illinois said it was initially thwarted from tracking a stolen car with a 2-year-old boy inside when Volkswagen's Car-Net service refused to provide access to the tracking system because the car's subscription had expired.

"While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said in a statement posted on Facebook about the incident on February 23. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen."

Volkswagen Car-Net lets owners track and control their vehicles remotely. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article, "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV." The article continued:

The detective pleaded, explaining the "extremely exigent circumstance," but the representative didn't budge, saying it was company policy, sheriff's office Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli said Friday.

"The detective had to work out getting a credit card number and then call the representative back to pay the $150 and at that time the representative provided the GPS location of the vehicle," Covelli said.

 

By the time officers say they paid the $150 and got the location of the vehicle, it had already been located by other means. "About 30 minutes had passed, and 'we had already located the 2-year-old child and located the vehicle before they even provided us the information, so it was at that point worthless,' Covelli said," the Sun-Times wrote.

Volkswagen admits “serious breach”

Volkswagen said there was a "serious breach" of its process for working with law enforcement in the Lake County incident. The company uses a third-party vendor to provide the Car-Net service.

"Volkswagen has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net Support Services involving emergency requests from law enforcement. They have executed this process successfully in previous incidents. Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process. We are addressing the situation with the parties involved," the company said in a statement provided to Ars and other media outlets.

The car with a toddler inside was stolen just after his mother returned to their home in Libertyville in her 2021 Volkswagen Atlas. The 34-year-old woman "pulled into her driveway and brought one of her children inside. She came back to her car to retrieve her other child, her 2-year-old son, when a white BMW... pulled into her driveway, behind her car," the sheriff's office statement said.

A man wearing a mask got out of the BMW "and struggled to get into the victim's Volkswagen, as she tried to keep her 2-year-old son safe," the sheriff's office said. "The offender battered the woman, knocking her to the ground. He then stole her car with the child inside. He and the driver of the BMW fled from the scene."

"One of the drivers ran her over as they fled, causing serious injuries to her extremities. The victim was still able to call 911 and sheriff's deputies immediately responded," the statement continued. The sheriff's office also said the BMW "was stolen in the past week from a car dealership in Waukegan."

Child rescued, mother remained hospitalized

Shortly after the Volkswagen was stolen with the child inside, "a person working at a business in the 2200 block of Lakeside Drive, Waukegan, called 911 to report they just saw two vehicles enter the parking lot, and the driver of one of the cars abandoned a small child," the sheriff's office said. The perpetrators fled, and the person who called 911 "rescued the child from the parking lot" before the boy could wander onto the busy roadway.

The woman's stolen vehicle was also found. "Sheriff's deputies located the stolen Volkswagen in a parking lot near Casmir Pulaski and Route 43. The vehicle will be thoroughly processed for trace evidence," the statement said.

The woman went to a hospital "and was in serious, but stable condition," the sheriff's office said on Thursday. Officers said they were still looking for the stolen BMW and asked the public to reach out if they see the car or have any information about the incident.

When contacted by Ars today, Covelli said the sheriff's office is still searching for the BMW and believes the car is still in the area. "The woman had some medical procedures on Saturday and she continues to improve. She remains hospitalized as of yesterday,"

Covelli said this morning.

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Flattened cities, millions of people burnt to death, and yet more tortured by radioactive fallout. That harrowing future may seem outlandish to some, but only because no nation has detonated a nuclear weapon in conflict since 1945. Countries including the US, Russia, and China wield hefty nuclear arsenals and regularly squabble over how to manage them—only last week, Russia suspended participation in its nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US. Thankfully, nuclear warheads mostly just sit there, motionless and silent, cozy in their silos and underground storage caverns. If someone actually tried to use one, though, would it definitely go off as intended?

“Nobody really knows,” says Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear weapons historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology. The 20th century witnessed more than 2,000 nuclear tests—the vast majority carried out by the US and the Soviet Union. And while these did prove the countries’ nuclear capabilities, they don’t guarantee that a warhead strapped to a missile or some other delivery system would work today.

Surprisingly, as far as we know, the US has only ever tested a live nuclear warhead using a live missile system once, way back in 1962. It was launched from a submarine. The Soviet Union had performed a similar test the previous year, and China followed in 1966. No nation has ever tested a nuclear warhead delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile could blow up on the launchpad, explains Wellerstein. No one wants to clean that mess up.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has, sadly, brought the specter of nuclear weaponry to the fore once again. In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed new strategic nuclear weapons systems had been placed on combat duty, and he threatened to resume nuclear testing. Russia’s former defense minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has been particularly vocal about his country’s readiness to use nuclear weapons—including against Ukraine. 

Russia has around 4,500 non-retired nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit that focuses on security. Roughly 2,000 are considered “tactical”—smaller warheads that could be used on, for example, a foreign battlefield. To our knowledge, Russia has not begun “mating” those tactical warheads to delivery systems, such as missiles. Doing so involves certain safety risks, notes Lynn Rusten of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a think tank: “It would be really worrisome if we saw any indication that they were moving those warheads out of storage.”

If they were brought into operation, multiple things could in theory go wrong with these weapons. For one thing, the delivery systems themselves might not be reliable. Mark Schneider, formerly of the US Department of Defense’s senior executive service, has written about the many problems Russia has faced with its missiles so far during the war with Ukraine. Last spring, US officials said between 20 and 60 percent of Russian missiles were failing, either in terms of not launching or not hitting the intended target. That doesn’t necessarily matter, though, notes Schneider. When firing a nuclear warhead with a big explosive yield, “accuracy is much less relevant,” he says.

Russia certainly has enough missiles to get a nuclear weapon more or less to where it wants—even if it takes more than one attempt. But what about the warheads themselves? Modern thermonuclear devices are complex bits of machinery designed to initiate a specific explosive sequence, sometimes called a fission-fusion-fission reaction, which releases a massive amount of energy.

Wellerstein points out that some warheads designed decades ago are still part of nuclear arsenals. Over time, their parts must be carefully checked for degradation and refurbished or replaced. But certain components can become unavailable due to changes in manufacturing capabilities. Eventually, you might have to find a substitute for some particular out-of-production widget or material in your warhead. Without then testing the whole device, you can only hope it still works. 

In the early 2000s, the US struggled to source a classified material (whose purpose is also classified), codenamed FOGBANK, for its nuclear warheads. Reports suggest the military had to relearn how to make this material. “One can imagine the Russians might have similar sorts of [problems] because the manufacturing has changed,” says Wellerstein. 

Nuclear warheads have also sometimes been built with flawed components. Take the W47, made by the US. These had a wire inside that had to be pulled out in order to arm the weapon. But this wire had a habit of becoming brittle when stored, and it often broke or got stuck at the moment of arming. Metals inside warheads can also become fragile over time, given the intense radiation to which they are exposed. And very expensive components containing tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, have to be quite regularly replaced, since the tritium depletes over time.

So nuclear warheads are actually surprisingly sensitive little things. And wielders of nuclear arsenals have limited options for how to test their kit. At present, most nations don’t test live nuclear warheads due to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (North Korea, a non-signatory, tested a nuclear device as recently as 2017), though they are able to try out warhead mechanisms. However, a 2020 US government report indicated that Russia and China might both have been testing live but ultra-low-yield nuclear devices. Such efforts are unconfirmed, but this kind of testing would presumably give both nations some idea of how reliable their weapons are.

It is also possible to use lasers and computer simulations to model warhead detonation. And the US has a special X-ray imaging system that can take high-speed pictures, which reveal how a warhead’s primary stage explodes and the likely characteristics of a nuclear detonation. The system uses a substitute for plutonium in these experiments, however, and no actual nuclear explosions occur during the process. “Some of the physics of this stuff you don’t see outside stars,” says Wellerstein, emphasizing the challenges involved. “There’s just an inherent trickiness to even simulating this.”

Provided you make the effort to maintain warheads properly, though, they ought to work. “Russia has a robust nuclear capacity. They refurbish their warheads often,” says Amy Woolf, a US specialist in nuclear weapons policy. Schneider, too, is confident that Russia’s nukes are serviceable. It would be unwise to assume otherwise. 

There is, though, the human factor. The gun might be more or less sure to go off—but will that soldier definitely pull the trigger on your orders? It’s hard to predict what anyone would do in that kind of situation, but experts who spoke to WIRED tend to agree that the Russian military’s chain of command is pretty loyal. Interestingly, to authorize the use of a nuclear weapon, President Putin—unlike the US president—is thought to require agreement from two other members of his government: the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff. “Once they all three agree, off they go,” says Woolf. Everyone else further down the chain is likely to follow their lead. “I doubt you’d get a mutiny of troops in the field.”

Finally, it’s conceivable that an enemy of Russia’s could try to sabotage its nukes, perhaps by hacking them or the systems on which they depend. But Schneider wouldn’t bet on it. “Even if you had a capability to do it today, you may not have a capability to do it tomorrow. I don’t think that’s really credible,” he says.

When it comes to nuclear weapons, it’s probably best to just assume they’re going to work. Consider the possibility that certain people who question the reliability of extant nuclear weapons may have a hawkish motive. “There does seem to be a significant appetite to resume nuclear testing under some factions of the Republican Party,” notes Emma Claire Foley at Global Zero, a nongovernmental organization that works to eliminate nuclear weapons.

These weapons’ deployment, though, is unlikely. Woolf argues that Putin has little to gain from using a nuke in Ukraine, no matter how frustrated he gets at Russia’s mounting failures and losses. Rusten agrees. “Breaking that taboo would have unbelievable consequences globally, diplomatically, economically,” she says. “There’s no way that turns out well for Russia.”

No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work

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Over the past few years, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) saw worrying trends indicating that teen sextortion is on the rise online and, in extreme cases, leads to suicides. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of sextortion cases reported on NCMEC’s online tipline more than doubled. At the start of 2022, nearly 80 percent of those cases involved teens suffering financial sextortion—pressured to send cash or gift cards or else see their sexualized images spread online.

NCMEC already manages a database that works to stop the spread of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), but that tool wouldn't work for confused teens ashamed of struggling with sextortion, because it gathers information with every report that is not anonymized. Teens escaping sextortion needed a different kind of tool, NCMEC realized, one that removed all shame from the reporting process and worked more proactively, allowing minors to anonymously report sextortion before any of their images are ever circulated online.

Today, NCMEC officially launched that tool—Take It Down. Since its soft launch in December, already more than 200 people have used it to block uploads or remove images of minors shared online, NCMEC’s communications and brand vice president, Gavin Portnoy, told Ars.

To use Take It Down, anyone—minors, parents, concerned parties, or adults concerned about their own underage images being posted online—can anonymously access the platform on NCMEC’s site. Take It Down will then generate a hash that represents images or videos reported by users as sexualizing minors, including images with nudity, partial nudity, or sexualized poses. From there, any online platform that has partnered with the initiative will automatically block uploads or remove content matching that hash.

For NCMEC, it’s perhaps the most proactive measure provided yet to minors to limit the spread of this traumatizing content, and it can help teens avoid bullying, as well as benefit survivors of sextortion, human trafficking, and revenge porn, Portnoy told Ars.

Take It Down’s message to minors is: “You can't go back and unsend, but we can help you move forward,” Portnoy said—without feeling shamed for any role you possibly played in sharing images. Teens “don't have to provide any other information if they don't want to. It's as simple as saying, ‘hey, I think this thing is out there, it can be really damaging to me, please, please take it down.’”

Meta, Pornhub help with launch

Helping to fund its launch, Meta is among Take It Down’s biggest partners, announcing in a blog that teens can now use the platform to block uploads and remove content on Facebook and Instagram.

“Having a personal intimate image shared with others can be scary and overwhelming, especially for young people,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, wrote. “It can feel even worse when someone tries to use those images as a threat for additional images, sexual contact, or money.”

Davis said that soon Facebook and Instagram users will be able to connect to the Take It Down platform from within the apps. Meanwhile, this type of functionality is already being provided by another Take It Down partner, the social networking app Yubo.

Yubo co-founder and CEO Sacha Lazimi told Ars that users who find nonconsensual images online “can now choose the option to report an 'inappropriate photo/video of me,' which immediately directs them to NCMEC’s Take It Down site, where they can securely submit anonymous reports.”

Teens can also use Take It Down to remove nonconsensual content on Pornhub and OnlyFans, additional founding partners. Portnoy told Ars that NCMEC expects other online platforms to join the Take It Down initiative soon.

Participating in Take It Down, Portnoy said, is different from other databases for reporting CSAM or adult revenge porn, because it requires platforms to opt in to participating for Take It Down to flag and remove content. Having Meta involved at launch, though, may influence other major social platforms like TikTok or Twitter to get involved.

OnlyFans Chief Strategy and Operations Officer Keily Blair told Ars that OnlyFans sees joining Take It Down as part of enforcing its zero tolerance policy for sharing minors’ intimate images, saying, “We believe that platforms have a responsibility to protect children online.” A spokesperson for Pornhub-owner MindGeek told Ars, “We encourage all image-sharing platforms to follow our lead and participate in Take it Down.”

Portnoy said that the risk to minors has recently expanded from simpler cases of kids bullying each other over compromising images to more frequently seeing cases of financial sextortion—particularly impacting teen boys who can be scammed or catfished into sharing compromising content. Launching Take It Down now is a big part of NCMEC’s plan to reverse that trend by equipping minors to prevent sextortion anywhere teens can be exploited online.

“Kids are freaking out over this,” Portnoy told Ars.

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Shortly before liftoff, SpaceX cancels a crew launch due to igniter issues

For decades, astronomers’ estimations for the rate at which new stars are being formed in the Milky Way have been ponderously slow, but a new study argues the true value is ten times that. If so, it would overturn the way we view our galaxy and how it compares to others.

Astronomers divide galaxies between those actively forming new stars and those they classify as “dead”. “Dead” galaxies still produce plenty of light, and they may well be the places most likely to have technological civilizations. However, they are producing few new stars. Unless something – such as a merger with another galaxy – changes that, the galaxy is set for a long, slow decline. Moreover, supernovas and many other interesting events almost exclusively occur within a few tens of millions of years of stars being formed, so a dead galaxy is a boring one on many measures.

The Milky Way still has star formation regions, most famously the relatively nearby Orion Nebula. Nevertheless, astronomers have long concluded it is far past its best years, with a rate of star formation that might be classed as “mostly dead”  – just one to two stars a year by some estimates, two to five in others. However, a paper recently accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics comes to a considerably higher figure.

Stars do not just suddenly appear one day – the process takes millions of years. So estimating the number of new stars is difficult, particularly in our own galaxy where larger areas are obscured from view. Dr Thomas Siegert of Universität Würzburg and co-authors use a bottom-up model which is somewhat indirect, looking at gamma rays associated with the decay of isotopes aluminum-26 and iron-60, both with half-lives of around a million years.

Both are formed by very large stars, both cases in supernova explosions and for aluminum-26 during the lifetime of the star. Consequently, their abundance offers a guide to how common these events are. Since stars massive enough to become supernovas have very short lives, the frequency of supernova events provides a strong indication of the number of large stars being formed not long before. From there, the authors extrapolate to the total number of new stars, including the majority that are far too small to come to such interesting ends.

Gamma rays are much better at passing through dust than visible light, so they provide a measure of what is going on in parts of the galaxy we can’t see directly.

The conclusion of 1.8-2.8 supernovas a century in the galaxy will only add to astronomers’ frustration that we have not observed one in our own galaxy since the invention of the telescope four centuries ago. The authors prefer to focus on the four to eight solar masses worth of stars being formed each year, predominantly in the spiral arms. Small stars are much more common than large ones, so that mass equals 10-20 new stars a year.

There are quite a few steps in the logical chain presented in the paper that could be open to questioning. For a start, there could be an error in the measurements of isotope abundance. Probably more significantly, the authors are using that abundance in specific parts of the galaxy to create an estimate for the entire body. Given the Milky Way is a far from uniform place, that’s a hard task to get right. They also rely on relationships between the number of stars massive enough to become supernovas and smaller counterparts that may not be perfect. 

Nevertheless, the work has already attracted praise from some not involved, and increases the possibility there’s more life left in the galaxy than we think. On the other hand, we’re certainly not in the same ballpark as COS-87259, found last week to be forming stars at a rate of more than a thousand a year. Now that would be an exciting place to live.

The paper has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The preprint is currently available on arXiv. 

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The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who goes by AMLO), has posted a photo of what he believes to be an "alux"; small mythical creatures believed in folklore to be invisible in general, but that occasionally take on physical form, dressing in tiny traditional Maya clothing when they do so.

"I share two photos of our supervision of the Maya Train works," the president wrote on Twitter. "One, taken by an engineer three days ago, apparently of an alux; another, by Diego Prieto of a splendid pre-Hispanic sculpture in Ek Balam. Everything is mystical."

Aluxes, often likened to elves, were said to be protectors of Maya villages who would keep you safe for seven years, if you built them a small home. After the time was up, people would seal the small houses to trap the creatures inside, as they would turn mischievous at the end of their contract. 

The photograph was met with more skepticism than AMLO may have anticipated. First off, people pointed out that the photograph in question was not taken last week, but in February 2021, and was attributed to a different area of Mexico.

While it would still be pretty cool to have captured an image of a mythical creature in 2021, there are of course many other reasons to be skeptical. Chief among these is the similarity between what these mythical creatures look like and what a monkey (or gibbon) in the dark might look like. 

New World monkeys, a more likely explanation than "ancient mythical elves are real", are native to South America, making it as far north as southern Mexico.  Another article from 2021 places the photo in Indonesia, significantly widening the type of animal that it could be, other than an alux. 

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Over three weeks after the toxic train derailment on February 3 in East Palestine, Ohio, a reel of strange and unusual symptoms has started to be reported among local residents. It’s still not clear if and how many of the symptoms are linked to the recent environmental disaster, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other authorities are finally looking into the ways the chemical spill may be impacting locals' health. 

Residents who returned to their homes near the crash site this week claim to have developed rashes, sore throats, nausea, difficulty breathing, burning eyes, and headaches, CNN reports. Other locals and workers have reported bronchitis and other respiratory conditions. 

Melissa Blake, who lives within a mile of the crash site, told NBC News that she started to cough up gray mucus and was struggling to breathe two days after the incident. Later that day, she was evacuated from her home and went to the hospital where she was reportedly diagnosed with “acute bronchitis due to chemical fumes.”

Wade Lovett, another local resident, had a similar experience in the days following the accident with complaints of difficulty breathing and even unusual changes to his voice.

“My voice sounds like Mickey Mouse. My normal voice is low. It’s hard to breathe, especially at night. My chest hurts so much at night I feel like I’m drowning. I cough up phlegm a lot. I lost my job because the doctor won’t release me to go to work,” Lovett told the New York Post. 

While these symptoms have not yet been officially linked to the derailment, it’s clear that chemicals onboard the train have the potential to cause harm to human health and the environment. 

Chief among them is vinyl chloride. After this flammable gas leaked from a number of the train carriages, authorities carried out a controlled burn in a bid to avoid a catastrophic explosion, creating a plume of black smoke that hung over East Palestine for days.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) carried out air monitoring in the area and stated that concentrations of the toxic chemicals had fallen below hazardous levels, so residents were given the go-ahead to return home after being evacuated. 

It’s very well known that this chemical is bad news for health. The EPA lists vinyl chloride as a Class A “known human carcinogen”, and lists dizziness, headaches, and drowsiness as possible effects from inhalation. Long-term, lifetime exposure has even been linked to liver disease and a rare form of liver cancer.

A generous amount of criticism has been thrown at the way authorities have dealt with the crisis, with many arguing they have been ignored or sidelined in favor of other political goals. 

Almost a month on, however, efforts to understand the situation's impact on human health are ramping up. Last week, the Ohio Department of Health set up a clinic for residents and carried out 77 appointments in the first three days of its running. 

Meanwhile, the CDC has also deployed a team of medical personnel and toxicologists to carry out public health testing in the surrounding area. They claim the results of these tests will be released to the public in due course.

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New intelligence has led the US Department of Energy to conclude that the coronavirus pandemic was likely caused by a Chinese laboratory leak, but the White House claims that American intelligence is still deeply divided on the subject. 

The conclusions, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, represent a change in the Department of Energy’s previous position that was more ambivalent on the potential causes.  Although we do not know the nature of the new intelligence, the fact that it has caused a shift in the department’s position is significant. As The New York Times points out, the Energy Department derives its insights from a network of laboratories, some conducting advanced biological research. It suggests the department is responding to information that has not been gleaned from more traditional forms of intelligence gathering, such as spy networks and communications interceptions. 

Yet these conclusions are not shared by everyone briefed on the intelligence. Officials have noted that the Department of Energy’s change of heart was made with “low confidence”, which demonstrates the level of division between US intelligence agencies concerning the virus’s origins. 

Although most authorities on the subject reject the idea that the virus was deliberately created as a biological weapon, there are still two distinct camps concerning its origins. In the first, the lab leak hypothesis camp, sits the Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who believe the pandemic was caused by an accidental leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese laboratory that worked on coronaviruses. In the other camp are four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council who believe, with low certainty, that the virus was most likely caused by a natural exposure to an infected animal. 

According to Jake Sullivan, a White House National Security Advisor, a “variety of views" on the matter remain. “Right now”, he said in an interview with CNN, “there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question.” 

“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”

Scientific communities across the world agree that it is crucial to determine the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that brought the world to a standstill in 2020. In March 2021, the World Health Organization concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had emerged from a lab leak in China, but this report was criticized, not least as China had appointed many of the scientists who helped produced it. Yet many scientists believe the disease to be zoonotic in nature, meaning it likely originated in an animal and mutated in a way that let it spread to humans. 

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The Southeast US will soon be springing with genetically modified (GM) trees that have been tweaked to turbocharge their ability to photosynthesize. The idea is that the fast-growing trees will become even more efficient at soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help ease the climate crisis.

The project is the brainchild of the California-based biotech company Living Carbon. 

Together with Oregon State University, the start-up recently released research – which is yet to be peer-reviewed – that suggested the GM trees accumulate 53 percent more biomass than their standard counterparts, resulting in them capturing up to 27 percent more carbon dioxide. 

This preprint study was carried out in a greenhouse under lab conditions, but the hybrid trees have recently had their first venture into the real world. As reported by The New York Times, a bunch of GM poplar seedlings were planted at an active timberland in southern Georgia earlier this month. 

It’s believed that this was the first time GM trees have been planted in the US outside the setting of a scientific study or a commercial fruit orchard. Beyond the site in Georgia, the company also says they have signed deals with private landowners to plant their GM trees in over 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of forest across the Southeast US and Appalachia.

“We have surpassed the point where reducing emissions alone will be enough to rebalance our ecosystems and stabilize our planet. Now is the time for large-scale carbon removal. Our goal is to draw down 2 percent of global emissions by 2050 using approximately 13 million acres [5 million hectares] of land,” Maddie Hall, co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon, said in a statement.

“Today’s research is just the first step in demonstrating how empowering ecology, through the responsible use of biotechnology in trees, can be a scalable and viable solution to the climate crisis,” she added. 

The GM trees work by making the plants' natural ability to photosynthesize more efficient. With the help of an enzyme known as RuBisCO, plants and other photosynthetic organisms can uptake inorganic carbon (CO2) from the air and fix it into sugar for them to use. 

This process doesn’t always work perfectly smoothly and occasionally “faulty” sugar chains featuring oxygen molecules are formed. To undo this, the plant will undergo photorespiration, which causes the plants to release some CO2 back into the atmosphere, wasting some of the energy produced by photosynthesis.

The GM trees have been engineered to avoid the usual photorespiration process through an alternative photorespiration bypass pathway, in which the troublesome byproduct is put directly back into tree growth, thereby wasting less energy. They acquire this ability through the addition of certain genes from plants and algae, which naturally possess alternative photorespiration bypass pathways. 

Genetic modification is often one of those hot-button topics that arouse suspicion and fear – and this project is no different.  The Global Justice Ecology Project has released a statement against Living Carbon's plans, arguing that the long-term risks of “GE trees, their pollen, or seeds to forests, wildlife, or human health are unknown.”

Living Carbon, for their part, argues they have taken plenty of steps to reduce the risk of “unintended consequences” and believe there are plenty of safeguards in place. Whether or not this small company can create any meaningful dents in the growing climate crisis is another question.

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