THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Americans are looking for greener ways to die, and a new wave of deathcare startups are rising to the occasion.

After death, bodies are typically handled in one of two ways: embalmed and buried in a casket or incinerated and turned into ashes. But both of these options have contributed to the environmental crisis—with fossil fuel-intensive cremation emitting chemicals such as carbon monoxide into the air, and burials taking up large swathes of land.

As interest in alternatives rises, startups aiming to disrupt these practices are gaining steam. New York in January became the sixth state in the US to legalize human composting, also known as “natural organic reduction,” which uses heat and oxygen to speed up the microbial process that converts bodies into soil.

The growth in demand is in part due to Covid-19, experts say. The pandemic brought death to the forefront of the public consciousness and exposed concerns about its environmental destruction as places like Los Angeles had to suspend air pollution rules to allow an influx of bodies to be processed.

Human composters are pitching themselves as part of the solution—and trying to dismantle the funeral industry in the process. The potential to alter an age-old practice has brought together former Silicon Valley types, celebrity investors, and mission-driven entrepreneurs as interested in lofty green goals as they are in changing our relationship to death.

Providers say they are seeing unprecedented demand. The human composting startup Return Home has seen 20 people from California, where human composting is not yet legal, transport loved ones to the company facilities in Washington state—including five who drove with bodies in tow.

“The fact that we are now seeing so many Californians flocking to Return Home in order to prepurchase services for themselves and their loved ones is proof-positive that [our technology] is the future of funeral services,” said Micah Truman, the company’s CEO and founder.

Founders paint a picture of an industry that is both collegial and competitive, where entrepreneurs connect at meetups and through group chats but often find themselves looking over their shoulders for people entering the industry with less altruistic views. This is especially true as old guards of the funeral industry seek to cash in on the new trend, Truman said.

“It’s interesting because to create disruption, we are going to have to have outsiders coming in,” he said. “Because everyone in the funeral industry is so invested in existing technologies, you need outsiders to help with thinking outside the box—no pun intended.”

Natural organic reduction is a relatively new process, recognized throughout the industry as having been pioneered by a woman named Katrina Spade. In her graduate thesis in 2013, Spade investigated methods farmers had been using to compost animals and found these could be applied to human bodies. When remains are placed in a container with natural materials like straw and wood chips, the microbial process that converts bodies into soil can be accelerated. Composting a human currently takes eight to 12 weeks and is estimated to use just one-eighth the energy required for cremation.

In the ensuing years, Spade worked with lobbyists, lawmakers, and investors to legalize natural organic reduction in Washington in 2019. By December 2020, her company, Recompose, had made the service available to consumers for $7,000—in line with the median cost of cremation, at $6,971, and the median cost of a funeral with burial, at $7,848. That’s not including cemetery plot costs, which can run upwards of several thousand dollars.

In the years since, at least three companies have sprung up in Washington alone, some of which have secured millions in funding from venture capital firms. And with more states catching on, entrepreneurs say the industry is livelier than ever.

At least six states have legalized the process so far, and California, the most populous US state, will allow human composting in 2027 after a law passed last year goes into effect, opening up the potential for millions of new customers.

“In Washington, where human composting has been legal for some time, the industry is concentrated and hyper-competitive,” Truman said. “But I’m sure everyone is going to be doing pushups and getting ready to go to California as soon as it opens.”

The commercialization of alternative deathcare is already creating tension in an industry built on a fraught product. It’s difficult to get people to talk about death, much less invest in it. This has left deathcare entrepreneurs and advocates for greener death grappling to balance altruistic goals with the demands of startup culture, according to Caitlin Doughty, a mortician and author of several books about death and the funeral industry.

“There is a newer disconnect between the fundamental idea of ritual around death in human composting versus a bizarre appeal to Silicon Valley that is emerging,” she said. “It is a fascinating development.”

With the traditional funeral market worth $20 billion, it is no surprise new technologies have piqued the interest of tech investors. A 2019 survey from the funeral directors’ association found that nearly 52 percent of Americans expressed interest in green-burial options, and experts have estimated that the emerging market opened by legalization efforts in Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and New York could create a market value in the $1 billion range.

There is also a growing market in Gen Z and millennials, who have been called the “death-positive” generations—more willing to discuss after-life plans at younger ages and to try green alternatives. Startups are rising to the occasion with social media outreach: Return Home has more than 617,000 followers on TikTok, where its employees answer questions like “what happens to hip replacements in the human composting process?” and “how does it smell during the process?”

Human composting is not the only alternative deathcare option that is seeing increased interest. Others include aquamation, a process legal in 28 states by which the body is turned into liquid and then powder. Green burial, in which bodies are interred without embalming or a casket and allowed to decompose naturally over time, is legal in almost all states, but laws vary as to where the body can be buried.

But of all the alternative options, human composting seems to have gotten the most attention, said Doughty.

“I do see the composting space as being uniquely competitive in a way that I haven’t seen with [processes] like aquamation, or even cremation,” she said. “It seems uniquely positioned at a nexus of climate change policy and new technology that appeals to the Silicon Valley ethos.”

The environmental benefits of alternative deathcare have become a large selling point for companies as green investments trend upward. Transcend, a New York-based green burial startup that promises to turn human bodies into trees after death, highlights its goal of mass reforestation and eco-friendly burial in its advertising, stating on its website: “Every Tree Burial creates a healthier foundation for all life on Earth.”

Its founder and CEO, Matthew Kochmann, has a Silicon Valley background, counting himself as one of the first employees at Uber. He came to the deathcare industry after meditating on the spiritual nature of burial options, he says.

“I was thinking about how I personally would like to become a tree after death, and I realized that there weren’t any options out there to make that happen—I’d have to do it myself,” he said. “I am a huge advocate of helping heal humanity’s relationship and fear around mortality.”

Through Transcend’s process, the body is buried in organic biodegradable flax linen, along with a unique blend of fungi-enriched soil, and a young tree is planted in the ground above it. The company says the mushrooms then “work their magic” to ensure “a direct connection between the nutrient-rich body and the tree’s root system so that the body can literally become the tree.”

The company has piqued the interest of investors and celebrities, with Darren Aronofsky, director of Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream, counting himself among the company’s advisers. Still, fundraising hasn’t always been easy, Kochmann said, adding that some investors told him: “We don’t invest in taboo areas like pornography or death.”

“Putting death on par with pornography just shows that there’s still a lot of work to do in our culture and our society to get people more comfortable with it,” he said.

Recompose, the original human composting startup, has raised nearly $18 million—none of which, its founder is quick to point out, came from traditional venture capital funds, but instead from accredited “values-aligned investors” who “are first and foremost investing for the mission and the vision” of Recompose.

Spade said the company had prioritized fundraising models that allow it to stay true to its roots as an advocacy group while still creating sustainable funding. It has also launched a “community fund” to help subsidize its services for clients who cannot afford to pay full price.

The company has worked directly with legislators to pass laws that allow for human composting while creating a framework that supports strong ethics in the burgeoning industry.

“We want to be sure that any kind of human composting operator that’s working with grieving families is doing so within the utmost ethical practices,” she said. “It is not only about how to decompose, operate, and care for our clients—but also, ‘how can we support an industry that always has the most ethical, rigorous operations?’”

Spade said although her company was the first to pioneer human composting, she was “thrilled” to see the movement grow. And although the new frontier of deathcare is getting increasingly crowded in some places, those involved say there is an environment of camaraderie and support as they work toward a common goal: taking down the monopoly that the traditional funeral industry has on death.

“This is a community that has to prioritize solidarity,” said Kochmann. “You are fighting for legislation, you are fighting regulatory battles, and you are fighting an uphill consumer battle because people don’t want to think about death.”

Source

UC Davis Project Scientist John N. Williams uses a drip torch to light a prescribed burn at Shaver Lake in the Sierra National Forest. Credit: Abner Kingman

Compared to historical patterns, the “wrong kind of fire” is burning.

According to a study conducted by the Safford Lab at the University of California, Davis and its partners, there has been a significant rise in high-severity wildfires in the Sierra Nevada and Southern Cascade forests. These fires have been burning at rates that surpass any seen prior to Euro-American settlement and have particularly skyrocketed over the past ten years.

The study, which was published in the journal Ecosphere, involved scientists who analyzed fire severity data from the U.S. Forest Service and Google Earth Engine. The analysis was conducted across seven major forest types.

They found that in low- and middle-elevation forest types, the average annual area that burned at low-to-moderate severity has decreased from more than 90 percent before 1850 to 60-70 percent today.

At the same time, the area burned annually at high severity has nearly quintupled, rising from less than 10% to 43% today. (High-severity burns are those where more than 95% of aboveground tree biomass is killed by fire.)

A firefighter helps containment efforts during the Creek Fire response in 2020. Credit: USDA, Pacific Southwest Forest Service

 

Lead author and UC Davis project scientist John N. Williams said this ratio is severely out of balance.

“We’re seeing more ‘bad fire’ and less ‘good fire,” said Williams, who is the coordinator of the California Prescribed Fire Monitoring Program. “Any consolation we’d get from the idea that, ‘At least we’re burning more than we used to,’ isn’t really a consolation because it’s often coming in the form of the wrong kind of fire.”

Good fire, bad fire

Many fire ecologists talk about the need to burn more acreage by putting “good fire” on the ground, such as through prescribed burning, while preventing “bad fire.” In forests like oak woodland, yellow pine, and mixed conifer, good fire refers to the low-to-moderate severity burning that the dominant species are adapted to. They are typically ignited by lightning or by people to enrich and restore the land. Many such fires were set by Native Americans before the mid-19th century through the practice of cultural burning.

Before 1850, much more land burned each year in California compared to the present day. The study indicates that the gap is beginning to close. Unfortunately, more of what is burning comprises damaging, high-severity fire.

UC Davis Project Scientist John N. Williams conducts a prescribed burn in Placer County in 2022. Credit: Tim McConville, UC Davis

 

That represents the most concerning result, say the authors: The average area of high-severity burning in the region is now above the best estimates of high-severity burning that took place before Euro-American settlement, even though overall burning in the modern day is still much lower.

“At current or even projected rates of forest management by federal and state agencies, the amount of forest treated or restored is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the need, and compared to the huge unmanaged areas that are going to burn, often at high severity,” said senior author Hugh Safford, a UC Davis fire ecologist and chief scientist of environmental public benefits corporation Vibrant Planet. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that the very existence of montane conifer forest in California is at risk, especially in the southern part of the state.”

A severe decade

Nine of California’s 10 biggest wildfires occurred within the past decade. The state’s record-breaking 2020 fire year –when nearly 9,900 fires burned 4.3 million acres—was the only year in which the annual area burned exceeded historical levels, but much of that burned at high severity.

The authors say this trend is especially concerning because most of the low- to middle-elevation forest types affected are adapted to low-to-moderate severity burning. Excessively severe fires in these forests can harm landscapes and the habitat and ecosystem services they provide.

Other research carried out by the Safford Lab at UC Davis and its partners has shown that the negative effects of severe burning in these forest types are serious and long-lasting to biodiversity, carbon storage, soil biogeochemistry, air quality, and forest regeneration.

Getting the right mix

The study’s results highlight the need to better balance fire exclusion with management practices that proactively reduce forest fuels and increase resilience to climate change and other ecological disturbances.

“We need to burn much more each year, but we want the right mix,” Williams said. “The current trend is going in the wrong direction if we want to restore forests and their natural ecological processes.”

Source

It is widely understood that adverse weather conditions can disorient birds during their fall migrations, leading them to end up in unfamiliar territory. But why, even when the weather is not a major factor, do birds travel far away from their usual routes?

According to a recent paper by ecologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field may cause birds to stray from their migration paths, a phenomenon known as “vagrancy.” This can occur even in ideal weather conditions and is particularly prevalent during fall migration. The findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

With North America’s bird populations steadily declining, assessing the causes of vagrancy could help scientists better understand the threats birds face and the ways they adapt to those threats. For example, birds that wind up in unfamiliar territory are likely to face challenges finding food and habitats that suit them, and may die as a result. But it also could be beneficial for birds whose traditional homes are becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, by “accidentally” introducing the animals into geographic regions that are now better suited for them.

Earth’s magnetic field, which runs between the North and South Poles, is generated by several factors, both above and below the planet’s surface. Decades’ worth of lab research suggests that birds can sense magnetic fields using magnetoreceptors in their eyes. The new UCLA study lends support to those findings from an ecological perspective.

“There’s increasing evidence that birds can actually see geomagnetic fields,” said Morgan Tingley, the paper’s corresponding author and a UCLA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “In familiar areas, birds may navigate by geography, but in some situations, it’s easier to use geomagnetism.”

But birds’ ability to navigate using geomagnetic fields can be impaired when those magnetic fields are disturbed. Such disturbances can come from the sun’s magnetic field, for example, particularly during periods of heightened solar activity, such as sunspots and solar flares, but also from other sources.

“If the geomagnetic field experiences disturbance, it’s like using a distorted map that sends the birds off course,” Tingley said.

Lead researcher Benjamin Tonelli, a UCLA doctoral student, worked with Tingley and postdoctoral researcher Casey Youngflesh to compare data from 2.2 million birds, representing 152 species, that had been captured and released between 1960 and 2019 — part of a United States Geological Survey tracking program — against historic records of geomagnetic disturbances and solar activity.

While other factors such as weather likely play bigger roles in causing vagrancy, the researchers found a strong correlation between birds that were captured far outside of their expected range and the geomagnetic disturbances that occurred during both fall and spring migrations. But the relationship was particularly pronounced during the fall migration, the authors noted.

Geomagnetic disturbances affected the navigation of both young birds and their elders, suggesting that birds rely similarly on geomagnetism regardless of their level of migration experience.

The researchers had expected that geomagnetic disturbances associated with heightened solar activity would be associated with the most vagrancy. To their surprise, solar activity actually reduced the incidence of vagrancy. One possible reason is that radiofrequency activity generated by the solar disturbances could make birds’ magnetoreceptors unusable, leaving birds to navigate by other cues instead.

“We think the combination of high solar activity and geomagnetic disturbance leads to either a pause in migration or a switch to other cues during fall migration,” Tonelli said. “Interestingly, birds that migrate during the day were generally exceptions to this rule — they were more affected by solar activity.”

Although the researchers only studied birds, their methods and findings could help scientists understand why other migratory species, including whales, become disoriented or stranded far from their usual territory.

“This research was actually inspired by whale strandings, and we hope our work will help other scientists who study animal navigation,” Tingley said.

To make the research more accessible to the birdwatching public, Tonelli developed a web-based tool that tracks geomagnetic conditions and predicts vagrancy in real-time. The tracker is offline during the winter, but it will go live again in the spring, when migration begins again.

Source

The World Health Organization (WHO) is working with Cambodian authorities to investigate two confirmed human cases of H5N1 bird flu in the country, officials announced this week.

But while the situation has been described by the WHO as “worrying”, experts have noted that there is not yet any evidence that the disease has adapted for human-to-human transmission.  

Cambodian health authorities confirmed the death of an 11-year-old girl from the disease Thursday – the first known human case of bird flu in the country in nine years, per the BBC. Her father has also tested positive for the virus, officials noted, while another 11 contacts have all tested negative.

Human cases of bird flu are rare, as we lack the receptors in our throats, noses, and upper respiratory tracts that are most susceptible to the virus. Most human infections occur in those who have direct and frequent contact with birds – which most experts currently think is what likely happened in Cambodia.

“The risks from this virus to your average person on the street right now is very low,” Richard Webby, director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds at St. Jude Children's Hospital, told the New York Times.

The discovery that the girl’s father was also positive for the virus strain set health officials on high alert, however. While hundreds of human cases of bird flu have been reported over the years – and indeed, in the decade before Cambodia’s last case, the country recorded 56 human cases of H5N1 infection, 37 of which were fatal – any evidence of human-to-human transmission may signal the onset of the planet’s next great pandemic.

“The global H5N1 situation is worrying given the wide spread of the virus in birds around the world and the increasing reports of cases in mammals including humans,” Sylvie Briand, the director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, told reporters in a press briefing on Friday. “WHO takes the risk from this virus seriously and urges heightened vigilance from all countries.”

While the fact that so many of the family’s close contacts have tested negative for the virus is no doubt reassuring, Briand noted that antivirals and vaccines for the disease are already available. However, they would need to be updated to more closely match the strain of H5N1 currently circulating – a process that could take four to five months, Webby advised.

Luckily, despite fears over the current subtype’s transmissibility and fatality numbers among birds – plus concerns over its apparent ability to infect some mammals – only eight human cases worldwide have been reported to the WHO. All of those were in people who had close contact with infected birds, and most caused fairly mild illnesses.

Nevertheless, the WHO has confirmed that the virus will “need to be monitored closely” to see if it is mutating into a form that can spread among humans. In the meantime, Webby advised, people should take care to avoid contact with birds that may be infected – particularly with the current subtype proving so virulent among avian species.

“[Transmission among people is] very, very rare,” he told the New York Times. “But it’s not zero. And that’s primarily because there’s just so many more infected birds around right now.”

Source

Suffering from long COVID can dramatically increase your risk of cardiovascular complications, a new study and meta-analysis have revealed.

More than three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re starting to get a much better handle on the disease which has so far claimed the lives of over a million people in the US alone.

Long COVID, however, is still as elusive as ever. We still don’t even have a single accepted definition of the syndrome – that’s why estimates of how many people are affected by the illness are so variable, ranging from as low as five percent of COVID-19 patients to as high as 50 percent.

And even as we hone in on the condition, it evidently continues to surprise us. The new study – a systematic literature review and meta-analysis covering close to six million people – found strong evidence that patients who developed long COVID were significantly more likely than control subjects to experience heart problems down the line. 

“COVID-19 is more than a simple respiratory disease – it is a syndrome that can affect the heart,” said Joanna Lee, a medical student at David Tvildiani Medical University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lead author of the study, in a statement on the results.

“Clinicians should be aware that cardiac complications can exist and investigate further if a patient complains of these symptoms, even a long time after contracting COVID-19,” she advised. “For patients, if you had COVID-19 and you continue to have difficulty breathing or any kind of new heart problems, you should go to the doctor and get it checked out.”

The study marks the most comprehensive investigation to date into the effects on cardiovascular health from long COVID – a condition which, for the purposes of this analysis, was defined as “symptoms persisting for at least four weeks and occurring at least two months after the initial COVID-19 infection.”

And the results were stark: patients who experienced this extended version of the disease were around 2.5 times as likely as control groups to develop cardiac problems such as chest pain, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, and fatigue. That wasn’t just the case for those self-reporting symptoms, either: individuals with long COVID were also more likely to show markers of heart disease or elevated cardiovascular risk in medical imaging and diagnostic tests.

While the study didn’t investigate the reason for the link, the team suspects it might have something to do with one of the signature complications of long COVID: inflammation resulting from an overactive immune system. If so, it may be good news – there is already a growing body of research into countering these autoimmune mistakes that have made catching COVID such a long-term pain in the butt.

Nevertheless, it’s important not to take too much from these results just yet. With so much variability between data collection methods, study populations, and even the very definition of the condition being studied, the team was limited in how definitive any conclusions would be – although, with COVID-19 being as new as it is, this is a common problem with studies into the virus’s effects, they point out.

Still, the study is important for both patients and healthcare providers interested in looking after heart health. “Coordinated efforts among primary care providers, emergency room staff and cardiologists could help with early detection and mitigation of cardiac complications among long COVID patients,” Lee said.

Lee will present the study, “Cardiac Complications among Long Covid Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” at ACC.23/WCC, the annual conference of the American College of Cardiology and World Congress of Cardiology, on Monday, March 6. 

Source

The cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last spring, extremely distant yet very bright galaxies immediately shone into the telescope’s field of view. “They were just so stupidly bright, and they just stood out,” said Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The galaxies’ apparent distances from Earth suggested that they formed much earlier in the history of the universe than anyone anticipated. (The farther away something is, the longer ago its light flared forth.) Doubts swirled, but in December, astronomers confirmed that some of the galaxies are indeed as distant, and therefore as primordial, as they seem. The earliest of those confirmed galaxies shed its light 330 million years after the Big Bang, making it the new record holder for the earliest known structure in the universe. That galaxy was rather dim, but other candidates loosely pegged to the same time period were already shining bright, meaning they were potentially humongous.

How could stars ignite inside superheated clouds of gas so soon after the Big Bang? How could they hastily weave themselves into such huge gravitationally bound structures? Finding such big, bright, early galaxies seems akin to finding a fossilized rabbit in Precambrian strata. “There are no big things at early times. It takes a while to get to big things,” said Mike Boylan-Kolchin, a theoretical physicist at the University of Texas, Austin.

Astronomers began asking whether the profusion of early big things defies the current understanding of the cosmos. Some researchers and media outlets claimed that the telescope’s observations were breaking the standard model of cosmology—a well-tested set of equations called the lambda cold dark matter, or ΛCDM, model—thrillingly pointing to new cosmic ingredients or governing laws. It has since become clear, however, that the ΛCDM model is resilient. Instead of forcing researchers to rewrite the rules of cosmology, the JWST findings have astronomers rethinking how galaxies are made, especially in the cosmic beginning. The telescope has not yet broken cosmology, but that doesn’t mean the case of the too-early galaxies will turn out to be anything but epochal.

Simpler Times

To see why the detection of very early, bright galaxies is surprising, it helps to understand what cosmologists know—or think they know—about the universe.

After the Big Bang, the infant universe began cooling off. Within a few million years, the roiling plasma that filled space settled down, and electrons, protons, and neutrons combined into atoms, mostly neutral hydrogen. Things were quiet and dark for a period of uncertain duration known as the cosmic dark ages. Then something happened.

Most of the material that flew apart after the Big Bang is made of something we can’t see, called dark matter. It has exerted a powerful influence over the cosmos, especially at first. In the standard picture, cold dark matter (a term that means invisible, slow-moving particles) was flung about the cosmos indiscriminately. In some areas its distribution was denser, and in these regions it began collapsing into clumps. Visible matter, meaning atoms, clustered around the clumps of dark matter. As the atoms cooled off as well, they eventually condensed, and the first stars were born. These new sources of radiation recharged the neutral hydrogen that filled the universe during the so-called epoch of reionization. Through gravity, larger and more complex structures grew, building a vast cosmic web of galaxies.

Astronomers with the CEERS survey, who are using the James Webb Space Telescope to study the early universe, look at a mosaic of images from the telescope in a visualization lab at the University of Texas, Austin.

Photograph: Nolan Zunk/University of Texas at Austin

 

Meanwhile, everything kept flying apart. The astronomer Edwin Hubble figured out in the 1920s that the universe is expanding, and in the late 1990s, his namesake, the Hubble Space Telescope, found evidence that the expansion is accelerating. Think of the universe as a loaf of raisin bread. It starts as a mixture of flour, water, yeast and raisins. When you combine these ingredients, the yeast begins respiring and the loaf begins to rise. The raisins within it—stand-ins for galaxies—stretch further apart from one another as the loaf expands.

The Hubble telescope saw that the loaf is rising ever faster. The raisins are flying apart at a rate that defies their gravitational attraction. This acceleration appears to be driven by the repulsive energy of space itself—so-called dark energy, which is represented by the Greek letter Λ (pronounced “lambda”). Plug values for Λ, cold dark matter, and regular matter and radiation into the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and you get a model of how the universe evolves. This “lambda cold dark matter” (ΛCDM) model matches almost all observations of the cosmos.

One way to test this picture is by looking at very distant galaxies—equivalent to looking back in time to the first few hundred million years after the tremendous clap that started it all. The cosmos was simpler then, its evolution easier to compare against predictions.

Astronomers first tried to see the earliest structures of the universe using the Hubble telescope in 1995. Over 10 days, Hubble captured 342 exposures of an empty-looking patch of space in the Big Dipper. Astronomers were astonished by the abundance hiding in the inky dark: Hubble could see thousands of galaxies at different distances and stages of development, stretching back to much earlier times than anyone expected. Hubble would go on to find some exceedingly distant galaxies—in 2016, astronomers found its most distant one, called GN-z11, a faint smudge that they dated to 400 million years after the Big Bang.

That was surprisingly early for a galaxy, but it did not cast doubt on the ΛCDM model in part because the galaxy is tiny, with just 1 percent of the Milky Way’s mass, and in part because it stood alone. Astronomers needed a more powerful telescope to see whether GN-z11 was an oddball or part of a larger population of puzzlingly early galaxies, which could help determine whether we are missing a crucial piece of the ΛCDM recipe.

Unaccountably Distant

That next-generation space telescope, named for former NASA leader James Webb, launched on Christmas Day 2021. As soon as the JWST was calibrated, light from early galaxies dripped into its sensitive electronics. Astronomers published a flood of papers describing what they saw.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint venture of space agencies in the United States, Europe, and Canada that took decades to design, build, and test, was launched into space on December 25, 2021.

Courtesy of Northrop Grumman

Researchers use a version of the Doppler effect to gauge the distances of objects. This is similar to figuring out the location of an ambulance based on its siren: The siren sounds higher in pitch as it approaches and then lower as it recedes. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it moves away from us, and so its light stretches to longer wavelengths and appears redder. The magnitude of this “redshift” is expressed as z, where a given value for z tells you how long an object’s light must have traveled to reach us.

One of the first papers on JWST data came from Naidu, the MIT astronomer, and his colleagues, whose search algorithm flagged a galaxy that seemed inexplicably bright and unaccountably distant. Naidu dubbed it GLASS-z13, indicating its apparent distance at a redshift of 13—further away than anything seen before. (The galaxy’s redshift was later revised down to 12.4, and it was renamed GLASS-z12.) Other astronomers working on the various sets of JWST observations were reporting redshift values from 11 to 20, including one galaxy called CEERS-1749 or CR2-z17-1, whose light appears to have left it 13.7 billion years ago, just 220 million years after the Big Bang—barely an eyeblink after the beginning of cosmic time.

These putative detections suggested that the neat story known as ΛCDM might be incomplete. Somehow, galaxies grew huge right away. “In the early universe, you don’t expect to see massive galaxies. They haven’t had time to form that many stars, and they haven’t merged together,” said Chris Lovell, an astrophysicist at the University of Portsmouth in England. Indeed, in a study published in November, researchers analyzed computer simulations of universes governed by the ΛCDM model and found that JWST’s early, bright galaxies were an order of magnitude heavier than the ones that formed concurrently in the simulations.

Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was among the first scientists to spot a surprisingly bright early galaxy in JWST images.

Courtesy of Michelle L. Peters

Some astronomers and media outlets claimed that the JWST was breaking cosmology, but not everyone was convinced. One problem is that ΛCDM’s predictions aren’t always clear-cut. While dark matter and dark energy are simple, visible matter has complex interactions and behaviors, and nobody knows exactly what went down in the first years after the Big Bang; those frenetic early times must be approximated in computer simulations. The other problem is that it’s hard to tell exactly how far away galaxies are.

In the months since the first papers, the ages of some of the alleged high-redshift galaxies have been reconsidered. Some were demoted to later stages of cosmic evolution because of updated telescope calibrations. CEERS-1749 is found in a region of the sky containing a cluster of galaxies whose light was emitted 12.4 billion years ago, and Naidu says it’s possible the galaxy is actually part of this cluster—a nearer interloper that might be filled with dust that makes it appear more redshifted than it is. According to Naidu, CEERS-1749 is weird no matter how far away it is. “It would be a new type of galaxy that we did not know of: a very low-mass, tiny galaxy that has somehow built up a lot of dust in it, which is something we traditionally do not expect,” he said. “There might just be these new types of objects that are confounding our searches for the very distant galaxies.”

The Lyman Break

Everyone knew that the most definitive distance estimates would require the JWST’s most powerful capability.

The JWST not only observes starlight through photometry, or measuring brightness, but also through spectroscopy, or measuring the light’s wavelengths. If a photometric observation is like a picture of a face in a crowd, then a spectroscopic observation is like a DNA test that can tell an individual’s family history. Naidu and others who found large early galaxies measured redshift using brightness-derived measurements—essentially looking at faces in the crowd using a really good camera. That method is far from airtight. (At a January meeting of the American Astronomical Society, astronomers quipped that maybe half of the early galaxies observed with photometry alone will turn out to be accurately measured.)

But in early December, cosmologists announced that they had combined both methods for four galaxies. The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) team searched for galaxies whose infrared light spectrum abruptly cuts off at a critical wavelength known as the Lyman break. This break occurs because hydrogen floating in the space between galaxies absorbs light. Because of the continuing expansion of the universe—the ever-rising raisin loaf—the light of distant galaxies is shifted, so the wavelength of that abrupt break shifts too. When a galaxy’s light appears to drop off at longer wavelengths, it is more distant. JADES identified spectra with redshifts up to 13.2, meaning the galaxy’s light was emitted 13.4 billion years ago.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

As soon as the data was downlinked, JADES researchers began “freaking out” in a shared Slack group, according to Kevin Hainline, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, we did it we did it we did it!’” he said. “These spectra are just the beginning of what I think is going to be astronomy-changing science.”

Brant Robertson, a JADES astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says the findings show that the early universe changed rapidly in its first billion years, with galaxies evolving 10 times quicker than they do today. It’s similar to how “a hummingbird is a small creature,” he said, “but its heart beats so quickly that it is living kind of a different life than other creatures. The heartbeat of these galaxies is happening on a much more rapid timescale than something the size of the Milky Way.”

But were their hearts beating too fast for ΛCDM to explain?

Theoretical Possibilities

As astronomers and the public gaped at JWST images, researchers started working behind the scenes to determine whether the galaxies blinking into our view really upend ΛCDM or just help nail down the numbers we should plug into its equations.

One important yet poorly understood number concerns the masses of the earliest galaxies. Cosmologists try to determine their masses in order to tell whether they match ΛCDM’s predicted timeline of galaxy growth.

A galaxy’s mass is derived from its brightness. But Megan Donahue, an astrophysicist at Michigan State University, says that at best, the relationship between mass and brightness is an educated guess, based on assumptions gleaned from known stars and well-studied galaxies.

One key assumption is that stars always form within a certain statistical range of masses, called the initial mass function (IMF). This IMF parameter is crucial for gleaning a galaxy’s mass from measurements of its brightness, because hot, blue, heavy stars produce more light, while the majority of a galaxy’s mass is typically locked up in cool, red, small stars.

But it’s possible that the IMF was different in the early universe. If so, JWST’s early galaxies might not be as heavy as their brightness suggests; they might be bright but light. This possibility causes headaches, because changing this basic input to the ΛCDM model could give you almost any answer you want. Lovell says some astronomers consider fiddling with the IMF “the domain of the wicked.”

Wendy Freedman at the University of Chicago is exploring how JWST observations can be squared with the standard cosmological model.

Courtesy of Nancy Wong

“If we don’t understand the initial mass function, then understanding galaxies at high redshift is really a challenge,” said Wendy Freedman, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. Her team is working on observations and computer simulations that will help pin down the IMF in different environments.

Over the course of the fall, many experts came to suspect that tweaks to the IMF and other factors could be enough to square the very ancient galaxies lighting upon JWST’s instruments with ΛCDM. “I think it’s actually more likely that we can accommodate these observations within the standard paradigm,” said Rachel Somerville, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute (which, like Quanta Magazine, is funded by the Simons Foundation). In that case, she said, “what we learn is: How fast can [dark matter] halos collect the gas? How fast can we make the gas cool off and get dense, and make stars? Maybe that happens faster in the early universe; maybe the gas is denser; maybe somehow it is flowing in faster. I think we’re still learning about those processes.”

Somerville also studies the possibility that black holes interfered with the baby cosmos. Astronomers have noticed a few glowing supermassive black holes at a redshift of 6 or 7, about a billion years after the Big Bang. It is hard to conceive of how, by that time, stars could have formed, died and then collapsed into black holes that ate everything surrounding them and began spewing radiation.

But if there are black holes inside the putative early galaxies, that could explain why the galaxies seem so bright, even if they’re not actually very massive, Somerville said.

Benjamin Keller, an astronomer at the University of Memphis, showed that supercomputer simulations of the cosmos could produce early galaxies like the four that have been spectroscopically analyzed by JWST.

Photograph: Wendy Adams/University of Memphis

Confirmation that ΛCDM can accommodate at least some of JWST’s early galaxies arrived the day before Christmas. Astronomers led by Benjamin Keller at the University of Memphis checked a handful of major supercomputer simulations of ΛCDM universes and found that the simulations could produce galaxies as heavy as the four that were spectroscopically studied by the JADES team. (These four are, notably, smaller and dimmer than other purported early galaxies such as GLASS-z12.) In the team’s analysis, all the simulations yielded galaxies the size of the JADES findings at a redshift of 10. One simulation could create such galaxies at a redshift of 13, the same as what JADES saw, and two others could build the galaxies at an even higher redshift. None of the JADES galaxies was in tension with the current ΛCDM paradigm, Keller and colleagues reported on the preprint server arxiv.org on December 24.

Though they lack the heft to break the prevailing cosmological model, the JADES galaxies have other special characteristics. Hainline said their stars seem unpolluted by metals from previously exploded stars. This could mean they are Population III stars—the avidly sought first generation of stars to ever ignite—and that they may be contributing to the reionization of the universe. If this is true, then JWST has already peered back to the mysterious period when the universe was set on its present course.

Extraordinary Evidence

Spectroscopic confirmation of additional early galaxies could come this spring, depending on how JWST’s time allocation committee divvies things up. An observing campaign called WDEEP will specifically search for galaxies from less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. As researchers confirm more galaxies’ distances and get better at estimating their masses, they’ll help settle ΛCDM’s fate.

Many other observations are already underway that could change the picture for ΛCDM. Freedman, who is studying the initial mass function, was up at 1 a.m. one night downloading JWST data on variable stars that she uses as “standard candles” for measuring distances and ages. Those measurements could help shake out another potential problem with ΛCDM, known as the Hubble tension. The problem is that the universe currently seems to be expanding faster than ΛCDM predicts for a 13.8-billion-year-old universe. Cosmologists have plenty of possible explanations. Perhaps, some cosmologists speculate, the density of the dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe is not constant, as in ΛCDM, but changes over time. Changing the expansion history of the universe might not only resolve the Hubble tension but also revise calculations of the age of the universe at a given redshift. JWST might be seeing an early galaxy as it appeared, say, 500 million years after the Big Bang rather than 300 million. Then even the heaviest putative early galaxies in JWST’s mirrors would have had plenty of time to coalesce, says Somerville.

Astronomers run out of superlatives when they talk about JWST’s early galaxy results. They pepper their conversations with laughter, expletives and exclamations, even as they remind themselves of Carl Sagan’s adage, however overused, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. They can’t wait to get their hands on more images and spectra, which will help them hone or tweak their models. “Those are the best problems,” said Boylan-Kolchin, “because no matter what you get, the answer is interesting.”

No, the James Webb Space Telescope Hasn’t Broken Cosmology

(May require free registration to view)

The Lucira COVID-19 & Flu Home test, which can be purchased without a prescription, uses self-collected nasal swab samples and delivers results in about 30 minutes, the agency said.

While at-home COVID tests are readily available, this is the first home test for influenza A and B, commonly known as the flu. The test was granted an emergency use authorization, which facilitates the availability of "medical countermeasures" during public health emergencies.

Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, called the authorization "a major milestone in bringing greater consumer access to diagnostic tests that can be performed entirely at home."

The agency said the test is for individuals "with signs and symptoms consistent with a respiratory tract infection" and said it can be used on children as young as 2, with adults collecting the samples.

It recommends that tests be reported to healthcare providers and cautions that there is a risk of false positive and negative results. "Individuals who test negative and continue to experience symptoms of fever, cough and-or shortness of breath may still have a respiratory infection and should seek follow-up care with their healthcare provider," the agency said.

Citing the impact of COVID and RSV, another respiratory infection, the FDA said it "recognizes the benefits that home testing can provide" and would work to increase the number of tests available.

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Source

A return to regular drug use can be caused by the body's physical dependence on the drug as well as experiences associated with prior drug use. Exactly how these drug associations are formed in the brain and how they trigger a return to drug use remain unclear.

"Individuals make long-lasting associations between the euphoric experience of the drug and the people, places and things associated with drug use," said Christopher Cowan, Ph.D. professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and member of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Scientific Council.

Cowan and his team report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that an enzyme known as histone deacetylase 5, or HDAC5, plays a significant role in limiting heroin-associated memories and drug-seeking behavior following a period of abstinence in rats.

The study reveals HDAC5 as a target of interest in treating vulnerability to return to drug use in opioid use disorder.

HDAC5 is an "epigenetic" enzyme, meaning it can influence the expression of many different genes. HDAC5 is active in the brain and has been associated previously with resumed cocaine use after a period of abstinence.

"In a prior study, we showed that HDAC5 is regulated by cocaine, and it reduces the impact of substance use triggers following cocaine use," said Cowan. "In the new study, we wanted to learn why HDAC5 had these effects and if they were specific to cocaine or perhaps generalizable to other classes of addictive drugs, like opioids."

Cowan examined drug-seeking behaviors by modelling a return to opioid use in rats after a period of abstinence from self-administration of heroin, a commonly used opioid drug.

First, rats were given the opportunity to self-administer heroin by pressing a lever. At the same time, they were presented with visual and audio cues that they associated with their heroin use.

Then, after 2-3 weeks of daily heroin use, the rats went through a week of abstinence before being placed back in the environment where they formerly used heroin. This drug-associated "place" triggered the pressing of the lever, or heroin seeking, but in this case no heroin was delivered.

Later, drug-seeking behavior was stimulated in the rats by exposing them to the visual and audio cues formerly linked to their heroin use.

Finally, the rats were given a small dose of heroin to remind them of the feeling of the drug, and again, this stimulated vigorous heroin seeking.

"By seeing how many times the rats press the lever while not getting the drug, we can measure the strength of the drug-use context, the drug-associated memory cues or the re-exposure to physiological drug effects to promote return to heroin use," explained Cowan.

To see how HDAC5 controlled drug-seeking behavior after a period of abstinence, Cowan's lab used a molecular trick to either increase or decrease the levels of HDAC5 in the nucleus, or DNA-containing site, of their targeted brain cells.

Rats with lower HDAC5 showed enhanced heroin seeking when exposed to triggers, while rats with higher HDAC5 showed reduced heroin-seeking behavior. This finding showed that the epigenetic enzyme HDAC5 plays a critical role in modulating the power of drug-associated memories and preventing a return to drug use.

"We found that HDAC5 limits heroin-associated cues and opposes the powerful nature of these drug cues to trigger drug-seeking behavior," said Cowan. "This suggests that, in the brain, HDAC5 functions to influence the formation and strength of these drug memories that can promote a return to drug use."

To ensure that their findings were specific to drug-seeking behavior and not just general reward seeking, Cowan's lab repeated the same experiment but used sucrose instead of heroin. Sucrose is a simple sugar that rats enjoy consuming and serves as a natural reward.

"There was absolutely no effect of HDAC5 on sucrose-seeking behavior," said Cowan. "So, it seems that addictive drugs, like cocaine and heroin, are engaging HDAC5 in a way that is separate from our natural reward learning and memory process."

After observing the effects of HDAC5 on drug-seeking behavior, Cowan's lab investigated what genes HDAC5 was actually controlling.

"We found hundreds of genes affected by HDAC5," said Cowan. "But a large number of the genes are linked to ion channels that influence the excitability of neuronal cells in the brain."

Rats with higher levels of HDAC5 had much less excitable neurons than those with low HDAC5, showing that the enzyme has a suppressive effect.

"The firing suppression from HDAC5 is likely a key underlying mechanism controlling the formation and strength of drug-associated memories," said Cowan.

With a better understanding at a molecular level of drug addiction and return to drug use, scientists and physicians can develop targeted therapies to treat SUD. Future studies in Cowan's lab aim to leverage HDAC5 to make the road to recovery less challenging.

"We have uncovered a mechanism in the brain that is controlling the formation and maintenance of really powerful and enduring drug-cue associations," said Cowan. "We want to translate these findings to the clinic and help individuals with substance use disorder by reducing vulnerability to return to regular drug use."

Source

The return of Flat Earth, the grandfather of conspiracy theories

Monday, February 27

• The first launch on Monday is a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft which will head to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) and will ferry NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen, Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Al-Neyadi, and Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev to the ISS. This mission was brought forward from March but was delayed from February 15, 19, and 26. It’ll launch at 6:45 a.m. UTC from Florida and will be available to watch on SpaceX’s website.
• The second launch on Monday is due between 6:37 a.m. and 7:15 a.m. UTC from Cape Canaveral where SpaceX will launch another Falcon 9, this time carrying Starlink satellites. This batch of 20-30 Gen2 Starlink “Mini” satellites will be known as Starlink Group 6-1 and can be found on satellite tracking apps under this designation. As mentioned previously, these satellites are covered in anti-reflective paint which should make them less of a hindrance to astronomers. Use the link to SpaceX’s website above to watch this launch too.
• The third and final launch on Monday is yet another Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites. Included in this batch are 49 Block 1.5 Starlink satellites, rather than the “Mini” variants, however, these will also come with an anti-reflective coating. This launch will take place in California, the other side of the U.S., at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The launch will occur around 12 hours after the other two at 7:31 p.m. UTC and will be available to stream in the same place on SpaceX’s website.

Wednesday, March 1

• The final launch of the week takes place on Wednesday. It’ll be yet another Falcon 9 taking off from Cape Canaveral, this time at 7:44 p.m. This mission will see 40 OneWeb satellites sent into orbit and is designated OneWeb L17. The launch should be available to stream on SpaceX’s website and possibly OneWeb’s website too.

Recap

• The first launch we had this week took place on Thursday. A Long March 3B rocket took off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province carrying the ChinaSat 26 which is described as a high-throughput satellite with a capacity of more than 100 Gbps.

• The second and final launch we saw took place on Friday when Russia launched a Soyuz 2.1a carrying Soyuz MS-23 to the space station. The mission was uncrewed but was transporting provisions for the astronauts aboard the ISS. Soyuz MS-23 will return to Earth later this year with Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin, and Frank Rubio.

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

TWIRL 103: SpaceX to dominate this week's schedule with Falcon 9 launches

Unexpected protein interactions needed to build flowers

Vaccine maker Moderna has forked over $400 million to the National Institutes of Health for using a molecular stabilizing technique borrowed from government and academic researchers in its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine—which the company made roughly $36 billion selling amid the deadly pandemic, according to The New York Times.

Moderna mentioned the payment in the company's latest earnings report, which described the sum as a "catch-up payment" negotiated with the NIH in December as part of a new royalty-bearing license agreement. The agreement will also grant the NIH "low single-digit royalties on future COVID-19 vaccine sales." The company expects to make around $5 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales in 2023.

The molecular technique at the center of the agreement is designed to stabilize the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein so that it can spur a strong immune response following vaccination. The mRNA-based vaccine delivers genetic code for the spike protein, which is then translated by human cells into protein. Researchers at the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—as well as collaborators at Dartmouth and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California—came up with a method of tweaking the mRNA code so that, when translated, the spike protein would stay locked in a specific conformation best for generating an immune response. They had developed the technique years before the pandemic, publishing it in a 2017 study involving the spike protein from a SARS-CoV-2 relative, MERS-CoV, aka the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus. Moderna began collaborating with the NIAID on a general design for mRNA-based vaccines in 2016, but none of its scientists were authors of the 2017 paper.

The Times reported that NIH would share the catch-up payment from Moderna with Dartmouth and Scripps.

While the agreement seems to settle one aspect of rights over the life-saving, billion-dollar vaccine, a larger fight still looms. That fight is centered around a principal patent Moderna filed over the entirety of the mRNA sequence used in the vaccine. Moderna says its scientists came up with the sequence independently, while the NIH says its researchers came up with it and gave it to the company. The agency requested Moderna list three NIH researchers as co-inventors on the patent they filed. But Moderna excluded them, as Nature reported back in 2021.

“Not done”

At the time, then-NIH director Francis Collins told Reuters that the NIH had spent time trying to resolve the dispute amicably with Moderna but had failed. "I think Moderna has made a serious mistake here in not providing the kind of co-inventorship credit to people who played a major role in the development of the vaccine that they're now making a fair amount of money off of," Collins said.

"But we are not done," he added. "Clearly this is something that legal authorities are going to have to figure out." A spokesperson for Collins later clarified to the Times that by "legal authorities," Collins meant government lawyers.

It's unclear how that dispute will resolve, and such patent fights can take years to unfold. It's also unclear how aggressive the federal agency will ultimately be over its co-inventor status. As Nature pointed out earlier, the agency has tended to let industry partners handle intellectual property rights as it sees its role largely in the foundational research. But with drug prices continuing to skyrocket in the US, political will is shifting for the government to be more involved in the outcomes of its early-stage efforts.

As the Times notes, not only did Moderna make roughly $36 billion in sales from COVID-19 vaccines worldwide, the company also received $10 billion in taxpayer funding to help develop and test the vaccine. Yet, this year, the company signaled that it would raise the price of the vaccine by 400 percent as it moves from government distribution to the commercial market. Amid backlash to this plan and an upcoming Congressional hearing, Moderna released a commitment statement last week saying that Americans "will have access to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine regardless of their ability to pay." But it's still unclear what that means and how the company's financial assistance programs will work.

As for the agreement with the NIH revealed yesterday, Moderna spokesperson Chris Ridley said in a statement to the Times that they "have been engaged in productive discussions since 2020 regarding the licensing of certain patents related to COVID-19 vaccines." He added that "It was always our intention to reach an agreement, and we were pleased to have done so this past December."

Source

The launch mission, titled GLHF (Good Luck, Have Fun), is scheduled for March 8 at the Cape Canaveral LC-16, Florida, and the launch window will open at 1:00 PM ET. According to Relativity, its 2-stage expendable rocket is the largest 3D-printed object which is 110 ft tall and 7.5 ft wide. The rocket has nine Aeon engines in its first stage and one Aeon Vac in the second stage.

The current Terran 1 vehicle is 85% 3D printed by mass, however, the company aims to reach 95% in the future. GLHF will be the first orbital attempt from the company and would not carry any customer payload. The launch event will be streamed live on YouTube as well for viewers across the globe.

While SpaceX is quite popular for its reusable rockets, Relativity is also working on its own version called Terran R with a 20,000 kg payload capacity. The company claims it can manufacture Terran 1 and Terran R rockets from raw materials to finished products within 60 days. Terran R is expected to launch sometime in 2024.

Source: Relativity Space via Gizmodo

World's first 3D-printed rocket Terran 1 to launch next month

Rocket Report: SpaceX may see revenue spike in 2023; Terran 1 gets a date

After a jury unanimously decided last September that Meta owed $175 million to walkie-talkie app-maker Voxer for patent infringement, Meta tried to avoid paying up by requesting a judge either reject the jury's verdict or give Meta a new trial. This week, a federal judge denied Meta’s request, making it likely that Meta will have to pay all those running royalties for illegally copying Voxer’s technology and using it to launch Facebook Live and Instagram Live.

Meta had argued seemingly everything it could to get out of paying millions in damages. It questioned whether the jury’s decision was reasonable, claiming that Voxer’s lawyer had made comments that biased the jury. In Meta’s view, no reasonable jury would have found that Meta infringed Voxer’s patented video-streaming and messaging technologies. Further, even if everyone agreed that there was infringement, Meta argued that the damages were too extreme and improperly calculated by Voxer’s expert. Instead of owing running royalties, Meta felt it should be required to pay either no damages or a lump sum.

In his decision, US District Judge Lee Yeakel affirmed that substantial evidence supported the jury’s verdict of patent infringement and sufficient evidence supported the damages that the jury awarded Voxer.

Meta can still appeal, but a Meta spokesperson declined to tell Ars if the company will.

Ars could not immediately reach Voxer to comment, but this week’s decision inches the company closer to the end of a decade-long legal saga that started in 2012 when Voxer first met with Facebook to discuss a potential partnership.

According to Voxer’s complaint, Voxer began developing its technology in 2006, hoping to help improve battlefield communications. US army veteran Tom Katis co-founded the company, wanting to create a live-messaging and video-streaming app that would help eliminate interruptions in transmissions that left soldiers vulnerable during sudden ambushes or when medevacs were needed. That ambition morphed into the walkie-talkie app that Voxer launched in 2011, which was so popular, it prompted meetings with Facebook by 2012.

Voxer was likely excited to be wooed by Facebook, but soon after Voxer shared its patent portfolio and proprietary tech with the social network, the partnership fell through. When that happened, Facebook revoked Voxer’s access to its platform, deeming Voxer a competitor while allegedly making it harder to discover Voxer on Facebook. After that, Meta moved forward without Voxer's involvement and launched Facebook Live in 2015 and Instagram Live in 2016.

After the launches, Voxer tried to book another meeting with Facebook, but the social network declined to discuss any alleged patent infringement. When Voxer sued in 2020, the app maker alleged that “both products incorporate Voxer’s technologies and infringe its patents.”

Meta has maintained in the three years since then that there was no patent infringement, but notably, the company didn’t immediately repeat statements to that effect this week.

Voxer's win this week is due to Katis' foresight in filing patents as he developed a bold new kind of technology he'd never seen before. When Katis built Voxer, he told a 2012 conference audience in Paris that he was surprised how easy it was to patent Voxer’s technology, quickly filing more than 75 patents the year after launching the walkie-talkie app. Katis said he successfully patented the technology because “no one”—including Facebook—"was crazy enough” to try to develop livestreaming tech like the vision he had for Voxer.

Source

Is it a bad time or the perfect time to release a game about humans mindlessly marching toward their doom unless an ethereal Shiba Inu guides them toward the light?

Humanity, a new puzzle-and-somewhat-platformer game from the publisher of Tetris Effect, was shown off in a trailer at Sony's State of Play event last night, and in many ways, it stole the show from more traditional big-name titles. It was originally announced in 2019 but is looking much more defined, surreal, and beautiful ahead of its May 2023 launch. You can play a demo on PS4, PS5, PSVR, PSVR 2, and PC from now until 3 am on March 6. I highly recommend that you do.

The premise will be familiar to fans of the Amiga classic Lemmings, but the execution is markedly different. You are a glowing dog. Faceless, polygonal humans—said to be "without soul, without intellect, without a will of their own—are shambling out of an entry point in a blocky 3D landscape. You hear a voice telling you to guide them toward the light. You do this by putting various instructions onto the cubic tiles, forcing the humans to turn, jump, float, and otherwise divert from their death by falling, trampling, or other means. Some amount must reach a tile that lifts them into a glowing sky, but not all of them.

Unlike its spiritual forebear, Humanity is far less punishing, and it has a whole other dimension to work with. In the demo levels, the humans are infinite, so once you figure out a path and a few of them ascend, you can either move on or try again. You are seemingly not punished for how many people die while you figure things out, which is nice, if a bit unsettling. You can improve your ratings by having your humans reach "Goldies," marching Oscar statues that you must keep alive until the ascent.

Here they come, the humans who have no idea what they're doing, but they're doing it together. In the game, I'm saying.

 

The first level in the Humanity demo. A nice introduction: make them turn a few times.

 

Getting this big golden guy to safety is how you nab achievements in the game (and possibly unlock levels).

 

By level 3, it's getting a bit more complicated.

 

By level 4, your brain is starting to meld with the game, and it can get very, very confused.

 

Also unlike Lemmings, you are an entity moving about the play field, not simply a cursor. While you work out your higher-level go-here-then-there strategy, you must implement it by running or jumping to the spots where you'll put your directives. Sometimes there are obstacles you can only surpass once your humans step on a button that unlocks them, so you must then rush to where they'll next be, lest you lose a Goldie. You'll also occasionally possess the spirit of one of your humans to move around since you don't have all their long-jumping or climbing powers.

It's important to point out how wonderful this all looks and sounds. Like Tetris Effect, the visual complications of the humans moving and flying about the level, with all their different-colored clothing, builds and builds to a kind of psychedelic crescendo. On an RTX 3070, with the graphics turned all the way up, the demo typically ran between 70 and 90 frames per second, though the fans noticeably spun up. However, this seems like a title where higher-res, ray-traced graphics aren't necessary to enjoy the game.

We're eager to try it out with the PSVR2.

The soundtrack evokes Tetris Effect's ethereal but soothing tones. I can't say for certain if it's similarly generative or whether it ramps up with the action, but it felt wonderfully matched to the colorful, contemplative gameplay.

The demo's levels ramp up rather quickly, though this may not reflect the final game. In level one, you are getting the humans to turn a few directions on a flat field. By the fifth level, your humans are jumping, long-jumping, floating to extend their long jumps, dispersing through liquid cubes, and often doubling back on themselves. The trailer indicates much more complexity to come, including light-stick combat, but I have faith in the experience being manageable for most.

Source

If you’re keen to see eerie objects that look like they’ve been turned to stone, Mother Shipton’s petrifying well in Knaresborough, England, is the place to be. Due to a quirk of local geology, the petrifying well has the medusa-like ability to turn the cuddliest of objects rock-hard, taking three months for a teddy bear and up to two years for non-porous items to be coated in minerals.

The local figure of myth and legend, Mother Shipton, is said to have been born in a nearby cave, now called Mother Shipton’s Cave, in the year 1488. Known as a witch and prophetess, she is sometimes referred to as “Yorkshire’s Nostradamus”. However, we probably would have noticed if the world had ended in 1881, as Mother Shipton predicted.

As the website of Mother Shipton’s Cave notes: “The prophecies may not be all historically correct, and the stories may have been embellished slightly over the centuries […] Although we cannot be sure how much of the legend is true, what must be certain is that 500 years ago a woman called Mistress Shipton lived here in Knaresborough and that when she spoke people believed her and passed her words on.”

A kettle at Mother Shipton's petrifying well. Image Credit: Anne/Flickr.com, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The seemingly mystical properties of the well (also known as the dropping well) have been documented for centuries. In 1534, Leland’s Intinerary described “a Welle of a wonderful nature, caullid Dropping Welle, for out of the great Rokkes by it, distilleth water continually ynto it. This water is so could, and of such a nature, that what thing soever faullith oute of the Rokkes ynto this pitte, or ys caste in or growith about the Rokke and is touched of this water, growith ynto stone ; or else some sand, or other fine ground that is about the Rokkes.”

What we can be sure of is that Mother Shipton’s petrifying well is a fascinating, sometimes creepy-looking, scientific marvel. So, how does the petrifying well work? It’s not down to the water being imbued with magical powers, or being too cold as the 1534 account states, but rather its mineral content. The process isn't true petrification, being more similar to a stalactite forming.

The petrifying well’s waters come up from about a mile (1.6 kilometers) underground, via a body of rock called an aquifer, where minerals are dissolved. “The waters consist of iron, zinc, magnesium, aluminium, calcium carbonate,” Park Assistant at Mother Shipton’s Cave John Wynne told Youtuber Tom Scott in 2021. Before it was bought by Sir Charles Slingsby in 1630 and subsequently turned into a tourist attraction, Wynne notes, “People, being superstitious, would find animal skeletons, leaves, turning to stone, and they actually thought people would turn to stone!”

A 2013 paper references an 1896 report claiming that one pint of water from the petrifying well weighed 10 grains (0.65 grams, or 0.023 ounces) more than a pint of regular water, pointing to about 1,140 milligrams per liter (0.18 ounces per gallon) of dissolved solids. The paper also notes that “sulfate-and carbonate rich water is also favorable to the deposition of calcareous tufa, the best example of which is the Dropping Well tufa screen at Knaresborough.”

Tufa is a type of limestone. It forms when carbonates dissolved in the water come out of solution and become a solid, a process called precipitation. This is prompted by some of the water evaporating, increasing the concentration of carbonates in what remains. The petrifying well is made up of tufa and a harder type of sedimentary rock called travertine, also made up of calcium carbonate – and this calcium carbonate is the secret behind the well’s petrifying powers. In fact, the front of the well needs to be regularly scraped to prevent an overhang forming from the buildup.

A lobster, teapot, and doll at the petrifying well. Image Credit: Dark Dwarf/Flickr.com, (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Many weird and wonderful objects have been given a calcium carbonate coat in the well. These include a shoe from Queen Mary left in 1923, an Ewok toy left by actor Warwick Davis, and a top-hat and bonnet from 1853 that are now just lumps in the rock face. 

You can even buy a mineral-coated teddy bear from the gift shop!

Source

Roswell, New Mexico. The Atacama Desert. The Mapimí Silent Zone. Without a doubt, there are certain so-called “alien encounters” that have garnered more name recognition than others.

One you may not have heard of, though, is the Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter of 1955 – which might seem strange, because it’s generally considered by UFO enthusiasts to be one of the most significant and well-documented cases in the history of alien encounters.

Of course, to skeptics, it’s probably a story about owls.

“The Kelly-Hopkinsville case is a classic of UFO literature that has puzzled both believers and debunkers alike,” wrote Chris Rutkowski, renowned UFO skeptic and author of The Big Book of UFOs. “Dr J Allen Hynek, the leading UFO researcher of the early days of ufology, said the Kelly-Hopkinsville case seemed ‘preposterous’ and offensive to ‘common sense’. Despite this […] many investigators consider it a solid example of a close encounter of the third kind.”

It all started on the night of August 21, 1955, near the communities of Kelly and Hopkinsville in Christian County, Kentucky. Two cars, carrying five adults and several children, arrived at the local police station with a plea: “We need help,” they announced, apparently terrified. “We've been fighting them for nearly four hours.”

Who were "them"? According to the assembled refugees, it was aliens – complete with their very own interstellar spacecraft. 

“Small alien creatures had come from a spaceship and were harassing the household, and the two families inside had been holding them off with gunfire since dusk,” explained Brian Dunning on the October 9, 2012 episode of Skeptoid. “Faces had appeared at the window, one grabbed a man's hair, and any number of the little beings had been floating around on or near the ground, flying from tree to rooftop, and evading capture.” 

All told, there were apparently 12 to 15 of the mysterious creatures badgering the house, with witnesses claiming to have seen the visitors’ flying saucer zip across the sky and land behind some nearby trees. The aliens were described as having large eyes, being about a meter tall (3.2 feet), and having spindly legs, human-like hands, and possibly antennae.

Worse still, shooting the creatures seemed futile: “Shoot them, and they'd float to the ground, and then escape,” Dunning noted. “When a bullet would strike one it sounded like shooting a tin can.”

It sounds terrifying. But was it really, as UFO enthusiasts through the decades have claimed, an alien invasion? 

Well, the first point against the story may have been when the police arrived at the scene – a scene which was suspiciously alien-free. Then there’s the fact that, according to official reports, it seems very few weapons were actually fired during the supposed four-hour shoot-out: despite later retellings of a dramatic interspecies gun battle, it turns out that only one neighbor reported hearing any shots from the house at the time, and he mistook them for a few firecrackers.

Of course, it’s possible the story was simply exaggerated, but not untrue. Maybe the invadees didn’t shoot as many aliens as the story records – but that doesn’t account for the aliens themselves, nor the appearance of a flying saucer in the sky.

Except here’s the thing: in the earliest versions of the story, it wasn’t a spaceship but a shooting star that was seen that night. Others in the vicinity also reported seeing a light streak across the sky, too – and in fact, it’s easy to check that the Kappa Cygnids meteor shower, part of the Perseids meteor shower, was taking place at that very time.

Which just leaves the question of the little alien creatures themselves – and according to French researcher Renaud Leclet, the answer is kind of a hoot.

“When we compare these descriptions [of the aliens versus owls], we notice striking similarities between them, too frequent to be just a coincidence,” he wrote in 2008. Indeed, the local great horned owls stand around 64 centimeters (25 inches) tall, have large, reflective eyes, little legs, and of course, can fly – just like the little alien guys seen on the night of August 21. As a kicker, great horned owls are particularly active around one hour after sunset – exactly when the supposed firefight went down – and are famously territorial.

Add to that the fact that, despite later reports of 12 to 15 of the creatures attacking the home, the witnesses’ original testimonies only ever mentioned seeing one or two at the same time, and it all seems to come together.

“Could it really have been just owls? Well, of course we'll never know. It's certainly one possibility, and seems consistent with the reports,” Dunning concludes. “Another possibility is that strange creatures with unprecedented superpowers, never before or since sighted in the vicinity, with no evident motive, toyed with the Sutton clan one night in 1955. No evidence was found either way.”

We guess the jury’s still out on this one, folks.

Source

The ego is a difficult concept to define, but can roughly be equated to an awareness of oneself as a distinct entity from the rest of the universe. It’s through this perspective that we all experience life, effortlessly recognizing the boundary at which we end and the outside world begins at all times. Determined to find the seat of the ego within the brain, neuroscientists have identified a series of structures collectively known as the default mode network (DMN) which appears to maintain this self-centered form of cognition.

What Is The Default Mode Network?

Our understanding of brain activity is largely based on the idea of resting-state brain networks, which essentially regulate our consciousness when we aren’t focusing on any particular task. The DMN is one such network, generally directing our attention inward, resulting in a stream of self-oriented thoughts.

In doing so, the DMN helps us maintain a sense of personal identity and construct a self-narrative, which is an important component of the Freudian concept of the ego.

Among the brain regions that make up the DMN is the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), which is highly active during rest and uses up about 20 percent more metabolic energy than most brain structures. Heavily associated with self-reflection, the PCC is thought to uphold the narrative sense of self.

The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), meanwhile, allows us to order our personal memories by assigning each one to a time and place, while also linking these recollections to emotions. Under normal circumstances, the various brain regions of the DMN communicate with each other to prevent cracks from appearing in our ego, yet some pretty wild stuff starts to happen when connectivity within the DMN is turned down.

Dissolving The Ego

The term "ego dissolution" first rose to prominence in the 1950s and 60s as a way of describing the experience induced by psychedelic drugs like LSD and mescaline. Though hard to describe using mere words, the phenomenon manifests as an unfamiliar form of cognition that is completely unbound by the perception of boundaries between one’s internal and external environments, or indeed any notion of the self at all.

More recently, scientists have developed a scale known as that Ego-Dissolution Inventory to identify and measure the experience. The items quantified by the inventory range from feeling “less absorbed with one’s own issues and concerns” to a full-blown sense of being “at one with the universe.”

Interest in ego dissolution has increased in recent years, largely thanks to a wave of psychedelic studies indicating that the experience may be linked to the therapeutic effects of certain substances. As the ego loses its grip on patients’ cognition, pathological modes of thought are replaced by new insights and a re-working of personal identity, sometimes leading to lasting improvements in mental health.

How To Turn Down The Default Mode Network

The DMN contains a high concentration of serotonin 2A receptors, which act as the primary binding sites for most psychedelic drugs in the brain. As these consciousness-expanding molecules attach to these receptors, connectivity within the DMN is disrupted and communication between the various brain regions that make up the network decreases.

As a result, the DMN is said to “disintegrate”, while a simultaneous explosion of connectivity between brain regions that wouldn’t usually interact with one another leads to an “entropic” pattern of brain activity. The DMN, therefore, ceases to function as a discrete network, and the ego has the neurological rug swept from beneath its feet.

For instance, studies have shown that psilocybin – the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms – causes a decrease in cerebral blood flow to the PCC of up to 20 percent and that this alteration is correlated with the subjective experience of ego loss.

Similarly, the ability of LSD to trigger ego dissolution has been linked to reductions in the power of alpha-frequency brainwaves within the PCC.

Other studies involving experienced meditators have revealed that entering a meditative trance while under the influence of psilocybin results in decreased communication between the PCC and mPFC. As these two important nodes of the DMN become decoupled, the ego is once again abolished. 

Having said all that, there is some debate as to how much ego is really contained within the DMN, as other brain networks such as the salience network and the frontoparietal control network are likely to play a role in maintaining certain aspects of selfhood. 

What’s clear, though, is that messing with the DMN radically weakens the ego, allowing people to take a much-needed break from themselves.

Source

Over the past century, the Earth’s average temperature has swiftly increased by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). The evidence is hard to dispute. It comes from thermometers and other sensors around the world.

But what about the thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, before thermometers, and before humans warmed the climate by releasing heat-trapping carbon dioxide from fossil fuels?

Back then, was Earth’s temperature warming or cooling?

Even though scientists know more about the most recent 6,000 years than any other multimillennial interval, studies on this long-term global temperature trend have come to contrasting conclusions.

To try to resolve the difference, we conducted a comprehensive, global-scale assessment of the existing evidence, including both natural archives, like tree rings and seafloor sediments, and climate models. Our results, published Feb. 15, 2023, suggest ways to improve climate forecasting to avoid missing some important slow-moving, naturally occurring climate feedbacks.

Global warming in context

Scientists like us who study past climate, or paleoclimate, look for temperature data from far back in time, long before thermometers and satellites.

We have two options: We can find information about past climate stored in natural archives, or we can simulate the past using climate models.

There are several natural archives that record changes in the climate over time. The growth rings that form each year in trees, stalagmites and corals can be used to reconstruct past temperature. Similar data can be found in glacier ice and in tiny shells found in the sediment that builds up over time at the bottom of the ocean or lakes. These serve as substitutes, or proxies, for thermometer-based measurements.

Trees are the best-known natural archives. Here are several others that hold evidence of past temperature. Cores or other samples from these archives can be used to reconstruct changes over time. Viktor O. Leshyk, Author provided

For example, changes in the width of tree rings can record temperature fluctuations. If temperature during the growing season is too cold, the tree ring forming that year is thinner that one from a year with warmer temperatures.

Another temperature proxy is found in seafloor sediment, in the remains of tiny ocean-dwelling creatures called foraminifera. When a foraminifer is alive, the chemical composition of its shell changes depending on the temperature of the ocean. When it dies, the shell sinks and gets buried by other debris over time, forming layers of sediment at the ocean floor. Paleoclimatologists can then extract sediment cores and chemically analyze the shells in those layers to determine their composition and age, sometimes going back millennia.

Ellie Broadman, right, an author of this article, holds a sediment core from a lake on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Emily Stone

Climate models, our other tool for exploring past environments, are mathematical representations of the Earth’s climate system. They model relationships among the atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere to create our best replica of reality.

Climate models are used to study current conditions, forecast changes in the future and reconstruct the past. For example, scientists can input the past concentrations of greenhouse gases, which we know from information stored in tiny bubbles in ancient ice, and the model can use that information to simulate past temperature. Modern climate data and details from natural archives are used to test their accuracy.

Proxy data and climate models have different strengths.

Proxies are tangible and measurable, and they often have a well-understood response to temperature. However, they are not evenly distributed around the world or through time. This makes it difficult to reconstruct global, continuous temperatures.

In contrast, climate models are continuous in space and time, but while they are often very skillful, they will never capture every detail of the climate system.

A paleo-temperature conundrum

In our new review paper, we assessed climate theory, proxy data and model simulations, focusing on indicators of global temperature. We carefully considered naturally occurring processes that affect the climate, including long-term variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun, greenhouse gas concentrations, volcanic eruptions and the strength of the Sun’s heat energy.

We also examined important climate feedbacks, such as vegetation and sea ice changes, that can influence global temperature. For example, there is strong evidence that less Arctic sea ice and more vegetation cover existed during a period around 6,000 years ago than in the 19th century. That would have darkened the Earth’s surface, causing it to absorb more heat.

Some example of foraminifera shells. From Anna Tikhonova, Sofia Merenkova, Sergei Korsun and Alexander Matul via Wikimedia, CC BY

Our two types of evidence offer different answers regarding the Earth’s temperature trend over the 6,000 years before modern global warming. Natural archives generally show that Earth’s average temperature roughly 6,000 years ago was warmer by about 0.7 C (1.3 F) compared with the 19th century median, and then cooled gradually until the Industrial Revolution. We found that most evidence points to this result.

Meanwhile, climate models generally show a slight warming trend, corresponding to a gradual increase in carbon dioxide as agriculture-based societies developed during the millennia after ice sheets retreated in the Northern Hemisphere.

How to improve climate forecasts

Our assessment highlights some ways to improve climate forecasts.

For example, we found that models would be more powerful if they more fully represented certain climate feedbacks. One climate model experiment that included increased vegetation cover in some regions 6,000 years ago was able to simulate the global temperature peak we see in proxy records, unlike most other model simulations, which don’t include this expanded vegetation.

Understanding and better incorporating these and other feedbacks will be important as scientists continue to improve our ability to predict future changes.

Ellie Broadman, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Climate Science, University of Arizona and Darrell Kaufman, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Northern Arizona University

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

Source