A female bear that was discovered in 2020 by reindeer herders in the permafrost on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island, part of the New Siberian archipelago in Russia, has undergone a necropsy this week. 

“This find is absolutely unique: the complete carcass of an ancient brown bear,” said Maxim Cheprasov, laboratory chief at the Lazarev Mammoth Museum Laboratory at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, eastern Siberia in a statement to Reuters.

Prior to being discovered, the bear had been trapped in the permafrost for nearly 3,500 years. The freezing temperatures of the region helped preserve the bear’s tissues – even the contents of the bear's stomach were preserved, including bird feathers and plants.

Named the Etherican brown bear, since it was found east of the Bolshoy Etherican River, the body provides scientists with a unique opportunity to study the organs and tissues of the ancient creature. 

“For the first time, a carcass with soft tissues has fallen into the hands of scientists, giving us the opportunity to study the internal organs and examine the brain,” said Cheprasov. 

During the necropsy, the team discovered that the bear had died due to an injury to its spinal column. By analyzing the bear’s DNA, the researchers found the bear is the same as a modern-day bear from the north-east of Russia. They also cut through the hide to examine the internal organs, look at the brain, and perform a whole host of genetic and microbiological investigations.

Estimated to be between two and three years old, the bear is around five feet tall, and despite being over 3,000 years old still weighs almost 78 kilograms (172 pounds). 

While the team is learning all they can from the bear's body, there is a mystery remaining about how the bear came to be found on an island that is now separated from the mainland by almost 50 kilometers (31 miles) of water. Three theories suggest that either the bear was able to cross to the island over ice in the winter, that the island was still part of the mainland 3,500 years ago, or simply that the bear fancied a long swim to gain access to the island. 

Many species have been discovered trapped in permafrost across the world, including a rhino, other bear species, and even lion cubs. Some areas are so rich in species that ivory hunters frequently look for mammoth tusks hidden in the icy depths. 

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In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes studying river sediments and historical records to learn more about the impact on the river by locals living in the area over the past millennium.

The Yellow River, the second-longest river in China, has played an important role in the history of that country. For thousands of years, people living near the river have used its fertile soil to grow food. But the population also had to contend with occasional flooding, which ruined crops and likely led to starvation for some. Over time, many of the locals began lining parts of the river with mud banks, hoping to keep the river from spilling out and onto crop lands. But such efforts, it turns out, tended to make things worse.

To learn more about the impact of mud-banking and other attempts to prevent flooding, such as channeling, the research team visited several sites along the river and collected sediment samples. They also collected flood records created over time by people living there. By analyzing both sources together, the group was able to create a detailed history of river flooding going back 1,000 years.

The researchers found that prior to humans altering the environment, the Yellow River tended to flood approximately four times every century. But just 6,000 years after humans established farming in the area, the river was flooding 10 times as often.

Aerial videography showing the levee-lined Yellow River perched around 10 m above the surrounding floodplain in the northwest of Xuzhou, China, during 1128-1855 CE. Credit: Nan Ding

The researchers found that adding mudbanks next to the river led to an increase in sediment deposits, which lifted the river and made it overflow during heavy rains. They note that such flooding has finally been reduced in the modern era by removing mudbanks and increasing natural vegetation along the river, which helps to reduce the flow of soil into the river during the rainy season.

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The study, published February 24 in JAMA Network Open, is one of the largest to date to look at the effects of long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution, which is emitted from sources such as vehicles, smokestacks, and fires. Fine particle air pollution, also known as PM2.5, are fine particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller. The research lends support to current efforts to make the country's air pollution standards more stringent.

"We found that people exposed to fine particulate air pollution have an increased risk of experiencing a heart attack or dying from coronary heart disease—even when those exposure levels are at or below our current U.S. air quality standards," said lead author Stacey E. Alexeeff, Ph.D., a research scientist and biostatistician at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.

"Our work has the potential to play an important role in ongoing national conversations led by the Environmental Protection Agency on whether—and how much—to tighten air quality standards to protect the public from pollution's effects."

The study included 3.7 million adults who were members of Kaiser Permanente in Northern California from 2007 to 2016 and had lived in California for at least one year. The researchers tied each adult's address to a specific geographical location—a process known as geocoding—to establish annual average exposure to fine particle pollution so it could be linked to annual PM2.5 exposure data. Then they identified the patients diagnosed with a heart attack or who had died from heart disease or cardiovascular disease.

The Environmental Protection Agency's current annual regulatory standard for fine particle air pollution PM2.5 is 12 micrograms per cubic meter, on average, over a year. Long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution PM2.5, is a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease. That's why the EPA initially instituted air quality standards.

The study found that PM2.5 exposure at a concentration between 12.0 and 13.9 micrograms per cubic meter was associated with a 10% increased risk of experiencing a heart attack and a 16% increased risk of dying from heart disease or cardiovascular disease compared to concentrations less than 8 micrograms per cubic meter.

Heart disease is a condition that develops when cholesterol builds up inside the heart's arteries, preventing the heart from getting the blood and oxygen it needs. Cardiovascular disease is a broad category covering all the diseases that can affect the heart and blood vessels, such as heart failure, stroke, and peripheral artery disease.

In January 2023, the EPA announced a proposal to tighten the annual PM2.5 standard by reducing the acceptable level to between 9.0 to 10.0 micrograms per cubic meter. The EPA said it was advising this change because the current standard did not adequately protect public health under the guidelines required by the Clean Air Act.

The study also looked at diagnoses of heart attacks and deaths from heart disease and cardiovascular disease in people whose exposures were below the current standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter. The study showed a 6% increased risk of heart attack and a 7% increased risk of death from heart disease in adults exposed to air pollution at moderate concentrations of 10.0 to 11.9 micrograms per cubic meter compared to low concentrations of less than 8.0 micrograms per cubic meter.

This suggests people would see health benefits if the new standard were 10.0 micrograms per cubic meter or less.

Additional analyses found that the increased risk of heart attacks persisted even at concentrations of 8.0 to 9.9 micrograms per cubic meter compared to concentrations below 8.0 micrograms per cubic meter. This suggests the U.S. would see fewer heart attacks if the new standard were reduced to 8.0 micrograms per cubic meter.

"This is one of the largest studies to date to look at the impact of air pollution on heart disease," said senior author Stephen Sidney, MD, MPH, a research scientist at the Division of Research.

"Importantly, Kaiser Permanente's electronic health records made it possible for us to account for other factors that might increase a person's risk of having a heart attack or developing cardiovascular disease, such as smoking status, body mass index, or having other illnesses, such as diabetes. This allows us to be confident in our conclusion that fine particle air pollution has adverse associations with cardiovascular health."

The study also showed that neighborhood socioeconomic status was tied to pollution exposure and the risk of cardiovascular disease. "We found strong evidence that neighborhood matters when it comes to exposures to this type of air pollution," said co-author Stephen Van Den Eeden, Ph.D., a research scientist at the Division of Research.

"The strongest association between exposure to air pollution and risk of cardiovascular events in our study was seen in people who live in low socioeconomic areas, where there is often more industry, busier streets, and more highways."

The researchers say their findings add important new information to ongoing policy discussions. "Our study clearly adds to the evidence that the current regulatory standards are not sufficient to protect the public," said Dr. Alexeeff.

"Our findings support the EPA's analysis that lowering the standard to at least 10.0 micrograms per cubic meter is needed to protect the public.

Our findings also suggest that lowering the standard to 8.0 micrograms per cubic meter may be needed to reduce the risk of heart attacks."

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When it comes to antitrust cases, the Department of Justice and coalitions of states have all thrown the gauntlet at Google. In this case, the Department of Justice is enforcing a lawsuit against the defendants in 2020 for "illegally maintaining monopolies" in the search and search-related advertising industries.

DOJ says Google destroyed chat evidence for its antitrust lawsuit

In a filing made public on Thursday, the Department of Justice said that Google "systematically destroyed" IM chats every 24 hours, which is against federal rules that say communications that could be useful in court should be kept.

Even so, Google reportedly told the government that it had "put a legal hold in place" to stop its chat tool from automatically deleting messages. The DOJ says that the company's claim was a lie and only stopped deleting chat histories this week after being told that the agency would file a motion for sanctions. It now asks the court to say that Google broke a federal rule and set up a hearing to determine how to punish the company. The DOJ also wants the court to tell Google to tell the court more about how it handles chats.

Google, on the other hand, says that the DOJ is wrong. The Wall Street Journal quoted a spokesperson: "Our teams have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation. In fact, we have produced over 4 million documents in this case alone, and millions more to regulators around the world."

The DOJ says that Google should have changed its defaults around the middle of 2019, "when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation."

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There are a few tried and true pieces of advice that sleep doctors always give for battling insomnia: Watch those alcoholic drinks at dinner, cut the afternoon coffee, stop scrolling before bed. And please, they beg: Keep your sleep schedule consistent.

Flip-flopping between wake-up times — jolting awake at 7:30 on a Friday morning and then dozing until the afternoon on Saturday — wreaks havoc on our internal body clocks. Sleep experts refer to this as “social jet lag,” said Dr. Sabra Abbott, a sleep medicine specialist at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. Similar to changing time zones, heading to bed at vastly different times from night to night may throw off your circadian rhythm.

And still, as anyone who’s worked a night shift, taken care of a toddler or fumbled back home after a party might tell you: Going to bed and waking up at the same times is easier said than done. “It’s a luxury, right?” said Kelsie Full, a behavioral epidemiologist and an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Dr. Full is the lead author of a new study that tied irregular sleep to an early marker of cardiovascular disease. Researchers examined a week’s worth of sleep data from 2,000 adults over 45 and found that those who slept varying amounts each night and went to bed at different times were more likely to have hardened arteries than those with more regular sleep patterns.

People whose overall sleep amounts varied by two or more hours from night to night throughout the week — getting five hours of sleep on Tuesday, say, and then eight hours on Wednesday — were particularly likely to have high levels of calcified fatty plaque built up in their arteries, compared with those who slept the same number of hours each night.

The study could not confirm that inconsistent sleep patterns definitively caused the heart issues, Dr. Full said. And the findings don’t necessarily mean that the occasional late night or very early morning should be off the table.

“An off day or two is OK,” said Dr. Tianyi Huang, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study. “It’s more about the long-term pattern.”

For most people, if you have a night or two of inconsistent sleep timing, you’re likely not going to throw off your entire circadian rhythm, said Aric Prather, a psychologist and sleep specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. And if you go to bed at 4 a.m. on a Saturday, you’re probably better off sleeping until noon and avoiding some of the acute effects of sleep loss than forcing yourself awake at the time you get up for work, he said.

But the new study supports what previous research has theorized: Consistent sleep is crucial for health. A 2020 study found that people ages 45 to 84 with erratic sleep schedules were nearly twice as likely to develop cardiovascular disease as those with more regular sleep patterns. An analysis of over 90,000 people linked circadian rhythm disruptions with a greater risk of mood disorders. Researchers have even tied irregular sleeping patterns to high cholesterol and hypertension.

Over the last decade, researchers have strengthened the link between sleep and heart health, specifically. Last summer, the American Heart Association added sleep duration to its checklist for measuring cardiovascular health. One theory for why consistent sleep helps your heart is that maintaining your circadian rhythm — the 24-hour cycle of your body’s internal clock — helps regulate cardiovascular function, Dr. Huang said. And a mounting body of research shows that catching up on your sleep during the weekends can’t compensate for staying up during the week, he added.

People often think that sleeping in after several nights of limited sleep or insomnia will make them feel better, said Dr. Marri Horvat, a sleep specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, “but it usually doesn’t help,” she said. “Keeping a regular, set schedule is more likely to put your body in a place where it needs to be to get a full night’s sleep going forward.”

So how do you actually get yourself to bed and wake up on a schedule? We asked sleep doctors to share tips.

How to build a consistent sleep schedule

Treat yourself.

Set a wake-up goal that feels attainable (even if it’s challenging), Dr. Prather said — and then reward yourself for getting out of bed. That could mean heading to your favorite coffee shop or saving the show you’ve been looking forward to for Saturday morning instead of Friday night.
Pay attention to your pre-bedtime ritual.

A regular bedtime routine — reading a few pages of a novel after you brush your teeth, for example — can help lock in a set sleep schedule. But the hours before you wind down for bed matter too, Dr. Horvat said. In the four hours or so before you head to bed, avoid alcohol, she suggested, and don’t work out (you may want to switch your dedicated exercise time to the morning). These shifts will help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.

Find an accountability partner.

Recruit a friend or a family member to get up around the same time you do, Dr. Prather recommended, and hold yourselves accountable by texting each other when you wake up. Even better: Make an early(ish) plan for brunch or a morning walk to give yourself added motivation for getting up.

Get some sun.

Light helps regulate our circadian rhythm, Dr. Abbott said, signaling to our bodies that it’s time to wake up. Take a  walk first thing, if the weather allows, to expose yourself to sunlight around the same time each day, she recommended.

Make your alarm as annoying as possible.

If you can’t pry yourself out of bed on the weekends, Dr. Prather said, go for the nuclear option: Opt for an alarm you can’t ignore. Set a grating song as your alarm tone, or try a puzzle alarm — an app that makes you solve a puzzle to shut it off. For extra incentive to wake up, keep your phone across the room at night, instead of by your bed, so you have to force yourself out of your covers to turn off the alarm.

Give yourself grace.

“How aligned you are with your biological clock and how consistent you keep things does matter,” Dr. Prather said. “But that doesn’t mean every little moment, every week, matters.” Long-term sleep patterns are more important for overall health, he added, rather than worrying about one or two nights’ bad sleep. “It takes the pressure off,” he said.

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81% of international flights into NYC had SARS-CoV-2 in waste, small trial finds

Every few days, they leave home at dawn to row about two kilometers (1.2 miles) in a fishing boat to the mangroves, where they crawl through gnarly branches knee-deep in mud, digging for the delicacy by hand.

While keeping food on the table, the women also help conserve the mangrove forest -- a natural barrier that harbors countless animal species and protects coastal settlements from floods, tidal waves and hurricane winds.

It is hard, back-breaking work that leaves the women covered in mud from head to toe. But 40-year-old Martinez and her companions laugh and joke as they go about the task of finding mangrove cockles.

In several hours they each gather a small pile of the mollusc known to science as Anadara tuberculosa -- some for home consumption, but most to sell in town.

The cockle is a popular menu item in Nicaragua and famed for purported aphrodisiac qualities.

Restaurants can resell a dozen cockles for as much as 120 cordobas (about $3.30), but the women only get about a quarter to a sixth of that price.

"Only women" do this job "because men don't like to get dirty, they don't like to get scratched" by the mangrove branches, said Martinez.

"We have to do it because of our children, for our children's studies. We have to find a way to feed them," she explained.

The men of Aserradores make a living mainly from fishing for the table and to sell. But the fish are getting fewer.

'We plant, we reforest'

The work of Martinez and her colleagues is also important for conservation.

While digging for cockles in the Aserradores estuary more than 150 kilometers (93 miles) northwest of Managua, they deposit seedlings provided by environmental authorities and NGOs to repopulate the mangrove forest.

"What we do is protect the mangrove... we plant, we reforest," said Martinez as she deftly dug into the mud, removed a cockle, and placed it in a bag hanging from her waist.

"It is for our own sake, that of our children and the rest" of the community, she said.

Martinez was 10 when she first started to gather cockles, at a time the finite nature of the resource was not appreciated, she said.

"Growing up, I did not consider how valuable it was... we took large amounts of shells without thinking that maybe one day they will run out and we won't have anything with which to sustain our children."

Martinez is a mother of three youngsters in their twenties engaged in fishing.

Juana Izquierdo, 50, recalls that as a child, the cockles were so plentiful she scooped them up from the surface of the mud but over the years, "they started decreasing because there were more collectors."

Nowadays, she returns smaller cockles to the mud to grow, "to protect and save our mangrove."

About 100 women in the municipality of El Viejo, which includes Aserradores, are involved in cockle harvesting and mangrove reforestation.

"We work three days and rest three or four days, then we return," said Izquierdo.

"We support our family. In the sea, sometimes they catch fish, sometimes not, sometimes the poor things (men) only earn enough for fuel. And since we row, we don't spend anything on fuel, we just spend our energy," she said.

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Written by the Climate Council and the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (Elca), the report said wetter-than-average conditions, including record-breaking rainfall and floods in eastern Australia since early 2020, had been caused in large part by a La Nina event that lasted an unusually long three years.

But the wet conditions have eased and hot conditions are drying out grasslands and forests, said the report released on Wednesday.

“Excessive rainfall in recent years has caused prolific vegetation growth in Australia, which is now drying and turning into fire fuel as we experience hotter, drier conditions,” said co-author Greg Mullins, former commissioner of fire and rescue in New South Wales and founder of Elca.

Elca is a coalition of 40 former chiefs, commissioners and directors-general of fire and emergency services across the country. The Climate Council is a non-governmental group focusing on climate science communication and solutions.

Mr Mullins said the summer of 2023 to 2024 will almost certainly see a return to normal or above-normal bushfire conditions across most of Australia.

He said previous long wet periods were followed by major fires in parts of Australia, including around Sydney.

“All levels of government need to understand the escalating risk of devastating fires and ramp up preparedness now,” he added.

La Nina is a climate pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that brings cooler and wetter weather to the region. The alternate state, El Nino, leads to hotter and drier conditions, and past El Nino events triggered severe bushfires in Australia and Indonesia.

But because of climate change, hotter temperatures mean fires can occur even during the years with no El Nino episodes.

“Australia’s protracted La Nina episode is giving way to hotter and drier conditions, including the possible formation of an El Nino event. As a result, we will almost certainly see a return to normal or above normal fire conditions across most of Australia in coming months,” said the report.

Australia experienced three protracted La Nina episodes in 1954 to 1957; 1973 to 1976; and 1998 to 2001. After each of these events came extensive grass fires across Australia, followed by major forest fires causing loss of life and property on the east coast, particularly in New South Wales, said the report.

Australia’s most widespread grass fires occurred from 1974 to 1975, with about 117 million ha burned nationally – about 15 per cent of the country’s land mass.

The report’s warning comes as fears grow that a strong El Nino event in coming months could lead to a repeat of the catastrophic Black Summer wildfires of 2019 to 2020.

Over several months, hundreds of fires burned a record 24 million ha, killing 33 people, destroying more than 3,000 homes and causing billions of dollars in losses. Nearly three billion animals were also killed or displaced.

The fires were made worse by severe drought and extreme temperatures that made conditions ripe for the record blazes.

A New South Wales Rural Fire Service officer monitoring a bushfire along the Old Hume Highway near the town of Tahmoor, New South Wales, on Dec 19, 2019.

PHOTO: EPA-EFE

And there are fears that a worse disaster could happen.

“Firefighters fear that grass fires occurring in hot, dry and windy conditions worsened by climate change could unfold on a scale never before experienced,” Mr Mullins said, adding that this could potentially overwhelm emergency services and place communities at great risk.

Among the recommendations, the authors said emergency services and land management agencies need more funding to respond to escalating disasters, as well as more full-time staff and volunteers. And there needs to be much stronger action to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are fuelling more extreme weather.

“Governments at all levels must collaborate to reverse the funding trend that sees most disaster-related funds going towards response and recovery, by increasing public investment in adaptation and resilience,” the authors added.

The report said the extreme grass fire that swept through Marshall, near Boulder in the US state of Colorado, in December 2021 was an example of what a climate change-driven grassfire disaster might look like.

Tens of thousands of residents were forced to flee the fire, which was driven by hurricane-force winds and an extreme drought that dried out the landscape. About 1,100 homes were destroyed and one person was killed in a single afternoon.

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Twenty-seven global warming accelerators known as amplifying feedback loops, including some that the researchers say may not be fully accounted for in climate models, have been identified by an international collaboration led by Oregon State University (OSU) scientists.

They note that the findings, published today in the journal One Earth, add urgency to the need to respond to the climate crisis and provide a roadmap for policymakers aiming to avert the most severe consequences of a warming planet.

In climate science, amplifying feedback loops are situations where a climate-caused alteration can trigger a process that causes even more warming, which in turn intensifies the alteration. An example would be warming in the Arctic, leading to melting sea ice, which results in further warming because sea water absorbs rather than reflects solar radiation.

OSU College of Forestry postdoctoral scholar Christopher Wolf and distinguished professor William Ripple led the study, which in all looked at 41 climate change feedbacks.

“Many of the feedback loops we examined significantly increase warming because of their connection to greenhouse gas emissions,” Wolf said. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the most extensive list available of climate feedback loops, and not all of them are fully considered in climate models. What’s urgently needed is more research and modeling and an accelerated cutback of emissions.”

The paper makes two calls to action for “immediate and massive” emissions reductions:

• Minimize short-term warming given that “climate disasters” in the form of wildfires, coastal flooding, permafrost thaw, intense storms, and other extreme weather are already occurring.
• Mitigate the possible major threats looming from climate tipping points that are drawing ever-closer due to the prevalence of the many amplifying feedback loops. A tipping point is a threshold after which a change in a component of the climate system becomes self-perpetuating.

“Transformative, socially just changes in global energy and transportation, short-lived air pollution, food production, nature preservation and the international economy, together with population policies based on education and equality, are needed to meet these challenges in both the short and long term,” Ripple said. “It’s too late to fully prevent the pain of climate change, but if we take meaningful steps soon while prioritizing human basic needs and social justice, it could still be possible to limit the harm.”

Ripple, Wolf and co-authors from the University of Exeter, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Woodwell Climate Research Center and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates considered both biological and physical feedbacks.

Biological feedbacks include forest dieback, soil carbon loss, and wildfire; physical feedbacks involve changes such as reduced snow cover, increased Antarctic rainfall and shrinking arctic sea ice.

Even comparatively modest warming is expected to heighten the likelihood that the Earth will cross various tipping points, the researchers say, causing big changes in the planet’s climate system and potentially strengthening the amplifying feedbacks.

“Climate models may be underestimating the acceleration in global temperature change because they aren’t fully considering this large and related set of amplifying feedback loops,” Wolf said. “The accuracy of climate models is crucial as they help guide mitigation efforts by telling policymakers about the expected effects of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. While recent climate models do a much better job of incorporating diverse feedback loops, more progress is needed.”

Emissions have risen substantially over the last century, the researchers note, despite several decades of warnings that they should be significantly curbed. The scientists say interactions among feedback loops could cause a permanent shift away from the Earth’s current climate state to one that threatens the survival of many humans and other life forms.

“In the worst case, if amplifying feedbacks are strong enough, the result is likely tragic climate change that’s moved beyond anything humans can control,” Ripple said. “We need a rapid transition toward integrated Earth system science because the climate can only be fully understood by considering the functioning and state of all Earth systems together. This will require large-scale collaboration, and the result would provide better information for policymakers.”

In addition to the 27 amplifying climate feedbacks the scientists studied were seven that are characterized as dampening – they act to stabilize the climate system. An example is carbon dioxide fertilization, where rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 lead to increasing carbon uptake by vegetation.

The effects of the remaining seven feedbacks, including increased atmospheric dust and reduced ocean stability, are not yet known.

For more on this research, see Action Required on Many Dangerous Climate Feedback Loops.

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Parents with young children are often concerned about the amount of time they spend on screens, such as tablets, phones, computers, and televisions. They may also be wondering about the impact of screen time on their child’s development and if there is a way to counteract its negative effects. A recent study from Japan has found that a higher amount of screen time at age 2 is correlated with weaker communication and practical skills at age 4. However, when children engage in outdoor play, some of the negative impacts of screen time can be mitigated.

The study, set to be published in March in JAMA Pediatrics, tracked 885 children from 18 months to 4 years of age. The researchers examined the correlation between three crucial factors: the average daily screen time at age 2, the amount of outdoor play at age 2 years and 8 months, and neurodevelopmental outcomes, specifically, communication, daily living skills, and socialization scores, as measured by the standardized Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale-II assessment tool, at age 4.

“Although both communication and daily living skills were worse in 4-year-old children who had had more screen time at aged 2, outdoor play time had very different effects on these two neurodevelopmental outcomes,” explains Kenji J. Tsuchiya, Professor at Osaka University and lead author of the study. “We were surprised to find that outdoor play didn’t really alter the negative effects of screen time on communication—but it did have an effect on daily living skills.”

Specifically, almost one-fifth of the effects of screen time on daily living skills were mediated by outdoor play, meaning that increasing outdoor play time could reduce the negative effects of screen time on daily living skills by almost 20%. The researchers also found that, although it was not linked to screen time, socialization was better in 4-year-olds who had spent more time playing outside at 2 years 8 months of age.

“Taken together, our findings indicate that optimizing screen time in young children is really important for appropriate neurodevelopment,” says Tomoko Nishimura, senior author of the study. “We also found that screen time is not related to social outcomes and that even if screen time is relatively high, encouraging more outdoor play time might help to keep kids healthy and developing appropriately.”

These results are particularly important given the recent COVID-19-related lockdowns around the world, which have generally led to more screen time and less outdoor time for children. Because the use of digital devices is difficult to avoid even in very young children, further research looking at how to balance the risks and benefits of screen time in young children is eagerly awaited.

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Donald Trump, in a presidential campaign TV spot warned on Tuesday (February 21) that “World War III has never been closer than it is right now,” and blamed “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex.”

Special mention – rightly – was made of Victoria Nuland, the US deputy secretary of state for political affairs, who, said Trump, has been “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO.”
 
Trump accurately portrayed the current conjuncture. Pronouncements by US and NATO officials before and at the recent annual Munich Security Conference (Feb 17-19) can leave very little doubt that the US war aim in Ukraine is regime change in Russia and the decisive defeat of Russia to the point of de facto unconditional surrender.
 
Remembering the Munich “peace conference” of September 1938 and its consequences, one wonders if there’s something bad in the water in the Bavarian capital, but that’s another topic.

The fact is that at the famed Hotel Bayrischer Hof on February 18, US Vice President Kamala Harris was trotted out to declare that “The United States has formally determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity.”

How and by whom exactly that determination was made, she didn’t say. But crimes against humanity cannot be dealt with in a negotiation. This calls for total war “for as long as it takes.”  Roosevelt made such a determination and declared the demand for unconditional surrender in WW2.
 
Russia, of course, duly noted.

Russian President Vladimir Putin watches the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow, May 9, 2022. Photo: Sputnik / Mikhail Metzel

President Putin declared among other things in his annual address to the nation on February 21 that Russia would pull back from New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the United States, saying inspection of Russian nuclear facilities as NATO is in effect going to war with Russia was an absurd proposition. He also reiterated the threat of the use of nuclear weapons if the integrity of the Russian state was under immediate threat.
 
So, there we now stand. How over the recent months did we get there? Let’s cut a long story short.

On February 13, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters that Russia had started a new major offensive in Ukraine. Prior to that, Ukrainian President Zelensky and his officials (some no longer in office, having been expelled for corruption) had made similar declarations.

On February 14, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he expected Ukraine to launch its own offensive in the spring. In the same press conference with Austin, quite to the astonishment of reporters, US joint chiefs of staff head General Mark Milley said “In short, Russia has lost. They’ve lost strategically, operationally and tactically. And they are paying an enormous price on the battlefield.”

He later in the same press conference second-guessed himself, saying, “on the issue of the Russian offensive, this — this offensive that you see ongoing right now generally in the Bakhmut area, you know, from Kharkiv all the way down to Kherson the front line is quite stable, even though very violent and a lot of fighting. It’s relatively stable.

“Most of the dynamic movement back and forth is in — generally in the vicinity of Bakhmut. The Ukrainians are holding….. I would describe it as a very significant grinding battle of attrition with very high casualties, especially on the Russian side. There;s no fancy arts of maneuver going on here. This is frontal attacks, wave attacks, lots of artillery with extremely high levels of casualties in that particular area.”

That made a bit more sense than the initial assessment.

Then, on February 16, the State Department’s Nuland said that “Russia has declared that it is launching a new offensive. Well, if this is it, it is very pathetic.” She noted that the war is “grinding” in the east, at locations like the city of Bakhmut, where Russia is either inching forward or not gaining any territory at all.

Nuland think’s Russia’s offensive is “pathetic.” Image: Facebook

That’s a worrying bit of confused or deliberately confusing statements from the highest US and NATO officials. Not to question their intelligence and basic levels of competence, let’s assume it’s deliberate. But any way you read it, the bottom line is the same: Most of NATO and the US see themselves now in a total war conflict and Russian President Putin has said loud and clear that he gets it.

The real situation on the ground in Ukraine, as Jim Davis writes, is a stalemate with neither Ukraine nor Russia at this point having the forces in place to launch a decisive offensive. But a war of attrition favors the demographically and industrially superior side – Russia.

General Milley knows that full well and has called for settlement negotiations. But he, of course, is abiding by the political prescriptions of President Biden and his dominant ideological warriors.

Milley and all realist observers know that without massive NATO aid and intervention on the ground, if need be, Russia will win. Russia will also now make every effort to cut supply lines from Poland and western Ukraine across the Dnepr River and to Ukrainian forces in the Donbass region.

Will Ukraine with US long-range artillery help attempt again to take down the Kerch Bridge and Russian land supplies to the southern theater? That is the escalation scenario that’s near-inevitable unless Washington comes to its senses and clearly assesses its strategic interests, which is a very long shot.

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Chinese engineers have developed and unveiled a new space-based spoofing system designed to deceive missile defense systems into launching limited interceptors against fake target signatures in space, according to a South China Morning Post report.

The report, which refers to the system as “phantom space strike”, says that a team from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Unit 63891 has conducted a computer simulation of a ballistic missile fired against a state-of-the-art missile defense system that carried three small satellites instead of a lethal warhead.

Upon reaching space, the ballistic missile released its satellite payload, which then generated spoofing signals to deceive the target’s missile defense radar, making the unarmed missile appear as a more serious threat than it is. The spoofing attack resulted in the missile defense system firing an interceptor missile at a non-existent target.

According to Zhao Yanli, a senior engineer with PLA Unit 63891, which develops and tests new technologies and equipment, his team exploited the weakness of missile defense radar and the advantages of satellite-based decoys.

Zhao’s team exploited the tolerable margin of error for missile defense satellites by keeping the positioning error between spoofing sources to less than half a meter.

The team also cited the cost advantages of using satellites, whose costs are lower than traditional electronic warfare aircraft and whose flight paths and speeds could be set according to intelligence about fixed missile defense sites. They also noted that the attack could be intensified by using more spoofing satellites.

However, a Beijing-based scientist not affiliated with Zhao’s team cautioned that phantom strike technology may lead to unintended nuclear retaliation and will most likely never be used against a nuclear-armed opponent.

With the unlikeliness of phantom strike technology being used against a nuclear-armed opponent such as the US, it may instead be used as a counter anti-satellite weapon system aimed at the secondary anti-satellite capabilities of the US Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD), the only missile defense system defending the US homeland against missile attacks.

In a 2008 paper by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Pavel Podvig and Hui Zhang note that some Chinese observers view the GMD as a space weaponry system, as the concept of space weapons in China includes not only space-based weapons but also any weapons that target objects in outer space, regardless of where they are based.

Podvig and Zhang note that China perceives that the US uses missile defense for space control, as it is easier to target satellites than missiles. According to them, any mid-course missile defense system, such as the GMD, can attack satellites in low and high Earth orbit.

They also note that tests have shown that the GMD’s anti-satellite capability may be more relevant than its ability to intercept missiles, making improvements to the system motivated by a push to acquire anti-satellite capabilities.

In line with that, Asia Times reported in August 2022 about the US Long-Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR), a significant upgrade of the GMD’s sensor component.

The LRDR is a two-in-one system combining low and high-frequency radars. Low-frequency radars have a wide field of view and can track multiple space objects but cannot discriminate threats from non-threats. High-frequency radars have a narrow field of view but can identify specific targets.

Such capability is crucial in defeating evolving ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile threats, which may be volley-fired and equipped with penetration aids to defeat US missile defenses. The LRDR may also be used to identify military from civilian satellites.

Defense News reported in June 2022 that Northrop Grumman with Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin with Aerojet Rocketdyne are competing to design a Next-Generation Interceptor (NGI) for the GMD system.

NGI’s mission is to protect the US against missile threats from rogue nations with a modern weapon system as an evolution of the currently deployed Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. Credit: Lockheed Martin.

The report notes that current-generation GMD interceptors are not designed to destroy missiles with multiple warheads or decoys, with the NGI aiming to address the shortcoming. In addition, as with its GMD predecessor, the NGI will likely have improved secondary anti-satellite capabilities.

Asia Times has previously reported on China’s increasing arsenal of satellite-based military capabilities, such as satellite-mounted microwaves, AI-upgraded spy satellites and AI deception tactics for hunter satellites. China’s improving space-based, AI-powered satellite military capabilities can spur US anti-satellite measures to become more precise, destructive and harder to trace, increasing the chances of a US preemptive anti-satellite strike.

In July 2020, Business Insider reported that Russia tested a possible “nesting doll” space-based anti-satellite weapon. The report notes that the Russian satellite involved in the July 2020 test birthed a smaller satellite and that the smaller satellite ejected a projectile that Russia describes as an “inspector satellite.”

However, Stephen Kitay, former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, noted that the “inspector satellite” showed suspicious behavior.

Moreover, Asia Times noted in August 2022 that Russia’s nesting doll satellites could “hide” within space debris fields while collecting intelligence or even send out jamming and spoofing signals to confuse satellite navigation and missile guidance systems.

An August 2018 article by the Union of Concerned Scientists says that the fragility of missile defense systems is their greatest vulnerability, as a barrage of several missiles can overwhelm the system. The article also says that doubling the number of interceptor missiles would mean doubling the size of the system, which may have unfeasible costs.  

The same weaknesses can carry over to their secondary anti-satellite capabilities. Limited US space target discrimination capabilities and interceptor missile stocks mean that decoys, spoofing signals and military satellites concealed among space debris and civilian satellites pose a severe challenge to its anti-satellite operations. 

This situation may force the US to increasingly allocate the GMD for anti-satellite missions, which can detract from its original missile defense mission or impose unfeasible costs for system upgrades.

Thus, the strategic aim of China’s phantom strike tactics may be to detract US missile defense capabilities to anti-satellite missions or impose huge and unsustainable upgrade costs, thereby increasing US strategic vulnerability in an era of rising bilateral tensions.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted in January that another round could happen this year, and now we have official confirmation.

“Meta plans to push some leaders into lower-level roles without direct reports, flattening the layers of management between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s interns, according to a person familiar with the matter…”

-Reported by The Washington Post

 

Meta layoff land is ready to welcome its new residents

Meta, Facebook's parent company, is preparing for another round of layoffs. It has tasked its human resources department, legal team, financial advisors, and executive leadership with developing a strategy to flatten the organization in preparation for a reorganization and downsizing that could affect thousands of employees.

Zuckerberg hinted at further layoffs in early February when he told investors he would reduce middle management and increase the speed with which Facebook made decisions.

Executives at Meta are “evaluating the cheapest way to accomplish the most necessary tasks,” which will “disproportionately affect workers in non-engineering roles.”

Big tech layoffs will continue in 2023. A large number of people may lose their jobs in this wave of layoffs, which “may not happen on a single day, but will likely roll out across the company in the coming months.”

After the story went viral, Andy Stone, Meta’s Policy Communications Director, criticized The Washington Post's perspective. However, he did not deny the layoff news.

The layoffs will greatly affect personnel in fields outside of engineering.

Managers will consider things like employee reviews, job descriptions, and pay structures when deciding where to make cuts.

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While a small number of similar procedures appear in the Bronze Age Levantine archaeological record, this is the earliest example of trephination ever discovered in the region. Estimated to have taken place sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries BCE, the ancient surgery sheds new light on the type of medical care available to the elites who once lived in the opulent city of Megiddo, in what is now Israel.

Occupying an important strategic position on a major trading route, Megiddo rose to prominence as one of the wealthiest cities in the Near East around 4,000 years ago. The two brothers were buried with a cache of valuable grave goods in a residential area next to a palace, indicating that they were elites – possibly even royalty.

Ironically, the pair’s terrible health can also be seen as evidence of their high social status, since the poorer classes typically died long before their illnesses became reflected in their bones due to a lack of access to medicine. In contrast, both brothers appear to have survived their illness for some time, allowing it to ravage their skeletons. This indicates that they probably received medical care that few could afford.

“These brothers were obviously living with some pretty intense pathological circumstances that, in this time, would have been tough to endure without wealth and status,” said study author Rachel Kalisher in a statement. “If you’re elite, maybe you don’t have to work as much. If you’re elite, maybe you can eat a special diet. If you’re elite, maybe you’re able to survive a severe illness longer because you have access to care.”

Despite this, both brothers died young, with one perishing in his late teens or early twenties while the other expired between the ages of 21 and 46. Both skeletons show extensive porosity, lesions, and signs of inflammation in the membranes covering the bones, all of which suggest they may have suffered from leprosy.

“Leprosy is hard to identify because it affects the bones in stages, which might not happen in the same order or with the same severity for everyone,” explained Kalisher. “It’s hard for us to say for sure whether these brothers had leprosy or some other infectious disease.”

Whatever condition the brothers were suffering from, the researchers say that the trephination “was meant as an intervention to deteriorating health.” Unfortunately, however, the skull surgery was a disaster, as a lack of bone healing suggests that the patient died almost immediately after the procedure.

Throughout history, trephination has been used as a means of releasing pressure from the brain following head trauma. Less frequently, the procedure has been conducted on individuals with diseases such as scurvy, epilepsy, or bone inflammation. 

“However, there are no archaeological examples of trephination on an individual exhibiting diffuse, extensive lesions as is the case in our study,” write the researchers.

While the study authors can’t be sure exactly why this particular Bronze Age brother sought out the procedure, Kalisher says that “you have to be in a pretty dire place to have a hole cut in your head.”

The study has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

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No one has ever probed a particle more stringently than this.

In a new experiment, scientists measured a magnetic property of the electron more carefully than ever before, making the most precise measurement of any property of an elementary particle, ever. Known as the electron magnetic moment, it’s a measure of the strength of the magnetic field carried by the particle.

That property is predicted by the standard model of particle physics, the theory that describes particles and forces on a subatomic level. In fact, it’s the most precise prediction made by that theory.

By comparing the new ultraprecise measurement and the prediction, scientists gave the theory one of its strictest tests yet. The new measurement agrees with the standard model’s prediction to about 1 part in a trillion, or 0.1 billionths of a percent, physicists report in the February 17 Physical Review Letters.

When a theory makes a prediction at high precision, it’s like a physicist’s Bat Signal, calling out for researchers to test it. “It’s irresistible to some of us,” says physicist Gerald Gabrielse of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

To measure the magnetic moment, Gabrielse and colleagues studied a single electron for months on end, trapping it in a magnetic field and observing how it responded when tweaked with microwaves. The team determined the electron magnetic moment to 0.13 parts per trillion, or 0.000000000013 percent.

A measurement that exacting is a complicated task. “It’s so challenging that nobody except the Gabrielse team dares to do it,” says physicist Holger Müller of the University of California, Berkeley.

A team of physicists (pictured) captured a single electron in a trap (experimental apparatus shown) and studied it for months to measure a property called the electron magnetic moment. Laura Nevins

The new result is more than twice as precise as the previous measurement, which stood for over 14 years, and which was also made by Gabrielse’s team. Now the researchers have finally outdone themselves. “When I saw the [paper] I said, ‘Wow, they did it,’” says Stefano Laporta, a theoretical physicist affiliated with University of Padua in Italy, who works on calculating the electron magnetic moment according to the standard model.

The new test of the standard model would be even more impressive if it weren’t for a conundrum in another painstaking measurement. Two recent experiments, one led by physicist Saïda Guellati-Khélifa of Kastler Brossel Laboratory in Paris and the other by Müller, disagree on the value of a number called the fine-structure constant, which characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions (SN: 4/12/18). That number is an input to the standard model’s prediction of the electron magnetic moment. So the disagreement limits the new test’s precision. If that discrepancy were sorted out, the test would become 10 times as precise as it is now.

The stalwart standard model has stood up to a barrage of experimental tests for decades. But scientists don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all. That’s in part because it doesn’t explain observations such as the existence of dark matter, an invisible substance that exerts gravitational influence on the cosmos. And it doesn’t say why the universe contains more matter than antimatter (SN: 9/22/22). So physicists keep looking for cases where the standard model breaks down.

One of the most tantalizing hints of a failure of the standard model is the magnetic moment not of the electron, but of the muon, a heavy relative of the electron. In 2021, a measurement of this property hinted at a possible mismatch with standard model predictions (SN: 4/7/21).

“Some people believe that this discrepancy could be the signature of new physics beyond the standard model,” says Guellati-Khélifa, who wrote a commentary on the new electron magnetic moment paper in Physics magazine. If so, any new physics affecting the muon could also affect the electron. So future measurements of the electron magnetic moment might also deviate from the prediction, finally revealing the standard model’s flaws.

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"We saw a clear dose-response relationship, so the more beneficial factors someone has in terms of having higher quality of sleep, they also have a stepwise lowering of all cause and cardiovascular mortality," said Frank Qian, MD, an internal medicine resident physician at Beth Israel Deaconess

Medical Center, clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study. "I think these findings emphasize that just getting enough hours of sleep isn't sufficient. You really have to have restful sleep and not have much trouble falling and staying asleep."

For their analysis, Qian and team included data from 172,321 people (average age 50 and 54% women) who participated in the National Health Interview Survey between 2013 and 2018.

This survey is fielded each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Center for Health Statistics to help gauge the health of the U.S. population and includes questions about sleep and sleep habits. Qian said this is the first study to his knowledge to use a nationally representative population to look at how several sleep behaviors, and not just sleep duration, might influence life expectancy.

About two-thirds of study participants self-reported as being White, 14.5% Hispanic, 12.6% Black and 5.5% Asian. Because researchers were able to link participants to the National Death Index records (through December 31, 2019), they could examine the association between individual and combined sleep factors and all-cause and cause-specific mortality.

Participants were followed for a median of 4.3 years during which time 8,681 individuals died. Of these deaths, 2,610 deaths (30%) were from cardiovascular disease, 2,052 (24%) were from cancer and 4,019 (46%) were due to other causes.

Researchers assessed five different factors of quality sleep using a low-risk sleep score they created based on answers collected as part of the survey.

Factors included: 1) ideal sleep duration of seven to eight hours a night; 2) difficulty falling asleep no more than two times a week; 3) trouble staying asleep no more than two times a week; 4) not using any sleep medication; and 5) feeling well rested after waking up at least five days a week. Each factor was assigned zero or one point for each, for a maximum of five points, which indicated the highest quality sleep.

"If people have all these ideal sleep behaviors, they are more likely to live longer," Qian said. "So, if we can improve sleep overall, and identifying sleep disorders is especially important, we may be able to prevent some of this premature mortality."

For the analysis, researchers controlled for other factors that may have heightened the risk of dying, including lower socioeconomic status, smoking and alcohol consumption and other medical conditions.

Compared to individuals who had zero to one favorable sleep factors, those who had all five were 30% less likely to die for any reason, 21% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, 19% less likely to die from cancer, and 40% less likely to die of causes other than heart disease or cancer. Qian said these other deaths are likely due to accidents, infections or neurodegenerative diseases, such as dementia and Parkinson's disease, but more research is needed.

Among men and women who reported having all five quality sleep measures (a score of five), life expectancy was 4.7 years greater for men and 2.4 years greater for women compared with those who had none or only one of the five favorable elements of low-risk sleep. More research is needed to determine why men with all five low-risk sleep factors had double the increase in life expectancy compared with women who had the same quality sleep.

"Even from a young age, if people can develop these good sleep habits of getting enough sleep, making sure they are sleeping without too many distractions and have good sleep hygiene overall, it can greatly benefit their overall long-term health," Qian said, adding that for the present analysis they estimated gains in life expectancy starting at age 30, but the model can be used to predict gains at older ages too.

"It's important for younger people to understand that a lot of health behaviors are cumulative over time. Just like we like to say, 'it's never too late to exercise or stop smoking,' it's also never too early. And we should be talking about and assessing sleep more often."

These sleep habits can be easily asked about during clinical encounters, and the researchers hope patients and clinicians will start talking about sleep as part of their overall health assessment and disease management planning.

One limitation of the study is that sleep habits were self-reported and not objectively measured or verified. In addition, no information was available about the types of sleep aid or medicine used or how often or long participants used them. Future research is needed to understand how these gains in life expectancy might continue as people age, as well as further explore the sex differences that were observed.

Previous studies have shown that getting too little or too much sleep can negatively affect the heart. It's also been widely reported that sleep apnea, a sleep disorder that causes someone to pause or stop breathing while asleep, can lead to a number of heart conditions, including high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation and heart attacks.

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When it was first discovered in 2012, the Higgs boson captured the popular imagination and became the subject of intense scientific scrutiny.

One way scientists knew for sure that the object they discovered was indeed the long-theorized Higgs particle involved identifying one of its unique qualities: It is the only “scalar” fundamental particle researchers have ever seen. Unlike every other elementary particle we know of—every electron, quark and neutrino—the Higgs boson has a quantum spin of precisely zero.

Gleaning the full significance of this unique characteristic requires that we think bigger than the boson itself, an object so hopelessly unstable it decays into less massive and less exotic particles almost as soon as it blinks into existence. Instead, we must turn our attention to the realm of quantum field theory, and to the special place the Higgs boson calls home, the Higgs field. Along the way, we’ll see how the relationship between quantum fields and the basic physical property of quantum spin can help us better understand the nature of our universe. And why finding the Higgs is far from the end of the story.

Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Abigail Malate

Taking a spin in quantum field theory

We’ve established that the Higgs boson is a spin-zero, a.k.a. “scalar” particle, but what does that mean? And what does that have to do with the Higgs field?

Let’s start with the basics: Quantum field theory posits that all particles, spinning or not, are local excitations or fluctuations within “quantum fields.” These fields play an important role in enforcing the laws of nature.

“From the quantum field theory perspective, when we are thinking about everything, we think that everything is made up of fields,” says Nausheen Shah, associate professor of physics at Wayne State University. “That's the electromagnetic field, gravitational field—but also all the particles, the electron field, the Higgs field—all of these are fields that are permeating space.”

There’s a quantum field for each of the 12 known matter particles, as well as fields for all four of the fundamental forces (corresponding to force-carrying particles like the photon).

In most cases, we need two numbers to describe a field at any given point in space and time. One number indicates its strength or “magnitude;” the other indicates its “spin.” Spin here is a quantum property that doesn’t have an easy analogue at the macroscopic scale. Particles don’t spin the way the Earth spins, but particles and planets do share something in common—they both have angular momentum.

“And that momentum is finite. You can measure it,” says Matt Strassler, a physicist at Harvard University.

Even though a particle isn’t actually rotating around an axis, it moves and interacts with other particles and forces as if it were. The Higgs boson, which has no spin, does not. But what about the Higgs field? How can a field have a spin?

“A field having spin, that is really a question of whether the field ‘points’ or not,” Strassler says.

A gravitational field, for example, points toward the massive object that is generating it. So the gravitational field that holds you to the Earth points—from your perspective—down, toward the center of the planet.

The Higgs field, on the other hand, is just as spinless as the Higgs boson. Like a college senior sitting forlorn in a career counselor’s office, it has no direction.

It’s no coincidence that both the Higgs boson and the Higgs field are spin-zero. “The properties of a particle are essentially properties of the field,” says Peter Onyisi, associate professor of physics for the University of Texas at Austin. Like waves in the ocean, “Higgs bosons are vibrations in a Higgs field.”

Tipping the scalar: the Higgs field & rotational symmetry

The fact that the Higgs field has zero spin is an important element of the Higgs mechanism—the way the Higgs field gives particles mass. “The source of mass for fundamental particles, it has to be spin-zero,” Shah says. “Physics has to be the same if you translate, or rotate, or boost to a different frame [of reference]. It just has to be.”

To understand what Shah means by this, we must examine another special trait of the Higgs boson—its nonzero vacuum expectation value. A field’s vacuum expectation value is the average value of all the information you can have about that field, including its magnitude and spin, across a macroscopic region of space.

If you traveled deep into some intergalactic void and tried to measure the vacuum expectation value of the gravitational or electromagnetic field thousands of lightyears from the nearest galaxy or star, you would likely find it to be negligible. That’s because most quantum fields have a vacuum expectation value of zero unless a particle is present.

The one exception to this rule is the Higgs field. The Higgs field has a nonzero vacuum expectation value throughout all of spacetime, meaning there is always some value associated with it, even when no Higgs particles are present. What’s more, that value is constant, meaning you can measure it at any place or time, and you’ll always get the same answer.

Things would get pretty weird if the Higgs field had a spin, because not only would it have a nonzero vacuum expectation value everywhere at once, but it would also point in a uniform direction that could be measured from anywhere in the universe. This would mean that we could define a preferred direction, a “true north,” for all of spacetime.

Such an idea goes against some of our most basic precepts about the universe itself, including the idea of “isotropy” or “rotational symmetry,” which tells us that the laws of physics remain uniform no matter which direction we face. This isn’t just a theory; it’s an observational fact.

Scientists have spent decades searching to no avail for violations of rotational symmetry.

“You’re literally saying that if you’re in a frame, and you did a rotation, whatever physics you’re seeing here are not the same when you’re looking at [a different angle],” Shah says. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

But where did the spin go?

For our understanding of physics to work, the Higgs cannot have a spin. But it’s still strange for a fundamental particle to be spin-zero. So, theorists have come up with ways that it might not be.  

For example, it could be that the Higgs is not actually a fundamental particle at all. Some models speculate that the Higgs boson is a composite particle, made up of two or more non-scalar fundamental particles whose spins add up to zero.

“The Higgs being a composite particle has a very long history as an idea,” says Onyisi.

He says composite Higgs models appeal to theorists because they address another peculiarity of the Higgs—its incomprehensible mass at high energies.

Physicists want to understand how particles behave at high energy scales, in part because those energy scales mimic the conditions precipitated by the Big Bang—and thus can give us a view into what our universe was like at its very beginning.

A particle can have very different properties, depending on the energy scale at which it is measured—differences in charge, mass and other quantum numbers. When it comes to changes in mass, some particles are “protected” in the mathematical theory of particle physics. For example, the photon has no mass, and it does not suddenly gain a mass as energy scales increase.

The Higgs boson, however, does not enjoy such protection. “Famously, there’s a runaway behavior at high energy scales of the Higgs mass term,” Onyisi says.

Calculations predict that a fundamental Higgs particle would be impossibly massive at such an energy scale.

A composite Higgs could present an easy solution to this problem, since the fundamental particles making up a composite Higgs would presumably have their mass controlled via some well understood physical mechanism. “So that actually is, for a lot of people, a very attractive idea,” he says.

What if the Higgs really is fundamental, though? Could it be that it does have a spin after all, one that is hidden from us in an extra dimension? Some models say so.

Strassler says alternative theories of the Higgs all share a common problem: It’s hard to get them to line up with what we already know about the particle and its field. “What makes the Higgs field and the Higgs boson really tough is that we also have to arrange that it has some other rather weird properties,” Strassler says.

There’s a big difference between the mass of a top quark, the heaviest fundamental particle discovered so far, and the mass of an electron, one of the lightest. To get their differing masses, particles have to interact to different degrees with the Higgs field—and any new theory about the Higgs has to be compatible with that observable reality.

“It is quite difficult,” Strassler says, “to make theories that cook up the Higgs boson as a [particle that spins in a 4th dimension], or cook it up as a composite object, and still successfully get it to have all the other properties that it needs to have in order to give the particles of the Standard Model the wild diversity of masses that they have.”

Scalar fields forever

If alternative models are wrong, it could be that the Higgs is indeed the lone fundamental particle with no spin.

Or it might not be alone after all. “Even in the world of the Higgs boson itself, it’s not clear that there’s only one of them,” Onyisi says.

Some models of grand unified theories—which suggest that three of the four fundamental forces (all except gravity) may have been joined together as one unified force during the high energy period following the Big Bang—predict the existence of a whole family tree of Higgs bosons.

“The Higgs field solves a certain class of problem,” Onyisi says, “and so often what people do when they encounter that kind of problem theoretically is [they] just replicate the idea for the [new] context.”

It’s also possible the early universe was once teeming with a different kind of scalar boson, but those particles have since disappeared.

That’s how scientists view the inflaton, a particle associated with cosmic inflation. “So the idea is, right after the Big Bang, there was this very short, like 10-30 seconds, period of what’s called inflation,” Shah says.

This is the period during which the very fabric of spacetime itself exploded out from the starting point of the Big Bang, inflating at a pace faster than the speed of light to form the hot, dense soup of the early universe. What powered that explosive growth could have been something called the inflaton field, with associated particles called inflatons.

Of course, the inflaton and the inflaton field would need to be spin-zero, “because there can’t be a direction which is associated with any point in space,” Shah says.

The inflaton field also would have had a nonzero vacuum expectation value, at least during the inflationary period.

Some scientists think inflation ended when the inflaton field began to lose its vacuum expectation value, a process that would have produced an abundance of inflaton particles. These particles would have quickly decayed into the ordinary matter that makes up the universe today.

Shah says this could explain the incredible homogeneity we observe in the night sky. “When we look out to the universe all around us, as far as we can see, everything is very, very homogenous,” Shah says. “And [without inflation,] there is zero reason for that. In fact, it doesn’t work with our current understanding of things.”

That’s because if we look far in two opposite directions in space, we’re looking at segments of the universe that, without inflation, would have never, ever been in causal contact. In other words, they would have never been close enough to interact, so there’s no reason they should look alike.

But if the inflaton field existed everywhere at once in the early universe, and if it lost its vacuum expectation value at a uniform rate throughout all of space, it would make sense that things should look relatively similar in all directions.

The investigation continues

As we’ve seen, the Higgs and its lack of spin answer some questions about our universe, but they also raise new ones. Shah says she keeps studying the Higgs sector in the hopes of answering this one: In a world made up of only a handful of subatomic ingredients, why do so many exotic, unstable particles exist?

“The Standard Model of particle physics is something we have built empirically over the past 100-ish years,” she says. “And if you actually look at what the world around us is made of, it is actually just one tiny subset of these particles”—just electrons, neutrinos and two types of quarks. This is the first “generation” of known matter particles.

However, more particles exist. Each of the particles that make up our atoms have relatives, making up two additional particle generations.

The next two generations each contain copies of the particles we see in the first, but those copies are much more massive, in some cases several orders of magnitude. Scientists can produce and study these particles in accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, but they are too massive to remain stable and disintegrate into less massive particles almost immediately after they are born.

“Why in the world should how they interact with this background field [the Higgs field] be so different? Where does it come from?” Shah says. “I feel like—and this is personal, obviously—that there are secrets…We’re not seeing the full picture.”

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The winter morning was cloaked in thick fog. Our car swerved past horse-drawn carriages, a mode of transport still popular in the rural reaches of the eastern Indian state of Bihar, the trotting horses and turbaned coachmen looking like shadowy apparitions in the pearly-white mist.

After spending a night in the town of Bodhgaya, the ancient settlement where Lord Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, I set out that morning for Nalanda, whose red-brick ruins are all that remain of one of the greatest centres of learning in the ancient world.

Founded in 427 CE, Nalanda is considered the world's first residential university, a sort of medieval Ivy League institution home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era's most revered scholars. As the Dalai Lama once stated: "The source of all the [Buddhist] knowledge we have, has come from Nalanda."

Ten thousand students from across Asia came to Nalanda to learn Buddhist principles from some of the era's most revered scholars (Credit: imageBROKER/Alamy)

In the more-than seven centuries that Nalanda flourished, there was nothing else like it in the world. The monastic university predates the University of Oxford and Europe's oldest university, Bologna, by more than 500 years. What's more, Nalanda's enlightened approach to philosophy and religion would help shape the culture of Asia long after the university ceased to exist.

Interestingly, the monarchs of the Gupta Empire that founded the Buddhist monastic university were devout Hindus, but sympathetic and accepting towards Buddhism and the growing Buddhist intellectual fervour and philosophical writings of the time. The liberal cultural and religious traditions that evolved under their reign would form the core of Nalanda's multidisciplinary academic curriculum, which blended intellectual Buddhism with a higher knowledge in different fields.

The ancient Indian medical system of Ayurveda, which is rooted in nature-based healing methods, was widely taught at Nalanda and then migrated to other parts of India via alumni. Other Buddhist institutions drew inspiration from the campus' design of open courtyards enclosed by prayer halls and lecture rooms. And the stucco produced here influenced ecclesiastical art in Thailand, and metal art migrated from here to Tibet and the Malayan peninsula.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

VIDEO: Return of the world's oldest university (Credit: Mithun Pramanik/BBC Reel)

But perhaps Nalanda's most profound and lingering legacy is its achievements in mathematics and astronomy.

Aryabhata, considered the father of Indian mathematics, is speculated to have headed the university in the 6th Century CE. "We believe that Aryabhata was the first to assign zero as a digit, a revolutionary concept, which simplified mathematical computations and helped evolve more complex avenues such as algebra and calculus," said Anuradha Mitra, a Kolkata-based professor of mathematics. "Without zero, we wouldn't have computers," she added. "He also did pioneering works in extracting square and cubic roots, and applications of trigonometrical functions to spherical geometry. He was also the first to attribute radiance of the moon to reflected sunlight."

This work would profoundly influence the development of mathematics and astronomy in southern India and across the Arabian Peninsula.

The university regularly sent some of its best scholars and professors to places like China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka to propagate Buddhist teachings and philosophy. This ancient cultural exchange programme helped spread and shape Buddhism across Asia.

The excavated Unesco site extends for 23 hectares, but is likely a mere fraction of the original campus (Credit: Dinodia Photos/Alamy)

The archaeological remains of Nalanda arenow a Unesco World Heritage site. In the 1190s, the university was destroyed by a marauding troop of invaders led by Turko-Afghan military general Bakhtiyar Khilji, who sought to extinguish the Buddhist centre of knowledge during his conquest of northern and eastern India. The campus was so vast that the fire set on by the attackersis said to have burned for three months. Today, the 23-hectare excavated site is likely a mere fraction of the original campus, but ambling through its multitude of monasteries and temples evokes a feeling of what it must have been like to learn at this fabled place.

I wandered around the porches and porticos of the monasteries and the shrine-chambers of the temples. After slipping through a corridor with lofty, red-brick walls, I arrived at an inner courtyard of a monastery. The cavernous, rectangular space was dominated by a raised stone platform.

"This used to be a lecture hall that could sit 300 students. And the platform was the teacher's podium," said Kamla Singh, my local guide, who showed me around the ruins. I went into one of the small rooms that lined the courtyard where students from as far away as Afghanistan lived. Two alcoves facing each other were meant to hold oil lamps and personal belongings, and Singh explained that the small, square-shaped hollow near the entrance of the cell served as each student's personal letterbox.

Like today's elite universities, admission was tough. Aspiring students needed to engage in a rigorous oral interview with Nalanda's top professors. Those who got lucky were tutored by an eclectic group of professors from different corners of India and collectively operated under the most revered Buddhist masters of the era, such as Dharmapala and Silabhadra.

The library's nine million handwritten, palm-leaf manuscripts was the richest repository of Buddhist wisdom in the world, and one ofits three library buildings was described by Tibetan Buddhist scholar Taranatha as a nine-storey building "soaring into the clouds". Only a handful of those palm-leaf volumes and painted wooden folios survived the fire – carried away by fleeing monks. They can now can be found at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the US and Yarlung Museum in Tibet.

The Dalai Lama once said: "The source of all the [Buddhist] knowledge we have, has come from Nalanda." (Credit: REY Pictures/Alamy)

The acclaimed Chinese Buddhist monk and traveller Xuanzang studied and taught at Nalanda. When he returned to China in 645 CE, he carried back a wagonload of 657 Buddhist scriptures from Nalanda. Xuanzang would go on to become one of the world's most influential Buddhist scholars, and he would translate a portion of these volumes into Chinese to create his life's treatise, whose central idea was that the whole world is but a representation of the mind. His Japanese disciple, Dosho, would later introduce this doctrine to Japan, and it would spread further into the Sino-Japanese world, where it would remain as a major religion ever since. As a result, Xuanzang has been credited as "the monk who brought Buddhism East".

In Xuanzang's description of Nalanda, he had mentioned the Great Stupa – a huge monument constructed in memory of one of Lord Buddha's chief disciples. I stood in front of the ruins of the imposing structure, shaped like an octagonal pyramid. Open-brick staircases wound their way up to the top of the edifice, also known as the Great Monument. Numerous small shrines and votive stupas dot the paved terrace that runs around the 30m-high temple, which is adorned by beautiful stucco images in the niches of the exterior walls.

"The Great Stupa actually predates the university and was built in the 3rd Century CE by Emperor Ashoka. The structure had been rebuilt and remodelled several times over eight centuries," said Anjali Nair, a history teacher from Mumbai, whom I had met at the site. "Those votive stupas contain the ashes of the Buddhist monks who had lived and died here, dedicating their entire lives to the university," she added.

More than eight centuries after its demise, some scholars contest the widely held theory that Nalanda was destroyed because Khilji and his troops felt its teachings competed with Islam. While uprooting Buddhism may have been a driving force behind the attack, one of India's pioneering archaeologists, HD Sankaliya, wrote in his 1934 book, The University of Nalanda, that the fortress-like appearance of the campus and stories of its wealth were reasons enough for invaders to deem the university a lucrative spot for an attack.

The onsite museum houses more than 13,000 antiquities salvaged during the site's excavations (Credit: Sugato Mukherjee)

"Yes, it is difficult to assign a definitive reason for the invasion," said Shankar Sharma, the director of the onsite museum, which displays 350 artefacts of the more-than 13,000 antiquities it houses, which were salvaged during Nalanda excavations, such as stucco sculptures, bronze statuettes of the Buddha, and ivory and bone pieces.

"It was not the first attack on Nalanda, though," Sharma said, as we strolled through the ruins. "It was attacked by the Huns under Mihirkula in the 5th Century, and again sustained severe damages from an invasion of the Gauda king of Bengal, in the 8th Century."

While the Huns came to plunder, it is difficult to conclude whether the second attack by the King of Bengal was the result of a growing antagonism between their Shaivite Hindu sect and the Buddhists at the time. On both occasions, the buildings were restored, and the facilities were expanded after the attacks with the help of imperial patronage from the rulers.

"By the time Khilji invaded this sacred temple of learning, Buddhism was on an overall state of decline in India," Sharma said. "With its internal degeneration, coupled with [the] decline of the Buddhist Pala dynasty that had been patronising the university since the 8th Century CE, the third invasion was the final death blow."

The ruins of Nalanda remain an important place of pilgrimage and reflection for Buddhists (Credit: Sugato Mukherjee)

Over the next six centuries, Nalanda would gradually sink into oblivion and remain buried, before it was "discovered" by Scottish surveyor Francis Buchanan-Hamilton in 1812, and later identified as the ancient Nalanda University by Sir Alexander Cunningham in 1861.

Standing near a miniature stupa, I watched a small band of young monks clad in crimson robes touring the site before they stopped to gather atop the large plinth of a former temple. The young ascetics sat upright in a meditative repose, their eyes fixed on the Great Monument – a silent homage to a glorious past.

Places That Changed the World is a BBC Travel series looking into how a destination has made a significant impact on the entire planet.

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It follows searches at BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai by tax officials.

Mr Davie thanked staff for their courage and said nothing was more important than reporting impartially.

The BBC, which is co-operating with the investigation, recently aired a documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

India's government called it "hostile propaganda" and attempted to block it being aired domestically.

Mr Davie said the BBC would help staff do their jobs effectively and safely.

"Nothing is more important than our ability to report without fear or favour," he said in the email.

"Our duty to our audiences around the world is to pursue the facts through independent and impartial journalism, and to produce and distribute the very best creative content. We won't be put off from that task.

Tim Davie told BBC staff in India it's his job to help them do their work safely

"I'd like to be clear: the BBC does not have an agenda - we are driven by purpose. And our first public purpose is to provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them."

Tax officials spent three days carrying out what they called a "survey" at the BBC offices.

India's Central Board of Direct Taxes said it had found "discrepancies and inconsistencies" as well as evidence indicating "that tax has not been paid on certain remittances which have not been disclosed as income in India by the foreign entities of the group".

Earlier this week opposition MPs in the UK described the raids as "intimidation" and deeply worrying.

A Foreign Office minister would not comment on the allegations by India's income tax department but said "we continue to follow the matter closely".

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Universe’s first galaxies unexpectedly large

The COVID-19 Vaccine Immune Responses Study (COVIRS), published in Cell Reports Medicine, tracked the immune responses of 102 adults of varying ages, all living in South Australia where there was no community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at the time.

Participants had their bloods taken immediately after each dose of either the Oxford/AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines to assess early immune response.

They were also tested 28 days after every immunization to evaluate B and T cell activity. Both are critical, as B cells produce antibodies and T cells kill infected cells.

The vaccines are alike in the sense that they induce the immune system to recognize and protect against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but they differ in how this is achieved.

The Pfizer vaccine uses mRNA technology to induce host cells to produce the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, while the AstraZeneca vaccine uses a harmless virus (a chimpanzee adenovirus) to encode the Spike protein.

Head of SAHMRI's Systems Immunology Laboratory and Flinders University Professor David Lynn led the study, using a method of biological analysis known as 'multiomics' to examine immune responses in many different ways in thousands of blood samples.

Professor Lynn says this comprehensive analysis of immune responses to these different vaccines has revealed lots of new information that'll help inform future vaccine design.

"After the first dose, we were surprised to find the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine elicits an unexpected memorylike response in the immune system, recognizing the vaccine as if it's something it's seen before," says Professor Lynn, from the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University.

"This response is targeted against the adenovirus vector in the vaccine, not the Spike protein and the intensity of this response correlates with the expression of proteins that act as a pre-cursor to thrombosis, or blood clotting.

"While Vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) is an extremely rare side effect associated with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine that none of the participants developed during the study, this research offers a potential explanation for the connection between the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and the cases of VITT that've been reported."

The study also found those who'd only had two doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine generally produced lower amounts of antibodies and less of a specialized type of T-cell that helps with antibody production; compared to those who had two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

However, this was rectified once they had their third booster dose of an mRNA vaccine, illustrating the importance of booster doses.

The study added evidence to the notion that COVID-19 vaccines offer some people more effective protection than others.

The reasons for this variability are not well understood, but Professor Lynn says age is a factor, with older people generally having a lower immune response after two doses. Fortunately, a third booster dose was highly effective at overcoming this.

Immune responses induced immediately after vaccination predicted the subsequent B and T cell response to the vaccine measured a month later.

"One to two days after initial vaccination we measured gene expression responses in the blood which correlated with adaptive immune responses that mediate protection 28 days later," Professor Lynn says.

A further surprise to researchers was the finding that feeling unwell after a vaccine dose may in fact be linked to its effectiveness.

"People who showed symptoms of fatigue and fever immediately after the third dose were more likely to have better T-cell responses. T-cells play a vital role in vaccine efficacy as they can directly kill viral cells," Professor Lynn said.

The study was a major collaboration involving SAHMRI, Flinders University, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, The University of Melbourne, The University of Adelaide, Basil Hetzel Institute for Translational Health Research, University of New South Wales, The Kirby Institute, Alfred Hospital, Monash University, AstraZeneca and the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Overall, this project has provided important new insights into the early immune responses to these vaccines and offers a greater understanding of how they work to protect against COVID-19.

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In the late 2000s, Carlos Monteiro noticed something strange about the food that Brazilian people were eating. The nutritionist had been poring over three decades’ worth of data from surveys that asked grocery shoppers to note down every item they bought. In more recent surveys, Monteiro noticed, Brazilians were buying way less oil, sugar, and salt than they had in the past. Despite this, people were piling on the pounds. Between 1975 and 2009 the proportion of Brazilian adults who were overweight or obese more than doubled.

This contradiction troubled Monteiro. If people were buying less fat and sugar, why were they getting bigger? The answer was right there in the data. Brazilians hadn’t really cut down on fat, salt, and sugar—they were just consuming these nutrients in an entirely new form. People were swapping traditional foods—rice, beans, and vegetables—for prepackaged bread, sweets, sausages, and other snacks. The share of biscuits and soft drinks in Brazilians’ shopping baskets had tripled and quintupled, respectively, since the first household survey in 1974. The change was noticeable everywhere. When Monteiro first qualified as a doctor in 1972, he’d worried that Brazilians weren’t getting enough to eat. By the late 2000s, his country was suffering with the exact opposite problem.

At a glance, Monteiro’s findings seem obvious. If people eat too much unhealthy food, they put on more weight. But the nutritionist wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. He thought that something fundamental had shifted in our food system, and scientists needed a new way to talk about it. For more than a century, nutrition science has focused on nutrients: Eat less saturated fat, avoid excess sugar, get enough vitamin C, and so on. But Monteiro wanted a new way of categorizing food that emphasized how products were made, not just what was in them. It wasn’t just ingredients that made a food unhealthy, Monteiro thought. It was the whole system: how the food was processed, how quickly we ate it, and the way it was sold and marketed. “We are proposing a new theory to understand the relationship between diet and health,” Monteiro says.

Monteiro created a new food classification system—called NOVA—that breaks things down into four categories. Least worrisome are minimally processed foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed meats. Then come processed culinary ingredients (oils, butter, and sugar), and after that processed foods (tinned vegetables, smoked meats, freshly baked bread, and simple cheeses)—substances to be used carefully as part of a healthy diet. And then there are ultra-processed foods.

There are a bunch of reasons why a product might fall into the ultra-processed category. It might be made using “industrial processes” like extrusion, interesterification, carbonation, hydrogenation, molding, or prefrying. It could contain additives designed to make it hyper-palatable, or preservatives that help it stay stable at room temperature. Or it might contain high levels of fat, sugar, and salt in combinations that aren’t usually found in whole foods. What all the foods share, Monteiro says, is that they are designed to displace freshly prepared dishes and keep you coming back for more, and more, and more. “Every day from breakfast to dinner you are consuming something that was engineered to be overconsumed,” says Monteiro.

The concept of ultra-processed food has caught on in a big way since it was first introduced in 2009: Brazil, France, Israel, Ecuador, and Peru have all made NOVA part of their dietary guidelines. Countless health and diet blogs extol the virtues of avoiding ultra-processed foods—shunning them is one thing that both followers of a carnivorous and a raw vegan diet can actually agree on. The label has been used to criticize plant-based meat companies, who in turn have embraced the label. Impossible calls its plant-based burger “unapologetically processed.” Others have pointed out that there’s no way we can feed billions of people without relying on processed food.

The concept of ultra-processed food has captured our imaginations. And yet we know so little about these foods and what they do to our bodies. Scientists can’t even agree on what counts as an ultra-processed food or why they should matter. Only one thing is for certain: These foods are a huge part of our lives.

Ultra-Processed People

Open up my kitchen cupboards and you’ll find instant ramen, potato chips, biscuits, canned soup, sweets, and cereal bars—a world of ultra-processed food, all of it ready to eat with either no preparation or just a minimum of effort. It’s not just me that is in thrall to convenient foods. Ultra-processed food makes up almost 57 percent of the average UK diet and more than 60 percent of the US diet.

And all of this consumption seems to be doing something to our health. Overconsumption of ultra-processed food has been linked to all kinds of health issues: colourectal and breast cancer, obesity, depression, and all-cause mortality. Figuring out how our diets influence our health is extremely difficult, and any armchair statistician will tell you that correlation does not equal causation, but it does seem clear that consuming too much ultra-processed food isn’t good for us.

One reason for this is that ultra-processed foods are often high in salt, sugar, and fat, which almost everyone agrees we should be cutting down on, says Stacey Lockyer, a senior nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation. But if these foods are unhealthy simply because of their nutrients, then maybe we don’t need the ultra-processed category at all. Could it be that Monteiro’s NOVA categorization is just traditional nutrition science repackaged?

Kevin Hall started out as an ultra-processed skeptic. He’s a researcher at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he studies how diet influences body weight and metabolism. He first heard about the NOVA categorization at a conference in 2015 when a Brazilian researcher mentioned the system to him. Why are you still looking at nutrients when they’re not important anymore, the researcher asked him. “This struck me as a profoundly weird way to think about food,” says Hall. He had spent his entire career studying how nutrients affected the human body. That’s what food was, he thought, just different ways of packaging nutrients together.

Still, Hall was intrigued enough by the NOVA categorization that he put together the first randomized control trial comparing ultra-processed and unprocessed diets. In 2019 Hall asked 20 volunteers to stay at a clinical research hospital in Bethesda where they would be fed a diet of only ultra-processed or whole foods for two weeks, then switch to the other diet for the subsequent two weeks. Those on the ultra-processed diet were fed a selection of dishes including tater tots, turkey sausage, Spam, and an ungodly amount of diet lemonade. The whole-food diet was mostly made up of fruit, vegetables, and unprocessed meat. For both diets, Hall and his researchers provided double the recommended portions of food so participants could eat as much as they liked. The critical part, however, was that the two diets were nutritionally matched, so each contained roughly the same amount of protein, fat, carbohydrates, fibre, and so on.

The results of the study surprised Hall. On the ultra-processed diet, people ate around 500 extra calories per day and put on about two pounds. When people were on the whole-food diet, they ate fewer calories and lost weight—this is despite the fact that the meals on offer had roughly the same nutrient compositions. To Hall, this implied that there was something other than salt, sugar, and fat content that was causing people to eat excess calories and gain weight. “It suggested that there was something different about this NOVA categorization system,” he says. Maybe there is more to food than its constituent parts.

Hall’s study drew a clear link between junk food and excess calorie consumption, but it can’t tell us why people on the ultra-processed diet ate more. After he published the results, Hall was flooded with suggestions from other scientists. Some thought it was because junk food is more calorie-dense. Since processed foods are often deep-fried and high in fat, they pack in more calories per gram than whole foods. Or maybe it was because junk food was eaten more quickly; in the study, people on the ultra-processed diet ate significantly faster than those eating whole foods. Other scientists thought that additives might be playing a role, or that junk food changed the gut microbiome in a way that influenced calorie intake.

A big factor might be the effect that ultra-processed foods have on our brain. Alexandra DiFeliceantonio is an assistant professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine who studies how junk food interacts with the brain’s reward systems. “We know a lot more about fat, sugars, and carbohydrates, and how those are signaled in the gut and to the brain. We know a lot less about the role of ultra-processing in altering any of those signals,” says DiFeliceantonio.

Her hypothesis is that since ultra-processed foods are rich in easily available calories, they induce a potent reward response in our brains that keeps us coming back for more.

DiFeliceantonio’s work draws parallels between junk food and the tobacco industry. In an editorial for the journal Addiction, DiFeliceantonio and her colleague Ashley Geardhardt argue that highly processed foods should be considered addictive substances if we measure them against the standards set for tobacco products. But until we really understand the science behind how ultra-processed food impacts our bodies, policy will always lag behind. “We saw big shifts in things like tobacco policy and policy for opioids when we had really solid, scientific, biological data,” says DiFeliceantonio.

Taking on Big Food

So what should health authorities do about it? Government guidelines in Brazil advise people to avoid ultra-processed foods altogether, while French guidelines recommend limiting consumption. But other countries’ guidelines don’t refer to ultra-processed foods at all. In 2021 an independent report commissioned by the UK government proposed a series of reforms aimed squarely at the ultra-processed food industry. The report recommended a tax on sugar and salt used in processed foods, and for large companies to report how much unhealthy food they were selling. The government’s response, published a year later, largely ignored these recommendations. In the UK’s official nutrition guidelines, the only reference to processed food is that people should eat no more than 70 grams of red or processed meat each day.

While the role of processing in our diets has come under greater focus, public agencies have been slow to respond. Stanford nutritionist Christopher Gardner sits on the US Dietary Guidelines Committee and is a member of the American Heart Association. “For both of them, processed food is an issue they have to address next, because the public is so interested in this,” he says. “We don’t have a position yet. We need a position on this.”

Hall, meanwhile, is running a new study to pinpoint what it is about ultra-processed foods that causes us to eat excess calories, and the first participants have already arrived at the clinical research center in Bethesda. The study is similar to his previous experiment, but this time he’ll be varying the ultra-processed diet he gives volunteers to test whether the energy density or palatability of the food influences how much people eat. If he can figure out what it is in ultra-processed foods that leads people to overeat, it might help design better policies to help people eat healthier diets, or lead food companies to reformulate their products.

It might also mean that we narrow down our definition of ultra-processed food. Packaged and processed foods are such an important source of nutrition for so many people that we need to be careful before we demonize the entire category, says Hall. They’re convenient, tasty, and cheap. In Hall’s 2019 study, the weekly cost of the ultra-processed meals was $45 cheaper than the whole food diet. “If you design policies to try to eliminate those foods without at the same time providing cheap, inexpensive, easy, convenient alternatives, you’re going to have a lot of people who are going to experience negative consequences of that,” he says.

Things get even trickier when you factor in the climate impact of our diets. Most plant-based meats are highly processed, but that doesn’t necessarily make them less healthy than their meat equivalents. Meat substitutes tend to be lower in calories and saturated fat and higher in fibre, but lower in protein. But on an environmental level, plant-based beef is much better than the real thing. “If you’re comparing a highly processed beef burger or pork sausage with its plant-based equivalent, then the plant burger or sausage is generally going to have lower environmental impacts,” says Tara Garnett, a food researcher at the University of Oxford. Monteiro admits that ultra-processed foods are sometimes better than their unprocessed alternatives, but he’s concerned that plant-based burgers might displace other, healthier plant-based foods.

Even there the picture is complex. Christopher Gardner ran a trial where people swapped animal meat with plant-based meats for eight weeks. After the plant-based phase of the trial, people lost weight and had low cholesterol concentrations. When it comes to plant-based meats, Gardner says the ultra-processed label might be doing the category a disservice. 

Monteiro thinks that we can’t afford to wait until we know everything about ultra-processed foods before public health bodies take action. “We are dealing with something very complex. It will take many years to understand all of these mechanisms. But do we need to wait until we know all of this to start to do something to stop this?” he says. For now the science on ultra-processed foods is moving along slowly, but the debate is raging louder than ever.

Fat, Sugar, Salt … You’ve Been Thinking About Food All Wrong

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Tinder bracket fungus / hoof fungus / horse’s hoof (Fomes fomentarius) on a fallen tree trunk in Belgium.

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