His company, the investment bank China Renaissance, went on to advise and invest in many of China’s most successful tech companies, taking them public in Hong Kong and New York.

“If you don’t know Bao Fan,” goes a saying in the industry, “you haven’t made it.”

Eight years later, on Valentine’s Day last week, rumors started circulating that Mr. Bao had gone missing. His company later confirmed his disappearance in a regulatory filing. Chinese media reported that he had been summoned by the authorities to assist in an investigation of a former senior executive of his company who used to work at a state-owned financial institution.

China’s tech world is watching closely what will happen to Mr. Bao, who knows or has worked with nearly every mover and shaker in the industry.

He is not as well known outside the business world but is just as symbolic of the industry’s rising presence in China as Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, who has largely vanished from public view after falling out with the government in 2020.

Mr. Bao’s disappearance has undercut Beijing’s new priority to restore business confidence after ending its “zero-Covid” policy and crackdowns on the private sector. It threatens to upend the government’s promise that it supports private enterprise and would provide legal protections for the business class.

And the episode, even if Mr. Bao resurfaces soon, also illustrates how China’s tech industry, once the country’s most globalized and independent sector, has become entangled with the government.

“When the rabbit dies, the fox grieves for fear it would be the next; when the lips are dead, the teeth will be cold,” said an executive who has known Mr. Bao for more than a decade, mixing Chinese idioms to describe the mood among his peers.

“This matter shouldn’t be seen as just an individual issue for Bao Fan,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal like other businesspeople I spoke with. “It’s an event that affects the entire industry. It’s related to the survival of investors and entrepreneurs.”

A tech founder who had worked with Mr. Bao on deals wrote on social media that entrepreneurs were like “frightened birds.” “Confidence is slow to build but quick to dissipate,” he wrote. “Without confidence, who will build factories, start companies and invest in the future?”

These people are concerned that the authorities can make anybody disappear without legal processes, and that it can happen to anyone anytime and anywhere.

Mr. Bao, 52, is one of many Chinese born in the 1960s and 1970s who benefited from policies that opened up the country. His parents were diplomats and he was exposed to the outside world before most of his generation. He got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Norway and worked for Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse after graduation.

In 2004, Mr. Bao founded China Renaissance to focus on the budding internet industry, which was too small for the big Wall Street firms that were busy chasing state-owned giants such as China Mobile and PetroChina. He got to know all the big shots in tech when they were nobodies and knew little about raising money.

He became their go-to banker when they needed financing and advice. China Renaissance’s best years were between 2015 and 2017, when hot Chinese start-ups were raising as much funding as their peers in Silicon Valley. Mr. Bao helped put together three of the four mega-mergers in 2015 that produced dominant internet companies such as Didi, which was China’s answer to Uber, and the meal delivery giant Meituan.

As tech grew, so did Mr. Bao’s ambition. In addition to dominating deals, his firm started investing in start-ups.

He became as famous as the founders he had helped shepherd and was a sought-after speaker at conferences in and outside of China. He had always cultivated a rowdy boy image and enjoyed talking about his hobbies such as boxing and Formula 1 racing. Like many people in China’s tech industry, Mr. Bao believed in the free market and wanted minimal government intervention.

But the Chinese government, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, intensified its control over the economy. The tech industry had to learn to deal with it. Companies expanded their government relations teams, hiring former officials and executives of state-owned enterprises, to smooth communications with the mandarins.

China Renaissance was no exception. In 2017, ICBC International, a division of the state-owned banking giant ICBC, provided the investment bank with a $200 million credit line. Mr. Bao backed the loan with shares in his firm and promised to repay it after China Renaissance went public in Hong Kong the next year. It delivered on that pledge.

In 2020, Mr. Bao hired Cong Lin, the head of ICBC International, as chairman of a brokerage business China Renaissance had formed. Last September, Mr. Cong became a target of a government investigation related to his dealings before he joined China Renaissance. He left the company around the same time.

Even without this trouble, 2022 was a bad year for Mr. Bao. The government’s regulatory crackdowns on tech, education and other business sectors dried up deal-making, and the harsh “zero-Covid” policy put hundreds of millions of people under lockdowns, halting economic activity.

In the first six months of last year, China Renaissance’s revenue fell by 40 percent and the firm lost $23 million, compared with a $179 million profit in the same period a year earlier.

Since the news of Mr. Bao’s disappearance came out, China Renaissance’s share price has fallen by more than 20 percent.

Mr. Bao was already changing his style to accommodate the country’s leadership. He had kept a much lower media profile in the past few years.

In a speech at a big internet conference in 2021, he quoted Mr. Xi’s instructions on the digital economy, using government lingo such as “new era” and “a community with a shared future in cyberspace.”

On National Day last October, he posted on WeChat: “Warm congratulations on the 73rd anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China!” His firm made a red digital card for the occasion. It was probably not something Mr. Bao would have done in the past.

It’s not just the government that has grown hostile to the business class. On Weibo, a social media platform, some people said that Mr. Bao’s disappearance proved that he was greedy and lacked judgment.

Last Saturday was the 26th anniversary of the death of China’s former paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping. Some people wrote articles or social media posts to commemorate him, reminiscing about the days when China was opening to the world and its leaders focused on building the economy.

One popular article about Mr. Bao was nostalgic, too. Its headline was “Would Bao Fan want to remain in the year of 2016?” That year was the peak of Mr. Bao’s career. Many people fear it also might have been the peak of China’s tech industry.

The post China’s Tech Rainmaker Vanishes, and So Does Business Confidence appeared first on New York Times.

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Wars are world-shaping. Beyond their immediate human and physical tolls, wars alter the fates of societies and states; of clans, cultures and leaders. They establish new lines of access to resources and influence, determining who has what – and who doesn’t.

They set precedents for how future wars are justified and, in the case of attempted conquest, wars can ultimately redraw the map of world politics.

One year after its unprovoked invasion on February 24, 2022, Russia’s war against Ukraine encompasses all these dangers.

With Ukraine waging an existential battle for its very survival, and Russia seemingly happy to settle for destroying Ukraine if it fails to conquer it, neither side has any incentive to stop fighting.

Absent the complete collapse of either the Ukrainian or Russian armed forces, the grim reality is that the war will likely drag on throughout 2023 – and potentially beyond it.

2023 will be crucial

But what happens in Ukraine during 2023 will be crucial. For a start, it will reveal whether victory for either side is possible, or whether a “frozen” conflict is more likely.

It will test the resolve of all the main protagonists and their supporters:

• Ukraine’s ability to repel Russian onslaughts and recapture territory
• the extent to which Vladimir Putin can command domestic obedience
• and even of China’s intentions, as it mulls supplying Moscow with weapons.

How the war plays out in 2023 will also reveal how credible the West’s determination to stand up to bullies really is. Will it move further towards supporting Kiev by all means necessary, revert to drip-feeding its assistance, or give in to apathy and war fatigue?

At present, Ukraine continues to have the upper hand, even if Russia’s armed forces have lately wrested back some momentum. But in the coming months, Kiev will face two key challenges.

First, it will need to absorb Russian attacks while conducting its own offensive operations, which will require Western heavy armor, longer-range strike capabilities and possibly air power.

Second, Ukraine will require continued international aid and assistance to ensure its social order doesn’t break down as a result of economic collapse and to be able to mitigate further damage to its critical infrastructure.

Putin’s army – and his authority – in the spotlight

Conversely, for Russia to turn the tide it will have to dramatically reverse the abysmal performance of its armed forces. The recent spectacular failure of the Russian assault on Vuhledar in Ukraine’s southeast, seen by many as the prelude to a Spring offensive, doesn’t bode well.

With an estimated 80% of Russia’s entire ground forces now engaged in the conflict, plus tens of thousands of newly mobilized conscripts arriving at the front, there’s mounting pressure on those at the very top of Russia’s military leadership to achieve rapid results.

Russia’s infantry has been front and center in the battle for Donbas. Image: Tass

Failing to achieve that will ultimately rebound on Putin. To maintain social order he has become increasingly repressive, banning books, engaging in shadow conscription campaigns, and imprisoning many of those who speak out against the war.

And while the bitter infighting between the armed forces and paramilitary organization the Wagner Group seems to have been settled for the moment, the fact that it was conducted so publicly suggests Putin no longer enjoys the same iron control amongst Russia’s leaders that he once did.

Of course, another Russian revolution (either from above or below) is still far off. There’s no alternative value proposition for Russia’s political elites to remove Putin, and the personal risks for trying it remain very high. For its part, Russian society remains effectively apathetic – if no longer very enthusiastic – about the war.

Yet that might change. Putin can’t endure unscathed by forever blaming the West, or purging his security services for his own bad choices. His longevity has relied on the bargain he made with Russians: to protect them, and offer them stable lives with gradually improving living standards.

Russian leader likely didn’t foresee the course of the Ukraine war. Image: Sputnik

In the last 12 months, he has broken both parts of that bargain, drafting large numbers of Russians to fight in Ukraine, and causing tough sanctions in response to his actions.

By using mobilized Russians as cannon fodder, and having emptied much of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in 2022 to blunt damage to its economy, Putin has created dual pressures on Russian society.

First, the demand for fresh recruits has become recurrent, mandatory and inexhaustible.

Second, sanctions are about to bite much harder. And instead of being able to direct mobilization campaigns at Russia’s marginalized and minority groups, affluent and influential areas like Moscow and St Petersburg will for the first time find their livelihoods affected by the war in 2023.

If the war escalates, it will likely happen this year

If maintaining control at home becomes more challenging for Putin, a new round of brinkmanship will look increasingly attractive. In turn, that elevates the risks of conflict escalation.

Already the past 12 months have witnessed the Kremlin flirting with global hunger games, hinting at nuclear annihilation, raising the specter of “dirty bombs” and branding virtually anyone who opposes Moscow as a Nazi.

So far, the West has responded tactfully and proportionately to the Kremlin’s threats. It largely weaned itself off Russian energy over the past year, removing a key part of Russian strategic leverage. But in 2023 we should expect a redoubling of Moscow’s efforts to fracture Western unity.

Putin’s propensity for risk means any action short of war in the so-called “grey zone” is possible, as demonstrated by reports the Kremlin has been supporting a coup attempt in Moldova and aiding Serbian nationalists protesting against closer ties with Kosovo.

More broadly that list could include blackmail, cyberattacks, sabotage, and even assassinations on NATO territory, coupled to posturing and provocations by Russia’s armed forces.

Similar efforts will likely be made to try and sway Western populations. True, Russia’s previous attempts to enlist gullible and/or reflexively suspicious Western citizens with false narratives about NATO enlargement have only enjoyed limited success, mainly because it’s painfully obvious Russia is engaged in a war of imperial expansion.

But just like prohibition-era Baptists and bootleggers, it will continue trying to exert pressure by seeking to unite seemingly disparate groups, such as the anti-war campaigns which have brought together the anti-globalist Far Left with the conspiracy theory-laden Far Right.

A Ukrainian soldier keeping watch at a damaged energy facility near Kyiv, February 2023. Photo: Sergey Dolzhenko / EPA / AAP

NATO’s center of gravity will continue to shift eastward

The center of NATO gravity will likely continue to shift further east. Both Poland and Estonia have emerged as strong champions of Ukrainian sovereignty, and have been particularly instrumental in pushing more reticent European nations, including Germany and France, towards a firmer stance.

NATO aspirant members Finland and Sweden have been busy too, with both nations increasing their 2022 defense expenditure by between 10% and 20%.

With the exception of Hungary, the Bucharest Nine Group – formed in 2015 in response to Russian aggression in Crimea – has emerged as a powerful voice within NATO, advocating for the transfer of more sophisticated weapons systems to Ukraine.

In January 2023, Poland announced it was increasing its military spending to 4% of GDP, and it has been placing numerous orders for weapons, including from the US and South Korea.

Policy coordination between Warsaw and Washington has increased as well, especially on stationing NATO systems, personnel, and providing training for Ukrainian forces – including US President Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Kiev on Monday (February 20) to announce a new military aid package, ahead of a visit to Poland to mark the anniversary of Russia’s invasion.

The challenge for NATO is that a two-speed approach to Ukraine within the alliance increases the potential for disagreement and fracture. Conversely, given the reticence of some West European nations to lead the response to Russian aggression, it’s incumbent on the Baltic States, Poland and others to do so.

Ultimately, those predicting a swift end to Russia’s war in Ukraine are likely to be as disappointed in 2023, as they were 12 months earlier.

The past year has taught us much: about how the weak can resist the powerful; about the dangers of peace at any price; and about the hubris of believing autocrats can be bought off with inducements.

But perhaps most importantly it has taught us to question our assumptions about war. Now, one year into a conflict in Europe that many thought impossible, we are likely about to rediscover just how world-shaping wars can be.

Matthew Sussex is Fellow, Strategic and Defense Studies Center, Australian National University

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

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The US military is intensifying its commitment to the development and use of autonomous weapons, as confirmed by an update to a Department of Defense directive.

The update, released January 25, 2023, is the first in a decade to focus on artificial intelligence autonomous weapons.

It follows a related implementation plan released by NATO on October 13, 2022, that is aimed at preserving the alliance’s “technological edge” in what are sometimes called “killer robots.”

Both announcements reflect a crucial lesson militaries around the world have learned from recent combat operations in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh: Weaponized artificial intelligence is the future of warfare.

“We know that commanders are seeing a military value in loitering munitions in Ukraine,” Richard Moyes, director of Article 36, a humanitarian organization focused on reducing harm from weapons, told me in an interview.

These weapons, which are a cross between a bomb and a drone, can hover for extended periods while waiting for a target. For now, such semi-autonomous missiles are generally being operated with significant human control over key decisions, he said.

Pressure of war

But as casualties mount in Ukraine, so does the pressure to achieve decisive battlefield advantages with fully autonomous weapons – robots that can choose, hunt down and attack their targets all on their own, without needing any human supervision.

This month, a key Russian manufacturer announced plans to develop a new combat version of its Marker reconnaissance robot, an uncrewed ground vehicle, to augment existing forces in Ukraine. Fully autonomous drones are already being used to defend Ukrainian energy facilities from other drones.

Wahid Nawabi, CEO of the US defense contractor that manufactures the semi-autonomous Switchblade drone, said the technology is already within reach to convert these weapons to become fully autonomous.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital transformation minister, has argued that fully autonomous weapons are the war’s “logical and inevitable next step” and recently said that soldiers might see them on the battlefield in the next six months.

Proponents of fully autonomous weapons systems argue that the technology will keep soldiers out of harm’s way by keeping them off the battlefield. They will also allow for military decisions to be made at superhuman speed, allowing for radically improved defensive capabilities.

Currently, semi-autonomous weapons, such as loitering munitions that track and detonate themselves on targets, require a “human in the loop.” They can recommend actions but require their operators to initiate them.

By contrast, fully autonomous drones, like the so-called “drone hunters” now deployed in Ukraine, can track and disable incoming unmanned aerial vehicles day and night, with no need for operator intervention and faster than human-controlled weapons systems.

Calling for a timeout

Critics like The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots have been advocating for more than a decade to ban research and development of autonomous weapons systems.

They point to a future where autonomous weapons systems are designed specifically to target humans, not just vehicles, infrastructure and other weapons.

They argue that wartime decisions over life and death must remain in human hands. Turning them over to an algorithm amounts to the ultimate form of digital dehumanization.

Together with Human Rights Watch, The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots argues that autonomous weapons systems lack the human judgment necessary to distinguish between civilians and legitimate military targets.

They also lower the threshold to war by reducing the perceived risks, and they erode meaningful human control over what happens on the battlefield.

It wouldn’t take much to turn this remotely operated mobile machine gun into an autonomous killer robot. Photo: Pfc Rhita Daniel / US Marine Corps

The organizations argue that the militaries investing most heavily in autonomous weapons systems, including the US, Russia, China, South Korea and the European Union, are launching the world into a costly and destabilizing new arms race. One consequence could be this dangerous new technology falling into the hands of terrorists and others outside of government control.

The updated Department of Defense directive tries to address some of the key concerns. It declares that the US will use autonomous weapons systems with “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.”

Human Rights Watch issued a statement saying that the new directive fails to make clear what the phrase “appropriate level” means and doesn’t establish guidelines for who should determine it.

Gregory Allen, an expert from the national defense and international relations think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that this language establishes a lower threshold than the “meaningful human control” demanded by critics.

The Defense Department’s wording, he points out, allows for the possibility that in certain cases, such as with surveillance aircraft, the level of human control considered appropriate “may be little to none.”

The updated directive also includes language promising ethical use of autonomous weapons systems, specifically by establishing a system of oversight for developing and employing the technology, and by insisting that the weapons will be used in accordance with existing international laws of war.

But Article 36’s Moyes noted that international law currently does not provide an adequate framework for understanding, much less regulating, the concept of weapon autonomy.

The current legal framework does not make it clear, for instance, that commanders are responsible for understanding what will trigger the systems that they use, or that they must limit the area and time over which those systems will operate.

“The danger is that there is not a bright line between where we are now and where we have accepted the unacceptable,” said Moyes.

Impossible balance?

The Pentagon’s update demonstrates a simultaneous commitment to deploying autonomous weapons systems and to complying with international humanitarian law. How the US will balance these commitments, and if such a balance is even possible, remains to be seen.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the custodian of international humanitarian law, insists that the legal obligations of commanders and operators “cannot be transferred to a machine, algorithm or weapon system.”

Right now, human beings are held responsible for protecting civilians and limiting combat damage by making sure the use of force is proportional to military objectives.

If and when artificially intelligent weapons are deployed on the battlefield, who should be held responsible when needless civilian deaths occur? There isn’t a clear answer to that very important question.

James Dawes is a professor of English at Macalester College.

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

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TOKYO – The best one can say about the freefall in Taiwanese exports in January is that it could have been worse.

The 19.3% drop from a year ago was less severe than the 24% economists feared. It’s also less than December’s 23.2% plunge. Yet Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s economy has a US$40 trillion problem on its hands.

The reference here is to the combined annual gross domestic product (GDP) of the US and China. And at the moment, the half of this challenge that really stands out is China.

Fewer and fewer of Taiwan’s integrated circuit chips are going to the mainland and Hong Kong. By some measures, the shortfalls are the biggest since January 2009.

In part, Taiwan’s data signals that global demand for electronics continues to crater. The biggest problem, though, is Taiwan’s increasingly precarious place amid US-China trade tensions. Orders from China and Hong Kong plunged 45.9%.

It’s not just Taiwan. Japan and South Korea are also learning how expensive it is to stand with the US as an ally amidst China’s economic rise.

As Henry Kissinger, the one-time US secretary of state, once quipped: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” Surely, it’s proving all too true these days from a GDP standpoint.

In Tokyo, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s approval rating is in the mid-20s as his economic reform hopes go sideways. While that’s on him and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Japan, too, is suffering extreme feedback effects from US-China dynamics.

In recent weeks, Kishida’s government reportedly joined forces with US President Joe Biden and the Netherlands to restrict exports of some advanced chipmaking technology to Xi’s economy.

The pact, which aims to stymie China’s efforts to increase market share in the chips space, would result in blowback for companies including ASML Holding, Nikon Corp, Tokyo Electron and other tech giants.

US President Joe Biden wants more advanced semiconductors produced in America as part of his push to compete with China. Image: Twitter

It’s a win for Biden, as he presumably prepares to run for reelection in 2024. Though predecessor Donald Trump claimed to be tough on China, Biden has pursued a quieter, more surgical, approach that’s causing real challenges for Xi’s economy.

Yet the unintended consequences are adding up for Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as North Asian democracies close ranks vis-a-vis China. These pressures are likely to grow more intense as the 2024 US election cycle heats up, and China finds itself front and center.

Republicans now controlling the House of Representatives, meanwhile, are working up investigations into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and spy balloons flying over the US mainland, regulation of Chinese tech platforms like ByteDance’s TikTok and other topics sure to rankle officials in Beijing.

For Taiwan, the fallout from increased tensions could be especially bleak considering the economy shrank 0.86% in the last three months of 2022. That was the worst quarterly showing since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.

Worse still, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs sees little reason for optimism that export demand will bounce back. “The downside risks to the global economy are still high, which may affect the performance of export orders,” the ministry said.

Huang Yu-ling, head of the ministry’s statistics department, reports that 70% of over 2,000 companies surveyed so far detect little uptick in demand since China ended Covid-19 controls.

Hence the ministry’s efforts to telegraph that exports this month will be between 6.9% and 10.8% lower than in February 2022.

This makes Taiwan something of a global weathervane. News that its open and sizable economy is sputtering augers poorly for growth everywhere. Local giants like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) are major suppliers to Apple, Qualcomm and other global tech names.

Taiwan is “especially exposed to the vagaries of the global electronics sector given its key role in global tech supply chains,” notes economist Frederic Neumann at HSBC.

TSMC is the world’s leading chip maker. Image: Facebook

South Korea, too, at a moment when President Yoon Suk-yeol’s approval rate is treading water just nine months into his five-year term. Much of the deterioration in support relates to an underperforming economy.

Sales shortfalls at chip giants Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and others buttress Kissinger’s point that being a top US ally can prove very costly as your biggest customer stands ready to pump fresh demand into your economy.

Semiconductors are by far the biggest source of income for Korea’s economy. Xi’s 1.4-billion-person nation is both the world’s largest semiconductor market and Korea’s biggest trade partner. 

Misgivings abound in Seoul since August 2022 when Washington limited US$7,500 tax credits for electric vehicles to those assembled inside North America. It generated new headwinds for Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Corp, which make EVs in Korea and export them overseas.

In his February 8 State of the Union speech, Biden announced an even sharper pivot toward restoring America’s role as a manufacturing power. Yet his cornerstone argument— “build more and build it here” — signaled Biden is doubling down on a “buy America” industrial policy that put allies in Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo in a tight spot.

The pretext seems to be that fellow democracies in North Asia follow Biden’s lead. Might South Korea, for example, run afoul of US priorities if it maintains a policy of investing in advanced technologies in China?

Since taking power in May, Yoon has tried to straddle US-China tensions, a policy his government calls “strategic equilibrium.” As conglomerates that generate the lion’s share of Korean GDP risk losing market share, Yoon’s balancing act between East and West becomes more precarious.

At the very least, Korea’s family-owned conglomerates, known as chaebols, can expect Biden’s White House to be lobbying for investments in the US that might otherwise go to China.

A big precedent was set in May when Hyundai Motor pledged to invest $10 billion in Biden’s economy by 2025. Odds are, the US will be angling for similar commitments from Korea Inc.

All this has Korea’s most powerful CEOs struggling to figure out where the geopolitical landmines are. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Act that Biden signed last year are keeping compliance officials in Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo on edge.

South Korea’s Samsung is caught in the middle of the US-China tech war. Image: AFP

A big worry: balancing plans for building advanced semiconductor factories over the next decade without crossing Washington’s red lines.

Questions abound about what Bidenomics means for Samsung’s huge production facility in Xi’an and SK hynix’s in Wuxi. And, of course, what might happen if Korean circuitry unwittingly ends up in Chinese weapons, lasers, air-defense systems and surveillance tools?

One answer is to negotiate a middle ground with Biden’s trade team. For all their geopolitical loyalties and security concerns, it’s high time Asia carved out a way to coexist as the two biggest economies brawl. It’s not like, after all, the US-China decoupling theory is playing out at warp speed.

Last year, trade between the two biggest economies increased markedly despite tensions. US imports from China rose $32 million to $537 billion in 2022, while the US shipped a record $154 billion in exports to China.

Yet Taiwan, Japan and South Korea also should be riding the tailwinds generated by China’s reopening ­– and, for now, stronger than expected US growth – to reinvigorate economic reforms.

Goal one: diversifying growth engines away from exports. Twenty-five years of all three economies pledging to recalibrate economic models haven’t gone particularly well.

Here, North Asia might want to follow Biden’s lead. The CHIPS Act alone is pumping $300 billion into research and development to increase productivity and new innovation. Trump completely neglected efforts to build economic muscle at home.

Biden needs to go much further and think more ambitiously. Had Trump acted more innovatively – and Biden added a zero to his tech investment package – US inflation might not be at 40-year highs. And the Federal Reserve might not be carrying out the most aggressive rate hike cycle since the mid-1990s.

Scott Kennedy, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, finds great significance in US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo “repeatedly” saying the administration will “emphasize investing in the US’ own capabilities, aligning with allies, and competing vigorously with China, but that it will also remain open to constructive communication and cooperation where possible.”

It’s grand, Kennedy says, that Biden is reaffirming his approach “with China where it can advance American interests and benefit the world.” But, he adds, “managing our differences and cooperating both require greater communication.”

Here, Blinken’s decision to scrap a long-planned Beijing visit over Chinese balloons was a costly own-goal for the US economy, many analysts say.

Unleashed pent-up Chinese demand could drive the global economy in 2023. Image: Screengrab / NDTV

China, too, needs to tend to its own reputational losses. As economist Diana Choyleva at Enodo Economics notes, “Beijing’s abandonment of its harsh Covid policy is sure to unleash some pent-up consumer spending. But the authorities’

precipitous and inept opening of the economy has further tarnished their reputation for economic management and brought uncertainty about the future.”

Choyleva adds that “the loss of confidence is likely to prove a more intractable problem, which won’t be solved by simply lifting Covid restrictions.’’

Still, Taiwan is Exhibit A for any discussion of how maintaining alliances with the US amid China tensions has its costs. Rising ones, too, if Biden and Xi can’t soon find ways to mend fences.

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After decades of progress on limiting the buildup of nuclear weapons, Russia’s war on Ukraine has prompted renewed nuclear tensions between Russia and the United States.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his annual State of the Nation address on February 21, 2023, that Russia is “suspending” its participation in the US and Russia’s last remaining nuclear arms agreement – known as New START.

“Our relations have degraded, and that’s completely and utterly the US’s fault,” said Putin, who stopped short of entirely withdrawing Russia from the deal that aims to limit nuclear arms expansion.

In the same speech, Putin threatened to resume nuclear testing if the US does the same, claiming that the US is considering renewed nuclear testing. The US has repeatedly reaffirmed that it can modernize and certify the reliability of its nuclear weapons without resorting to testing.

A woman in Crimea watches a TV broadcast of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech on Feb. 21, 2023. Photo: AFP via Getty Images / Stringer

The US State Department quickly condemned Putin’s announcement, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that Russia’s suspension from the deal makes the world a more dangerous place.

Putin’s announcement greatly weakens the last remaining arms control agreement but does not immediately terminate it. By “suspending” rather than withdrawing from the treaty, Putin retains the possibility of reactivating the agreement – without having to renegotiate it or have the US Congress ratify it once more.

The New START is the only remaining agreement between the US and Russia limiting the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. It allows both countries to regularly, and with limited advance notice, inspect each other’s nuclear weapons arsenals.

Convincing countries to reduce their nuclear weapons stockpiles or renounce the pursuit of this ultimate weapon has always been extremely difficult.

Students at a school in Brooklyn, New York, conduct a nuclear attack drill in 1962. Photo: GraphicaArtis / Getty Images

A history of nonproliferation

The Soviet Union, US, United Kingdom, France, Israel and China had active nuclear weapons programs in the 1960s.

Countries recognized the risk of a nuclear war in the future.

Sixty-two countries initially agreed to what’s been called the “Grand Bargain” in 1967, an essential element of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. One hundred and ninety-one countries eventually signed this treaty.

The agreement prevented the spread of nuclear weapons to countries that didn’t already have them by 1967. Countries with nuclear weapons, like the US and the UK, agreed to end their nuclear arms race and work toward eventual disarmament, meaning the destruction of all nuclear weapons.

This landmark agreement laid the groundwork for agreements between the US and the Soviet Union to further reduce their nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. It also stopped other countries from developing and testing nuclear weapons until the end of the Cold War.

Israel, India and Pakistan never joined the agreement because of regional security concerns. They all now possess nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the agreement and developed nuclear weapons.

Some successes

There have been major achievements in preventing countries from gaining nuclear weapons and dramatically reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles since the Cold War.

The global nuclear stockpile has been reduced by 82% since 1986, from a peak of 70,300, with nearly all of the reductions in the US and Russia, which held the largest stockpiles at the time.

Globally there are now around 12,700 nuclear weapons, with about 90% held by Russia and the US – or between 5,000 to 6,000 weapons each.

Several other countries have nuclear weapons, and most of them have a few hundred weapons each, including the United Kingdom, France and China – though China has been building up its nuclear stockpile. Newer nuclear countries like India, Pakistan and Israel have around 100 each, while North Korea has around 20.

Starting in the late 1960s, countries agreed to more than a dozen legally binding agreements, or treaties, that limited new countries from getting nuclear weapons and prohibited nuclear weapons testing, among other measures.

But they have not reduced the number of nuclear weapons with short-range missiles. No agreements cover these weapons, which could also cause widespread destruction and deaths.

Peace protesters in Berlin call for more nuclear disarmament in 2021. Image: John MacDougall / AFP via Getty Images / The Conversation

US-Russia cooperation declines

US-Russia engagement on nuclear weapons changed when Russia forcibly annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Russia built up land missiles in Kaliningrad, an enclave of Russia in the middle of Eastern Europe, in 2014.

The US and NATO then accused Russia of violating a 1987 nuclear agreement on short- and intermediate-range land missiles. From Russia, these could travel from 311 to 3,418 miles (500 to 5,500 kilometers), hitting targets as far as London.

The US also terminated this agreement in 2019 because of reported Russian violations. Now, there are no international nuclear agreements in Europe.

The New START agreement, signed by Russia and the US, remains the one main strategic nuclear weapons agreement in place. It was to continue until at least 2026.

The US and Russia halted all inspections of each other’s nuclear weapon sites and operations in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, hundreds of notifications were still exchanged between the two states, reducing the likelihood of miscalculations and misunderstandings.

In November 2022, Russia canceled talks to resume inspections. The US considers these violations of the agreement, but not an altogether outright material breach of the treaty.

Impact of Ukraine war

Putin has repeatedly ignited concern that Russia’s setbacks during its nearly year-old war with Ukraine – as well as Western involvement in the conflict – could result in Russia’s launching a nuclear attack on Ukraine or another country in the West.

A single nuclear weapon today in a major city could immediately kill anywhere from 52,000 to several million people, depending on the weapon’s size.

The US and Russia’s arms control regime was successful in the Cold War because it included significant verification mechanisms – direct inspections of each party’s nuclear arsenal with less than 24 hours’ notice.

Russia and the US have conducted 306 inspections since New START took effect in 2011. Without New START, all inspections of nuclear bases and support facilities will end.

During nuclear talks in 1987, President Ronald Reagan translated a Russian maxim, saying, “trust, but verify,” the foundation of the nuclear arms control regime.

If the US and Russia are no longer transparent about their nuclear arsenals and developments, pressure for both countries to develop new nuclear weapons and delivery systems will increase, along with the risk of miscalculations.

US B61 nuclear bombs. Photo: Supplied

The US State Department already told Congress in January 2023 that Russia is not complying with New START. Russia has denied these accusations and accused the US of violating the agreement as well. Putin reiterated these accusations on February 21, 2023.

While Putin has not followed through on his threat of a nuclear strike, the potential for a nuclear attack has meant the US and NATO have responded to Russia’s attack on Ukraine with this lingering threat in mind.

The US and NATO members announced in January and February 2023 plans to increase their military assistance to Ukraine. This might signal a change to the US’s and NATO countries’ strategy, so far, of limiting their direct support to Ukraine and avoiding further escalation with Russia in the conflict.

Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, Professor of International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

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The US is moving to accelerate the development of autonomous drone swarm technologies, which have proved effective in the ongoing Ukraine war and in simulations showing their decisive effect in a Taiwan contingency scenario.

This month, The Debrief reported that the US Department of Defense (DOD) had launched the low-profile “Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms” (AMASS) project to develop autonomous drone swarms that can be launched from sea, air and land to overwhelm enemy air defenses.

The report says that AMASS aims to develop the capability to launch and command thousands of autonomous drones, working together to destroy an enemy’s defenses including air defenses, artillery pieces, missile launchers and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms.

The Debrief notes that while details of the project are highly classified, pre-solicitation documents show that autonomous drone swarms are likely to focus on deterring or defeating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

“The DARPA AMASS program is exploring the use of swarms-of-swarms to conduct military operations in highly contested environments” with “low-cost swarms with diverse sensors and kinetic and non-kinetic effectors would primarily be pre-positioned forward and launched remotely, providing rapid response and adaptability to overcome the adversary’s time-distance-mass advantage,” said a DARPA spokesperson quoted by The Debrief.

The report notes that US$78 million has been allocated for the AMASS program, with the award expected to go to a single private contractor.

In May 2022, Asia Times reported on the potential decisive effects of drone swarms during a Taiwan Strait crisis. Simulations done by the RAND Corporation think-tank in 2020 showed that drone swarms linked by a laser “mesh” data-sharing network were decisive in ensuring a US victory in defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.

The US drone swarms formed a decoy screen for manned aircraft such as the F-22 and F-35, extending the latter’s sensor ranges through data-sharing and enabling them to maintain electronic silence upon approaching their targets.

The drone swarms also drastically increased the situational awareness and target acquisition capabilities of manned platforms while flooding enemy radar scopes with multiple targets, forcing the latter to expend limited missiles and ammunition and reveal their positions for manned platforms and loitering munitions to move in for the kill.

Machine learning and AI also allow drone swarms to look at targets from multiple angles, cross-check various targeting data streams and suggest the best way to attack.

Recent experience from the ongoing Ukraine war has shown the potential effectiveness of drone swarms in large-scale conventional wars. In a January article for the Royal United Services Institute, Uzi Rubin notes that Iran’s Shahed 131/136 has been a game-changing precision weapon that has severely threatened Western air defense systems deployed to Ukraine.

Iran’s Shahed-136 drone has been reconfigured by Russia into a more efficient weapon. Image: Iranian Ministry of Defense

Rubin notes that the Shahed’s simplicity, uncanny accuracy, low cost and long range make it unique among strategic standoff weapons. In practice, he mentions that the Shahed is operated in swarms and shows pinpoint accuracy in destroying stationary tanks, command vehicles and large installations.

Shahed’s trump card, Rubin notes, is that it is very low cost compared to cruise and ballistic missiles, meaning it can be mass-produced cheaply and deployed massively to overwhelm enemy air defenses.  

It should be noted, however, that the 2020 Rand simulation resulted in a Pyrrhic victory for US and allied forces vis-à-vis China. Previous simulations resulted in the same Pyrrhic scenario, with drone swarms unlikely to prevent such an outcome.

Asia Times reported this January that the US might likely repel a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but both sides will incur massive losses. In addition, a report released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank about a simulated Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026 shows that defending Taiwan resulted in massive losses for the US, Japan, Taiwan and China.

In the scenario, the US and Japan lost 449 combat aircraft and 43 ships, including two aircraft carriers, and the US lost 6,960 personnel, with 3,200 killed in action. Taiwan also sustained staggering losses in the simulation, losing half of its air force, 22 ships and 3,500 ground troops with a third killed in action.

The simulation’s figures were likewise bleak for China with a loss of 138 ships, 155 combat aircraft and 52,000 ground troops, with 7,000 casualties and a third of that number killed in action, 15,000 soldiers lost at sea with half that number assumed dead and 30,000 prisoners of war from landing force survivors in Taiwan.

Fast-evolving countermeasures against drone swarms may limit their effectiveness in future conflicts. For example, in an August 2022 article in Small Wars Journal, Ryan Bridley and Scott Pastor mention several methods to counter drone swarms including traditional machine guns and missiles, microwave weapons, laser weapons, signal jamming, underground concealment of critical facilities and deploying defensive drone swarms.

However, Bridley and Scott note that these proposed counter-swarm measures have various drawbacks. They note that machine guns have a very limited range and arcs of fire, and their accuracy degrades in bad visibility conditions.

Counter-swarm measures on the drawing table. Image: Facebook

At the same time, missiles are ineffective against very low-flying drones. They also mention that the high cost of directed energy weapons takes them out of developing countries’ reach while adverse weather conditions can affect the effectiveness of lasers.

Drones can also be built with reflective coatings to mitigate laser heat damage.

Bridley and Scott say that while signal jamming can be effective against low-quality drones, they can still be programmed with inertial navigation technology if signal jamming is detected and that high-end drones have various anti-jamming features.

They also note that while concealing sensitive targets underground covers and shields them from drone swarm attacks, underground concealment is costly and time-consuming. Last, they mention that defensive drone swarms are at risk of friendly fire from other drones and require support from other defensive systems to be effective.

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We humans are empathic by nature – it’s a fundamental part of how we build relationships with one another. Most people subconsciously mirror the feelings of those around them and try to think the way they must be thinking. When this goes wrong, it can have some pretty alarming effects; but even outside of these extreme cases, you might find yourself taking on board feelings that you’d rather not have. Ever notice your shoulders tensing or your jaw clenching when you’re around people who are panicking?

Turns out, stress is contagious.

Feeling stressed?

Stress is almost a fact of modern life. We know that it’s not good for us, with studies reporting its effects on everything from brain development to the immune system. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health links chronic stress to a number of serious health concerns, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Science is also not short of recommendations on how to relieve stress – but, no matter how much yoga and meditation you do, there is one source of anxiety and tension that you might not be able to avoid: other people.

Is stress really contagious?

The short answer is, yes.

The idea that stress can rub off on those around us is not new. In a recent review published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, authors Jonas P. Nitschke and Jennifer A. Bartz took a systematic look at the previous scientific literature on the topic and found that there is indeed “abundant evidence for stress contagion – the 'spillover' of stress from a stressed target to an unstressed perceiver.”

In other words, you might have been feeling perfectly zen about that big work project, but spending time with your stressed-out colleague has left you feeling just as frazzled as they are. It’s not quite as simple as that, and the authors raise a number of areas that require further study, such as whether there is a difference between chronic and acute stress. However, it’s definitely true that the stress of those around us can be catching.

Amongst the many studies that Nitschke and Bartz included in their exhaustive analysis were several that have tried to find experimental evidence for the stress contagion.

In one 2017 study, electrocardiogram data was collected from 63 subjects as they watched videos of people speaking. The video recordings were divided into three categories, with the speakers in a state of no stress, stress, or post-stress. The results showed that when the observers were viewing someone in obvious distress, their own heart rates actually decreased.

This might sound counterintuitive – we normally associate stress with a rapid heart rate – but the researchers do have an explanation: “cardiac deceleration may be indicative of a ‘freezing’ stress response. Cardiac deceleration responses generally occur in situations when no behavioral response is necessary or during periods of information collection.”

So, the observers were sensing and taking on board the stress of the people in the video, but because the person was only in a video, and the observers weren’t required to take any action to help them, this manifested as a decrease in heart rate.

This is important evidence to support the idea of stress as a contagion, but the authors again caution that more research is needed and that this effect might be mediated “in a more complex way than previously recognized.” They also point out another important piece of the puzzle that is missing – it’s not yet clear whether second-hand stress has the same negative health consequences as first-hand stress.

That leads us nicely to our next point: spreading your stress around might not be such a bad thing after all.

It’s not all bad

Despite what you may think, there are actually some benefits to sharing stress with those around us. Nitschke and Bartz discuss how sharing a stressful experience can lead to a strengthening of some relationships: “stress has the power to draw individuals closer together”.

Not only that, but people who are more readily affected by other people’s stress might also be more affected by their positive emotions too. “It’s the foundation for empathy, and without emotional contagion, it would be harder to understand what others are experiencing,” said lead author of the 2017 study Stephanie Dimitroff, in an interview with Vogue. “And if you’re prone to stress contagion, you’re likely to catch all emotions from others – including happiness.”

Evolutionarily, too, it’s been useful for humans to have a knack for sensing the feelings of their compatriots. Also speaking to Vogue, Professor Tony Buchanan of St Louis University explained that “in animals who live in groups, such as humans, your chances of survival are greater if you pay attention to others’ stress, as a warning sign of danger, and mobilize internal resources to get your muscles working to flee that situation.”

It's a trait that’s not exclusive to primates. Studies have shown similar stress-sharing between mice, and there’s evidence to suggest that our stress could even be rubbing off on our canine companions.

However, even if you find yourself getting swept up in the tension of others, you do still have some control over how you react. Speaking to LiveScience, Professor Joe Herbert of the University of Cambridge emphasized that it’s possible to learn to avoid the stress contagion: “High empathy will increase the awareness of another’s emotion. How this affects the onlooker will depend on circumstance. […] Good leaders and even parents can learn to not catch the stress of others, and instead simply deal with the situation at hand.”

Unanswered questions

So, we can safely conclude that stress can be infectious – but precisely how this effect is mediated, and how significant it truly is for our own well-being, are just some of the facets that require further study.

The fact is, while the idea of “catching” feelings from other people makes for a snappy headline, there’s still a minefield of unanswered questions to explore. It’s vital that scientists do explore them, to enrich our understanding of what it means to coexist as humans in our modern, stressful world.

"Not only is stress an inescapable fact of existence in general," conclude Nitschke and Bartz, "but it is, arguably, intimately tied to the phenomenon of empathy and social relations more broadly.”

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A 2,000-year-old sarcophagus, lead-lined and dating back to the Roman era, has been discovered by archaeologists working in the Gaza strip. Located just 500 meters (0.3 miles) from the sea along the Northern Gaza coast, the sarcophagus is part of a large Roman necropolis that was discovered only last year.

The excavation project is being supervised by Première Urgence Internationale, a French humanitarian organization that supports cultural heritage preservation projects in Gaza under a program called INTIQAL, and funded by the British Council, Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities' director of excavation and museums Jehad Yasin told CNN.

So far, around 90 individual and collective graves have been found at the ancient 3,500-square-meter (37,673-square-foot) site – but experts believe this one is special, likely belonging to a prominent individual. 

That theory is based on the location of the burial, Yasin explained – but perhaps strengthening this conclusion is the fact that in Roman times, as through later centuries, lead coffins were considered a “fancy and expensive” way to be buried, Laura Burnett, from the UK’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, told the BBC in 2017.

For now, though, we’ll have to wait to see who was interred in such a remarkable fashion, with a statement from the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities confirming that the sarcophagus had not yet been opened, according to Reuters. Instead, the coffin has been put in a protective wooden container, ready for further study by local and international experts.

According to Yasin, the analysis of the discovery, which will include bone identification, will likely take around two months.

Despite the turmoil that is near-synonymous with the region, the state of the sarcophagus was “exceptional,” according to a press release from the Ministry. This is thanks to the fact that it remained sealed and closed throughout its 2,000 years underground – a timeframe that is evidenced by the clay jars and other artifacts found in the cemetery, Ministry spokesman Tareq Al-Af told Reuters.

While the necropolis itself seems to have been something of a serendipitous discovery – it was originally found in 2022 by a group of construction workers on a housing project – its existence is far from surprising. As an important trading spot for many civilizations throughout history, Gaza is so full of ancient relics that people almost literally trip over them: last year alone saw both part of a 4,500-year-old statue of a Canaanite goddess discovered in a farmer’s field, and an ornate Byzantine mosaic discovered by accident while trying to plant a tree.

No wonder, then, that the team behind the new discovery say they expect to find much more from the necropolis. After all, so far only ten burials have been opened for excavation – and according to Yasin, there are likely more sarcophagi waiting to be uncovered.

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A giant metal mystery orb recently washed up on the shore of Enshu Beach in Hamamatsu, Japan. The buoy-like object is 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) wide and is being described as an “iron ball” in the press, though exactly what it is remains a mystery at time of writing.

Authorities were first made aware of the orb’s arrival after a resident called it in on Tuesday, and swiftly set about cordoning off a 200-meter (656-foot) radius among fears that whatever it was might explode. Footage shared online shows investigators in specialist suits taking a closer look at the enormous object, which was marked as safe after X-rays revealed there was nothing in its hollow core. Restrictions on Enshu Beach were lifted the same day, but the orb’s identity is still up for debate.

Twitter has thrown up suggestions ranging from exciting things like unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and Dragon Balls to the more mundane, including spy balloons and mooring buoys. The latter is arguably the most likely as these metallic objects can break free from the cables that bind them at sea, and eventually beach when they meet the shoreline. 

When it comes to unidentified flotsam, the answer is rarely worthy of the silver screen, though strange and valuable treasures do sometimes wash ashore (would you know if you were looking at precious ambergris?).

Unidentified objects are big in the press in 2023, as just two months into the year we’ve seen a slew of news relating to off-course weather balloons and UFOs all receiving the “shoot down” treatment. Everywhere from Romania to China and the US has been reporting the arrival of mysterious objects, though mostly they’ve turned out to be weather balloons. The spike in reports is probably less to do with their increased usage and more to do with the news focusing everyone’s attention, but who among us can resist the allure of a good Giant Mysterious Thing? 

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Chinese researchers claim to have significantly boosted the efficiency of boron air-breathing engines in a massive breakthrough for hypersonic missiles, according to the state-sponsored South China Morning Post. The new advancements resulted in 79 percent fuel efficiency in ground simulations, giving engines capable of pushing Mach 6 much further range and increasing the viability of the boron scramjet design. 

Scramjets work by pushing the vehicle to supersonic speeds and then using those speeds to compress incoming air before combustion, with this design using a boron powder as fuel to mix with the air. However, while supersonic air mixing with fuel can produce extreme speeds, it doesn’t make for particularly high efficiency and the high speeds pose a significant challenge in getting the air mixed, ignited, and burned within milliseconds.  

The new technology is proposed by Ma Likun, an associate professor at the National University of Defence Technology in Changsha, and their team of military researchers and uses extra nozzles in the engine to slow the flow of air down to subsonic speeds before combustion, allowing more time for the fuel mixing to take place and improving efficiency. The benefit of the new design is that once in flight, the engine was able to switch modes to the more efficient option, granting significantly improved range. 

“A solid scramjet engine has numerous advantages, such as simple structure, high volume specific impulse, high flame stability and the potential to work in a wide speed range,” write the authors of the paper, which was published in the Journal of Solid Rocket Technology, according to the SCMP. 

While the researchers have not been able to test the engine in actual hypersonic flight conditions (which is remarkably hard to do), various metrics support their claims. The temperature within the engine was recorded at 3,000°C (5,432°F), which is around 50 percent higher than a standard scramjet engine, supporting the fact that more fuel was combusting within the chamber.  

Once up to speed, the engineers could switch the engine into this ramjet mode (using shockwaves to decelerate the air to subsonic speeds) to cruise, before switching it back to scramjet (air remains supersonic) at will. 

The engine was able to maintain this efficiency while traveling at a blistering six times the speed of sound, which, along with the mid-air maneuverability of hypersonic missiles, makes them almost impossible to detect or intercept. 

It did not come without weaknesses, however. Hypersonic engines are notoriously delicate, and the constant shockwaves began to damage the nozzles. These posed new engineering challenges and would require consistent upkeep if they were to be reused. 

The paper was published in the Journal of Solid Rocket Technology, according to the SCMP.

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Several studies have confirmed that symptoms can persist in people with long COVID for more than a year after infection. And long COVID can occur regardless of whether or not people were very sick when they caught the virus.

Meanwhile, there is convincing evidence of organ impairment in people who were hospitalised with COVID. But what about organ damage in people who didn’t necessarily need to be admitted to hospital with the virus, but developed long COVID?

In a new study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, my colleagues and I looked at organ damage in long COVID patients, most of whom were not severely affected when they had COVID initially. We identified organ damage in 59% of participants a year after their initial symptoms.

Filling a knowledge gap

We were a week into the first UK lockdown in late March 2020. In patients who became seriously unwell and were hospitalised with COVID, risks of dysfunction in the heart and other organs were becoming clear to clinicians and scientists.

The term “long COVID”, now used to describe post-COVID symptoms persisting for more than 12 weeks, had not yet been coined. The effects of a COVID infection in people who weren’t hospitalised were not characterised, but were assumed to be negligible.

An Oxford-based company specialising in organ-specific imaging asked me to collaborate on a follow-up study of people in the community after COVID, presenting an opportunity to address this knowledge gap.

During 2020 and 2021, we documented symptoms and conducted a 40-minute multi-organ MRI scan in 536 people with long COVID, six months after their initial infection, focusing on the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and pancreas.

Some 13% were hospitalised when they were first diagnosed with COVID, and only 2% had received one or more COVID vaccinations, reflecting the situation in the early stage of the pandemic.

From this first set of scans, we found 331 participants (62%) had organ damage. Impairment of the liver, pancreas, heart and kidneys were most common (affecting 29%, 20%, 19% and 15% of participants respectively). These 331 participants were followed up six months later with a further MRI scan.

We found that three in five of the original study participants (59%) had impairment in at least one organ a year after infection, while just over one in four (27%) had impairment in two or more organs. So, for the vast majority of participants who had organ damage at six months, it was sustained until at least 12 months.

While in some cases participants with organ damage were no longer experiencing symptoms, organ impairment was associated with a higher likelihood of persistent symptoms and reduced function at 12 months.

Long COVID affects many millions of people around the world. Image credit: panitanphoto/Shutterstock.com

Future research should have four priorities

Our study has some limitations, which should guide future research.

First, the vast majority of participants in our study caught COVID before vaccines were available. So we need to see if the same degree of organ impairment occurs in the current context where most people have had at least one COVID vaccine. It will also be important to study people who have been infected with more recent COVID variants.

Further, longer follow-up of people with long COVID will show how much of the organ impairment eventually improves, and could help us understand how organ damage in this context affects quality of life and longer-term health.

Second, we compared our participants with a healthy control group at the first scan, but not at the follow-up scan. Future studies should compare organ function over time in long COVID patients with different control groups. Useful comparison groups could include people with risk factors (such as diabetes and obesity) but not long COVID, and people who had COVID but did not develop long COVID.

Third, we were not able to identify clear subtypes of symptoms associated with impairment of a particular organ, or organs. That is, we weren’t able to link damage to a specific organ to specific symptoms.

There needs to be a concerted effort to better define long COVID subtypes by symptoms, blood investigations or imaging. For example, inflammation and abnormal blood clotting have been hypothesised to be major mechanisms behind long COVID, but are either of these associated with changes in specific organs? If we can better understand the underlying mechanisms behind long COVID, this will increase the chances of effective treatments.

Fourth, this was not a study at population level. The impact of long COVID on quality of life and time off work is a major concern for individuals, health systems and economies, and should inform further consideration of the wider costs of organ impairment in long COVID.

In an ongoing study, STIMULATE-ICP, we are considering all these aspects, including assessing whether the multi-organ MRI scan could improve care for long COVID patients.

Further research into organ impairment with long COVID will be important. But given the number of people living with long COVID, even if a smaller proportion have organ impairment than shown in our study, this is a problem on a large scale.

To reduce the risk of long COVID and any associated organ damage, COVID infection and reinfection are worth avoiding as much as possible.

Amitava Banerjee, Professor of Clinical Data Science and Honorary Consultant Cardiologist, UCL

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

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Softgrid Computers’ software is equipped with a notification system that kicks in the moment an employee’s shift is over, warning them that “the office system will shut down in 10 mins” and asking them to “please go home”.

The measure comes amid an increased focus on and research into the adverse effect of long working hours on the health and relationships of employees across the world.

The World Health Organisation, for example, warned in 2021 that working 55 or more hours a week can lead to a 35 per cent higher risk of stroke, and a 17 per cent higher risk of dying from heart disease.

“The thought behind this is providing employees a good work-life balance so that they can spend time with their families and loved ones,” Chief Executive Ajay Golani told Reuters partner ANI.

The pop-up created a social media buzz recently when an employee, Ms Tanvi Khandelwal, shared a picture of the warning on a company desktop.

“They put this special reminder, which locks my desktop after business hours and issues a warning,” Ms Khandelwal shared on LinkedIn a week ago. Her post has since received nearly 400,000 likes. “NO MORE CALLS AND MAILS OUTSIDE OF BUSINESS HOURS!! Isn’t this fantastic?”

Ms Kritika Dubey, one of 40 people employed at the company, told ANI that the pop-up helped her leave on time and fulfil other responsibilities at home.

REUTERS

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Unvaccinated more likely to have heart attack, stroke after COVID, study finds

A new kind of “edgeless” engineered tissue can fit any irregular shape, paving the way for hand and face grafts that look and move better.

Alberto Pappalardo was nervous the morning before the transplant. He’d spent the previous month nurturing a cluster of skin cells until they reached their final form: a pinkish-white tissue in the shape of a mouse’s hindlimb that could be slipped onto the animal like a pant leg. If all went according to plan, the mouse’s surrounding skin would accept the lab-grown stuff as its own.

In the end, it took less than 30 seconds to position the new skin, and under 10 minutes to complete the whole procedure. “It was a perfect fit,” recalls Pappalardo, a medical doctor and postdoc focusing on dermatology and tissue engineering at Columbia University Medical Center. That’s a big deal, because it could help solve a persistent challenge in treating burns and other large wounds: how to cover irregular shapes with real, functional skin.

Pappalardo’s lab-grown material is known as a “skin construct,” meaning it’s a sheet of human cells which can be implanted on a wound that’s too large for a graft from another body part. The craft of growing skin constructs hasn’t changed much in 40 years; they are usually just flat rectangular or circular patches. That’s a problem, says Hasan Erbil Abaci, an assistant professor, bioengineer, and Pappalardo’s adviser, because these shapes don’t match those of body parts like fingers and faces. Putting two-dimensional patches on three-dimensional contours requires more patches—so more sutures and longer surgery. It looks worse aesthetically, and it performs worse mechanically. “So what if we mimic this geometry?” Abaci thought.

Writing in Science Advances on January 27, the team described their process for making a three-dimensional graft that they call “edgeless,” meaning it’s shaped to fit a body part and has no seams. They began by 3D-printing a scaffold that let skin cells grow in the desired shape. Pappalardo seeded human cells in layers around the scaffold, then waited for those cells to build a dense network of structural molecules. This engineered skin is more true to form and function than any before it, and when they tested it on the mouse it integrated as if it was native skin.

“Not only will it go on more efficiently and take better, but it will work better,” says Randolph Sherman, director of plastic surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.

Photograph: Alberto Pappalardo/Abaci Lab

Sherman previously treated patients with severe burns for the nonprofit Operation Smile. Even if they healed following traditional skin grafts, they might lose function. Some couldn’t move their necks much, or open and close their eyes or mouths. Sherman is “very optimistic” that this new approach will translate to people and improve his field. He says it could be useful for treating anything from diabetic ulcers and pressure sores to serious dog bites and burns. “Better efficiency, better take, better function, and probably much better aesthetics,” he says. “Four potential significant game changers.”

Skin is a hard organ to bioengineer, because it’s made up of multiple types of cells, forms complex shapes, and varies in mechanical properties from place to place—the skin on your back has a different form and function than that on your face or hands. “It's not like Saran Wrap around your body. It really is a functioning organ that does a lot of things,” Sherman says. Skin regulates body temperature. Skin conserves hydration. Nerve endings in skin form our interface with the world, feeling hot, cold, sharp, dull.

Over the past decade, bioengineers have made big strides toward capturing that complexity in lab-grown tissues. They’ve cultured cells with the precursors necessary for hair follicles and blood vessels, for instance. But Abaci couldn’t let go of what he felt was a glaring oversight: skin’s geometry. Skin envelopes every contour of our bodies, and Abaci figured that this geometry helps provide its structural integrity. A flat sheet couldn’t do it. “As an engineer, I was bothered by this,” he says.

His team began their experiment by growing skin in a simple cylindrical shape. They used a 3D scan or digital model to print a permeable plastic scaffold for cells of two layers of skin, the inner dermis and outer epidermis. Pappalardo cast fibroblasts (cells from the dermis) with collagen around the scaffold. After that layer matured for two weeks, he seeded keratinocytes, cells found in the epidermis. The combination then sat for a week exposed to air on one side and fluid on the other—just like our skin. And it worked. “We thought, if we can make a cylinder, we can make any shape,” says Abaci.

Photograph: Alberto Pappalardo/Abaci Lab

The breakthrough launched a debate: What do we make now? One faction wanted to grow a face, but the faction that wanted to try a hand won. They imagined a five-fingered structure that could be snipped open at the wrist, slid on like a glove, then sutured. “You would only have to apply bandages around the wrist area—and that would be the surgery,” Abaci says.

So the lab printed a five-fingered scaffold about the size of a sugar packet, prepared the cells as they had before, and then tested how well the “edgeless” construct held up compared to traditional grafts. In a mechanical strain test, edgeless constructs beat flat patches by up to 400 percent. Microscope images revealed a healthy, more normal extracellular matrix—the network of proteins and molecules that provide structure to tissue. This matrix had more molecules, like hyaluronic acid, and a more realistic layout of cells. Abaci was delighted, yet surprised: “It was really fascinating to see how the cells really respond to just the change in the geometry. Nothing else.” He thinks this method is better at creating a more normal skin substitute because it lets the cells grow in a natural, enclosed way.

But could a skin graft like this actually take? Pappalardo’s mouse demonstration—which he ultimately did 11 times—suggests so. It wasn’t possible to do the same surgery with flat grafts; he elected to attempt the mouse’s hindlimb because the area’s geometry is so complex. Four weeks later, the skin replacement became fully integrated on the mouse’s surrounding skin.

“The way they got this to work was pretty exciting,” says Adam Feinberg, a biomedical engineer at Carnegie Mellon. “We're on a path to these technologies being more broadly available. Ultimately, in another decade or so, it's going to really change how we're able to repair the human body after injury or disease.”

He’s particularly excited by how they could vascularize the skin, helping it grow blood vessels. That could be a huge boon to people with diabetic ulcers. “Vascularization is what keeps tissue alive,” says Feinberg, and one reason people get diabetic ulcers in the first place is that their tissue gets poor blood circulation. “If [engineers] could create a better vascular quality to the tissue to start with, they may have more success” with treating those patients, he says.

Sashank Reddy, a plastic surgeon and tissue engineer at Johns Hopkins University, points out that the team can also grow these structures from very small biopsies, rather than having to transplant a large quantity of tissue from somewhere else on the patient’s body. “Say I had to resurface someone's entire forearm—that's a lot of skin that I have to borrow elsewhere from their body, from their back or their thigh,” Reddy says. Removing that tissue creates a flaw at the “donor site” it was taken from. “The other beauty of this approach is not just the geometry, but that it spares that donor site defect,” he continues.

And Sherman notes that a transplant that can be done in an hour is a huge improvement over today’s graft operations, which can take between 4 and 11 hours, requiring extensive anesthesia for a vulnerable patient. “It could be a profound step forward,” Sherman says.

Still, the new constructs will have to clear several hurdles—like clinical trials—before surgeons can use it, Reddy says. Not many companies have attempted to implant engineered tissue onto patients. Last year, one called 3DBio transplanted a human ear printed from cells.

And Reddy notes that this tissue is missing several components of real skin, like hair follicles and sweat glands. “People can think of these as ‘nice to haves,’ but they're really quite critical in anchoring the skin,” he says. It’s crucial to incorporate skin pigments too, to match skin tone. But he’s optimistic that these add-ons are achievable, and he notes that surgical demos in mice translate more easily to humans than drug trials performed on mice do. “There's always surprises in biology, but it's less of a leap to say that that will reproduce,” he says. “It's more of an engineering issue than a fundamental discovery issue.”

Abaci sees potential to use this engineered skin for testing drugs and cosmetics, and for studying the fundamental biology of skin. But the main draw for him is creating transplants—ideally ones that can go on as a single wearable piece and might be engineered with the help of other research groups that specialize in muscle, cartilage, or fat.

In the meantime, his group has been working on making larger constructs, like an adult male hand. (They think it would only take a 4-millimeter biopsy to get enough tissue to grow the 45 million fibroblasts and 18 million keratinocytes needed for a culture that size.) They also plan to do away with the scaffold and start printing actual tissue. That would not only cut out some steps, but would give them more control over the skin’s thickness and functionality in different spots.

Tissue engineers are confident that new approaches like this one will make it to the clinic. “It's really becoming a question of when will this be available,” says Feinberg, “and not an if.”

This Lab-Grown Skin Could Revolutionize Transplants

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Texas is planning to make a huge public investment in space

Philosophers have grappled with the nature of evil for thousands of years, but these days, immorality can feel like a solved problem. Take the case of Bryan Kohberger, the prime suspect in a quadruple homicide near the University of Idaho whose arrest ignited rampant media speculation about the psyche of a killer, as if properly diagnosing his personality disorder could mitigate the damage already done. His “psychopathic stare” made headlines in UK tabloids, while The New York Times dissected Kohberger’s self-described feelings of remorselessness as an adolescent. Dr. Drew brought on a former FBI agent to discuss Kohberger in the context of the “dark triad”: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. 

Americans understandably want help making sense of the otherwise senseless deaths that populate the front pages of local papers and constitute Netflix’s extensive true-crime back catalog. But attempts to characterize evil remain scientifically dubious, say criminologist Jarkko Jalava and psychologist Stephanie Griffiths, coauthors of The Myth of the Born Criminal. When it comes to crime, psychologists frequently “get really sloppy,” Jalava says, adding, “we’re functioning on this folkloric level.”

The perpetrator of the University of Idaho murders should be condemned, but getting inside the mind of a killer is easier said than done. Prediction and prevention—the supposed end goal of criminal profiling—is even harder. And the proliferation of quasi-scientific terms for jerks, assholes, and even killers has far-reaching consequences. 

The medicalization of evil—that is, the physician-led diagnosis and management of diseases like “moral insanity” and “criminal psychosis”—stretches back to the early 19th century. Where clerics once drew the line between good and evil, psychiatrists began to take people who engaged in impulsive, self-defeating, or otherwise un-Christian acts into their care. 

Early on,  these doctors-cum-criminal-profilers explained bad apples through theories such as atavism. Proponents believed that, over time, bad breeding led to degeneration of the gene pool, and the concentration of poverty, criminality, and other undesirable traits in certain ethnic groups or social classes. While the theory of degeneration was slowly replaced by a strikingly similar notion of “psychopathy” (literally “soul sickness”), many of the concerns remained the same: deviants who showed a lack of remorse or guilt, exhibited sexual promiscuity, and developed a lengthy rap sheet, perhaps from a young age.

New variations on this theme pop up all the time. The “dark triad,” coined in 2002 by Canadian psychologists Delroy Paulhaus and Kevin Williams, aims to describe “offensive but non-pathological personalities,” including CEOs, politicians, and bad boyfriends. There are also labels like antisocial personality disorder, a diagnosis given to individuals with severe impulsivity, aggression, and criminal behaviors—in other words, a DSM-approved twist on the old “psychopathic” standard.

At first glance, these attempts at categorization appear to be trending positive. For one thing, researchers are slowly cleaving obvious wrongdoing from the more inadvertent harms of mental illness. Similarly, it’s a relief to be able to use the dark triad to acknowledge just how commonplace selfishness really is. 

But the shadow of degeneracy still looms large. In addition to further medicalizing everyday discourse (“jerks,” Jalava and Griffiths point out, have become “psychopaths,” with all the attendant baggage), these models uphold the dubious belief that every human has an immutable personality—and that those personalities can be easily classified as good or bad. In reality, recent research shows that many people change—and, in some cases, change dramatically—over the course of their lifespan. At the same, many researchers remain critical of the historic characterization of personality disorders, in part because it is stigmatizing and can obfuscate trauma, and even then it doesn’t lead to clear directions for treatment.

Many popular ideas about evildoers seem to stem from tabloid news, rather than scientific evidence. For example, Jalava and Griffiths have shown that many experiments that make claims of a genetic or neurobiological basis have not been replicated, and those that have been replicated have produced contradictory results. Soon, they will publish a new review detailing similar problems in studies of psychopathy and fMRI brain imaging. Perhaps most importantly, the husband-wife duo have documented how meta-analyses of psychopathy research, ostensibly the gold standard in scientific research, often ignore published results with null findings. 

Even if researchers working on the problem of evil content themselves with the shortcomings of the existing scientific literature on psychopathy, dark triad, and the like, a new issue arises: People don’t just want to describe existing traits. They want to use these scales to predict future behavior. 

In the criminal system, the results of assessments like the Hare Psychopathy Checklist are used to assess an individual’s risk of recidivism, and therefore the possibility or terms of parole. Paulhaus, the creator of the Dark Triad Personality Test, wants prospective employers, including police and the US military, to screen prospective candidates with his scale—and not always for the reasons you’d imagine. “It makes a big difference whether you diagnose someone as a Machiavellian or a sadist or a narcissist,” Paulhaus says. “There may be occasions where that's what you’re looking for.” At the same time, it’s easy to imagine a world in which individuals are screened for psychopathy and, if their score is high enough, closely monitored for potential crimes.

But Jalava and Griffiths insist that meaningful prediction isn’t possible with existing measures, either. If you remove questions on psychopathy evaluations that ask about previous criminal activity, these scales fail to anticipate what the test-taker does next. It’s an unsexy finding: “Past behavior can predict future behavior” is never going to be an A1 headline. But unlike other, more elaborate theories of pathological personalities, this at least is real. 

The desire for strong language to match heinous acts is only natural. Unfortunately, sadistic bosses, everyday assholes, and even murderers are still human—shaped by and shaping the world. Condemning people as the subhuman (or, paradoxically, superhuman) embodiment of evil isn’t based on “the characteristics of the individual in front of us,” Griffith says, “but our response to them.” Such illusory categories make real understanding almost impossible.

In the context of evil, pursuing understanding is itself controversial. For decades, people have rightly criticized the media for the breathless attention it pays to killers—on the assumption that it feeds the psychopath’s or narcissist’s desire for attention, and may in turn inspire copycats. But there’s a difference between a news consumer’s insatiable desire for serial-killer content, and the responsibility we all have to face the harm in our society—and, perhaps, the capacity for harm in ourselves.

For example, many true-crime aficionados will cite data showing that something like one-third of serial killers (many of whom are presumed to be psychopaths) experienced physical abuse, one-fourth experienced sexual abuse, and half experienced psychological abuse as children. But these statistics don’t explain much at all about these “evil” adults, more than half of whom weren’t abused. Rather, they raise a more interesting question: Why are so many ostensibly non-psychopathic American parents abusive of their children? 

This reformulation isn’t an excuse or an absolution; adults can, by and large, be considered responsible for their own actions. But it makes clear that “evil” doesn’t exist neatly in an individual in the way inherently judgemental labels like “psychopath” might imply. It’s not simply that psychopaths aren’t born but made, either. It’s that, if psychopaths exist at all, the same forces that shape them are at work on the rest of us, likely with similar, if more subtle consequences. 

Flipping cruelty on its head also opens avenues for new solutions. We know, for example, that poverty is the number one cause of child abuse. One might reasonably conclude that the money devoted to studying dark traits might better be used for a universal basic income. Similarly, the notion that past behavior can, in meaningful ways, suggest future behavior is a helpful starting point. For example, if the only part of a psychopathy test that can predict crime are questions about past criminality, we should be able to ditch the armchair psychoanalysis and focus on documented, real-world behavior. Even then, because people can and do change, these rules cannot be hard and fast, and context and compassion will remain essential.

It’s still possible to divest even further from useless labels, by focusing on the idiosyncrasies of troubled—or, more precisely, troubling—individuals, as well as the specific context in which they emerged. Despite all of their scholarship, Jalava and Griffiths say they don’t have a silver bullet for defeating, let alone replacing, the myth of the born criminal. Rather, they advocate for a descriptive (rather than the standard normative) approach. Understanding how a certain person arrived at a certain point in time can’t undo the hurt they’ve caused, but it might help them to chart a new path—perhaps even one that deviates from their dark “personality.”

The Myth of the Psychopathic Personality Refuses to Die

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Over 60 firms in Britain took part in the six-month experiment allowing almost 3,000 employees to work one day less per week while retaining the same salary.

Conducted between last June and December, it was organized by non-profit group 4 Day Week Global alongside the think tank Autonomy, the University of Cambridge and Boston College in the United States.

It has been described as the world's biggest trial of a four-day working week.

The study found more than nine out of ten firms will continue with the shortened working week or plan to do so, organizers said in a statement.

Just four percent will not extend it.

"Results are largely steady across workplaces of varying sizes, demonstrating this is an innovation which works for many types of organizations," said lead researcher and Boston College professor Juliet Schor.

Productivity did not suffer from the lighter working weeks, with company revenue rising 1.4 percent on average over the trial.

Revenue jumped 35 percent on average, when compared with similar periods from previous years.

The study also found that hiring increased and absenteeism dropped—while the number of staff leaving fell sharply during the trial.

In addition, researchers concluded that the overall health and well-being of employees had improved.

"Significant" increases were observed in physical and mental health, time spent exercising, and overall life and job satisfaction.

Rates of stress, burnout and fatigue all fell, while problems with sleep declined, according to the statement.

'Really positive'

"In terms of employees, their mental health improved, they got better sleep, they got less burnt out," Cambridge University's Professor Brendan Burchell told AFP.

"But at the same time, the companies reported that if there were changes in their profits or their performance, if anything they were more likely to go up rather than down.

"And we got lots of very happy people—people really enjoyed it; they found it such a reward to have three day weekends instead of two day weekends."

UK environmental consultancy Tyler Grange was among 18 firms to adopt permanently the four-day week after taking part.

"My experience has only been really, really positive—you can see it in people day-to-day at work, that they're more energized at work," Tyler Grange client director Nathan Jenkinson told AFP.

Employees "come into work at the start of the week on a Monday, having had three days rest, and they're feeling much more positive about work and got a lot more energy".

Tyler Grange reported that turnover increased slightly despite the reduced hours.

In recent years, studies into the four-day working week have spread globally as employers explore post-pandemic flexibility, including the concept of a hybrid workplace that enables more working from home.

Experiments on the shortened week have taken place across Europe, the United States and Canada, as well as in Australia and New Zealand.

However, asked if the UK government might adopt the trial as national policy, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's spokesman sounded a cautious note, saying there were "no plans for that".

© 2023 AFP

Source

A new analysis of Earth's innards suggests the presence of an inner core within the inner core – a dense ball of iron at the very center of our planet.

This could reveal some previously unknown details about the history of Earth's formation and evolution, suggesting a significant global event early in our planet's history.

Earth's interior structure consists of a series of concentric layers, from the crust to the core. At the very center, with a radius of about 1,227 kilometers (762 miles) is the inner core – the densest part of our planet, a solid ball mostly composed of iron and nickel, comprising less than 1 percent of Earth's volume.

This inner core is like a time capsule of Earth's history.

As the inner core grows, the solidification process releases heat and light that drives convection in the outer liquid core – the engine that powers the dynamo that converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy and maintains Earth's global magnetic field. That magnetic field is thought to keep harmful radiation out, and the atmosphere in, allowing life to thrive.

Changes in the inner core could thus trigger changes in the dynamo, which in turn could have implications for Earth's habitability over time.

But studying the inner core isn't easy. We can't just pop down there and drill into it; instead, we have to rely on seismic waves that bounce around inside the planet, changing as they encounter volumes of varying density.

Over 20 years ago, scientists identified the presence of another, even innerer core inside the inner core. They called it the innermost inner core, and other studies have supported its existence; but finding out more about it has remained difficult, partly because it's obscured by so many other layers, and partly because placing seismic stations in the right spots can be hard to do.

However, the number of global seismic monitoring stations around the globe is continuing to grow, constantly recording the imperceptible shuddering of the planet beneath our feet. And now seismologists Thanh-Son Phạm and Hrvoje Tkalčić from the Australian National University (ANU) in Australia have figured out a way to squeeze data on the innermost inner core out of those recordings.

"This study uses the ever-growing global seismograph network to produce global stacks for some significant seismic events individually," they write in their paper.

"This study reports a previously unobserved and unutilized class of seismological observations of reverberating waves through the bulk of the Earth along its diameter up to five times … To our knowledge, reverberations from more than two passages are hitherto unreported in the seismological literature."

The ray paths of fivefold reverberations along Earth's diameter. (Drew Whitehouse, National Computational Infrastructure's Vizlab, Australian National University)

When a giant quake rattles Earth, the event generates waves that ripple through the planet, traveling through and bouncing off structures within. This is how scientists have obtained such a detailed map of what's inside Earth.

But when the seismic waves hit a boundary, the wave that bounces off – a reverberation, like an earthquake "echo" – is much weaker. Previously, scientists had not been reported more than two passages of a seismic event through the planet.

By stacking the data – adding a collection of seismic signals together into a single trace – Phạm and Tkalčić were able to amplify the signal from several major seismic events, thus breaking this record. For the first time, they identified three-, four-, and five-fold seismic reverberations, which in turn allowed a more detailed probe of the inner core than previously achieved.

The different travel times of pairs of waves inferred the presence of the innermost inner core no wider than 650 kilometers (404 miles) across, made of dense iron. This structure could be the result of a fundamental change in the growth of the inner core at some point in Earth's past.

The research, Phạm and Tkalčić say, means we now have sufficient evidence of the existence of the innermost inner core, and that future efforts should focus on characterizing it, the outer inner core, and the boundary between the two. And it demonstrates that the answers we seek may be already waiting in the data for someone to uncover.

"The findings reported here are a consequence of the unprecedentedly growing volume of digital waveform data and will hopefully inspire further scrutiny of existing seismic records for revealing hidden signals that shed light on the Earth's deep interior," they write.

The findings have been reported in Nature Communications.

Source

Shortly after takeoff, a pilot flying a light aircraft over the skies of northwest England last June noticed the head of his copilot—a flying instructor he knew well—had rolled back in his chair. The pilot thought his friend was merely pretending to be asleep, even when the instructor slumped over onto the pilot’s shoulder.

The pilot continued the flight and landed as normal. Only when he tried to get the instructor to quit kidding around did the pilot realize the instructor was dead.

According to a report from the U.K.’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch, the 57-year-old instructor had suffered a fatal cardiac arrest inside the cockpit but his colleague believed the whole thing was a joke for the entirety of the journey.

Although the pilot was able to safely land the aircraft, the safety report concluded that “had this occurred on another flight the outcome could have been different.” The instructor—who was known to have had a history of high blood pressure and was overweight—had passed a medical four months before the fateful flight.

People who had spoken to the instructor on the morning of his death said he had been “his normal cheerful self and there were no indications that he was feeling unwell.” He had just flown with with three other people for a trial lesson before he climbed into the cockpit of the Piper PA-28 where he died at Blackpool Airport.

The pilot didn’t recall the instructor saying anything after takeoff, the report said, or after his head rolled back in his chair. “The pilot knew the instructor well and thought he was just pretending to take a nap,” the report says, “so he did not think anything was wrong at this stage.” The pilot continued to think nothing was wrong when the “instructor slumped over with his head resting on the pilot’s shoulder. The pilot still thought the instructor was just joking with him and continued to fly the approach.”

After landing, the instructor remained on the pilot’s shoulder. At that point, the pilot realized something was wrong and raised the alarm. “The fire crew and the air ambulance medical crew, who are based at the airport, attempted to revive the instructor but he remained unresponsive and they were unable to save him,” the report says.

Mid-flight cardiac arrest deaths are rare, but not unheard of. In 2017, American Airlines Capt. Michael Johnston died of a heart attack while flying between Boston and Phoenix, prompting an emergency landing.

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According to the findings, bad luck having babies and short lifespans are two factors that could be to blame. However, since this problem is on an intercontinental scale, scientists still have no definitive answers regarding the disappearance of birds. The issue is significantly more pressing for some species, including Cuckoos, Swifts, and Turtle Doves.

Researchers with RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) and BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) say understanding why this is happening is difficult due to the birds travelling such vast distances and depending on multiple locations at different times of the year. When they’re not breeding, birds spread out across a massive expanse, creating another hurdle in finding the cause.

As a result, researchers argue that site-specific conservation efforts at a small number of locations could be unhelpful. Instead, RSPB and BTO teams believe wintering and breeding habitats spanning Europe and Africa need improvement.

Resolutions may lie in planting and conserving native trees in African wintering regions, fixing-up significant locations where birds stop to refuel mid-migration, and protecting some species from hunting along the migration routes. The lack of answers comes despite conservationists working in the “golden age” of migrant research, with new tracking technology providing unprecedented insight into bird behavior.

“Although we have learnt a lot about migrant birds in the past seven years, we are still no closer to understanding what is driving the declines of most of these species,” says Dr. John Mallord, an RSPB senior conservation scientist, according to a statement provided by SWNS. “We need to shift the focus from species-specific diagnostic research and start to use what we do already know to inform conservation actions on the ground.”

BTO Chief Executive Professor Juliet Vickery, lead author of the paper published in IBIS, is calling for action.

“Our declining migrant birds need action,” Vickery says in a statement. “Although it remains important to continue some diagnostic research, particularly tagging and tracking birds, resources need to be focused on trialing solutions based on what we know already.”

“This is not just about the conservation of individual species but the preservation of a spectacular phenomenon that has inspired humans for generations,” the lead author continues.

“We must afford a higher priority to addressing the declines of widespread and relatively common birds, not least because these carry a stronger warning about the health of our natural world than is the case for of rare and threatened species.”

“The time has come to begin putting what we know into practice,” a BTO spokesperson adds, according to SWNS. “If we wait until our understanding of these birds’ declines is complete, it may already be too late.”

Source

That said, it is essential we step up green investment even more if we are to sustain low-carbon economic growth. According to the International Energy Agency, more than $2 trillion in annual investment in clean electricity will be needed by 2030 to achieve carbon neutrality. The war in Ukraine has also highlighted the risks posed by states’ dependence on imported hydrocarbons, making the energy transition not only an economic and ecological imperative, but a political one.

However, we note in an EDHECinfra study that there are a number of risks inherent in this type of investment. Our work has tracked 20 years of energy transition in the UK, an example of an economy that has successfully moved away from coal and made a rapid transition to renewables, while relying on limited hydro and nuclear power.

The risk premium increases

As in most developed economies, the growing share of intermittent renewables in the energy mix has created new challenges:

• an increase in development costs;

• an increase in production volatility;

• an increase in market price volatility.

So while renewables are enjoying record profits (a recent EDHECinfra research note showed that returns on European renewable energy assets reached 16% in 2020, up from 10% in 2015), the risks faced by investors are also increasing.

And while interest remains strong, the risk premium demanded by the market in unlisted wind and solar projects has started to rise again since the beginning of 2022, after a decade of decline. This premium now stands at 700 basis points for wind projects in the most developed economies, according to our data provider infraMetrics, up from just over 500 at the end of 2020.

The impact on investors of a rapid transition to intermittent renewable energy generation is therefore notable. First up, there is the instability of the energy system to contend with, but also the increase in the value of gas production, which remains one of the main sources of energy, increased price volatility, and of course, a negative impact on the returns expected by investors.

To rebalance the risks, investors and consumers could turn to price stabilisation mechanisms.

The storage capacity strategy

For investors, this is an opportunity to better think about and manage the risks to which they are exposed. Part of these risks can be managed by investing in the technologies that seem to be most needed today, such as those that increase storage capacity.

To date, the majority of new investments have been directed toward intermittent energy production (such as wind and photovoltaic). However, storage capacity is struggling to develop at the same rate, which makes the supply chain more fragile.

But other tools than the investment strategy can also be mobilised. In this respect, diversification can be mentioned. For example: combining investments in several types of renewable energy, such as wind and solar, or in several European countries.

Investors can also opt to use hedging strategies such as hedging (insurance or guarantee contracts against risk). Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and Contracts for Difference (CfDs), financial instruments designed to limit the risk of losses, can also be used.

The urgent need to stabilise prices

While investors have the leverage to control the risks to which they are exposed, strong public intervention remains necessary to accelerate the development of renewable energies. Firstly, it is necessary to protect consumers from soaring prices (+65.5% for electricity in the United Kingdom over the period from November 2021 to November 2022, +15% in France from January 2023 thanks to the tariff shield).

Thus, the preservation of existing price stabilisation mechanisms such as the tariff shield in France, the “contracts for difference”, or the end of price coupling between gas and electricity seems essential.

This type of measure would indeed make it possible to compensate for the deficiencies of a market which is increasingly based on the production of renewable energies, but where gas remains, paradoxically, the measure of all things.

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Among the many looming ecological disasters that terrify us today, one that only a handful of people have contemplated as sufficiently looming and terrifying is the loss of the bats in our belfry. According to “The Darkness Manifesto” (Scribner), by the Swedish ecologist Johan Eklöf, most churches in southwest Sweden had bat colonies back in the nineteen-eighties, and now most of them don’t. Light pollution, his research suggests, has been a major culprit: “District after district has installed modern floodlights to show the architecture it’s proud of, all the while the animals—who have for centuries found safety in the darkness of the church towers and who have for 70 million years made the night their abode—are slowly but surely vanishing from these places.”

The presence of bats in the belfry, as a metaphor for disordered thinking, is usually taken to refer to the way bats would flutter around the upper stories of distressed churches, but a larger madness, Eklöf thinks, is responsible for their absence. A professor at Stockholm University, he is an expert in bats, which might suggest a déformation professionnelle in his interest in darkness, the way an expert in roosters might have a weakness for the dawn. He is able to tell us authoritatively that, though bats do indeed use natural sonar to echolocate their way around, their eyes see well enough in the dark to help in their navigation. (As so often, nature’s secret to survival is not one perfect plan but a little bit of this and a little bit of that.) Of course, Eklöf’s arguments escape the narrow world of roof eaves and pointy ears. Though the book is written as a sort of “Silent Spring” manifesto against the ecological devastations of light pollution, its considerable charm depends on the encyclopedic intensity with which he evokes the hidden creatures of the night.

Agreeably in love with darkness, Eklöf is not entirely a sentimentalist about it. Sex and violence rule the night sky as much as they ruled the drive-in movies that the night sky once superintended. What governs the sunless vistas is not a peaceable kingdom but a fierce contest for life, occasionally made vivid for us by the fiery, bioluminescent nature of its display. The firefly is signalling and winking as desperately as a Raymond Chandler heroine for a mate, until a greedy frog, like a Chandler gangster, stops everything and devours it. Eklöf makes it clear that the great Cambrian explosion of species, which began the evolution of animal eyes that could translate light into images, was set off by the advent of predation and countermeasures to it. Advanced animal evolution—and optical perception—began when creatures realized that they could make a better living by eating one another than by staying in place and absorbing nutrients from the ooze around them. Teeth and shells, claws and hide, rose in a flurry, and among the foremost of the defenses were eyes to sense the presence of a predator.

The difference between light and dark is, in a way, arbitrary: what counts as light and what as darkness depends on what wavelengths we discern. But the nocturnal world gives rise to creatures, equipped with large-pupilled and infrared-sensitive eyes, that see what we cannot and that, under cover of darkness, act as we can only imagine. And so Eklöf’s book is made most memorable by the sometimes wild eccentricities of the life-forms it chronicles. Though his catalogue of catastrophe is real, what one most remembers are the beasts in his bestiary.

We learn, for instance, of the ghost moths, a species in which the adult males appear in fields in twilight, white as their namesakes and just as evanescent-seeming, floating eerily as they signal to the females—only to mate once and then fall to the ground dead. Mouthless by nature, they, like various others of their order, never feed at all in their adult lives. They do not sow, or reap; they merely fornicate once in the dark and die. (The females carry the eggs from their lonely coupling to distribute across the fields, and then die themselves.) Though Eklöf tells us that these Tristan-and-Isolde-like creatures are threatened by the confusing presence of artificial light and that moths play a crucial role as pollinators (“something of invaluable importance for keeping our ecosystem intact and thriving”), what one recalls is the plaintive doom of their couplings.

Biological creatures ourselves, we pair our lives with the rest of biology. “It is fascinating to imagine how nocturnal animals experience their existence in the dark, how their brains interpret sensory stimuli,” Eklöf writes. He cites approvingly Thomas Nagel’s famous philosophical essay on why we as humans cannot know what it feels like to be a bat. And yet we can imagine it—certainly, we can imagine what it would be like to be an owl. We may not live as owls do, mating once to make baby owls and then, after the owlets have safely flown away, going off to separate perches. But we can imagine how it would feel to soar alone all night, see your spouse for a brief period to raise the kids, and then head off for a divorced life in your own studio on the opposite side of town. A naturalist’s acts of empathy can be emancipating even if incomplete.

Alongside the spectral ghost moths come the speckled and companionable cabbage moths, as ready for one-night stands as Bobby in Sondheim’s “Company.” Only after the sun sets does the adult moth, having crawled from its chrysalis, look for a mate. “The female takes the first step by extending her antennae forward, flapping her wings, and secreting scents, at around ten in the evening,” Eklöf writes. “The two spend the night together, one wing of the female around the male’s body, then she leaves to lay the fertilized eggs.” But light ruins the romance: “The female emits fewer pheromones in the presence of artificial light, and furthermore, the composition of the scent is completely different from that emitted in darkness. So mating never gets started. The females wait in vain in the darkness.”

For all the poetic appeal of his examples, Eklöf has come to us from Sweden—his book is translated by Elizabeth DeNoma—bearing a noirish moral. The source of all this harmful light is, of course, us, city-dwelling human beings, who are presumably keeping the lights on all night in pursuit of our own couplings. Where once human life had its nocturnal rhythms, interrupted only by the dim light of candles and fireplaces, the Earth is now so lit up that, seen from space, it glows like a Japanese lantern. Since the invention of the light bulb, street lights and floodlights have come, ominously, to disturb age-old circadian rhythms, to the point that, Eklöf writes, “artificial light, the polluted light, is now dominant—light that causes birds to sing in the middle of the night, sends turtle babies in the wrong direction, and prevents the mating rituals of coral in reefs, which take place under the light of the moon.”

It turns out that the strongest source of illumination on Earth is not some helpful harborside lighthouse but the “sky beam” atop the Luxor Hotel, in Las Vegas. Creating forty-two billion candlepower of light every night, meant merely as a come-on to tourists and gamblers, it unintentionally excites and undoes flocks of birds, genetically programmed by evolution to fly toward bright light—and, in 2019, attracted clouds of grasshoppers, who flew toward the pseudo-Egyptian pyramid with all the horror of a pseudo-Egyptian plague. “Every evening Nevada’s meteorologists could see on their radar screens the swarms approach Las Vegas,” Eklöf says. Whoever would have imagined that reconstructing an Egyptian tomb and sending a piercing pillar of light from it to the heavens would reawaken an ancient curse—that is, aside from every screenwriter with a spec script? The, er, black comedy of this effect is not lost on Eklöf, but he sees it as something less than entertaining. In recent decades, he tells us, the biomass of all flying insect species has, by some measures, collapsed by close to seventy-five per cent.

Nor are bugs and birds alone affected by the light; so are plants, and so are humans. Our eyes adapt badly to darkness, and our night vision—which is activated by the pigment protein rhodopsin—takes a long while to turn on, as anyone who leans back on a car roof to watch the evening stars knows. By now, cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong are so brightly lit that their inhabitants scarcely call on night vision at all, and, as their rhodopsin becomes superfluous, they may well create descendants who, in even middling darkness, are as blind as, it turns out, bats are not.

The really insidious light pollution that people experience is of the indoor kind: our laptops and our devices bathe us in their light, and we find ourselves trapped in the same kind of death spiral that the Luxor beacon creates for the poor Las Vegas grasshoppers. Our daily cycles of melatonin and other sleep hormones are disrupted, with sometimes dire effects. “The body enters a vicious circle where stress and disturbed sleep go hand in hand,” Eklöf writes. “We become vaguely depressed.” Overweight, too: “Obesity has many causes, but one of these is constant low leptin levels, which is a direct result of the breaking down of the melatonin circle.” The grasshoppers beam down to their burning death; we just grow chubby and cheerless.

Eklöf insists that doom is still avoidable. “Light pollution is the easiest of all environmental problems to solve, at least technically,” he writes. “We, as private individuals, can, with little cost, reduce the amount of our light pollution. With light shades, downward-facing light sources low to the ground, and dim lighting, we can reduce the cities’ total amount of light, as well as the artificial light scattered in the atmosphere.”

Yet the glum practicality of the solution seems inadequate to the wound it describes. “The Darkness Manifesto” has, beyond its ecological arguments, a particular moral temperament. Eklöf does not merely think that too much artificial light is bad for our ecology, which it doubtless is; he thinks that light, and our preference for amplifying it, is in itself morally dubious. In his view, the will to light the night is in essence a will to power. Industrialized capitalism lights up our streets not to assist us on our path home but to show that its empire is inescapable. His point is made with a kind of good-humored if slightly puritanical melancholy that one thinks of as distinctly Swedish; in this spirit, he quotes Strindberg’s observation that electric lighting, presented as betterment, was simply a way of getting workers to work more. Dimming the world is a necessary and reasonable goal, he believes, and he is encouraged by various green initiatives, including Earth Hour, an annual event newly promoted by the E.U., in which electric lights are kept off for sixty minutes, both to discourage power consumption and to remind us of the antique joys of candlelight.

Undoubtedly, the loss of night to artificial illumination is a loss for diversity in every sense, ecological and experiential. Yet we can wonder if what human beings mainly experience as improvements must, in every instance, be subordinated to the “welfare of the planet,” a concept that is itself available only to humans. Nor are Eklöf’s examples always exemplary. He notes that van Gogh’s “Starry Night” could not be readily painted today, given the light pollution of contemporary Provence. (“Maybe this was a manifestation of his inner darkness, or simply how the night sky could be experienced as crackling and chaotic—before the entry of electric light.”) But the gas lamps of London, enemies of night, were themselves another haunting Romantic subject, as van Gogh knew from his love of Whistler, with an equivalent poetry of their own, while in his earlier “Starry Night Over the Rhône” the bright lights of human habitation are themselves made to shine with an almost celestial aura.

Inevitably, what presents itself as empirical inquiry reflects a cultural mood. Every environmental apocalypse bears the imprint of the apocalyptic imagination of its time: even the Book of Revelation, with its raptures and its scarlet woman, has a rich underpinning in Roman imperial politics. In the same way, Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968), now much derided, shared a semantic space with the sculptor Robert Smithson’s “Nonsites,” site-specific installations that were made in the same year and produced photographic monuments to the entropic wilderness of blighted post-industrial landscapes. Ehrlich’s specific pessimism may have been empirically misconceived, but it was part of the poetic pessimism of its time and perhaps a necessary corrective to a preceding era of pro-growth boosterism—as Smithson’s grim dust piles were correctives to the paradisiacal glow of industrial materials beloved of the other minimalists.

The allure of night is one of the great cultural discoveries of the Romantic era, with its twilight landscapes and piano nocturnes, and Eklöf’s book is, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, a Romantic one. If nature is made secondary to human will, as in classical and Enlightenment times, then a care for nature expresses itself in bucolics and pastorals—nature as a setting for human amorousness or agriculture. If the value of nature is an absolute, as it was for the Romantics, we discover ourselves in sublime nocturnes and moments of wonder. The Romantic love of darkness is a turn toward the embrace of nature in all her aspects. The faces that seemed hostile to us were to be as welcomed as those which seemed obviously benign.

The Romantic contradiction is that, since nature is in itself moral, no landscape can be left unmoralized by man. When the lights go off, we fumble in the dark for meaning as the ghost moth fumbles for its mate; the loss of night to artificial light thus becomes not merely a mistake but a sin. A few decades ago, expressions of an original taste in natural phenomena were usually sprightly or self-consciously eccentric in tone—Alexander Frater’s wonderful travelogue “Chasing the Monsoon,” in 1990, made the case for rain almost entirely on sensual grounds. Today, we would stress that rain is essential to life, an obvious truth, but one whose emphasis holds virtue to be more important than pleasure. Eklöf’s nocturnal tastes are acceptable now only if we can make them part of a crusade.

It may seem unduly sunny, but surely not false, to say that we need both artificial light and natural darkness. Winged creatures rightly petition us to ease the intensity of the Luxor beam, but the city planners who insisted on mandating a high incandescent signature for every new sign in Times Square—the so-called LUTS (Light Units Times Square) measure—were aesthetes more than despoilers. Times Square must shine to remain timeless. We can want a brightly lit Vegas Strip, while still wanting the desert outside Vegas, or for that matter the suburbs of New Jersey, to offer the spectacle of stars. The Enlightenment taste for progress and the Romantic love of mystery may be cabbage moths who seek each other in the night.

“More light!,” Goethe’s famous deathbed command, was the battle cry of the Enlightenment, which produced the progressive-minded science that eventually gave us the light bulb and the neon sign and the L.E.D. “Turn on the night!,” still the essential cry of the Romantics, from Caspar David Friedrich to Kiss, urges us to love in darkness. The light of reason makes searchlights and lighthouses; the love of darkness asks us to adjust our eyes and egos sufficiently to see as owls do. Seek light in the morning; accept the night when it comes. Then call it a day. ♦

Published in the print edition of the February 27, 2023, issue, with the headline “Turn Off the Light.”

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

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

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

To try to resolve the difference, we conducted a comprehensive, global-scale assessment of the existing evidence, including both natural archives, like tree rings and seafloor sediments, and climate models.

Our results, published 15 February 2023, suggest ways to improve climate forecasting to avoid missing some important slow-moving, naturally occurring climate feedbacks.

Global warming in context

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

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

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

There are several natural archives that record changes in the climate over time. The growth rings that form each year in trees, stalagmites, and corals can be used to reconstruct past temperature.

Similar data can be found in glacier ice and in tiny shells found in the sediment that builds up over time at the bottom of the ocean or lakes. These serve as substitutes, or proxies, for thermometer-based measurements.

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

Another temperature proxy is found in seafloor sediment, in the remains of tiny ocean-dwelling creatures called foraminifera. When a foraminifera is alive, the chemical composition of its shell changes depending on the temperature of the ocean.

When it dies, the shell sinks and gets buried by other debris over time, forming layers of sediment at the ocean floor. Paleoclimatologists can then extract sediment cores and chemically analyze the shells in those layers to determine their composition and age, sometimes going back millennia.

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

Climate models are used to study current conditions, forecast changes in the future, and reconstruct the past.

For example, scientists can input the past concentrations of greenhouse gasses, which we know from information stored in tiny bubbles in ancient ice, and the model can use that information to simulate past temperature. Modern climate data and details from natural archives are used to test their accuracy.

Proxy data and climate models have different strengths.

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

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

A paleo-temperature conundrum

In our new review paper, we assessed climate theory, proxy data, and model simulations, focusing on indicators of global temperature.

We carefully considered naturally occurring processes that affect the climate, including long-term variations in Earth's orbit around the Sun, greenhouse gas concentrations, volcanic eruptions, and the strength of the Sun's heat energy.

We also examined important climate feedbacks, such as vegetation and sea ice changes, that can influence global temperature.

For example, there is strong evidence that less Arctic sea ice and more vegetation cover existed during a period around 6,000 years ago than in the 19th century. That would have darkened the Earth's surface, causing it to absorb more heat.

Our two types of evidence offer different answers regarding the Earth's temperature trend over the 6,000 years before modern global warming.

Natural archives generally show that Earth's average temperature roughly 6,000 years ago was warmer by about 0.7 °C (1.3 °F) compared with the 19th century median, and then cooled gradually until the Industrial Revolution. We found that most evidence points to this result.

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

How to improve climate forecasts

Our assessment highlights some ways to improve climate forecasts.

For example, we found that models would be more powerful if they more fully represented certain climate feedbacks.

One climate model experiment that included increased vegetation cover in some regions 6,000 years ago was able to simulate the global temperature peak we see in proxy records, unlike most other model simulations, which don't include this expanded vegetation.

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

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

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

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For decades, it’s been hard to think of Alaska without thinking of oil. The state has the third-highest petroleum consumption, per capita, of any US state. More than three quarters of people there heat their homes using fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)—well above the US average. Until recently, Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, a resident of Alaska’s capital, Juneau, was among them. But when she received a bill of almost $900 last March for heating her home during the winter months, she decided to find an alternative.

“I thought it was a joke. I was just gobsmacked,” Gagne-Hawes says.

Oil prices in Juneau hit an average of more than $5 per gallon last winter—25 percent higher than the US national average and nearly five times the current global average, according to one tracker—triggering a rush for heat pumps. Gagne-Hawes decided to install an air source heat pump, which runs on electricity. It has kept her house warm this winter even when the outdoor temperature has dipped below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (–17.7 Celsius).

“I expected it to be fine but it’s been spectacular,” says Gagne-Hawes. She says the heat pump is saving her roughly $100 a month.

The IEA estimates that switching to heat pumps 222222could reduce global CO2 emissions by 500 million metric tons by 2030. In principle, that means the more people who drop fossil fuel boilers for these devices, the better—in climate terms.

Alaskan oil production has fallen in recent times and the state is gradually embracing renewables, with 31 percent of its electricity generation coming from renewables, comparable to solar-power-rich Massachusetts. The shift toward cleaner energy is happening on an industrial scale, but also in people’s homes, where heat pumps are beginning to take the place of fossil-fuel-guzzling furnaces. Air source heat pumps use a refrigerant to absorb heat from the outdoor air, which then gets passed on to rooms in a house or a hot water supply. 

Some Alaskans are pushing air source heat pumps to their limits, running them even when outdoor temperatures plummet to nearly –30 degrees Fahrenheit (–34.4 Celsius). 

Andy Romanoff, the executive director of Juneau-based nonprofit Alaska Heat Smart, estimates that there are about 2,000 heat pumps covering roughly 15 percent of the city, a number that he expects to grow. “We do see a 10 to 15 percent, maybe even 20 percent, increase year-after-year in the number of permits that are being applied for,” he says. 

Heat pump installers in Alaska recommended by Heat Smart also say demand for the devices is rising. One installer, Mark Houston, describes a spike in inquiries about heat pumps at the beginning of 2023, more than the number of inquiries he’d received for the whole of 2022. Another, Kris Karsunky, says he installs between 50 and 70 heat pumps a year but fields twice that many requests via phone. Businesses are increasingly adopting the technology, too, he adds.

Juneau gets most of its electricity from lakes that offer a clean hydropower resource. This means that it is particularly ecofriendly to install electrified heating systems in the city.

But, to be fair, Juneau lies at the warmer end of the state and doesn’t tend to experience the same blisteringly cold winter weather that can afflict places farther north like Anchorage or Fairbanks, where using heat pumps could be less cost-effective.

In the village of Eklutna, not far from Anchorage, electrician Derek Lampert has found a heat pump that copes with extreme temperatures. He lives in a house that he built with his father during the pandemic. The walls are 22 inches thick, he boasts. Lampert planned for the house to be as energy efficient as possible, and so he invested in a SANCO2 heat pump, which uses CO2 for a refrigerant. The machine provides space heating and hot water supply.

“We’ve had it as cold as –20 degrees Fahrenheit and it still worked,” says Lampert. “I was getting 135-degree water.” 

High efficiency was certainly Lampert’s goal, and overall he’s happy with the results. Financially, at least, the well-insulated house and heat pump setup has proved beneficial. “People in my neighborhood spend more [than my entire electricity bill] on propane and heating oil,” says Lampert.

However, because a heat pump sucks heat indoors from outside, sometimes for long periods, the outer part of the machine can get especially cold and make the device less energy efficient. Heat pumps are generally designed to defrost themselves periodically, but Lampert argues that his model could be better at this. He says he has noticed a fair amount of frosting and ice build-up around the exterior of his heat pump when it’s very cold. “Certainly, the colder it gets, the worse it gets. It just struggles with all the moisture,” he explains. 

John Miles, a spokesman for Eco2 Systems LLC, which makes the SANCO2 heat pump, says the current model works down to –26 degrees Fahrenheit (–32 Celsius). He adds that it has various means of checking for frost build-up and that any ice that does form will, eventually, melt away. 

Terry Chapin, an ecosystem ecologist and professor emeritus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, has a heat pump but notes that his model—designed to work down to –13 degrees Fahrenheit (–25 Celsius)—struggles in the winter months. “It doubled our electricity use when I was using it at very low temperatures,” he says. When the temperature drops below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, he switches back to his oil heating system instead.

Vanessa Stevens, a building science researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Fairbanks, says that the latest heat pumps are increasingly cold-hardy.

“We’re actually testing a heat pump in our lab this spring where the cutoff temperature is –31 degrees Fahrenheit,” she says. “That was unheard of 10 years ago.”

Demand in Alaska appears to be rising strongly because heat pumps are becoming more efficient and cost effective, she suggests, adding that there are now companies solely dedicated to heat pump installations—a relatively new development.

Heat pumps have great decarbonization potential, but this depends on context, says Meredith Fowlie, an economist at UC Berkeley. They will be most beneficial as a climate solution when they run on electricity generated predominantly from low-carbon sources—and when manufacturers move away from the least climate-friendly heat pump refrigerants. New homes, or homes requiring a brand-new heating system, should opt for a heat pump as standard now, according to Fowlie. But as heat pumps continue their spread, there must be enough properly trained tradespeople to install them, as well as building codes that promote the use of more efficient systems, says Fowlie.

“There’s a sense of urgency that needs to be balanced against some of the practical, pragmatic challenges that we need to overcome.” 

Heat Pumps Sell Like Hotcakes on America’s Oil-Rich Frontier

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