Turkey's disaster and emergency agency Afad said the tremor occurred at 20.04 local time (17.04 GMT).

Witnesses told the Reuters news agency there had been further damage to buildings in Antakya.

A 7.8-magnitude struck the region on 6 February, killing more than 44,000 people in Turkey and Syria.

Turkish authorities have recorded more than 6,000 aftershocks since that earthquake hit, but the BBC team in the region said today's tremor felt much stronger than previous ones.

Witnesses said it was also felt in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon.

It is currently unclear how much damage it has caused or if there are any casualties.

In a tweet, Afad urged people to stay away from coastlines as a precaution against the risk of rising sea levels.

Muna Al Omar, a local resident, told Reuters she was in a tent in a park in central Antakya when the earthquake hit.

"I thought the earth was going to split open under my feet," she said, crying as she held her seven-year-old son.

"Is there going to be another aftershock?" she asked.

An AFP journalist reported on scenes of panic in Antakya - which was already devastated by the previous earthquake - with the latest tremors raising clouds of dust in the city.

The walls of badly damaged buildings also crumbled, AFP reports, with several apparently injured people calling for help.

Ali Mazlum said he was looking for the bodies of family members from the previous earthquake when the latest one hit.

"You don't know what to do... we grabbed each other and right in front of us, the walls started to fall. It felt like the earth was opening up to swallow us up," he said.

Antakya, the capital of Turkey's Hatay Province, was one of the places hit most severely by the earthquake on 6 February.

In Syria, the civil defence group White Helmets said several people were injured by falling buildings.

Source

Also: Turkey hit by two more powerful earthquakes two weeks after disaster.

Seth Putterman started out studying the behavior of plasma for national security reasons. Extremely fast hypersonic missiles heat and ionize the surrounding air and form a cloud of charged particles called plasma, which absorbs radio waves and makes it hard for operators on the ground to communicate with the missiles—a problem Putterman was trying to solve. Then it occurred to him: The same plasma physics apply to our sun.

The UCLA scientist and his colleagues have now created what Putterman calls “our sun in a jar,” a 1.2-inch glass ball filled with plasma, which they have used to model processes like those that create solar flares. These are explosive bursts of energy sometimes accompanied by the release of a high-speed blob of plasma that could wreak havoc with satellites in orbit and electricity grids on the ground. “The steps we’re making will influence modeling so that there can be a warning and determination of precursors of space weather,” says Putterman, the senior author of a study in Physical Review Letters describing their experiments.

The sun is basically a swirling inferno of plasma made up of rotating, electrically charged gas particles—mostly electrons and hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons. (Stellar plasma is a little different from the low-density plasma used in tokamak fusion reactors.) Researchers have long sought to better understand solar flares, especially in case a particularly large plasma chunk gets launched toward Earth.

The team’s experiments started by putting some partially ionized sulfur gas inside a glass bulb, then bombarding it with low-frequency microwaves—similar to the kind used in a microwave oven—to excite the gas, heating it up to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They found that a 30-kHz pulsing of the microwaves sets up a sound wave that exerts a pressure that causes the hot gas to contract. This sound wave pressure creates a kind of “acoustic gravity” and causes the fluid to move as if it were within the spherical gravity field of the sun. (The experiment’s gravity field is around 1,000 times stronger than the Earth’s.) This generates plasma convection, a process in which warm fluid rises and cooler, denser fluid sinks to the core of the glass ball. In this way, the team became the first people on Earth to create something resembling the spherical convection that’s normally found in the interior of a star.

Their project was first funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced research arm, because of its applications for hypersonic vehicles. Then it garnered the backing of the Air Force Research Laboratory, since space weather can interfere with aircraft and spacecraft. But astronomers think it can also tell us something fundamental about the sun’s behavior. “I think the real significance is to begin to simulate solar convection in the lab and therefore get insight into the mysterious solar cycle of the sun,” says Tom Berger, executive director of the Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center at the University of colourado at Boulder, who was not involved in the study. 

Berger is referring to an approximately 11-year cycle in which the inner convection zone of the sun somehow gets more active, leading the outer layer, or corona, to generate more frequent and intense flares and blasts of plasma, called coronal mass ejections. It’s hard to probe the inner regions of the sun, Berger says, although NASA is attempting to do so with a spacecraft called the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which uses sound waves to map the surface of the sun and make inferences about the plasma down below.

Others in the field also praise Putterman and his colleagues’ research, but note it has limitations. “It’s an exciting and innovative development. It’s cleverly done. It has always been a challenge to simulate the internal dynamics of a star in a laboratory,” says Mark Miesch, a researcher at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center and the University of colourado.

Scientists have long struggled to produce plasma convection in a sphere. In earlier experiments, Earth’s gravity would influence the plasma’s motion and disrupt the attempts. That prompted a precursor to this research, Geoflow, a European Space Agency project lofted to the International Space Station in 2008. It created an experimental model of how fluids flow within a planet—which isn’t so unlike convection in the interior of stars. Putterman and his team have shown it’s possible to create spherical convection without going into the microgravity of space. 

The sun in a jar does have one important shortcoming, though: It lacks magnetic fields, a crucial element of flares and other solar storms, Miesch says. The energy in solar storms comes from the sun’s magnetic field. When the solar cycle reaches its maximum—which we’re a few years from right now—magnetic fields in the inner regions of the sun get tangled up, creating tubes of concentrated magnetic fields that rise to the surface, producing sunspots. And it’s from these regions that flares and coronal mass ejections originate. For Putterman and his colleagues, attempting to incorporate magnetic fields into their model star will be part of the next phase of their research.

In the meantime, Putterman says he and his colleagues keep finding new applications for their experiments. That includes the study of Cepheid stars, which brighten and dim periodically and whose regular pulsations act as cosmic milestones, enabling scientists to chart the distances to other astronomical objects. “There are many directions to go,” Putterman says. “We feel we made a breakthrough in basic science, and when you do that, it has many tentacles, and these are what we’re enjoying exploring.”

Video: UCLA

A Tiny Sun in a Jar Is Shedding Light on Solar Flares

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AFTER DAYBREAK, THE village of Labota begins to shudder with the roar of motorbikes. Thousands of riders in canary yellow helmets and dust-stained workwear pack its ramshackle, pothole-ridden main road, in places six or seven lanes wide, as it runs along the coast of Indonesia’s Banda Sea. The mass of traffic crawls toward the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, better known as IMIP, the world’s epicenter for nickel production.

“This is a tainted city,” says Sarida, a woman in her forties buying cough medicine at a roadside pharmacy. Only her eyes are visible; the rest wrapped in a face mask, hijab, and burqa. Behind her, a factory belches out brown plumes as thick as a skyscraper.

Sarida, who asked to not share her surname for privacy reasons, arrived in 2019 from Kalimantan, a region on the island of Borneo 800 kilometers to the west, after her husband got a job processing wastewater at a nickel company. “We will leave as soon as we can,” she adds, mounting her red Honda moped. “Before we have to be carried out.”

A decade ago, Labota was a fishing village; today it’s been subsumed into a sprawling city centered around IMIP, a $15 billion, 3,000-hectare industrial complex containing steelworks, coal power plants, and manganese processors, with its own airport and seaport. Built as a joint venture between Chinese and Indonesian industrial companies, it is at the heart of Indonesia’s push to supply the electric vehicle market with nickel, a core component of batteries.

Rocketing demand for electric vehicles, combined with supply disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have made Indonesia—and IMIP—a critical link in the supply chains of EV manufacturers. That's especially true for Tesla, which has signed multibillion-dollar deals with companies at the site and is reportedly in talks to set up its own manufacturing facility in the Southeast Asian country. 

Meeting this demand has come at a huge social and environmental cost. Workers claim that deaths and injuries are common at IMIP. Medical professionals and environmentalists say the polluted air and water are causing respiratory problems, sickness, and eye injuries and destroying forests and fisheries. The rush to expand production has pushed local communities and infrastructure to the brink of collapse.

“Labor exploitation, economic injustices, and environmental degradation are undermining the socio-ecological transformation promised by electric vehicles,” says Pius Ginting, coauthor of a report by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation think tank on the industry. “The public needs to know the reality of what’s happening.”

Indonesia is home to the largest nickel deposits in the world, much of it found on Sulawesi, an equatorial island east of Borneo. Historically, nickel ore was shipped unprocessed, but around a decade ago, in an attempt to attract investment in heavy industries, the Indonesian government banned its export. Shortly before the ban took effect, in a ceremony attended by Chinese president Xi Jinping and Indonesia’s then president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Chinese steel giant Tsingshan Holding Group, one of the world’s largest producers of nickel, signed a deal with Indonesian miner Bintang Delapan Group to build IMIP. Yudhoyono’s successor, Joko Widodo, has continued the industrialization drive, courting the EV industry in particular.

Nickel production in Indonesia more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, to 1.6 million tonnes, more than 48 percent of the world's entire output. In April 2022, a consortium led by LG Energy Solution, the world’s second-largest EV battery manufacturer, signed a $9 billion contract with mining company PT Aneka Tamban and the Indonesia Battery Corporation. In August of the same year, Tesla agreed to a $5 billion deal with two Chinese companies working at IMIP, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt and CNGR Advanced Material. Chinese companies have come to dominate the EV supply chain, buying up mines and processing facilities around the world.

As money poured in, IMIP grew. Today, the smog-shrouded coastline is a chaotic jumble of hulking loading cranes, giant industrial warehouses, rows of electricity pylons, clusters of tin huts, streams of traffic, and the odd patch of remaining forest.

“The face of this place has been utterly transformed,” says Imam Shofwan, head of research at the Indonesian nonprofit JATAM, who visited the region in September. “It’s become unrecognizable. It’s like a city was dropped in the middle of paradise.”

The local infrastructure was never intended to cope with such explosive growth. In Labota, shops, restaurants and homes are plagued by days-long electricity blackouts; phone networks and the internet often fail due to oversaturation. Workers live in grim, hastily-built boarding houses, several crammed into each room, with toilets that flow directly into open sewers.

“Everything goes to IMIP, and we have to live like dogs on scraps,” says the owner of one noodle restaurant that had been without electricity for two days, speaking on condition of anonymity. Back in 2015, she says, IMIP provided the local community with a share of its electricity. “Not anymore.”

Tens of thousands of people have migrated from other parts of the archipelago nation in search of a living. According to Indonesia’s Manpower Ministry, IMIP had 28,000 employees in 2019 and 43,000 in 2020. That number has now grown to around 66,000.

There is no reliable data on the wider population, but locals estimate the number of internal migrants who have come to work in the service industry—from restaurants to phone shops and prostitution—is triple that number.

Yet, many who migrated here seeking a better life have instead found mediocre wages and sometimes deadly working conditions.

WIRED spoke to dozens of workers at IMIP, including five employed by Tesla’s supplier, PT Huayue Nickel Cobalt (HNC). Many of the workers arrived less than six months ago, and they describe working for up to 15 hours a day, earning less than $25—less than Indonesia’s median salary of around $30 a month. Some have not had a day off in three months.

Several say they suffer from breathing difficulties. One 18-year-old employee of HNC, who arrived three months ago from the Toraja region of Sulawesi, says that he receives around $15.75 a day. “Sometimes it’s hard to breathe,” he says. “I’m concerned, but I can’t do anything.”

These are not isolated cases. According to the Bahodopi Community Health Center, a regional clinic covering IMIP, 52 percent of patients last year came in suffering from acute respiratory infections. A number of nickel welders who spoke to WIRED reported eye pain, likely caused by particulates in the air, suggesting their safety gear was inadequate. 

Vehicle crashes are common inside the complex, according to one employee of HNC who works in safety administration. An employee of Cahaya Smelter Indonesia (CSI), which refines nickel at the complex, says they witnessed a number of workers fall off buildings because their harnesses weren’t properly secured. While this story was being reported, one man working for the company PT Dexin Steel died after being electrocuted, according to a nurse at the IMIP health clinic. PT Dexin Steel didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Working conditions at IMIP are “dangerous and deadly,” according to Katsaing, regional head of the National Workers’ Union (SPN), which has 300 members across 11 companies at IMIP. “The health and safety regulations now are toothless,” says Katsaing, who like many Indonesians has only one name. “They are putting profits over people’s lives.”

In January 2022, a worker was killed after being struck on the head by an excavator while not wearing a helmet. In June, the operator of a bulldozer was swept into the sea by an avalanche while working a night shift without lighting. 

Labor rights activists say that in its desire to bring investment into its nickel sector, the Indonesian government has weakened protections for workers. Last year, President Joko Widodo’s government pushed through a controversial “Omnibus Law on Job Creation,” after more than two years of constitutional and legal challenges, which relaxed environmental protections and workers’ rights. The government billed it as a way to attract foreign investment. Activists say that’s why the authorities are particularly keen to avoid a confrontation with Chinese companies, because of the billions of dollars they are pouring into Indonesia.

“The massive exploitation of workers, the environment, and residents is a grave crime against human rights,” says Aulia Hakim, head of advocacy and campaigns at WALHI Central Sulawesi, the regional branch of Indonesia’s largest green group. The government needs to look beyond the amount of money that IMIP is bringing in, and start to account for the social and environmental problems that it has caused, Hakim says.

The conditions at IMIP have led to protests by workers, but little has changed. On December 22, 2022, an explosion at a nickel smelter run by PT Gunbuster Nickel Industry (GNI) killed two workers—a 20-year-old crane operator named Nirwana Selle and her 20-year-old assistant, Made Defri Hari Jonathan—who burned alive. Video footage and photos obtained by WIRED show the flames from a distance as screams can be heard. Only bones remained of the corpses.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the local branch of the SPN union set out eight demands, including that GNI provide protective equipment to all workers, rehire workers who were previously fired for striking, install air circulation in every warehouse, and give legally required compensation to Selle’s and Jonathan’s families, according to a list of demands seen by WIRED.

Hakim points out that the workers’ demands would have brought the company in line with previous government regulations, but the protections they were asking for were erased by the Omnibus Law.

After GNI rejected their demands, workers called a strike from January 11 to 14. On the last day, more than 500 security personnel were dispatched to the industrial park. Workers who were present during the strike say that security forces fired pellet guns at the crowd. “They fired pellets everywhere. It was chaos,” says one GNI worker. 

According to official reports, two workers, one Chinese and one Indonesian, died, and 71 were arrested. A 100-room dormitory was burned down, and vehicles and machinery were destroyed.

Huayue Nickel-Cobalt, Gunbuster Nickel Industry, Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, Tesla, and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But a statement from GNI’s general manager, Teh Cha Les, published on the company website on February 15, said there “are still things that are not optimal” regarding work safety. “We strongly request instructions and guidance in order to improve a better, healthier, safer and more comfortable work environment for the entire workforce," he added. 

The labor issues at IMIP sit alongside severe concerns in Indonesia about the environmental impact of the nickel industry. According to a Brookings Institute report in September, Indonesia’s nickel sector is “particularly carbon-intensive and environmentally damaging,” due to its reliance on coal.

More than 8,700 hectares of rain forest have been destroyed in the North Morowali Regency, where IMIP is based, since 2000, according to an analysis by Greenpeace Indonesia carried out on behalf of WIRED, as trees have been cleared to make way for mines, smelters, and the infrastructure needed to support them.

The erosion of the landscape has made it prone to natural disasters. In June more than 500 houses in the area were hit by flash floods. Land clearance has made those an annual occurrence, leading to drownings and the destruction of homes, bridges, and government buildings. “The floods are now unavoidable due to massive land clearing that has occurred,” says Kasmudin, an environmental activist.

At Kurisa, a village on the southeast edge of IMIP, indigenous Bugis Wajo people told WIRED that the pollution has destroyed their livelihoods. “There’s no fish here anymore,” says Jus Manondo, a 45-year-old fisherman sitting on the wooden decking of his stilted home. “The waste from IMIP has killed them.”

In June 2021, a massive pile of coal fell into the hot water disposal of IMIP’s steam power plant and flowed directly into the sea, turning the water black, according to Manondo. Dumping of waste is common too. WIRED observed polluted water flowing directly into the sea a few hundred meters from Manondo’s home. 

Manondo’s hauls are now less than 20 percent of what they were a decade ago. The village’s fishermen are now forced to travel farther offshore to find fish, but with the high cost of fuel, it is a case of diminishing returns. “Sometimes we catch only enough to feed ourselves,” Manondo says. “Soon, we won’t even have that.”

However, despite the evidence that the rush for nickel, driven by the demand for EVs, has already pushed beyond the boundaries of social and environmental sustainability, the industry is still expanding in Indonesia.

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk set out the goal of selling 20 million EVs per year by 2030—an increase of more than 13 times its expected sales in 2022. The company’s competitors are also scaling up production of EVs. The automotive research consultancy Virta forecasts that there will be 140 million EVs on roads worldwide by 2030, up from 16 million in 2021. 

According to analysis by research company Rystad Energy, demand for high-grade nickel will outstrip supply in 2024. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which makes 11 percent of the world’s nickel, has tightened the market further and sent prices on the London Metal Exchange to a 35-year high. 

To take advantage of the coming squeeze, IMIP’s owners are doubling the size of the site and are in the middle of building a second park, Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP), on the neighboring Maluku Islands, which will eventually span 5,000 hectares.

“Whatever profits this brings in, it won’t be enough,” says WALHI’s Hakim. “We can’t save the planet by destroying it.”

Source

Also known as hypertension, high blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

Our research has found that most Americans don't know the normal or healthy range for blood pressure—yet strikingly, they think they do. And that is cause for serious concern.

We are a health communications expert and a cardiologist. Together with our health communication collaborators, we surveyed more than 6,500 Americans about their knowledge of blood pressure. They were recruited through the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents.

In our new study, published in January 2023, we found that 64% expressed confidence in their understanding of blood pressure numbers—but only 39% actually knew what normal or healthy blood pressure is.

False confidence, deadly consequences

Such false confidence can be harmful because it may prevent people from seeking care for high blood pressure. After all, if you think it's normal, why bother talking to your doctor about your blood pressure?

Part of the reason for this overconfidence begins in the doctor's office. Typically, a nurse brings over a blood pressure cuff, straps it on your upper arm and takes a reading. The nurse may announce the result, remove the cuff and record it for the doctor.

When the doctor arrives, the session may well move on to other matters without a word about the blood pressure reading. This likely happens because your doctor wants to focus on how you're feeling and why you're there. But as a result, you may leave your appointment thinking your blood pressure is fine, even if it's not.

About 70% of Americans will have high blood pressure in their lifetimes. What's more, only 1 in 4 patients with hypertension have their blood pressure under control. And because high blood pressure usually has no symptoms, you can have it without knowing it.

To lower your risk of heart attacks and strokes, it's critical to understand your blood pressure readings. This is especially true for patients with conditions such as heart disease, kidney disease and diabetes.

What the numbers mean

Blood pressure is reported with two numbers. The first number is your systolic blood pressure; it measures the pressure in arteries when the heart beats. The second number, your diastolic blood pressure, measures the pressure in your arteries between heartbeats.

Normal or healthy blood pressure is less than 120/80 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) for adults. This is a unit of measurement that stems from early blood pressure monitors, which looked at how far your blood pressure could push a column of liquid mercury. For most patients, lower tends to be better.

Stage 1 hypertension, which is the lower stage of high blood pressure, begins at 130/80. Stage 2 hypertension, which is the more severe stage of high blood pressure, begins at 140/90. Both numbers are critically important, because every increase of 20 millimeters of mercury in systolic blood pressure, or 10 in diastolic blood pressure, doubles a person's chances of dying from a heart attack or stroke.

A healthy diet, more exercise and less salt and alcohol are all ways to improve your blood pressure numbers.

To avoid false confidence, ask about your blood pressure at every doctor's visit, and find out what the numbers mean. If your blood pressure is above the normal or healthy range, then the American Heart Association recommends the following 10 tips.

1. Talk with your doctor. If your blood pressure is high, ask your doctor about strategies for lowering it, and how you can track your blood pressure at home.
2. Eat a heart-healthy diet. Vegetables, fruit, whole grains, low-fat dairy products, skinless poultry and fish, nuts and legumes, and olive oil are all good for your heart. Red meat, saturated and trans fats and ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy for your heart.
3. Cut back on salt, which increases blood pressure. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day—that's less than one teaspoon—but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that the average American takes in about 3,400 milligrams daily, roughly 50% more than recommended. Even if you don't add any salt to your meals, you may still get too much from ultraprocessed foods. One serving of canned chicken noodle soup has 680 milligrams of sodium. One Big Mac from McDonald's has 1,010 milligrams of sodium.
4. Limit your alcohol use. Whether it's beer, wine or spirits, alcohol increases your blood pressure. It's better to not drink alcohol, but if you do, observe the limits recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. For women, that's one drink per day at the very most. For men, it's two drinks per day at most. One drink is 12 ounces of beer, 4 ounces of wine, 1.5 ounces of 80-proof spirits or 1 ounce of 100-proof spirits.
5. Be more physically active. Just two and a half hours per week of physical activity can help lower blood pressure. For example, that's a 30-minute walk five days a week. You might also switch up your physical activity by swimming, lifting weights, doing yoga or going dancing.
6. Maintain a healthy weight. Even losing a few pounds can help manage high blood pressure in people who are overweight. Ask your doctor about a healthy approach to weight loss.
7. Manage stress, which is bad for your blood pressure. While stress relief doesn't always lower blood pressure, bringing down your stress level can help you feel better. The Mayo Clinic recommends several ways to manage stress, including learning to say no sometimes, spending time with family and friends and meditating.
8. If you smoke, vape or both: Quit now. Both are bad for your heart and blood vessels and contribute to high blood pressure. Quitting smoking may reduce your heart disease risk to nearly the same level as people who never smoked. And the benefits of quitting start right away. A recent study found that after just 12 weeks, people who quit had lower blood pressure than when they were still smoking. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommendations for programs and medication that can help you quit.
9. Take medication, which is often recommended for people with stage 2 hypertension, and for some with stage 1 hypertension, including those who also have heart disease, kidney disease or diabetes. Most patients need two to three medications to lower blood pressure to normal or healthy levels. A recent meta-analysis demonstrated that lowering systolic blood pressure by 5 mm Hg through medication reduces the risk of major cardiovascular events by about 10%, irrespective of baseline blood pressure or previous diagnosis of cardiovascular disease.
10. Track your blood pressure at home. The American Heart Association recommends an automatic, validated cuff-style monitor that goes on your upper arm. A record of readings taken over time can help your doctor adjust your treatments as needed.

High blood pressure is a silent killer. Being proactive and knowing your numbers can be a lifesaver.

Source

A recent study published in the Journal of Physiology has further supported the idea that exercise can help maintain youthful qualities in aging organisms. This research builds upon earlier experiments with lab mice who were near the end of their lifespan and had access to a weighted exercise wheel.

The lead author of the paper is Kevin Murach, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas in the Department of Health, Human Performance and Recreation. The first author is Ronald G. Jones III, who is a Ph.D. student in Murach’s Molecular Muscle Mass Regulation Laboratory.

For this paper, the researchers compared aging mice that had access to a weighted exercise wheel with mice that had undergone epigenetic reprogramming via the expression of Yamanaka factors.

Kevin Murach. Credit: University of Arkansas

 

The Yamanaka factors are four protein transcription factors (identified as Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc, often abbreviated to OKSM) that can revert highly specified cells (such as a skin cell) back to a stem cell, which is a younger and more adaptable state. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Shinya Yamanaka for this discovery in 2012. In the correct dosages, inducing the Yamanaka factors throughout the body in rodents can ameliorate the hallmarks of aging by mimicking the adaptability that is common to more youthful cells.

Of the four factors, Myc is induced by exercising skeletal muscle. Myc may serve as a naturally induced reprogramming stimulus in muscle, making it a useful point of comparison between cells that have been reprogrammed via over-expression of the Yamanaka factors and cells that have been reprogrammed through exercise — “reprogramming” in the latter case reflecting how an environmental stimulus can alter the accessibility and expression of genes. 

The researchers compared the skeletal muscle of mice who had been allowed to exercise late in life to the skeletal muscle of mice that overexpressed OKSM in their muscles, as well as to genetically modified mice limited to the overexpression of just Myc in their muscles.

Ultimately, the team determined that exercise promotes a molecular profile consistent with epigenetic partial programming. That is to say: exercise can mimic aspects of the molecular profile of muscles that have been exposed to Yamanaka factors (thus displaying molecular characteristics of more youthful cells). This beneficial effect of exercise may in part be attributed to the specific actions of Myc in muscle.

While it would be easy to hypothesize that someday we might be able to manipulate Myc in muscle to achieve the effects of exercise, thus sparing us the actual hard work, Murach cautions that would be the wrong conclusion to draw.

First, Myc would never be able to replicate all the downstream effects exercise has throughout the body. It is also the cause of tumors and cancers, so there are inherent dangers to manipulating its expression. Instead, Murach thinks manipulating Myc might best be employed as an experimental strategy to understand how to restore exercise adaptation to old muscles showing declining responsiveness. Possibly it could also be a means of supercharging the exercise response of astronauts in zero gravity or people confined to bed rest who only have a limited capacity for exercise. Myc has many effects, both good and bad, so defining the beneficial ones could lead to a safe therapeutic that could be effective for humans down the road.

Murach sees their research as further validation of exercise as a polypill. “Exercise is the most powerful drug we have,” he says, and should be considered a health-enhancing — and potentially life-extending — treatment along with medications and a healthy diet.

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"Sleep in many ways is associated with mortality—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, mental health, brain health, immune function, respiratory conditions, and cognitive function and performance," said Azizi Seixas, an associate professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

He and other panelists explored the health risks of long-term sleep deprivation and the fundamental role sleep plays in memory. According to Rebecca Spencer, a professor of psychology and brain science at UMass, "When you sleep, you're taking this movie of your day and you're putting it on replay, and it's this great mnemonic device. It's a way to really solidify the memories that we formed during our day."

Those memories might include noise and other disruptions, introducing a wider challenge: While getting enough rest is important for everyone, the world can get in the way. Panelists zeroed in on noise pollution, racial disparities in sleep, and how policy decisions can leave us tired and vulnerable.

"We know, for example, that marginalized communities and racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in neighborhoods with socioeconomic disadvantage," said Carmela Alcántara, an associate professor at Columbia University's School of Social Work. "That can include neighborhoods that might have higher policing, neighborhoods that then have greater exposure to noise pollution, greater exposure to light pollution, and all these factors which we know impact short-term sleep and then can have these cascading long-term effects on sleep."

So how to sleep better?

Spencer recommends "controlling the controllables." She noted that while you may not be able to lower your neighbors' volume or dim the streetlights, there are other strategies for making an environment more rest-friendly. One example is "exposing yourself to light during the day, particularly outside natural light, but then keeping your environment dark at night." Another tactic: moving around. "Exercising is something that you can do, if nothing else, that can clear your mind," Spencer said. "That's part of the rumination problem a lot of people have as they're trying to fall asleep."

If it doesn't work, don't beat yourself up, said Elizabeth Klerman, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. Instead, resolve to make up for the lost sleep on a weekend or a day off. Your body will cooperate. "There's no evidence that you can oversleep," said Klerman. "Unlike chocolate cake you can eat when you're not hungry, there's no evidence you can sleep when you're not tired."

The danger comes when a person loses sleep over the long term: "There are effects on memory and on your risk of dementia."

Seixas said that if you do find yourself losing sleep on a regular basis, it may be possible to adjust other aspects of your routine to mitigate negative effects. "We've been able to find different profiles and different recommendations of people who may get six hours of sleep but can make certain alterations in their lives and lifestyles to balance out their risk for cardio metabolic health conditions."

As for what lawmakers can do to help their constituents, the panelists agreed that movements to change daylight saving time are ill-advised. Instead, lawmakers should opt for solutions that prioritize sleep itself, like later school start times and public health campaigns about sleep hygiene.

"A combination of science, public policy, public education, advocacy—I think all of them are going to be important in trying to address the daylight saving time issue as well as other things related to structural and racial inequalities," Klerman said. "We need science but we also need communication."

Provided by Harvard University.

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The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics offers some tips for Americans who want to improve their nutrition.

"Fruits, vegetables and whole grains provide you with nutrients and dietary fiber that can help lower your risk of developing cancer in the long term," said Amy Bragagnini. She is a registered dietitian nutritionist and oncology nutrition specialist who serves as national spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

"Eating a variety of foods from all food groups keeps your meals interesting and healthful. Fresh, frozen, canned or dried fruits and vegetables all make your meal preparations easy," Bragagnini said.

She recommends filling half of your plate with fruits and veggies at each meal.

"Add fresh berries to your low-fat or fat-free yogurt in the morning. Eat a dark green leafy kale salad for lunch. Stir fry some spinach, broccoli and cabbage to add atop a bed of riced cauliflower for dinner," Bragagnini suggested.

Getting in more legumes—such as beans, peas and lentils—can also add nutrition. She suggests adding black beans to an omelet and using a carrot stick as an edible spoon with hummus for a snack. A big pot of chili or lentil soup can be a healthy dinner.

Making sure whole grains are also in meals is important. This can include a warm bowl of oatmeal with dried fruit for breakfast, a whole grain barley bowl with baked chicken for lunch and a whole wheat roll with dinner.

While making all these additions, there are some foods that it's better to subtract. Bragagnini suggests replacing red and processed meats with a tuna salad at lunch time, a grilled chicken breast at dinner or having a meatless meal, such as a whole wheat pasta primavera.

Also limit the amounts of added sugars and saturated fat, information that can be found on a packaged food's label.

A registered dietitian nutritionist can help you develop a nutrition and physical activity plan that meets your health goals, now and throughout life, she said.

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But much more serious, and sometimes deadly, things can throw off the heart's rhythm, including dehydration, a history of heart disease or a heart defect. Medications, intense exertion or anxiety can also trigger heart rhythm changes, or arrhythmias.

According to Dr. Mark Anderson of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, "the heart's system is not unlike the electrical system in a car," which helps the car run properly. The electrical pulses keep the heart's rhythm smooth and even, he explained in a recent article.

But when the electric signals that control the pace of your heartbeat malfunction, that is a heart arrhythmia, according to the American Heart Association (AHA).

What is heart arrhythmia?

Arrhythmias can feel like flutters or butterflies in your chest or that your heart is racing or pounding. Heart arrhythmias can also cause the heart rhythm to slow down or skip. Most of the time, they are harmless, but they can signify something more serious.

What are the types of heart arrhythmia?

The Mayo Clinic groups heart arrhythmias into two main types, tachycardia (faster heartbeats) and bradycardia (slower heartbeats).

Types of tachycardia

• Atrial fibrillation (a-fib) is one of the most common types of arrhythmia. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 12 million people will experience a-fib by 2030. It is described as a rapid, chaotic heartbeat and is associated with an increased risk of blood clots and stroke.

• Atrial flutter is like a-fib. It starts with an electrical short-circuit in the upper heart chamber. The heartbeats are rapid, but not chaotic like with a-fib. It is also associated with an increased risk of stroke.

• Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) is categorized as a sudden pounding of the heart. It is an umbrella term for arrhythmias that start above the lower heart chambers. SVT can also lead to serious complications such as stroke and other heart diseases.

• Ventricular fibrillation is a heart rhythm issue in the heart's lower ventricles. It is a misfire in the electrical signals of the heart that cause the ventricles to flutter randomly. If normal heart rhythm is not restored, it can lead to death. Ventricular fibrillation is most found in those with underlying heart disease or those who have experienced trauma.

• Ventricular tachycardia is also due to defective electrical pulses in the heart's lower ventricles. It is usually harmless for people with healthy hearts, but it can be life-threatening for a heart already weakened by heart disease.

Types of bradycardia

• Sick sinus syndrome is due to defective sinus nodes. The sinus nodes are the natural pacemakers in the heart. Heart rhythms will beat too quickly or, more commonly, too slowly when malfunctioning.

• Conduction block is a heart rhythm condition caused by a breakdown in the flow of the electrical pulses that make the heart pump. The blockage slows the heart rate because the messages of when to pump and contract are not coming on time.

What causes heart arrhythmia?

The AHA lists many causes that can lead to heart arrhythmias. They can include disease or illness, a stressful lifestyle, too much drinking and smoking, certain medications, trauma, surgery, and genetic or birth defects.

Heart arrhythmia symptoms

According to the Mayo Clinic, heart arrhythmias often don't have any signs or symptoms, but a doctor may catch them during a routine visit.

Sometimes, mild symptoms can include flutters or butterflies in your chest, a racing or slowing heart rate or a heart pounding. More severe symptoms may include chest pain, sweating, shortness of breath, lightheadedness, fatigue, and dizziness or fainting. If these more severe symptoms occur, they should be addressed immediately.

Heart arrhythmia treatments

Heart arrhythmias are often harmless and don't need to be treated, according to the AHA. Before that can be decided, a doctor must be aware of the issue and determine an underlying cause. If it is determined that treatment needs to happen, they may suggest several different options:

• Increased physical activity, reduced caffeine or alcohol intake, and stress management

• Heart arrhythmia medications or changes in medications that may be causing the symptoms

• Surgery to remove blockages or correct defects may be recommended. Surgery may also be needed to implant devices such as a pacemaker, which keeps the heart beating at a proper pace

How to prevent heart arrhythmia

The AHA also suggests heart arrhythmias can be prevented with heart-healthy habits:

• A heart-healthy diet includes fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, lean proteins, fiber and plenty of water

• Regular exercise, especially cardiovascular exercise

• Weight loss or maintaining a healthy weight

• Quit smoking and other drugs

• Limiting or avoiding caffeine and alcohol

• Practicing stress management and reducing anxiety

• Using medications as directed and tell your doctor about all the medicines or supplements you take, including those bought without a prescription

Copyright © 2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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A recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports found that maintaining water clarity in coral reefs is crucial for preserving coral biodiversity and avoiding reef degradation. The study analyzed the productivity and biodiversity of the world’s symbiotic coral communities.

“Coral reefs are one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth,” said Tomás López-Londoño, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State and lead author on the study. “To better understand that diversity, we looked at the role sunlight plays in the symbiotic relationship between coral and the algae that provide the oxygen for its survival. We found that underwater light intensity plays a critical role in the energy expended by the coral’s symbiotic algae to maintain its photosynthetic activity.”

The findings, although novel, are hardly a revelation, he explained. Science has long shown that sunlight is the major source of energy for virtually all biochemical reactions that sustain life on Earth, but sunlight’s impact had not yet been fully understood in coral, he said.

“What’s new here is we developed a model that provides a mechanistic explanation for the biodiversity patterns in coral,” said López-Londoño. “Central to that explanation is water clarity, meaning that preserving the underwater light climate should be a priority for coral reef conservation. It’s as vital as pollution mitigation, limiting ocean acidification, and reducing thermal stress.”

The researchers studied coral grown in an aquarium, simulating depth and gradations of sunlight, to develop a mathematical model that describes the association between the depth‐dependent variation in photosynthetic energy to corals and gradients of species diversity.

They then tested the model on existing published data, comparing reefs with contrasting water clarity and biodiversity patterns in hotspots of marine biodiversity across the globe. The team’s productivity‐biodiversity model explained between 64% and 95% of the depth‐related variation in coral species richness, indicating that much of the variation in species richness with depth is driven by changes in exposure to sunlight.

“The model is very elegant in that it takes into consideration only two things,” said Roberto Iglesias-Prieto, Penn State professor of biology and co-author on the study. “It looks at productivity, the potential that an alga has to extract energy from the sun, and the cost of living, the cost of the repair of the photosynthetic machinery. It’s a very simple notion and we found it explains the existing empirical data.”

Running their model against global data sets, the researchers found that variation in sunlight-supported algal energy supply plays an important role in the spatial variation of species diversity within coral communities. The results show that highly productive submarine environments, with plentiful access to sunlight, are a vital safeguard against the risk of species extinction from demographic and environmental changes.

The findings offer a new tactic for reef conservation: preserving the clarity of the water. The researchers found that “the maintenance of water optical quality in coral reefs is fundamental to protect coral biodiversity and prevent reef degradation.”

“We tend to react reflexively against large-scale threats like ocean acidification and thermal stress from climate change,” said Iglesias-Prieto. “We say ‘this is a serious issue, but what can I really do locally?’ In the case of mitigating optical pollution, the answer is ‘everything.’”

He explained that communities can protect the clarity of the local seawater by reducing the sedimentation and pollution associated with human development — and anyone can participate in that work.

“Unlike so much of the environmental threats that corals face, this is something that can and should be managed locally,” said Iglesias-Prieto.

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Using previous study data, researchers sought to determine what characteristics of meals were important for determining how many calories were eaten. They found that three meal characteristics consistently led to increased calorie intake across four different dietary patterns: meal energy density (i.e., calories per gram of food), the amount of “hyper-palatable” foods, and how quickly the meals were eaten. Protein content of the meals also contributed to calorie intake, but its effect was more variable.

First described by KU scientist Tera Fazzino in 2019, hyper-palatable foods have specific combinations of fat, sugar sodium, and carbohydrates—think of potato chips—that make them artificially rewarding to eat and harder to stop consuming.

“We wanted to know how hyper-palatable characteristics of foods, in combination with other factors, influenced how many calories a person consumed in a meal,” said Fazzino, who is associate director of the Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research and Treatment at the KU Life Span Institute, and assistant professor in the KU Department of Psychology.

Fazzino, together with researchers from the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, wrote in the journal Nature Food that hyper-palatability increased the amount of energy consumed across four diet patterns: low-carbohydrate, low-fat, a diet based on unprocessed foods and one based on ultra-processed foods. 

Diet recommendations for weight management could be informed by understanding how some foods result in people eating fewer calories without making them hungry. People are often advised to avoid energy-dense foods, such as cookies or cheese, that can lead to passive overeating. Instead, foods low in energy density — like spinach, carrots, and apples — are often advised. But foods characterized as hyper-palatable may be less familiar to people, and they may be unknowingly adding them to their plate.

While hyper-palatable foods are sometimes also energy dense, the new study suggests that these hyper-palatable foods independently contribute to meal calorie intake. Fazzino said the findings add to a growing body of research that shows that hyper-palatability plays a role in the food choices that people make and in their weight.

“We hope to get the information about hyper-palatable foods out there for individuals to consider as they make dietary choices, and we hope that scientists continue to examine hyper-palatable characteristics as a potential factor influencing energy intake,” she said.

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The giant grasshopper, Valanga irregularis, is the biggest in the world today, but you don’t exactly need a tennis racket to fight it. Image credit: KDendle via iNaturalist, CC BY-NC 4.0

Grasshoppers don’t have lungs and instead breathe through holes called spiracles that are found in a few spots across the length of their body. They’re spaced like this because they need to deliver oxygen directly to the localized tissues, as oxygen isn’t carried around insects’ bodies by blood like it is in mammals. 

The bigger you are as an insect, the more space you need for these dead-end breathing tubes to reach all your girth, and eventually there becomes a size where this just isn’t possible. In prehistoric times Earth enjoyed Palaeozoic hyperoxia where the air was flush with oxygen, meaning insect giants could get enough of it to their lumbering body parts.

That all changed at the end of the Permian when oxygen levels plummeted from 30 percent to around 21 percent, leaving many species gasping for air (or spiracling for their lives, as it were). The oxygen dive that triggered The Great Dying was caused by global warming, and beyond clipping the wings of our dreams of giant grasshoppers, it’s also something to keep in mind if we don’t want to end up meeting a similar fate.

A third, and perhaps most convincing, reason for doubting the photos comes from a story in the Tomah Monitor Herald. The hoax story tells of the appearance of giant hoppers on an orchard belonging to a Mr Butts who was being knocked on his ass by the whopping great hoppers.

Pull the other one.

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The intent is admirable: Give doctors guidelines so they can be sure to cover what needs to be discussed with patients and help select options. Let’s talk about your diet and any problems you might have sleeping. Are you getting enough exercise? If not, here is some advice. You are due for colon cancer screening. Do you prefer a colonoscopy or a fecal test? Here are the pros and cons of each.

But there is a problem. There are just not enough hours in a workday to discuss and act on all the guidelines.

Suppose an American doctor wanted a gold star when seeing patients and followed all of the guidelines for preventive, chronic and acute disease care issued by well-known medical groups. That could require nearly 27 hours per day, a team of doctors wrote in a study last year for the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

No one could actually do that, so imagine a doctor shrugged off the chronic and acute care, as well as administrative work, and merely followed the preventive care checklist recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of health experts. That would be 8.6 of the doctor’s hours each day, according to a study in the American Journal of Public Health.

As anyone who has been sped through a 15-minute annual wellness visit knows, doctors cannot be so exacting. That the guidelines are so thorough yet so often glossed over prompts questions about their usefulness. At the same time, doctors’ pay often depends on checking off guideline boxes.

“Is this an issue? Absolutely,” said Dr. Michael Pignone, a former member of the Preventive Services Task Force and chairman of the department of internal medicine at the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School.

“Suffice it to say that what has been incentivized isn’t always what delivers the most health or benefit,” Dr. Pignone said.

Guidelines have become “a constant frustration,” said Dr. Minna Johansson, a general practitioner in Uddevalla, Sweden, who also directs the Global Center for Sustainable Healthcare at the University of Gothenburg. She worked with doctors in other countries on an analysis of the issue that was published last month in BMJ. “A lot of guidelines may seem reasonable when considered in isolation,” Dr. Johansson said. “But the cumulative burden of all guideline recommendations combined is absurd.”

Dr. Johansson was inspired to study the issue working in a small town on Sweden’s west coast.

“I have a yearly visit with my patients,” she said. Spending that precious time discussing a lifestyle prescription that, however well meaning, is unlikely to change a patient’s habits, is of dubious value, she said. And, she added, it “crowds out more important discussions.”

“Maybe the patient smokes or has suicidal thoughts,” she said.

And, she added, many guidelines, like those for extensive discussions about improving exercise habits or diet, have not been shown to result in important health benefits.

Dr. Johansson worked with Dr. Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Dr. Victor Montori of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. They argue that this problem affects medical systems throughout North America and Western Europe.

In Norway, for example, guidelines for assessing and treating high blood pressure apply to the nearly three-quarters of adults with pressures above the goal of 120/80. If the guidelines were strictly adhered to, patients would need so many regular follow-up visits that accommodating them would require more general practitioners than are currently working in Norway.

And implementing all the British guidelines for improving patients’ lifestyles could require more doctors and nurses than are practicing in the entirety of Britain.

The researchers say that guideline makers should consider what the study calls “the time needed to treat” — how much time it takes to implement a guideline.

For example, they say, the British guideline on assessing a patient’s physical activity would take 15 percent of a doctor’s visit to implement, but there is no evidence it would improve long-term health. That, they say, might suggest the guideline should be jettisoned.

Dr. Carol Mangione, chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, said the task force considered the time guidelines take. And nowhere is it suggested that doctors try to tick off each guideline recommendation in a single visit.

“Clinicians do not — and would never be expected to — implement all of the suggested screenings, counseling services, and preventive medications in a single patient visit,” Dr. Mangione wrote in an email. “When caring for patients, clinicians use both their judgment and the information obtained during conversations with each patient to prioritize which preventive services should be offered during each visit.”

Even that is not easy, said Dr. Daniel Jonas, director of the division of general internal medicine at Ohio State University.

Guidelines can serve a purpose, Dr. Jonas said. “I think they’re incredibly helpful,” he added. But, he said, “deciding what to prioritize in a busy primary care practice is a big challenge.”

Dr. Montori added another complication.

“To assume that patients and clinicians can sort and prioritize recommendations over multiple visits,” he said, “wishes away the fundamental problem that many patients cannot get primary care, see the same clinician or have unhurried consultations.”

Dr. Pignone said that some of the burden should be shared with other professionals, like nutritionists, who can talk to patients about healthy diets. But, he said, that is only a partial solution. He’d like to see current recommendations prioritized by their impact on health and on their cost effectiveness. As examples, he said, childhood immunizations would rank high but existing guidelines to give tetanus boosters to adults who already had tetanus shots would rank lower.

Dr. Guyatt said guidelines should be held to the same standard as new drugs. Before they are implemented, there should be evidence that they are helpful.

“Somebody might say, ‘Oh, a new drug has side effects but what harm is there in this guideline?’” he said. “But yes, there is real harm. There is a trade-off between doing things that are actually useful and spending time on things that are useless.”

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From a sustainability perspective, designers have traditionally viewed attachment as positive, as it leads people to retain products they care about for longer periods, reducing consumption and waste sent to landfills.

New Cornell University research provides a more nuanced understanding, showing that product attachment can also unintentionally encourage less sustainable behavior. To prevent damage or loss, people may limit the use of their most prized possessions – preserving shoes in a box, dishes as decorations, or a car in storage – and buy additional, less meaningful goods for practical daily purposes.

“The goal has been to get people to hold on to products longer, which was seen as inherently more sustainable,” said Michael Kowalski, a doctoral researcher in the field of human-centered design with a background as an industrial product designer. “But that’s not always the case if people aren’t actually using these things.”

Kowalski is the lead author of a recent article published in the International Journal of Design. Co-author Jay Yoon, assistant professor in the Department of Human Centered Design in the College of Human Ecology, and director of the Meta Design and Technology Lab, is the adviser to the research.

The research seeks to inform designers about the multiple factors driving product attachment and which could be tapped to encourage a product’s active use for as long as possible – consistent with sustainability goals – and avoid continued redundant consumption.

That’s important because Americans, on average, now throw out seven times more durable goods (meant to last at least three years) than they did in 1960, according to the research. Meanwhile, the average new U.S. home, the main location where these increasing numbers of products are used, stored, or thrown away, has grown by 1,000 square feet over the past 40 years.

“Perceived irreplaceability as a factor of attachment has been designers’ gold standard, but it turns out addressing it does not guarantee a product’s impact is going to be sustainable, if people are so attached to it that they don’t dare to use it, instead storing it away,” Yoon said. “We need to give more attention to other factors in this relationship.”

Kowalski began to explore those factors after designing and building a wooden dining table for a family member. As referenced in the research article’s title, her seemingly paradoxical response upon receiving the completed piece was, “I love it, I’ll never use it.”

Seeking to better understand that outcome, Kowalski interviewed individuals of varying demographics in their homes about the products they felt attached to and why, and which of those items they actually used or didn’t use. The more than 100 objects discussed included a dresser admired for its craftsmanship, bowls that had belonged to grandparents, and a stuffed animal invested with childhood memories.

Two cars illustrated how attachment could inspire either active or passive product use. One owner adored a car – nicknamed Stella – that was reliable and capable in extreme weather, providing the joy of adventure-filled driving experiences. Another similarly loved a special-edition convertible that they stored in a garage and drove rarely, using other cars for daily transportation.

Kowalski and Yoon identified seven key factors influencing product attachment, including aesthetic qualities, durability, performance, and the memories and emotions invoked. Through an online survey of more than 220 participants, they further analyzed how those factors differently affect attachment and long-term usage.

Perceptions of irreplaceability, they determined, did the most to foster product attachment, yet also led to less sustainable behaviors. Products that were durable, resistant to obsolescence, and pleasing got more use, while those associated with meaningful memories and sentimental emotions got less.

The researchers said the findings highlight opportunities for designers to prioritize products that people both want to keep and engage with – because they are well made, enjoyable, and age gracefully. On the other hand, products valued as unique and irreplaceable may inadvertently promote less sustainable consumption. That means designs emphasizing limited releases, personalization, and beautiful-but-scarce materials should be considered with caution.

“Creating a sense that something is one-of-a-kind increases attachment but decreases actual use of a product,” Kowalski said. “Designers need to be mindful of consumers’ psychological and emotional experience in addition to their practical needs to promote sustainable consumption in the long run.”

Reference: “I Love It, I’ll Never Use It: Exploring Factors of Product Attachment and Their Effects on Sustainable Product Usage Behavior” by Michael C. Kowalski and JungKyoon Yoon, 31 December 2022, International Journal of Design.

DOI: 10.57698/v16i3.03

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Human Centered Design.

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Humans first arrived in North America at least 15,500 years ago. Exactly how they got there, however, constitutes one of the longest-standing debates in archaeology.

For decades, scientists assumed that people first arrived in the Americas by walking south from the now-flooded land bridge in the Bering Strait that once connected Russia to Alaska when sea levels were lower during the last ice age. But recent evidence suggests that these people were not the first to set foot on the continent.

According to the now-dominant "coastal route theory," that distinction belongs to humans who boated down the Pacific coast several millennia earlier. A 2023 study (opens in new tab), for instance, found that coastal conditions were favorable during two time windows: from 24,500 to 22,000 years ago, and from 16,400 to 14,800 years ago. And while the science is far from settled, the evidence increasingly points to the first Americans arriving by sea or land along the coast.

"The pendulum is swinging in support of the coastal corridor being the route taken by the first Americans," Michael Waters (opens in new tab), director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, told Live Science in an email. "But we still need the smoking gun: an early site along the coast."

Until 20 years ago, the best available archaeological evidence (opens in new tab) suggested that humans first arrived in North America about 13,000 years ago. The rise of the Clovis people — whose 13,400-year-old remains were discovered in Clovis, New Mexico, in the early 1900s — coincided perfectly with the formation of an ice-free corridor along the Rocky Mountains.

Scientists assumed that these humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge into what is now Alaska, and then turned south to march onward to New Mexico through that convenient corridor. This remains the prevailing theory as to how the Clovis people made it to the Americas. "It seems very likely that people did arrive from northeast Asia via the ice free corridor once this route was open and viable," Todd Braje (opens in new tab), chair of anthropology at San Diego State University, told Live Science in an email.

But recent excavations suggest that the Clovis were not the first Americans. A 2011 paper in the journal Science (opens in new tab) presented evidence of tools crafted by humans in Texas from up to 15,500 years ago, and a 2021 paper in Science (opens in new tab) described 23,000-year-old footprints in New Mexico. (However, the footprint date is disputed by a 2022 study in the journal Quaternary Research (opens in new tab), which posits that the plant seeds the original team used to radiocarbon-date the footprint layer are problematic.)

These "pre-Clovis people" would have had to migrate to America long before the ice-free corridor opened up. "The earliest the inland corridor was open is 14,300 years ago," Waters said. "It is impossible to have people in Texas and Idaho at 16,000 years ago, and Florida at 14,600 years ago, come through the corridor. They must have come a different way."

How the pre-Clovis people got to America without an inland corridor to take them south from the Bering Strait remains an open question. "With the breaking of the Clovis barrier in the 1990s, we know people were in the Americas prior to at least 14,000 years ago, but when people first arrived and by what route or routes remains unknown," Braje said. "There are now lively debates on the topic but the bottom line is that no one knows definitely."

The prevailing theory is that the pre-Clovis people arrived by watercraft. "The route taken by the initial migrants was almost certainly along the coast," said Matthew Des Lauriers (opens in new tab), director of the Applied Archaeology Program at California State University, San Bernardino.

Des Lauriers described the pre-Clovis as sophisticated maritime hunter-gatherers, who would have cast off south from the Bering Land Bridge and subsided on fish and game as they voyaged down the Pacific coast. Ultimately, Des Lauriers said, these intrepid seafarers parted ways. Some pre-Clovis people followed rivers inland, while others continued south as far as Chile.

"The ocean would always have provided resources for skilled fishermen and hunters," Des Lauriers told Live Science in an email. "The most likely scenario is one of coastal fisher-hunter-gatherers moving along the North Pacific Coast."

Recent work from geologists has lent support to the theory that the Clovis people arrived via an inland corridor, while the pre-Clovis people took a coastal route. Beryllium-10 dating of glacial boulders (opens in new tab) along the ice-free corridor suggests that the corridor opened about 13,800 years ago. And studies (opens in new tab) suggest that a strip of unglaciated land should have existed along the Pacific coast of Alaska and British Columbia 16,000 years ago — prime real estate for a coastal corridor.

As the field of ancient genetics has blossomed, multiple studies (opens in new tab) have provided additional evidence that the first Americans arrived between 15,000 and 17,000 years ago.

"It is gratifying to see the archaeological and genetic evidence converging to tell the same story," Waters said. "Finally, we have a much better understanding of the chronology of the opening of the two corridors, and the evidence now supports a coastal migration route."

Nonetheless, physical evidence for both corridors is still lacking. Significant archaeological, genetic and geologic legwork will be necessary before we can firmly point to the lives and times of the first Americans and begin to describe, with confidence, how they arrived in America.

"There are very few sites along the Pacific Coast that are pre-Clovis in age, and much work needs to be accomplished to find potential early coastal sites," Braje said. "We have no definitive answers about when and how people first arrived in the Americas."

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Though Earth’s iron-rich core is subjected to a dizzying temperature in excess of 5,427° C ( 9,800° F), it stays solid. This has always been a mystery for geologists and geophysicists but novel research might have finally settled the debate. According to Swedish physicists from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the iron inside the core stays crystallized because “it exhibits a pattern of atomic diffusion.”

The Earth’s core, the innermost part of our planet, is completely out of our direct reach. The deepest hole we’ve ever dug is about 12 kilometers, whereas the core lies at about 2,900 kilometers deep, and the inner core is at starts at 5150 km. But we can know some things about it by looking at seismic waves.

When an earthquake happens, it sends out seismic waves that get picked up at seismographs around the planet. Sometimes, these waves propagate through the core as well, and based on how they propagate through the core, we can infer some things about it. For instance, we know with certainty that the inner core is solid — which sounds completely surprising, given how hot it is.

The full picture

Much of what we know about the Earth’s inner structure is owed to some clever people who realized a long time ago that they could use acoustic physics to infer properties of objects, even when they are obscured by thousands of kilometers of material. In a fluid, such as a gas or liquid, you can get shear waves when a pressure wave hits a surface. While a pressure wave’s wobble is always in the same direction, a shear wave is like a wave on a string (it’s at a right angle with the wave’s direction of propagation). When waves created by earthquakes hit the liquid outer core then travel through the inner core, scientists record an extra wave going off at right angles which can only be explained be a shear wave. The only explanation is that core must be solid.

As mentioned, seismic waves, which are essentially waves of energy that travel through the Earth’s interior, provide valuable information about the structure of the planet, and researchers can tell whether these waves are passing through a solid or liquid medium. In the case of the inner core, there’s no doubt about it: the inner core is solid.

So how is it solid when it’s so hot?

Well, whether something remains solid or melts depends firstly on temperature — but it also depends on the chemistry (what the object is made of) and pressure. Higher pressure raises the melting point as well.

This solid inner core, which is nearly the size of the moon, is mostly made of crystallized iron.

The Earth’s core formed early in the planet’s history, with heavier elements sinking towards the center, when the entire planet was just forming. The core is kept hot by the decay of radioactive elements within the Earth, as well as residual heat from the planet’s formation.

Being a metal, iron’s atomic crystal structure is packed at room temperature and pressure in a body-centered cubic (BCC) phase — an architecture with eight corner points and a center point. At extremely high pressures, the crystalline structure transforms into 12-point hexagonal forms known as a close-packed (HCP) phase.

Seeing how Earth’s core is subjected to pressures 3.5 million times higher than atmospheric pressure, never mind temperatures more than 5,000 degrees K higher, it would be sensible to assume an HCP, liquid phase. But the evidence says otherwise.

Credit: School of Physics.

Using a supercomputer, Anatoly Belonoshko, a researcher in the Department of Physics at KTH, and colleagues, explained for the first time what’s going on. In short, characteristics of BCC iron once thought to render it unstable at high pressure actually cause the opposite effect — it makes the BCC crystalline phase even more stable.

“Under conditions in Earth’s core, BCC iron exhibits a pattern of atomic diffusion never before observed,” Belonoshko says.

“It appears that the experimental data confirming the stability of BCC iron in the Core were in front of us – we just did not know what that really meant,” he added, alluding to observations collected three years ago at Livermore Lawrence National Laboratory in California.

At high pressure but low temperature, the BCC phase is unstable as the crystalline planes slide out of the cubic structure. However, analysis of the computational samples suggests at that at high temperatures, these structures stabilize much like cards in a deck.

“The sliding of these planes is a bit like shuffling a deck of cards,” says Belonoshko. “Even though the cards are put in different positions, the deck is still a deck. Likewise, the BCC iron retains its cubic structure. The BCC phase goes by the motto: ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger.’ The instability kills the BCC phase at low temperature, but makes the BCC phase stable at high temperature.”

The data also revealed the most accurate composition of the inner core to date: 96 percent iron, the rest nickel and possibly light elements.

Belonoshko also said that the shuffling or diffusion of atoms can also explain another inner core mystery: why seismic waves travel faster between the Earth’s poles than through the equator. In an anisotropic material, its properties change with the direction of the object. Like a grain of wood, Earth’s inner core also has a texture that changes with direction, being anisotropic.

“The unique features of the Fe BCC phase, such as high-temperature self-diffusion even in a pure solid iron, might be responsible for the formation of large-scale anisotropic structures needed to explain the Earth inner core anisotropy,” he says. “The diffusion allows easy texturing of iron in response to any stress.”

So the outer core is the only liquid layer of the Earth (contrary to popular belief, the mantle is also solid, though it can move a bit like a liquid in geologic time). The inner core is solid — and now we truly understand why.

Findings appeared in the journal  Nature Geosciences. Check the video below for a visual explanation of what’s going on inside our planet’s core.
 

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I recently witnessed an act of humanity that was heartwarming. When the garbage man came to empty the huge bins in our apartment complex he started lifting one of the bins when a man started waving his arms frantically from inside the bin. The operator gently put the bin down and got out of the truck. He went over to the homeless man and made sure he was all right, then gave him some money out of his wallet and a pat on the back. These selfless acts are what make Calgary great.

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As you walk past the scene and enter the coffee shop, do you consider looking in your own wallet to see whether you also have something to offer the man on the sidewalk? Do you pull out a few bills and walk outside to offer them to him, wishing you could do more?

In effect: Does the simple act of witnessing such an interaction make you feel better about your neighborhood and community?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you're probably feeling what social scientists from UCLA's Bedari Kindness Institute call "elevation"—an uplifting emotion often accompanied by a warm feeling in the chest, goosebumps, sometimes even tears. Hopefully, that feeling comes part and parcel with some "prosocial contagion," or contagious kindness. Researchers from the institute, founded in 2019, have studied whether kindness can be contagious.

What they found, in short, is yes.

In a world that today seems overloaded with fractured discourse, hate speech, hate crimes, tension and trauma, we might all benefit from the reminder that our own positive actions have ripple effects.

Daniel Fessler, director of the institute (which is housed in the UCLA College's Division of Social Sciences), says, "Each of us is kind to someone, and therefore has the potential to be kind to everyone—even those with whom we differ."

In the study, 8,000 people participated in 15 experiments. Eleven were conducted online, and four were done in person via on-the-street interviews in Los Angeles. Half of the participants watched a viral video titled "Unsung Hero," which follows a young man as he goes through his daily routine, stopping often to help others. The other half watched a control video of a man performing impressive parkour stunts in a show of athleticism.

Those who participated in person received five $1 bills as payment for their time. At the end, researchers handed each a padded envelope and invited them to make a donation to UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital. The researchers then turned away so people could anonymously choose how much money, if any, to put inside before sealing the packet.

People who viewed the "Unsung Hero" video gave 25% more to the charity than those who saw the athletic-stunt video.

Those surveyed online also got the chance to show their propensity for contagious kindness. Each was asked a hypothetical question: If your employer were to match donations to a worthy cause, would you be inclined to give? Those who viewed the "Unsung Hero" video were significantly more likely to commit to charitable giving: Sixty-seven percent said they would donate to charities if backed by their companies. For people who only saw the parkour video, only 47% answered the same way.

The insights derived from the study continue to blossom into new projects that have the potential to make our world a kinder place. Most recently, researchers at the Bedari Kindness Institute teamed up with UCLA's Center for Scholars and Storytellers and YouTube Kids to curate a series of videos derived from this research, in an effort to inspire K-12 kids to show kindness to others as a way to negate bullying.

Released during October's anti-bullying month, the videos promote kind, caring behavior in everyday situations. Hosted by actress Tabitha Brown, the collection is anchored by two short animated films showing people doing good deeds, followed by videos of kids who describe witnessing or performing acts of kindness. Stacey Freeman, executive director of the institute, developed a parent resource guide to help inspire kindness in children's everyday actions. She also recruited kids ages 6–12 to create selfie-style videos as a relatable way for kids to see other kids talking about the importance of kindness.

"As a scholarly organization," she says, "we are always seeking to translate research and knowledge into real-world applications."

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Twitter closed its offices in the country’s capital New Delhi and financial hub Mumbai, and continued to operate an office in the southern tech hub of Bengaluru, reports Bloomberg, citing sources.

In November last year, Musk fired more than 90 per cent of its staff in India, around 200-plus.

Globally, Twitter has laid off more than 50 per cent of its staff.

Last month, Musk, who failed to pay the rent for Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, asked its remaining staff in Singapore to stop coming to the office and work remotely as the company has reportedly failed to pay the monthly rent.

According to reports, Twitter employees were informed about the decision via email, instructing them to leave the CapitaGreen building and work from home.

Casey Newton of Platformer said in a tweet, “Twitter employees were just walked out of its Singapore office - its Asia-Pacific headquarters - over nonpayment of rent".

In the US, Twitter has been sued as it failed to pay $1,36,250 rent for its office space in San Francisco.

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Scientists have long warned that climate change would push species into new territories, with the march of disease-carrying mosquitos among their gravest concerns.

But this is not some theoretical future threat. Mosquitos that transmit malaria have been moving into warming areas for over a century in Africa, according to a new study.

Georgetown University biologist Colin Carlson and colleagues used one of the most comprehensive datasets ever compiled by medical entomologists to track the outer reaches of mosquito distribution in Africa over 120 years.

The data allowed the researchers to estimate the range limits of 22 species of Anopheles mosquitos between 1898 and 2016. In that time, the world has warmed by at least 1.2 degrees Celsius, opening new areas suitable to mosquitos.

As a result, Anopheles mosquitos have spread southward by 4.7 kilometers (nearly 3 miles) every year, and risen 6.5 meters in elevation each year.

That's further and faster than estimates from a 2011 study which reported that across the board, terrestrial species were moving poleward by 1.7 kilometers a year and upslope by 1.1 meters each year – a rate that was, at that time, roughly two to three times faster than previously thought.

In fact, this new study suggests that African Anopheles mosquitos have moved so far that, on average, they are now found 500 kilometers (310 miles) closer to the south pole and 700 meters (2,300 feet) farther uphill than they were at the turn of the 20th century.

According to Carlson, this is some of the first "hard historical evidence" that mosquitos are already on the move with rising temperatures – and have been for quite from time.

"This is exactly what we would expect to see if climate change is helping these species reach colder parts of the continent," says Carlson.

"Up to this point," Carlson tells Science Alert, "most work on climate change and malaria has focused on the dynamics of malaria transmission itself. Here, we're taking a step back and saying, climate change might be independently affecting mosquitos and spreading them around before we even get to the malaria part of the story."

Mosquitos are flighty: they can travel hundreds of kilometers overnight with wind currents. But these cold-blooded creatures are also sensitive to temperature changes, humidity, and rainfall, hence why local climate dictates where they can survive.

It's expected that climate change will not only expand the range of mosquitos but also lengthen the time each year when they are out in force.

Noting that this new study only tracked mosquitos in the genus Anopheles, Carlson says other mosquito species are probably moving in a similar way, but only by collecting data can we begin to understand just how far they may go.

"We tend to assume that these shifts are happening all around us, but the evidence base is fairly limited," says Carlson.

As for Anopheles mosquitos, retracing their spread through history could help to explain shifting patterns of malaria transmission in the African region. It could also help clarify long-standing debates over why malaria cases have risen in highland east Africa, specifically.

Some researchers have argued that the resurgence of malaria in highland areas is better explained by lapsed control programs and growing drug resistance, whereas others say rising temperatures are part of the potent mix of factors that influence malaria transmission, and one we need to recognize.

"If [Anopheles] mosquitoes are spreading into these areas for the first time," Carlson argues, then "it might help explain some recent changes in malaria transmission that have otherwise been hard to trace back to climate."

All of this information plays an important role in the allocation of healthcare resources, which researchers say should be directed to the fringes of transmission zones where healthcare systems may be underprepared to deal with the increasing disease risk.

Of course, it's not just malaria that we should be worried about. Carlson's past research shows that Aedes mosquitos – which are vectors for dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses – are also on the move.

In the worst-case scenario, nearly a billion people could be threatened with new exposure to virus transmission from Aedes mosquitos as the planet heats up to add to the billions more at risk from malaria.

Less is known, however, about the impact of climate change on Aedes mosquitos than on Anopheles so we best get to grips with how the situation is changing – with increased surveillance to monitor for disease outbreaks.

"We should be looking for species on the move," Carlson tells ScienceAlert, "and thinking about that as a facet of how we prepare for the health impacts of climate change."

The research has been published in Biology Letters.

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Nanda is a foreign worker on an H-1B visa, and when a health technology company in Connecticut laid her off last month, a clock started ticking.

If she can’t adjust her visa status or find a new employer to sponsor her by March 19, she will have to abruptly pack up her settled life in the United States and return to New Delhi.

“I haven't processed the information yet. I am still in a state of shock,” she said.

Tech companies, including Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, have laid off more than 100,000 workers in the U.S. this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.

Thousands of these workers are on the same clock as Nanda. Foreign workers on H-1B visas, which are used by tech companies to employ highly skilled non-U.S. citizens, have a strict 60-day grace period to find a new employer willing to sponsor them or leave the country. More workers could be vulnerable: 85,000 visas are granted annually under the H-1B scheme, and some reports estimate that more than 70% of tech workers in Silicon Valley were born outside the U.S.

Sakshi Nanda in her home office in Connecticut. (Christopher Capozziello / For The Times)

For laid-off workers like Nanda, who has lived in the U.S. since 2019, the distress of being suddenly unemployed is compounded by the countdown.

“I don't think as an immigrant, you have the liberty to even process your emotions. … I have to find something within 50, 54 days because already my clock started ticking,” said Nanda, who has experience in business analytics and sales operations. “I don't have much time. Every day, it’s like a race against time.”

The layoffs do not mean that the skills of these foreign workers, some of whom were educated in the United States, are not needed, said David Loshin, senior lecturer at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. He told The Times that several international graduates of the master’s program that he teaches have been affected by the tech layoffs. (Nanda graduated from his program in 2021.)

“It would be unfortunate for these skilled practitioners to have to be forced to leave,” Loshin said. “I think it would be valuable to review whether these are times where circumstances would allow for there to be extensions to those timeframes.”

For the most part, specialized work visas for foreigners are intended to be temporary. For example, a foreign worker with an H-1B visa can stay in the U.S. for a maximum of six years, which can be extended only in certain circumstances. The H-1B visa and status is initially valid for three years and can be extended for another three. After the maximum period of stay, the H-1B visa holder must either leave the U.S. or obtain a different immigration status.  

Many people on work visas — especially H-1B holders — stay for much longer than the initial temporary period and keep renewing their visa while they wait to secure U.S. residency, said Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Backlogs for processing green card applications have ballooned over the last few years, and per-country caps for workers from particular countries, such as India and China, have forced many to wait decades to become legal U.S. residents.

In the meantime, workers build a life in their adopted country. Some have U.S. citizen children. Others purchase homes. Many integrate into their communities, planting deep roots.

If Sakshi Nanda cannot find a new employer to sponsor her by March 19, she will have to abruptly pack up her settled life in the United States and return to New Delhi. (Christopher Capozziello / For The Times) © (Christopher Capozziello / For The Times)

Sixty days to look for a new employer who is willing to become a sponsor can feel dauntingly short. Some workers may have the option to switch to a visitor visa and stay, but they wouldn’t be allowed to legally work in the U.S. Others, including Nanda, may be eligible to switch to a spousal visa, but that process can take as long as six months, and applicants can't work while waiting for their application to be accepted or rejected.

“It really is a challenge, especially since many of the workers have really specialized skills and the more specialized someone’s skills, the more time it can take … to find a new job that fits their talents and abilities,” Gelatt said.

In 2019, 1.6 million people in the United States held temporary worker visas, according to Department of Homeland Security’s most recent estimates. That number includes the spouses and children of the temporary workers, who may or may not be able to work themselves, depending on the type of visa. DHS has yet to publish numbers for 2020 and 2021.

Some companies are eager to hire laid-off H-1B visa holders. “If you have recently been laid off and hold an H-1B visa, we would love to chat with you,” Joshua Browder, CEO of the San Francisco AI-based legal services start-up Do Not Pay, tweeted shortly after Facebook’s parent company, Meta, laid off thousands of workers in November. “25% of our team are not US citizens and we can move quickly.”

Browder usually has to pay a recruiting agency 20% of someone’s salary for talent.

But after his tweet, he received an overwhelming response — including 450 résumés. He didn’t have the capacity to hire nearly that many people.

“We got more résumés than we could handle,” he said. He made two offers and one hire and plans to hire more workers. He’s also sent some applications to his friends at other start-ups.

Browder, a 26-year-old immigrant from the United Kingdom, said laid-off tech workers on specialized visas are really struggling.

“It’s really a shame. These are, like, some of the most talented people I’ve ever seen. I’ve interviewed a lot of people in my career and these people are especially talented,” he said. “I think it’s really wrong that the system only gives them 60 days.”

Among those who have been laid off are foreign graduates of American universities and colleges who received Optional Practical Training work authorization after completing their studies. Those workers, like Srinivas Ch, have 90 days to find new employers.

Ch, 25, from India, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in August with a master's in computer science. He was laid off — via email — in mid-January after just four months at Amazon.

“I felt really bad, I felt disheartened and eventually, I had to shed some tears as well,” he said. “Going into a FAANG company was always a dream for me; being passionate about software, being a software engineer, that was the biggest dream I ever had,” he added, referring to the industry acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

As his timeline nears, Ch spends his days mass-applying to dozens of jobs at a time. But few roles are open, and many companies are implementing hiring freezes. As for his family back home in India, he said they are “giving me moral support so that I don't get depressed and I keep moving on.”

Many of these tech companies have offered generous severance packages associated with weeks or even months of potential work, said Sophie Alcorn, who runs Alcorn Immigration Law in Mountain View, Calif.

“But, in the immigration context, the money doesn’t even really matter,” she said. “Most people in this situation have a lot of savings and they can afford to live here and not work for many months based on their emergency savings. The money is paltry compared to the immigration issues at stake.”

Since November, Alcorn has hosted numerous public webinars specifically for laid-off tech workers who are in the country with specialized work visas.

She believes that about 15% of all tech workers let go during the beginning of last year’s layoffs were immigrants. Alcorn came to that figure after analyzing the data from public lists in which laid-off tech workers looking for jobs self-identified their immigration status.

Alcorn said many of her clients aren’t willing to speak publicly about being laid off, fearing reprisal from potential employers or even from the U.S. government.

“This whole thing is shrouded in shame and secrecy for the people involved and who tend to come from cultures that value humility and following the rules and respecting authority,” she said.

During her online seminars, many chose to remain anonymous, typing up their questions in a chat. Sometimes the questions she gets aren’t so much about landing another job but how to manage family dynamics under such stress.

“How do I best prepare my family …?” one laid-off tech worker typed in a chat during a “Navigating the 2022 Tech Layoffs” webinar she hosted in November.

Alcorn choked up a bit reading the question.

“I have an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old. I think just being present, compassionate, loving. ... This is stressful,” Alcorn said. “Acknowledge that this is a strain on everybody. They know you are trying your best.”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that administers the nation’s naturalization system, “continues to monitor the U.S. labor market and economy when exploring procedural, policy and regulatory options to address related challenges faced by immigrant communities,” a spokesperson said. “USCIS remains committed to breaking down barriers in the immigration system.”

But any reforms, if they happen, would probably come too late for workers like Ch and Nanda. For now, they can only do one thing: “Apply, apply, apply, because you are racing against time and it's not a great feeling,” Nanda said.

“There's a lot of resilience being an immigrant,” she added. “We have had our own journey and struggles to come here so I'm not going to let that one job take that away from me. I'm going to fight till the end.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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The trend of Asian populations growing and moving to cities — providing cheap labor, demand for modern infrastructure and high economic growth — has reached a turning point with China now joining countries with shrinking populations in the region.

Still, the aging and shrinking countries of Northeast Asia are likely to continue to be Asia’s major powers for the foreseeable future but will link in new ways to Asia’s still-growing states.

Asia’s dominant economies — China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — are together experiencing unprecedented rapid population aging. It was only in 1999 that any major country had ever reached a median age above 40, with Japan at 40.4.

Japan continued to have the highest median age in the world in 2021 at 48.4, and its neighbors are close behind. In contrast, the majority of the world’s population lives in poor countries with young median ages — including several Indo-Pacific states such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Asia’s varied demographic transitions are creating surprising new connections. Manufacturing superpowers Japan and South Korea have shifted much of their production to places with more youthful populations. In 2018, over one-quarter of Vietnam’s GDP was created by just one South Korean firm, Samsung.

This is not a one-way street, as production in Vietnam constituted 30% of Samsung’s global sales that year. Youthful countries in the Indo-Pacific such as India and the Philippines also account for some of the world’s largest sources of emigration.

Vietnamese factory workers in a row. Image: Facebook

South Korea is an example of the trends in other Northeast Asian states — including Japan, Taiwan, China and Russia as well as North Korea to a lesser extent — where populations are rapidly aging and have begun to shrink in total size.

Despite South Korea’s continuing rise as an economic powerhouse and its recent increases in defense spending, the country will face real challenges in the coming years. Its working-age population will shrink dramatically and its long-standing practice of conscripting young men into mandatory military service will yield fewer and fewer soldiers.

South Korea will see a nearly 35% reduction in the working-age population (20–64 years old) from now until 2050 based on current fertility rates. Taiwan and China will see 28.6% and 20.6% reductions respectively. For China, that is a decrease of over 186 million people in this age group over the next 27 years.

Immigration is one option to maintain robust working-age populations. A group of regional states — including Australia, New Zealand and Singapore — have embraced this approach to offsetting below-replacement birth rates in their native populations, resulting in continued population growth.

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have experimented with receiving more foreign workers but so far have not instituted new programs at a scale that would have a noticeable effect on their rapid aging. Given China’s large population size, immigration is simply not an option to offset a shrinking working-age population.

Vietnam is an example of a group of regional states that are barely managing to maintain a stable population without immigration or rapid aging, while also experiencing numerous internal demographic shifts. The population shift from rural to urban areas is a driver for an urban labor market that fuels Vietnam’s export-driven growth.

The Vietnamese media and public are concerned about the increasing numbers of their young workers moving to foreign countries. At the same time, the growing symbiosis between South Korea and Vietnam is an excellent example of Asia’s demographic interconnectedness, as South Korea continues to locate its lower-cost manufacturing operations in other countries.

Several “middle power” states in the Indo-Pacific are projected to grow and age much more slowly — and are poised to benefit from a “demographic dividend” that Northeast Asian states experienced decades ago.

Young women are set to power India’s economy for years to come. Photo: AFP / Bhagirath Basnet / The Times Of India

India will become the world’s most populous country as early as 2024, with a projected population growth of around 256 million by 2050 — versus a combined projected population loss of 176 million by Russia, Japan and China combined, in addition to more rapid aging of those populations.

This group of states faces very different demographics-related challenges more in line with population-growth fears commonly heard in the twentieth century, such as concerns about having too many mouths to feed and not enough employment options, and the potential resulting political instability.

In the 21st century, 98% of population growth will be in less-developed countries and the world population is expected to peak before the century’s end.

Demographic change within Asia’s aging powers contributes to increased investments in Asia’s growing states, creating new opportunities for them to benefit from competition among states such as China, Japan and South Korea.

But domestic leaders across the region face mounting political pressures due to inadequate infrastructure for growing cities, another demographically driven challenge.

Asia’s population changes underscore the interconnectedness of the region and the shared challenges that states face. Rather than pushing them further away from each other, Asia’s demographic differences are bringing many states closer together.

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CHIANG MAI, Thailand—The funeral of Chao Duang Duen Na Chiang Mai, the last princess of the now dissolved Lanna Kingdom of Northern Thailand, was just as grandiose as the extraordinary life she led.

“It’s a funeral?” one onlooking traveler asks, “why are they wearing white?” Lanna don’t wear black and Saturday was the last day of a week-long, Lanna last rites ceremony. The Abbot had blessed the coffin, now nestled in a small mobile “castle” ready to be led in procession by alms bearers, an elephant, hundreds of Fon Lep nail dancers, tangerine monks and family of the deceased.

Chao Duang Duen died aged 93 on Jan. 2, at her home in Chiang Mai, the capital city of the lands of her forefathers. Established in 1292 AD, the Lan Na kings ruled a wide, mountainous region of what is now Northern Thailand for 500 years—before being annexed by Siam, the expanding dominion to the south. Distinguished by their own language, arts, culture, animistic beliefs and Buddhist traditions, Lanna lands became tributary states, their kingdom split into smaller principalities. That rolled along until 1939 when Duang Duen’s grandfather, King Kaew Nawarat died, and the Lanna royalty was completely abolished by Siam. Duang Duen was only 10 years old.

Courtesy of Chaoduangduen.com

Eighty years later, Thailand remembers Chao Duang Duen as a cultural patron, but for the people in the vast province of Chiang Mai, she was more than that. From the thousands of mourners at her funeral, to the language and reverence locals use when discussing her, it’s clear that she was still their princess.

“You can inherit the title, but you don’t inherit respect. She worked for that,” her granddaughter, Loogtan Yontaranak, told The Daily Beast while walking us through an exhibition on Duang Duen’s life. The photographs, trophies and awards, costumes and testimonies have their own pavilion in Wat Phra Singh temple for the week of the funeral.

“Her way of being a princess was the way she cared for other people,” her grandson Pana Yontaranak said. He told The Daily Beast how, throughout his grandmother’s life, she used savvy business acumen, devotion to Lanna culture and socio-political diplomacy to better the lives of people in both rural and urban Chiang Mai.

Courtesy of grandson Pana Yontaranak

Most of Chao Duang Duen’s descendants work in the arts. Yontaranak is a piano teacher and lecturer. His parents, including Duang Duen’s daughter Sugar and son-in-law Nat founded a much loved concert hall in Bangkok, Sala Sudasiri Sobha. A natural lineage, given the late princess’ background as an accomplished dancer, musician and performer. She practiced throughout her life, and in 1972, even danced Fon Lep for King Rama IX, his wife Queen Sikirit and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom on a state visit to Chiang Mai.

Duang Duen was raised by Princess Bua Tip, the daughter of that last Lanna ruler, King Kaew Nawarat, in the royal palaces of Chiang Mai. Bua Tip was a great patron of the arts and Duang Duen describes her young life at court as one of theatrical plays and music recitals, where she herself also trained in traditional Lanna arts, as nobles’ daughters led performances for visiting dignitaries. She and her three siblings lived in a colossal teak-wood palace on the Ping River in Chiang Mai, which was destroyed in the 1940s to make way for Nawarat Market. The developers had the good grace to name the market after the last king.

Three Rules

Pana reveals that following the dissolution of the Lanna princely line, Duang Duen’s father, Chao Ratchaphakinai, distributed plots of the erstwhile royal family’s land to his staff and farmers entirely for free, so they could continue to live and work safely. This philanthropy made a great impression on the young princess, who continued to live in Chiang Mai for her entire life, even after her siblings and wider family moved south to Bangkok.

Among her first steps into public life, following her marriage to local MP Pirun Intrawut, was the launch of her own newspaper, The Voice of Chiang Mai. She also hosted local radio shows, winning the prestigious Voice of America Medal for exemplary broadcasters. She was known for her sharp mind, and “always reading, always learning, making us watch the news instead of cartoons as kids,” Pana recalls.

After establishing herself as a critical voice to be reckoned with in the local media, Chao Duang Duen studied to become the first female judge of the Juvenile Court in 1970, before she was voted into the House of Representatives, part of Thailand’s National Legislative Assembly, in 1973.

“She didn’t stop working at all.”

“People ask me, how come your grandmother was so modernized?,” laughs Pana. She used her platform to promote women’s rights, campaigning for birth control to be adopted in the region, and leading the local Family Planning Association of Thailand. She went on to form the Northern Association of Women Entrepreneurs, encouraging women to get into the workplace. “In her speech when launching that association,” Pana says, “she said that firstly you have to be a good person. That’s the most important thing. Secondly, you have to be wise. Thirdly, you have to look great. And the final thing, you have to love your country and your people.”

Courtesy of grandson Pana Yontaranak

After being a journalist, judge and women’s rights campaigner, her final metamorphosis saw Chao Duang Duen take on the role of protector of Lanna arts, cleverly preserving her culture while creating jobs that equated to economic stability for people in rural and suburban Chiang Mai.

She founded the annual Chiang Mai Flower Festival in the 1970s, which still takes place every February. But more impactful still, in the 1980s she launched her own textiles brand, Duang Duen Cotton, opening factories and employing women from the villages surrounding Chiang Mai, preserving traditional Lanna weaving patterns and natural dyeing methods.

“She came at the right time and became a springboard for reviving Lanna culture,” Pana muses. “Her textile factory used to be a resort. She employed and trained villagers to weave textiles, this was in the late 1980s when others her age would have retired. She didn’t stop working at all.”

The factory neighbors her country residence in Jomthong; it’s since been sold on and is now called the Jomthong Native Handicraft Training Center. More visible to visitors, though, is the Chiang Mai Walking Street, which she initiated in the 1990s. Night markets and walking streets are now synonymous with Thailand, but she piloted the earliest incarnation, knocking on doors, encouraging locals to get behind it. The weekly market is a sprawling event to this day, giving hill tribe villagers and farmers a place to sell their crafts and produce.

Final Farewell

The silence of the funeral is interrupted by a somber drumbeat directing a woodwind band, which in turn guides 400 dancers. They flex then point their hands, adorned with six-inch, solid silver nails shining on every finger tip. Their sharp talons slice through the palpable tension, their dance the only movement here as everyone watches and waits. Even the confused tourists stand hushed, clustered in the temple forecourt. Wat Phra Singh is a popular sightseeing spot, as well as Chiang Mai’s royal temple. As the ranat ek Thai xylophone chimes, the entire abbey of Buddhist monks arrive, bright orange robes filing from every corner of this priory, ready to escort a coffin on a royal funeral the likes of which haven’t been seen in this city for generations.

Courtesy of grandson Pana Yontaranak

Her awards and accolades go on, but the behemothic funeral was the greatest proof of her devotion to Chiang Mai, as Chiang Mai poured love back in her moving send off. Police and traffic wardens blocked the streets of the old city center as the mile long procession of monks, Fon Lep dancers, an elephant, musicians and her extended family and loved ones slowly paced past.

After the two-hour march, her coffin arrived in Wat Suan Dok, the temple that has served as the resting place for Lanna kings for 700 years. Thousands of attendees, dressed in white, gathered to say their goodbyes to their princess as the pyre flamed—the last Lanna funeral the country will ever see.

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I’ve been trying to work out what the most stressful moment of my day is and I think I’ve got it: 5.38am, or thereabouts. That’s when I realise that, having been woken by the dog (erratic, ancient) sometime between 3am and 4am, none of my getting-back-to-sleep strategies are going to work and instead turn to catastrophising about the day ahead, reminding myself insomnia is probably worse than smoking, sitting down and snorting asbestos combined.

The question arose because according to what I suppose we could call research (a survey commissioned by Rescue Remedy, the flower-based potion for modern malaises), 7.23am is the “most stressful” time of the day. I get it. Bad things tend to happen around then: verticality, showering and dressing for starters. If you are a parent, you may also be upbraided for human rights violations in the fields of “breakfast”, “teeth” or “shoes”.

Possibly a child will pull a dog-eared letter out of a book bag with the triumphant air of a conjurer with a rabbit, informing you they need to come in this morning dressed as Pope Pius VII and bring a scale model of the Sistine Chapel made of “widely recyclable materials only, please”. If you’re commuting, any number of exciting developments are likely to be poised to ruin your day and, if you’re Mark Wahlberg, you’re an hour and 23 minutes into your shower and have to start playing golf in seven minutes.

But I’m not convinced 7.23am is really the worst. For one thing, that seems likely to be a transitory stress peak – the kind you get through by gritting your teeth (possibly trying not to crush the pipette delivering flower essences into your gullet as you do) and reminding yourself that later you’ll be able to snatch a few moments to quietly stare into space and regret your life choices. But it’s more that the real problem with stress is the relentless way it accumulates, like heavy metal in your blood; the way it keeps coming back to deliver a top up. After the 5.38am witching hour, I have multiple sweaty, chest-tightening peaks throughout the day. It’s a cruise ship buffet of cortisol and my life is laughably low-stress, so surely everyone feels like this? Maybe there wasn’t a tick box on the survey for: “It’s a constant roiling churn – please help.”

The thing is, we’re still evolutionarily maladapted to deal with the world in which we find ourselves. None of our fight-or-flight stuff is turning out to be particularly helpful for dealing with constant aggressive digital stimuli, the melting Antarctic, zoonotic bird flu, flesh-eating opioids, alien balloons et al. We’re reporting higher levels of stress all the time: according to Ipsos research last year, 60% of participants across 34 countries report that they have felt stressed “to the point where they felt like they could not cope or deal with things at least once in the past year”.

Women, people under 35 and on lower incomes suffered worse, unsurprisingly.

Goodness knows what can be done about the big stuff while we wait for the human central nervous system to catch up with the 21st century, or for one of the smörgåsbord of potential catastrophes to return us to calm, pre-agrarian living. But in terms of getting us through those stress crunch points in the day, there are so many little things that would help. Put phone chargers, public toilets and water fountains everywhere, for a start. Require all customer service helplines to give you £10 for every minute you wait and let you choose your hold music: birdsong, Bach, death metal, or Kate Winslet saying “Everything’s going to be amazing – you’ve got this” . Don’t just renationalise public transport – nationalise wifi, too, and liberate us from router-based suffering. Introduce a compulsory module on Stem degrees called “revolutionising printers” and one on arts degrees called “improving autocorrect”. Ban the sale of sticky tape that splits into multiple tiny unmanageable ends, ditto aluminium foil. Ah, I feel calmer already.

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Capping off a remarkable journey that began with his birth in a refugee camp in Nepal, a man from Louisville, Kentucky, recently emerged as champion of the Nepali version of the singing competition The Voice.

Karan Rai’s dramatic rise as the south Asian nation’s latest singing sensation was chronicled Friday in the Louisville Eccentric Observer alternative weekly newspaper, which declared his story “a classic humble-beginnings epic”.

According to the alt-weekly, nicknamed Leo, Rai was born in 1994 in the Pathri Morang refugee camp in eastern Nepal. It was one of two camps remaining for people fleeing ethnic cleansing of people with Nepali roots in Bhutan – another Himalayan country – in the 1980s.

Rai’s parents were born in Bhutan and were descendants of Nepalis who went there to work. But they went to the refugee camps amid conflict over speaking and teaching the Nepali language.

Rai told Leo that his family didn’t feel accepted as Nepali at the camp, where life was rugged.

“We just had a little house,” Rai said. “We used to get rations weekly,” including rice, potatoes and chiles – “and then sometimes we’d run out of the rations.”

Other countries, including the US, began offering ways for refugees to migrate. In 2013, Rai and his family went to the US, initially spending time in Seattle, Washington, before moving to Louisville for what they considered better educational opportunities, he said.

Rai had first shown a talent for singing during his days at the refugee camp. The thought of participating in a reality show always appealed to him, including NBC’s singing competition The Voice, whose 23rd American season is scheduled to air beginning in March.

Then Rai learned online that the Nepali version of The Voice allowed anyone who spoke the nation’s language to audition to become a contestant – “including those who had been trapped between two lands that didn’t want them, in refugee camps, left without a country to call home”, as Leo’s Erica Rucker put it.

Leo reported that Rai made an audition tape demonstrating how his range, from “hard rock to a delicate falsetto on more traditional Nepali melodies”, and submitted it to the show through its website. Producers notified him that he’d moved on to the next round, and he traveled to Nepal for a blind audition.

Rai went on to spend seven months in Nepal competing on the show’s fourth season as part of a team coached by Raju Lama, one of the brightest singing stars in the country of 30 million people.

Louisville, Kentucky, resident Karan Rai competes on the Nepali version of the Voice, which he ultimately won in December.

The time – and money – Rai expended participating on the show were worth it.

He clinched the crown as the competition’s champion in late December and with Lama performed a concert at the Pathri Morang camp, where his life began. He has also released an album, The Kites, and shot a video for his first single, Changa, which involved him collaborating with Dayahang Rai, a revered Nepali actor.

“He’s the superstar of [the] Nepal industry at this moment,” Karan Rai told Leo of the actor. “I get lucky to play with him in my music video.”

Rai spoke to Leo as he prepared to travel to Australia to perform as part of his contract with The Voice of Nepal. The contract calls on him to tour several countries and serve as an ambassador for the competition’s brand.

But first, he returned to Louisville – more than 7,700 miles from Nepal by airplane – with his trophy in hand. A small crowd of Nepali and Bhutanese residents of Louisville gathered at the city’s airport – named after another local champion, the late legendary boxer Muhammad Ali – and greeted him as a hero.

Later, he performed in a high school gym for a larger crowd of Louisville’s Nepali and Bhutanese residents. Banners at the venue read “Nepal-America Society of Kentucky” and “Bhutanese Society of Kentucky”, a striking illustration of how people from two countries that he once felt didn’t want him now claimed him proudly.

“All I want to say is no matter where you come from, where is your background, just focus – just do one thing,” Rai said. “Be passionate about one thing.”

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DALL·E 2 is a type of generative model—a system that attempts to use training data to generate something new that’s comparable to the data in terms of quality and variety. This is one of the hardest problems in machine learning, and getting to this point has been a difficult journey.

The first important generative models for images used an approach to artificial intelligence called a neural network—a program composed of many layers of computational units called artificial neurons. But even as the quality of their images got better, the models proved unreliable and hard to train. Meanwhile, a powerful generative model—created by a postdoctoral researcher with a passion for physics—lay dormant, until two graduate students made technical breakthroughs that brought the beast to life.

DALL·E 2 is such a beast. The key insight that makes DALL·E 2’s images possible—as well as those of its competitors Stable Diffusion and Imagen—comes from the world of physics. The system that underpins them, known as a diffusion model, is heavily inspired by nonequilibrium thermodynamics, which governs phenomena like the spread of fluids and gases. “There are a lot of techniques that were initially invented by physicists and now are very important in machine learning,” said Yang Song, a machine-learning researcher at OpenAI.

The power of these models has rocked industry and users alike. “This is an exciting time for generative models,” said Anima Anandkumar, a computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology and senior director of machine-learning research at Nvidia. And while the realistic-looking images created by diffusion models can sometimes perpetuate social and cultural biases, she said, “we have demonstrated that generative models are useful for downstream tasks [that] improve the fairness of predictive AI models.”

High Probabilities

To understand how creating data works for images, let’s start with a simple image made of just two adjacent grayscale pixels. We can fully describe this image with two values, based on each pixel’s shade (from 0 being completely black to 255 being completely white). You can use these two values to plot the image as a point in 2D space.

If we plot multiple images as points, clusters may emerge—certain images and their corresponding pixel values that occur more frequently than others. Now imagine a surface above the plane, where the height of the surface corresponds to how dense the clusters are. This surface maps out a probability distribution. You’re most likely to find individual data points underneath the highest part of the surface, and few where the surface is lowest.

DALL·E 2 produced these images of “goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach.” The program, created by OpenAI, had likely never encountered similar images, but could still generate them on its own. Courtesy of DALL·E 2

Now you can use this probability distribution to generate new images. All you need to do is randomly generate new data points while adhering to the restriction that you generate more probable data more often—a process called “sampling” the distribution. Each new point is a new image.

The same analysis holds for more realistic grayscale photographs with, say, a million pixels each. Only now, plotting each image requires not two axes, but a million. The probability distribution over such images will be some complex million-plus-one-dimensional surface. If you sample that distribution, you’ll produce a million pixel values. Print those pixels on a sheet of paper and the image will likely look like a photo from the original data set.

The challenge of generative modeling is to learn this complicated probability distribution for some set of images that constitute training data. The distribution is useful partly because it captures extensive information about the data, and partly because researchers can combine probability distributions over different types of data (such as text and images) to compose surreal outputs, such as a goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach. “You can mix and match different concepts to create entirely new scenarios that were never seen in training data,” said Anandkumar.

In 2014, a model called a generative adversarial network (GAN) became the first to produce realistic images. “There was so much excitement,” said Anandkumar. But GANs are hard to train: They may not learn the full probability distribution and can get locked into producing images from only a subset of the distribution. For example, a GAN trained on images of a variety of animals may generate only pictures of dogs.

Machine learning needed a more robust model. Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, whose work was inspired by physics, would provide one.

Blobs of Excitement

Around the time GANs were invented, Sohl-Dickstein was a postdoc at Stanford University working on generative models, with a side interest in nonequilibrium thermodynamics. This branch of physics studies systems not in thermal equilibrium—those that exchange matter and energy internally and with their environment.

An illustrative example is a drop of blue ink diffusing through a container of water. At first, it forms a dark blob in one spot. At this point, if you want to calculate the probability of finding a molecule of ink in some small volume of the container, you need a probability distribution that cleanly models the initial state, before the ink begins spreading. But this distribution is complex and thus hard to sample from.

Eventually, however, the ink diffuses throughout the water, making it pale blue. This leads to a much simpler, more uniform probability distribution of molecules that can be described with a straightforward mathematical expression. Nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes the probability distribution at each step in the diffusion process. Crucially, each step is reversible—with small enough steps, you can go from a simple distribution back to a complex one.

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein created a new approach for generative modeling based on the principles of diffusion. Courtesy of Asako Miyakawa

Sohl-Dickstein used the principles of diffusion to develop an algorithm for generative modeling. The idea is simple: The algorithm first turns complex images in the training data set into simple noise—akin to going from a blob of ink to diffuse light blue water—and then teaches the system how to reverse the process, turning noise into images.

Here’s how it works: First, the algorithm takes an image from the training set. As before, let’s say that each of the million pixels has some value, and we can plot the image as a dot in million-dimensional space. The algorithm adds some noise to each pixel at every time step, equivalent to the diffusion of ink after one small time step. As this process continues, the values of the pixels bear less of a relationship to their values in the original image, and the pixels look more like a simple noise distribution. (The algorithm also nudges each pixel value a smidgen toward the origin, the zero value on all those axes, at each time step. This nudge prevents pixel values from growing too large for computers to easily work with.)

Do this for all images in the data set, and an initial complex distribution of dots in million-dimensional space (which cannot be described and sampled from easily) turns into a simple, normal distribution of dots around the origin.

“The sequence of transformations very slowly turns your data distribution into just a big noise ball,” said Sohl-Dickstein. This “forward process” leaves you with a distribution you can sample from with ease.

Next is the machine-learning part: Give a neural network the noisy images obtained from a forward pass and train it to predict the less noisy images that came one step earlier. It’ll make mistakes at first, so you tweak the parameters of the network so it does better. Eventually, the neural network can reliably turn a noisy image, which is representative of a sample from the simple distribution, all the way into an image representative of a sample from the complex distribution.

The trained network is a full-blown generative model. Now you don’t even need an original image on which to do a forward pass: You have a full mathematical description of the simple distribution, so you can sample from it directly. The neural network can turn this sample—essentially just static—into a final image that resembles an image in the training data set.

Sohl-Dickstein recalls the first outputs of his diffusion model. “You’d squint and be like, ‘I think that colored blob looks like a truck,’” he said. “I’d spent so many months of my life staring at different patterns of pixels and trying to see structure that I was like, ‘This is way more structured than I’d ever gotten before.’ I was very excited.”

Envisioning the Future

Sohl-Dickstein published his diffusion model algorithm in 2015, but it was still far behind what GANs could do. While diffusion models could sample over the entire distribution and never get stuck spitting out only a subset of images, the images looked worse, and the process was much too slow. “I don’t think at the time this was seen as exciting,” said Sohl-Dickstein.

It would take two students, neither of whom knew Sohl-Dickstein or each other, to connect the dots from this initial work to modern-day diffusion models like DALL·E 2. The first was Song, a doctoral student at Stanford at the time. In 2019 he and his adviser published a novel method for building generative models that didn’t estimate the probability distribution of the data (the high-dimensional surface). Instead, it estimated the gradient of the distribution (think of it as the slope of the high-dimensional surface).

Yang Song helped come up with a novel technique to generate images by training a network to effectively unscramble noisy images. Courtesy of Yang Song

Song found his technique worked best if he first perturbed each image in the training data set with increasing levels of noise, then asked his neural network to predict the original image using gradients of the distribution, effectively de-noising it. Once trained, his neural network could take a noisy image sampled from a simple distribution and progressively turn that back into an image representative of the training data set. The image quality was great, but his machine-learning model was painfully slow to sample. And he did this with no knowledge of Sohl-Dickstein’s work. “I was not aware of diffusion models at all,” said Song. “After our 2019 paper was published, I received an email from Jascha. He pointed out to me that [our models] have very strong connections.”

In 2020 the second student saw those connections and realized that Song’s work could improve Sohl-Dickstein’s diffusion models. Jonathan Ho had recently finished his doctoral work on generative modeling at UC Berkeley, but he continued working on it. “I thought it was the most mathematically beautiful subdiscipline of machine learning,” he said.

Ho redesigned and updated Sohl-Dickstein’s diffusion model with some of Song’s ideas and other advances from the world of neural networks. “I knew that in order to get the community’s attention, I needed to make the model generate great-looking samples,” he said. “I was convinced that this was the most important thing I could do at the time.”

His intuition was spot-on. Ho and his colleagues announced this new and improved diffusion model in 2020, in a paper titled “Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models.” It quickly became such a landmark that researchers now refer to it simply as DDPM. According to one benchmark of image quality—which compares the distribution of generated images to the distribution of training images—these models matched or surpassed all competing generative models, including GANs. It wasn’t long before the big players took notice. Now, DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion, Imagen and other commercial models all use some variation of DDPM.

Jonathan Ho and his colleagues combined Sohl-Dickstein and Song’s methods to make possible modern diffusion models such as DALL·E 2. Courtesy of Jonathan Ho

Modern diffusion models have one more key ingredient: large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3. These are generative models trained on text from the internet to learn probability distributions over words instead of images. In 2021, Ho—now a research scientist at a stealth company—and his colleague Tim Salimans at Google Research, along with other teams elsewhere, showed how to combine information from an LLM and an image-generating diffusion model to use text (say, “goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach”) to guide the process of diffusion and hence image generation. This process of “guided diffusion” is behind the success of text-to-image models like DALL·E 2.

“They are way beyond my wildest expectations,” said Ho. “I’m not going to pretend I saw all this coming.”

Generating Problems

As successful as these models have been, images from DALL·E 2 and its ilk are still far from perfect. Large language models can reflect cultural and societal biases, such as racism and sexism, in the text they generate. That’s because they are trained on text taken off the internet, and often such texts contain racist and sexist language. LLMs that learn a probability distribution over such text become imbued with the same biases. Diffusion models are also trained on uncurated images taken off the internet, which can contain similarly biased data. It’s no wonder that combining LLMs with today’s diffusion models can sometimes result in images reflective of society’s ills.

Anandkumar has firsthand experience. When she tried to generate stylized avatars of herself using a diffusion model–based app, she was shocked. “So [many] of the images were highly sexualized,” she said, “whereas the things that it was presenting to men weren’t.” She’s not alone.

These biases can be lessened by curating and filtering the data (an extremely difficult task, given the immensity of the data set), or by putting checks on both the input prompts and the outputs of these models. “Of course, nothing is a substitute for carefully and extensively safety-testing” a model, Ho said. “This is an important challenge for the field.”

Despite such concerns, Anandkumar believes in the power of generative modeling. “I really like Richard Feynman’s quote: ‘What I cannot create, I do not understand,’” she said. An increased understanding has enabled her team to develop generative models to produce, for example, synthetic training data of underrepresented classes for predictive tasks, such as darker skin tones for facial recognition, helping improve fairness. Generative models may also give us insights into how our brains deal with noisy inputs, or how they conjure up mental imagery and contemplate future action. And building more sophisticated models could endow AIs with similar capabilities.

“I think we are just at the beginning of the possibilities of what we can do with generative AI,” said Anandkumar.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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