On Monday 6th February 2023, southeast Türkiye was hit by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake at 04:17 local time, the most powerful to strike the country since 1939. The epicentre was near Ataler in Gaziantep Province. More than 11,000 buildings were destroyed and many thousands of people were trapped in the rubble. Many of these buildings were flats with several floors. As authorities were responding, a second 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck just hours later at 13:30 local time with an epicentre at Ekinozu in the same region.

The impact was severe in southern Türkiye in towns such as Gaziantep, Malatya, Kahramanmaras, Hatay, Adana and Osmaniye. Northwest Syria has also been badly affected, not just in larger towns such as Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, Hama and Tartus, but in both countries, many smaller towns have been devastated.

A large number of rescue workers are on the scene and as they search through the rubble, the impact is becoming clearer. At this stage, 41,000 fatalities have been confirmed and the number of injuries is estimated to be 120,000, although thankfully, Turkish authorities rapidly transferred them to acute hospitals elsewhere in Türkiye and most have been discharged.

As with all earthquakes, there have been over 2,100 aftershocks which have traumatised displaced communities. As a result, many survivors are in their cars overnight or huddled around ad-hoc camp fires, too scared to go near buildings, many of which are unstable. The climate is wet and very cold making it much harder, especially for the elderly and very young children to cope with the conditions.

Humanity First previously responded to the Izmir earthquake in 1999, and for over a decade, has been assisting Syrian refugees in Gaziantep and Iskenderun in south-east Türkiye.

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China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co (CATL) will join hands with Ford Motor Co to produce lithium-iron-phosphate batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) made in Michigan, a move the Fujian-based battery maker hopes will gain and maintain market share in the fast-growing industry.

Ford, the second largest EV maker in the United States after Tesla, said on February 13 it would build a US$3.5 billion battery plant in Detroit, America’s once-robust but now flagging auto-making hub.

CATL announced it will contribute its core technology but not immediately make any capital investments in the deal, which has predictably sparked political controversy in Washington amid the two sides’ trade war, tech war and wider strategic rivalry.

Among the battery deal’s critics is Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who last month likened it to a Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing has countered that the US should provide a fair and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies as per its free trade obligations.

Chinese commentators have said CATL’s entry to the American market on the basis of its technology alone marks a milestone for the country. Others have said CATL had little choice but to follow in the footsteps of its South Korean and Japanese rivals or risk losing competitiveness, profits and market share.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co (CATL) is the world’s largest lithium-ion battery manufacturer for e-vehicles. Photo: catl.com

They said as major EV makers and users are based in North America and Europe, it is essential that battery suppliers move their production lines closer to their customers. 

CATL’s global market share reached 37% last year while South Korea’s LG Energy Solution had 13.6%, according to SNE Research. BYD, a Chinese electric car maker, had 13.6% while Japan’s Panasonic had 7.3%, the same research showed.

In February 2022, the Biden administration unveiled a plan to allocate $5 billion to states to fund EV chargers over the next five years. In May, it said it would begin a $3.1 billion plan to boost domestic battery manufacturing.

Last March, LG Energy Solution said it would invest $5.3 billion to build battery cell factories in Arizona in the US and Ontario in Canada over the next two years. The South Korean firm later said it planned to add six plants in North America by 2025. On January 23 this year, it said it would partner with Honda Motor to build a new battery plant in Ohio.

Panasonic also said last October it would start building a new battery factory in Kansas.

Last March, media reported that CATL planned to invest $5 billion to build a factory in North America. CATL chairman Robin Zeng said the company would enter US markets at all costs as most of its rivals had unveiled plans to move closer to their customers in North America.

But CATL’s plan has remained uncertain amid rising US-China tensions and rivalry. Last month, Governor Youngkin withdrew Virginia’s bid for a Ford EV battery plant due to the fact that it would use CATL’s technology.

On Monday, Ford’s chief executive Jim Farley said the company’s new plant in Michigan would produce both lithium-iron-phosphate and nickel-cobalt-manganese batteries beginning in 2026.

Beijing, meanwhile, is calling at the highest level for fair treatment in the US battery market. “Normal economic and trade cooperation between Chinese and US companies should not be politicized,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday.

Commenting on Youngkin’s rhetoric and moves, Wang said certain individuals in the US should abandon ideological bias and stop overstretching the concept of national security and suppressing foreign companies. He said the US should create an open, fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies to invest and operate.

Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin doesn’t want CATL in his home state. Image: CNN / Screengrab

Chinese commentators have mixed views of the battery kerfuffle. One automobile columnist writing under the name Dao Ge said the Ford-CATL deal marked a big milestone for China’s auto sector. 

He noted that over the past three decades US and Japanese automakers had exported their technologies to win market share in China. He said China now has a full auto supply chain and can export its battery technology to likewise win global market share in the sector.

A Beijing-based writer likened the deal to a perfect “curveball” that will help CATL enter North American markets without sparking any regulatory disputes. Because CATL will not invest directly in the new plant, Ford will still be able to enjoy subsidies from the US government that bar foreign participation, he wrote. 

The writer, like others, said it was urgent for CATL to close the Ford deal as most of its rivals had already started building battery plants in the US and Canada.

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TARYN FOSTER BELIEVES Australia’s dying coral reefs can still be rescued—if she can speed up efforts to save them. For years, biologists like her have been lending a hand to reefs struggling with rising temperatures and ocean acidity: They’ve collected coral fragments and cut them into pieces to propagate and grow them in nurseries on land; they’ve crossbred species to build in heat-resistance; they’ve experimented with probiotics as a defense against deadly diseases.

But even transplanting thousands of these healthy and upgraded corals onto damaged reefs will not be enough to save entire ecosystems, Foster says. “We need some way of deploying corals at scale.” Sounds like a job for some robots.

In a healthy ocean, individual corals called polyps build their skeleton by extracting calcium carbonate from seawater. They then fuse with corals of the same genetic makeup to form huge colonies—coral reefs. But as the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the water becomes more acidic, making it difficult for the polyps to build their skeletons or to keep them from dissolving. Acidification inhibits reef growth, and with global ocean temperatures rising, corals are struggling to survive.

In the Great Barrier Reef, for instance, coral growth has slowed in recent decades, partly because during heat waves the corals expel the tiny algae that live inside their tissues and provide them with nutrients, causing them to bleach. Bleached corals are not dead but are more at risk of starvation and disease, and the loss of coral reefs has a devastating impact on the thousands of fish, crabsc and other marine animals that rely on them for shelter and food.

Growing replacement corals in a nursery and manually grafting them onto existing reefs is labor intensive, expensive, and slow. Corals are naturally sluggish growers—they take three to 10 years, depending on the species, to build an adult-sized skeleton. With her company, Coral Maker, Foster is trying to accelerate this process. Before her research on coral reefs and climate change, Foster worked in her family’s masonry business. Now she is using the family’s dry-casting machines to produce limestone shapes that resemble the natural skeletons of corals—the plan is to provide young corals with a suitable foundation from which they can grow faster.

The first prototype of the Coral Maker skeleton is dome-shaped and has six plugs where live coral fragments can be placed. The skeleton design takes inspiration from nature: Many species such as brain corals grow in a dome shape, while branching or plate corals grow upward from a solid base. But there are also challenges with dome-shaped skeletons, says Foster. “They’re not as easy to manufacture as something with a flat surface, they’re not as easy to pack on a pallet, they’re not as easy to glue stuff on.”

That’s why Foster continues to tinker with the design so that the masonry machinery can soon produce up to 10,000 pieces a day for just a few dollars. The process could then be replicated in other factories.

Once multiple coral fragments with their premade skeletons are planted out on reefs, they could reach their full size within 12 to 18 months. That’s considerably faster than they would need without help—provided the location and water and light conditions are suitable. Corals like it warm, but not too warm; bright, but not too bright; they like water currents that bring in food but don’t destroy their delicate structures. “They’re a bit picky,” Foster says.

Foster has been growing a first batch of corals in premade skeletons for over a year on a coral farm near Abrolhos Island in Western Australia, where she lives. The purpose of the first trial was to test how easily divers can transport the limestone skeletons and how the coral fare in an area with good conditions. On December 2, 2022, Foster and her colleagues deployed a second batch of corals on a sandy patch on the underwater farm. This time, the premade skeletons were in the shape of a disc, with a small handle for a human diver or a remotely controlled vehicle.

Even as the corals happily encase their skeletons, Foster says that the manual tasks on land will have to be automated to produce around 1.7 million corals on 280,000 skeletons per year. She is working with researchers at the Autodesk AI Lab in San Francisco to develop and train two types of robotic arms with image sensors: one capable of cutting coral fragments into smaller pieces and gluing them into plugs and one that can implant those plugs into the limestone skeletons. Once these are running on an operational scale, she says, the goal is to have multiple projects on reefs and coastlines around the world. “I think of this as a delivery or scaling mechanism for these other technologies that people are developing, like coral propagation,” says Foster. “Just at a much faster rate and on a bigger scale.”

This article was originally published in the March/April 2023 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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• Study shows children sleeping under bed netting treated with two pesticides contract malaria at less than half the rate of those with single-treated netting

• Expert says study is proof that such nets with two or more insecticides should have been approved for widespread use a long time ago

• Mosquitoes have evolved to tolerate pyrethroids – a class of insecticides the world has relied on for preventing malaria

A recent study on the use of insecticides on anti-mosquito bed nets has demonstrated that thousands of people have unnecessarily contracted malaria due to a failure in policy.

In the renowned journal The Lancet, Professor Gerry Killeen, the AXA Research Chair in Pathogen Ecology at University College Cork (UCC), states that the results of a major trial on bed nets treated with a combination of two insecticides instead of one highlight the significant impact that such combinations can have on reducing the burden of malaria in rural Africa. According to Professor Killeen, the trial clearly demonstrates the potential of these combinations to make a difference in the fight against the disease.

Prof Killeen was commenting on research by Manfred Acrombessi and his team in Benin, also published in The Lancet.

It showed that because mosquitoes have evolved to tolerate pyrethroids – a class of insecticides the world has relied on for preventing malaria – children sleeping under bed nets treated with only this active ingredient still get malaria once a year on average, while their neighbors with dual ingredients nets became ill at only half that rate.

Prof Killeen, who wrote the commentary with Dr. Seynabou Sougoufara at Keele University, says this landmark paper also proves the point that such nets with two or more insecticides should have been approved for widespread use a long time ago.

“By using two or more active ingredients, such combination nets can decisively kill off insecticide-resistant mosquito variants before they have the opportunity to multiply, thus preventing resistance from becoming established across entire mosquito populations in the first place,” Prof. Killeen commented.

“Crucially, the pyrethroids are exceptionally useful insecticides for public health purposes: Apart from being the standard treatment for bed nets, they are also the only insecticide class that can be safely dispersed into the air as a repellent vapor, to protect people living in malarious areas when they are awake and active outside the protective reach of their bed nets.

“It is unclear at present whether the pyrethroid resistance genie can be put back in the bottle but that’s exactly why our ongoing work in collaboration with the Ifakara Health Institute and Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania is so important,” Prof. Killeen said.

“With a view to the future, in the hope that new insecticide combinations can be used to select back the pyrethroid susceptibility traits that make it easier to protect people against mosquitoes and malaria, our team is currently surveying wild conservation areas in southern Tanzania, looking for malaria vector mosquitoes that have escaped insecticide pressure by feeding on wild animals rather than humans or livestock,” he said.

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A new study is the first to detect an association between children whose mothers drank before and during pregnancy with certain facial changes. Altered face shape was seen even in cases where the amount of alcohol consumed amounted to less than a small glass of wine or bottle of beer.

The research points to a child’s face shape being a possible indicator of developmental health, something that was already known in the case of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder where heavy drinking during pregnancy leaves behind signs after birth.

“I would call the face a ‘health mirror’ as it reflects the overall health of a child,” said study lead Gennady Roshchupkin, assistant professor and leader of the computational population biology group at Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in a statement.

“A child’s exposure to alcohol before birth can have significant adverse effects on its health development and, if a mother regularly drinks a large amount, this can result in foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, FASD, which is reflected in children’s faces.”

To investigate further, researchers on a new paper used artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning technology to search for patterns between childrens’ face shapes and the alcohol their mothers drank, both during pregnancy and a few months before conception. They used 3D scans of thousands of participants aged nine and 13 from the longitudinal Generation R Study in the Netherlands.

“We found a statistically significant association between prenatal alcohol exposure and face shape in the nine-year-old children,” said first author Xianjing Liu, a PhD student in Professor Roshchupkin’s group who developed the AI algorithm. “The more alcohol the mothers drank, the more statistically significant changes there were. The most common traits were turned-up nose tip, shortened nose, turned-out chin and turned-in lower eyelid.”

“Among the group of mothers who drank throughout pregnancy, we found that even if mothers drank very little during pregnancy, less than 12 g a week, the association between alcohol exposure and children’s facial shape could be observed. This is the first time an association has been shown at such low levels of alcohol consumption.”

The connection between face shape and a mother’s alcohol consumption dropped off among the older group of children, but the researchers say that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t affected by other health problems. In cases of FASD, alcohol exposure can lead to neurological impairments, abnormal facial development, and memory problems. 

As such, the researchers suggest that this raises questions about the possibility of health conditions being associated with children whose mothers drank small amounts before conception, even when this was stopped during pregnancy. It also may be helpful in guiding advice for prospective parents with regard to drinking before pregnancy.

“The results of this study suggest that low–moderate maternal alcohol consumption up to three months before and during pregnancy is associated with the facial appearance of children,” concluded the authors. “Furthermore, our study suggests that women who are pregnant or want to become pregnant soon should quit alcohol consumption several months before conception and completely during pregnancy to avoid adverse health outcomes in the offspring.”

The study was published in the journal Human Reproduction.

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The first outbreak of Marburg Virus Disease (MVD) in Equatorial Guinea was confirmed on February 13, which has been linked to a funeral in the Kie-Ntem province. Marburg virus is in the filovirus family, related to Ebola virus. MVD is defined as a “rare but severe” hemorrhagic fever by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with an average case fatality rate of 50 percent according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The first case in the outbreak has been dated to January 7, with Equatorial Guinea’s ministry notified on February 7, according to a presentation from an urgent meeting of the WHO. On February 7, eight samples were sent for testing at the Institut Pasteur reference laboratory, Senegal, with one testing positive for MVD. So far, the WHO has reported nine deaths and 16 quarantined cases suspected to be due to the virus, with 15 asymptomatic close contacts.

The virus has an incubation period of 2 to 21 days, with early symptoms including severe fever, headache, muscle aches, and chills. Within days, this can progress to diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and a rash. Severe symptoms include liver failure, multi-organ dysfunction, and massive hemorrhaging. Blood can be found in vomit and feces, and patients can bleed from their vagina, nose, gums, and sites of intravenous access. According to the WHO, patients with fatal cases of MVD most often die around 8 or 9 days after the onset of their symptoms.

Marburg virus is zoonotic, hosted by African fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus). Close contact with these bats increases the risk of infection, as does contact with infected primates. It can also be spread through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person. The WHO recommends “prompt, safe and dignified burial of the deceased”, separating those sick with the virus from healthy people, monitoring people who may have been in contact with an infected person for 21 days, and good hygiene as outbreak containment measures.

The fatality rate of outbreaks varies, with the CDC stating a range of 23 to 90 percent whereas the WHO states a range of 24 to 88 percent.

Marburg virus was discovered after a 1967 outbreak in lab workers in Germany and Yugoslavia using African green monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops), which infected 31 people and killed seven. An outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2000 infected 154 people and killed 128. An outbreak in Angola between 2004 and 2005 infected 374 and killed 329 according to the WHO, or infected 252 and killed 227 according to the CDC.

The virus can remain in the eyes and testicles, as well as the placenta, amniotic fluid, and fetus in patients infected while pregnant. Marburg virus has been transmitted via semen up to seven weeks after the patient has recovered – similar to what can happen with Ebola – so the WHO recommends safe sex and semen testing for survivors.  

The Marburg virus vaccine consortium (MARVAC) and the WHO’s R&D Blueprint had an urgent meeting on February 14 about vaccines and therapies for MVD – of which there are currently none approved, with treatment of specific symptoms and rehydration currently being used.

However, luckily, multiple vaccines are currently in development, all viral vector-based vaccines. Vaccines by Janssen and Sabin have passed phase 1 clinical trials in humans. Also, the results of a phase 1 human trial of a vaccine developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) were published on January 28, showing it was safe and well-tolerated in 40 volunteers, as well as causing a robust antibody response. The WHO also says that monoclonal antibodies for MVD are being developed, and current antivirals could also be tested.

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A study looking at penis sizes from 1942 until 2021 has found that the average erect penis length has increased significantly in the last 30 years, while flaccid penis lengths remained the same. While this may sound like good, or at least neutral, news, the lead researcher says that it could be caused by factors such as chemical exposure interacting with our hormones.

The meta-analysis looked at penis length studies from the last eight decades, including data from 55,761 males all over the world. Studies were only included if the measurement was carried out by an investigator, excluding any that relied on self-reported data.

They also only included studies that measured penises "from the root (pubo-penile junction) of the penis to the tip of the glans (meatus) on the dorsal surface".

While no increase or decrease was found in flaccid or stretched penis length, the team found a significant increase in erect length.

"Erect length increased significantly over time in several regions of the world and across all age groups," the team wrote in the study. "After adjusting for geographic region, subject age, and subject population; erect penile length increased 24 percent over the past 29 years".

That's an increase from 12.3 centimeters (4.8 inches) to 15.2 centimeters (6 inches) in just under three decades. 

The authors explained that they had been motivated to compare penis sizes over time because of other changes to men's reproductive health in recent years, such as declining sperm count.

"Given the trends we'd seen in other measures of men's reproductive health, we thought there could be a decline in penile length due to the same environmental exposures," lead author Michael Eisenberg, professor of urology at Stanford Medicine, said in a press release.

That wasn't the case, but Eisenberg believes that the increase seen could be the result of changes to environments.

"There could be a number of factors at play, such as chemical exposure, like pesticides or hygiene products, interacting with our hormonal systems. These endocrine-disrupting chemicals – there are many – exist in our environment and our diet," he said. "As we change our body's constitution that also affects our hormonal milieu. Chemical exposure has also been posited as a cause for boys and girls going into puberty earlier, which can affect genital development."

The team noted that other factors, such as techniques for measuring length, temperature, and arousal state of the participant, could affect the results. However, they believe that it warrants further study, given the implications it could have for male reproductive health.

"The increase happened over a relatively short period of time," Eisenberg added. "If we're seeing this fast of a change, it means that something powerful is happening to our bodies. We should try to confirm these findings and if confirmed, we must determine the cause of these changes."

The study was published in the World Journal of Men's Health.

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Thor’s Well is among the oceans’ most perplexing natural wonders, appearing like a bottomless sinkhole that looks as though it’s draining the sea of its water. In actual fact, Thor’s Well is the remains of a sea cave, carved out by water, whose ceiling collapsed.

Found in the Cape Perpetua Scenic Area along the Oregon coast, Thor’s Well looks very different depending on the time of day or, more specifically, the tide. At high tide, water briefly conceals Thor’s Well before appearing to drain through – which is why the novelty formation is sometimes called “the drainpipe of the Pacific”.

During storms or choppy waters, Thor’s Well’s contents foam up and can shoot out of the top in a dramatic spray of sudsy-looking water. This is arguably the best time to photograph Thor’s Well, but it’s also the time at which anyone who gets too close is at the greatest risk of getting sucked in.

While Thor’s Well reportedly hasn’t yet claimed any lives, there are a few people who have been injured as the strong currents and powerful waves surrounding the hole have knocked them against the rock. With explosions from the well reaching up to 6 meters (20 feet) high, it’s easy to see how things can quickly take a turn.

At low tide, Thor’s well is considerably less intimidating as water passing under the bowl can be seen bubbling about quite peacefully. Here, the sinkhole’s residents become apparent: mussels, barnacles, and starfish can be seen lining the hole, which is about 3 meters (10 feet) in diameter.

As for Thor’s Well’s rather dramatic nickname, it’s in honor of the figure in Norse Mythology. Thor, with his big old hammer, is said to have smashed the hole into Oregon’s coastline – an explanation that’s undeniably sexier than a crumbling sea cave.

Made from the same basalt that lines the Oregon shoreline, Thor’s Well is estimated to be 6 meters (20 feet) deep and is at its explosive best around an hour before high tide as it begins to fill with fizzing seawater. Visitors wanting to gaze into the mythic bowl will find it south of the Cape Perpetua Visitor Center in Cook’s Chasm.

Millions of years of the powerful Pacific have transformed this stretch of Oregon’s coastline into something of a theme park for dramatic ocean activities.

Elsewhere in Cook’s Chasm, you’ll find spouting horns – a playful coastal character that is effectively an ocean geyser powered by seawater rushing in through a narrow hole. The effect is exploding fountains of water which can erupt quite unexpectedly, like the spout of a whale bursting through the ocean surface.

Sneaker waves are also of particular concern here, having killed many people in Oregon according to the National Weather Service. Also known as sleeper waves, they are particularly large waves with a high concentration of sand which can emerge suddenly and without warning.

While very dangerous, sneaker waves are rare, but it pays to be vigilant when exploring Cook’s Chasm. If in doubt, check the NWS public alerts for information on weather warnings that could increase the likelihood of sneaker waves.

An earlier version of this story was published in August 2022.

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Back in the heyday of reality TV not really giving a hoot about ethics, one reality show in the UK placed 10 boys and 10 girls in separate houses to look after themselves, without adult supervision.

The children, all aged 11 or 12, were provided with food, money, toys, and cleaning equipment for the "experiment", but other than that were left to their own devices, with the proviso that the crew would intervene if there were issues of safety.  The kids were filmed the whole time, with the footage broadcast in the UK Channel 4 documentary Boys and Girls Alone.

There was a stark difference between how the boys and girls behaved. While the girls cooked, cleaned, and organized a fashion show for entertainment purposes, the boys set about immediately trashing the house, and writing on the walls.

The boys separated after a few days into two groups, sleeping in two different bedrooms, who would then attempt to antagonize each other. One group decided to keep the other group awake after they decided to have an early night, constantly trying to enter the room and make loud noises. An argument broke out between the boys after one of the boy's t-shirts was painted and covered in shaving cream, but beyond a few minor arguments and annoyances, nobody was hurt.

An early moment of tension for the girls came when a neighbor's cat entered the house and they all attempted to take care of it.

That's not to say that the girls lived without their share of drama. Though they moved all the beds into one room and cooked and ate together, the girls did end up mildly bullying each other, and two of the girls ultimately decided to leave the house before the experiment was over.

While interesting to watch, you can't extrapolate a lot from the experiment, given the presence of cameras and nature of the experiment. There have been real-life examples of children becoming isolated, including one in 1965, when six boys attempted to run away and boat to Fiji. Unfortunately, they fell asleep at some point after stealing and getting in a boat, and became stranded on a small island for 15 months.

Before they were rescued, the boys created a schedule for duties around their camp, created musical instruments to entertain themselves, and attempted to make their own raft. One of the boys fell off a cliff and broke his leg during their stay. The boys set his leg using sticks, and took care of him until he recovered.

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Aris Angelis and colleagues point out that from 1999 to 2018, the world's 15 largest biopharmaceutical companies spent more on selling, general, and administrative activities (which includes marketing) than on R&D and that most new medicines developed during this period offered little or no clinical benefit over existing treatments.

By refocusing their spending, they say drug companies "could provide more innovative drugs at affordable prices" and they call for government action to encourage research and development oriented to public health priorities.

Concerns over the prices of new medicines have been growing over the past decade, they write. In the US, estimated net prices of newly launched prescription drugs increased from an average of around $1,400 a year in 2008 to over $150,000 a year in 2021, and even old and common drugs have seen inexplicable price increases in recent years.

The biopharmaceutical industry has long argued that high prices are needed to sustain R&D for new medicines. And while the authors acknowledge that there are large financial risks associated with bringing new medicines to market, they say analysis of drug company spending relative to products raises questions about this claim.

For example, publicly available financial reports from 1999 to 2018 show that the 15 largest biopharmaceutical companies had total revenues of $7.7tr. Over this period, they spent $2.2tr on costs related to selling, general, and administrative activities and $1.4tr on R&D.

Most of the same companies also spent more buying their own stocks, a practice known as share buybacks, than on R&D during this period, note the authors, which raises questions about commitments to truly valuable and risky biopharmaceutical research.

The justification of high drug prices to offset R&D spending also ignores the sizeable public investments in drug discovery and development, they add. This means that society is potentially paying twice for new drugs, first in the form of publicly subsidized research and second through high product prices.

What's more, most new drugs provide little or no added clinical value, they explain.

For instance, in the 1970s and the 1980s, around 1 in 6 (16%) new drugs approved by the FDA offered important therapeutic gains. Yet analyses of drug evaluation reports by health technology assessment bodies in France and Germany in the 2010s suggest that most new drugs offer little or no added clinical value, with only a fraction offering important or major improvements.

Angelis and colleagues acknowledge that, on the positive side, most products under development during 1997-2016 targeted novel mechanisms of action, but say there has also been a shift in focus from blockbuster drugs, typically targeting chronic diseases and sold in high volumes globally, to "nichebuster" drugs targeting rare diseases or narrow indications for which high prices can be charged.

"Given the amount spent on non-research and development activities and that most new drugs add little or no therapeutic value, in theory the biopharmaceutical industry could generate more medically valuable innovation with its existing resources," they say. "This is unlikely to happen, however, without government intervention or regulation along the lifecycle of new medicines."

As such, they argue that governments, policy makers, drug regulators, health technology assessment bodies, and payers "need to re-think the incentives for valuable biopharmaceutical innovation, creating policy and regulatory environments that will meet public health objectives."

"The world needs a truly value based health-industrial ecosystem for incentivising and rewarding improvements in health outcomes and population health throughout the lifecycle of new medicines," they conclude.

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KAMPALA – It was a typical day for Dr Hadson Kunsa, an intern at Uganda’s Mubende Regional Referral Hospital, 90 miles from the capital, Kampala. A patient came in with severe abdominal pain and tests found he had a perforated stomach. He was rushed to surgery, but it was too late. Several of his organs had shut down and no amount of resuscitation could help.

At the time, Kunsa and colleagues did not know they had just been exposed to Ebola – a rare, infectious virus that has been known to have a fatality rate of up to 90 percent.   

Looking back, the signs had been there. This was mid-September 2022, and a handful of other patients that week had died suddenly with similar symptoms. “One died on arrival at our hospital,” Dr Emmanuel Batiibwe, Mubende’s hospital director, told VICE World News.

But still, nobody could work out what was going on. Investigations into these mysterious deaths led the hospital staff to Madudu’s surrounding villages. “We found that nine deaths had already occurred, and the locals were also suspicious that something was wrong,” Batiibwe added.

Map of Uganda showing the Mubende and Kassanda districts. Photo: VICE

Many families in these villages had allegedly been seeking treatment from traditional healers, so it was hard to gauge the full extent of whatever this outbreak was. “Seeing people falling very sick at once and then dying one after another was strange,” Silvest Lwambuka, a community leader in Kassanda, one of the worst-hit districts, told VICE World News. “Instead of going to the hospital, many went to traditional healers to chase these evil spirits away.” Some of these treatments included drinking a concoction of local herbs and chanting specific, spiritual words.

Going to hospital, Lwambuka added, was their last option.   

Eventually, when a 24-year-old man with a bleeding nose arrived at Mubende hospital, a sample was instantly taken for testing and returned on the 19th of September. It was Ebola, the Sudan Variant, a strain that’s especially feared because it has neither a vaccine nor specific treatment.

Days later, Kunsa and several colleagues started experiencing ferocious bouts of fever, a drastic loss of appetite, overpowering body aches and intense diarrhoea. “I remember thinking of running away, anywhere, to avoid my reality,” Kunsa said as he came to terms with both what this could mean for his personal health and also his professional responsibilities in the coming days.   

Five staff members died within days – four health workers and a hospital driver. Two other health workers in nearby smaller community clinics also died. Morbid fear and confusion gripped the hospital staff, along with grief.

“We hurt,” Batiibwe told VICE World News, his voice just a whisper.

As word of the positive Ebola tests spread, governments and the media around the world started to paint a grim picture of Uganda’s ability to contain the outbreak, especially when cases spread beyond Mubende. The Telegraph would later report a leaked assessment that claimed 500 people would die by April, 2023. Memories of 2013-16, when a major outbreak across Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone killed more than 11,000 people were still fresh, with any new cases in the interim period sparking anxious updates on news wires.  Yonas Tegen, the WHO Country Representative described these reports as dramatic. The country’s tourism sector started to take a hit as visitors cancelled their trips to Uganda.

On the 11th of October, the US urged its citizens to reconsider travel to Uganda, and introduced special screening for passengers who had visited or transited through the country. “We anticipated that it would take 1-2 years to manage the outbreak, especially as Ebola cases presented in a complex urban setting such as Kampala,” Anne Robins, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Chief of Child Survival and Development, told VICE World News.

Yoweri Museveni, Uganda's 78-year-old president – a military strongman ruler who has been in power since 1986 – instructed senior army medical personnel to lead the fight against the disease.

“The government mobilised its resources,” Lt. Col. Dr. Kyobe Henry Bbosa, who was appointed to run the government’s response, told VICE World News. “It was a combination of skills coming together to get work done.”

He said his core team of 20, which he called “the engine of the operation,” partnered with around 3,500 health experts from across the country. But the first two weeks of the operation did not go well.

The normally busy Mubende-Kampala highway seemed deserted. The bustling Mubende market was just as mirthless; a few women could be seen hawking produce, but unsure whether the customers were comfortable with them moving close. In the worst-hit villages in Madudu, the roads are just as empty as the highway, save for the occasional farmer.

It took around 10 days for the government to establish a working relationship with local communities, where many people were still relying on local healers they knew and trusted. As a result, identifying and extracting suspected cases from their communities was a challenge. A task force was created to track and engage with suspected cases, while a series of risk analyses were carried out to identify the most at-risk areas and determine the worst-case scenarios.

Yet cases just kept rising and the Mubende Regional Referral Hospital – one of the biggest in central Uganda, with approximately 200 beds – was becoming overwhelmed with new cases. “In the first week alone, we had almost 49 admissions,” Batiibwe said. “In a few days, three people had already died. It was tough.”

Treatments that had worked against other Ebola variants were much less effective. On the 15th of October, nearly a month after the first confirmed case, and after an estimated 19 people had died from Ebola, President Museveni announced a lockdown for the roughly one million people who lived in the worst affected districts of Mubende and Kassanda.

Unfortunately, a pre-symptomatic Ebola case had travelled out of Mubende to Kampala and exposed up to 17 people to the virus, including six school children. Overall the number of new infections had dropped, but the presence of Ebola in Uganda’s densely populated capital signalled a new phase of the crisis.

Across Kampala, talk was of a potential lockdown, but while some people started wearing masks and crowded malls asked visitors to sanitise their hands before entering, most of the capital continued as normal.

Schools were eventually closed and some health experts lobbied for a wider lockdown, but authorities quickly ruled out the idea. “The entire public was tired of epidemics; many people refused to believe there was another one barely a year later," Dr. Richard Kabanda, the acting Commissioner of Health Services, told VICE World News.

The health ministry chose instead to launch a campaign to educate the public on the virus. Authorities believe the education programme proved the most successful aspect of the response. Thousands of flyers with messages from health officials were quickly circulated, encouraging people to seek help. “Your chances of survival and recovery are much higher if you seek early treatment and care from qualified health workers,” one read.

Posters with illustrations showing symptoms of Ebola with captions translated into multiple local languages helped the messages reach all ethnic groups. These were circulated in busy spots, such as markets, published in local newspapers and in TV ads. Toll-free numbers were shared, and the telecom companies played Ebola-awareness messages as people waited for their call to be picked up.

Authorities used a network of hundreds of Village Health Trainers (VHTs), who are the Health Ministry’s first point of community contact, known to help disseminate immunisation calls and family planning advice. Armed with portable megaphones, these individuals, trusted and loved in their local communities, moved from door to door, raising awareness.

"As we moved, we would also collect any information about who was not feeling well, and if the symptoms were similar to Ebola, we forwarded the details,” Anna Nalubega, a VHT in Kassanda, said.

“We gave people our numbers to call at any time, and we notified the district Ebola teams when they did,” Fedris Nambooze, also a VHT, added. Many VHTs had also been deployed during the COVID-19 outbreak, and we’re now doing the painstaking work of educating a populace on a unique virus all over again.

By mid-October, the biggest threat to the fight against Ebola was the myth in rural communities that the virus was spread by witchcraft. Bbosa’s Ebola taskforce successfully worked to educate traditional healers on the symptoms and dangers of the disease. They all agreed they would not treat anyone with Ebola symptoms but instead refer them to a hospital.

“We watched each other to make sure no one was putting themselves or the community at risk,” Mpuga Teribirye, the Uganda national inspector and chairperson of traditional healers in Mubende district, told VICE World News.

Despite the focus on education and prevention, the government widely failed to acknowledge the challenges communities faced by putting them into strict lockdowns, such as limited access to food and basic household items. “Should I stay in the house and watch my children die of hunger?” Gladys Kakulu, a casual labourer and mother of four in the Mubende district, said.

Communities blamed the government and called out  their elected officials, who voiced these concerns. “I appreciate the need to keep our people safe, but what should they eat in the meantime?” the Mubende Woman Member of Parliament, Hope Nakazibwe Grania. told VICE World News. “Most of these people live from hand-to-mouth; but now they can’t go out to work to put food on the table.”

However, the growing number of known Ebola-related deaths continued to take precedence. By the 30th of October, at least 53 people had died and about 136 had been infected by the virus. Benedicto Mweba, 11, from Kassanda district recalls answering more questions about his battle with Ebola than he could fathom. "I was so weak,” he told VICE World News over the phone. “I couldn't stand; even sitting was a problem. Sometimes I would be awake but hear doctors calling my name from far, and yet they were near me.”

Mweba tested positive for Ebola after his brother died from the virus; doctors found that he also had malaria. Before he died, his brother had been sick for a week, but they had assumed it was malaria, too. It wasn’t until Mweba tested positive that they realised he could have died from Ebola.

UNICEF's Robins confirms that several child Ebola and malaria cases – a common disease in Uganda – manifested simultaneously, with a near 60 percent fatality rate. UNICEF quickly started providing preventive medicine for malaria in the Ebola-affected districts and helped get faster referrals and more suitable treatment for child patients.

“There was a family that lost a mother, a baby, and then the remaining 7-year-old was left for treatment in the Ebola Treatment Unit to die alone,” Robins added. “He died after 19 days and his suffering, both physically and emotionally, was heartbreaking for all.”

UNICEF set up a child-friendly treatment centre in the lockdown districts that included a play area, and by extension, they also distributed picture-filled posters with messages about Ebola targeting children in and out of school.   

According to Dr Scott Murcko, a doctor with Doctors Without Borders, the treatment centres were a challenging place to work. “Some days you had three critical patients in the Intensive Care Unit fighting for their lives, and those were tough days,” he said.

Murcko said they did everything possible to keep people in good spirits, including once dancing for a patient in intensive care. “His morale was low, we needed him to feel hopeful again, so we danced for him,” he said. “Later, when he was discharged, we danced again to celebrate and give him more hope.”

This period also marked an important turn in the fight against the crisis, as hospitals started to note fewer transmissions and more recoveries.

“As soon as the minister and her team arrived and partner organisations like WHO, CDC, MSF, Baylor, Infectious Diseases Institute and others joined, I started to see results,” Batiibwe. “The workforce was bigger and it had health workers who had previously managed Ebola.”

Though chaotic, Batiibwe remembers how the first two weeks helped them build systems and that would eventually lead to less panic. “Even when more patients came, we knew what to do, and the teams in the field were making sure the suspected cases got to us on time,” he said. “We went from having patients arriving to die in hospital in September to mid-October, to having no deaths later in November.”

On the 12th of November, WHO’s Tegen told media that only five cases had tested positive for Ebola that week and that the previous three weeks had seen a sharp drop in the number of cases.

In Kampala, where a large treatment centre had been set up, Bbosa said that there weren’t any patients. “By mid-November, there were 300 unused beds at the National Referral Hospital alone in anticipation of a rise in patients, but there wasn’t any new case,” he told VICE World News.

On the 11th of January, Uganda and the WHO announced the outbreak was over after no new cases had been detected since late November. 

Ultimately, the WHO reported 142 confirmed Ebola infections, 55 deaths and 87 recoveries; CDC reported an additional 22 probable deaths from undiagnosed cases and over 4000 contacts traced. The final numbers are a long way from the initial estimates of over 500 deaths that were predicted at the outset of the outbreak.

The programmes have since shifted to the discharged patients who, the team on the ground recognised, still needed support. Alongside aid organisations such as USAID, the health ministry has since established Ebola survivor programmes.

"There are clinical issues that remain once you are discharged," Dr Sarah Page, the USAID Global Health Security Agenda Advisor, explained. "For many survivors, they experience headaches, joint pain, and sometimes you can have the virus persisting in breast milk and semen.”

Uganda’s survivor clinics continue to do rigorous 72-hour mobile testing of breastfeeding mothers and support infants who have been weaned. Not to mention the emotional support programmes monitoring survivors’ mental health.

Today, while the survivor monitoring continues, finding patient zero is high on the agenda. Dr Amy Boore, CDC Director of Global Health Protection, said that the world hopes Uganda will be the first country to deliver this critical news that has eluded every Ebola outbreak. Many studies are going on for now, with suspicion being placed on an animal reservoir. "We don't know which one, but Uganda's Ministry of Health is leaning in hard with the Wildlife Authority as well to up the game with ecologic studies," she says. "They are pretty determined this time around to answer that question, and if they do, they will be answering it for the world."

She commends the country for quickly differentiating between the Ebola variants. “Uganda is one of the very few places on this planet that could have identified the Sudan species,” she adds.

Emmanuel Ainebyoona, the Health Ministry’s Spokesperson, added: “Uganda has been a good example within the African continent to the extent that some other countries have had their samples tested here. The whole response lasted less than four months, contrary to the doom the articles in some foreign media had predicted.”

The UN has been equally complimentary. “I congratulate the government, health care workers, and the people of Uganda, for your leadership and dedication, which have enabled this Ebola outbreak to be contained in less than four months,” the Director General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a video message last month. “Even in the absence of approved vaccines and therapeutics for this specific Ebola, Uganda was able to use proven public health tools to contain the outbreak.”

“We commend the Ugandan government in leading efforts to put a swift end to the spread of the Sudan ebolavirus which spurred the outbreak, the US government said in a statement. “A major accomplishment in such a short time.”

In the end, Boore gives most of the credit to the people of Uganda. “Everything that Ugandans do, they do with absolute effort; people do not reserve energy till the end,” she told VICE World News. “The story of Uganda and Ebola from 2000 until now is inspirational.”

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Something strange is happening beneath our feet. Over the years, seismic studies have detected a number of anomalies happening in the area between the Earth’s core and mantle, which were believed to be the result of processes in the mantle. A new study published on Wednesday in Nature suggests this activity may in fact be related to the Earth’s core.

As the authors explain in the study, the boundary between the Earth’s and mantle represents an interface between the solid silicate mantle and the liquid metallic outer core, and the structure and dynamics in this region are fundamental for understanding heat and material transfer in our planet. Seismic imaging has allowed scientists to discover fine-scale structures at the boundary between the Earth's core and mantle. These “anomalies” are characterized by differences in velocity and density compared to the surrounding normal mantle or core region.

This study specifically focused on the Earth’s outer core, located about 3000 km below the surface. The region is made up of thick liquid iron alloy, which has a big impact on the habitability of the Earth’s surface and the creation of its magnetic field. Obviously, researchers can’t access the actual core, but can conduct research in similar conditions in a lab––which is what the study’s authors did.

“We conducted experiments to see what happens when we combine iron-hydrogen alloy liquid with silicon under high pressure and high temperature conditions, like those found in the outer core,” One of the study’s authors, geoscientist Suyu Fu from Arizona State University, wrote in an email to Motherboard. “We discovered that silicon-rich crystals form in the iron metal liquid (or silicon-rich snow), and they are lighter than the outer core liquid, causing them to rise to the boundary between the metallic core and the rocky mantle (rather than sink).”

Fu noted that this process can create a pile of silicon-rich snow, which can help us understand some puzzling structures found at the Earth's core-mantle boundary.

“Our study sheds light on the causes of two distinct seismic wave velocity anomalies at the Earth's core-mantle boundary, namely ultra-slow zones on the mantle side and the core rigidity zone on the core side,” he wrote.

“While the slow zones were previously believed to be linked mainly to mantle processes, our research suggests that some of them may be generated by processes occurring in the outer core. For the core rigidity zone, some researchers have hypothesized that the precipitation of light elements in the outer core might be responsible. We found evidence that the phenomenon of silicon "snowing" could be behind the observed core rigidity zone.”

Despite existing beneath our feet, there's a lot we still don't know about the Earth's insides, and especially the core. Just last month, scientists published a study suggesting that the core has in fact stopped and may be reversing direction, which would explain a number of cyclical phenomena. And more recently, scientists discovered that there is an entire zone of the Earth located 100 miles below the surface that has eluded detection until now.

The new findings have implications for understanding the chemistry of the deep Earth. As Fu explained, research has revealed that some volcanic rocks found on ocean islands, such as Hawaii, contain a chemical signature similar to that of the Earth's core.

“Our study suggests that if silicon-rich crystals from the Earth's core mix with mantle silicates to form these ultra-low velocity zones, they could provide a source for the core-like chemical signatures found in the volcanic rocks.”

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As the planet heats up, glaciers worldwide are in retreat, and one above all others worries oceanographers. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey have published two new papers observing conditions at the base of Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier to establish the factors driving its melting and its effect on global sea level rise.

They found that enough of the glacier is vulnerable that, were it to collapse, sea levels would rise 65 centimeters (25 inches) worldwide, something that could happen within a century. On its own, such an event could make some low-lying cities such as Miami effectively uninhabitable. Combined with inevitable melting elsewhere, it would turn serious problems into catastrophes.  

To reach this conclusion, the authors drilled access holes through almost 600 meters (1,900 feet) of ice downstream of the Thwaites Glacier’s grounding line, where the glacier stops sitting directly on bedrock and starts floating. Through the hole, they measured ocean temperature, salinity, melt rate, and the glacier’s speed. One paper describes observations made using a fixed mooring at the bottom of the hole. The other reports on observations made using an underwater vehicle, which could also study the shape of the underside of the ice.

The water at the bottom was found to be a warm (by Antarctic standards) 2.5°C (36°F) year-round. It is also stratified by salinity levels, which limits melting, as the ice is only in contact with the freshest, coldest water. Consequently, the bulk of the area studied is melting more slowly than expected, but certain hotspots are making up for it, losing ice terrifyingly fast.

The undersea vehicle Icefin being pulled up through the borehole that was used to allow it to reach the water under the Thwaites Glacier. Image credit: Icefin/ITGC/Schmidt

Thwaites Glacier is part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), and has been long considered a major threat to sea levels worldwide because it is both big and unstable. Thwaites drains around a tenth of the WAIS and contains enough water to make vulnerable low-lying islands uninhabitable and cause the poisoning of some of the world’s richest agricultural lands with salt. 

Moreover, the even larger components of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet are considered resistant to anything short of a major rise in global temperatures. Meanwhile, Thwaites sits on below-sea-level bedrock that gets deeper inland; prime conditions for a swift collapse, and indeed it has probably done so during humanity’s lifespan.

When humans were mobile hunter-gatherers with a population of a few million, the consequences of previous collapses were probably subtle. Now, as billions of us cluster around the coast, things are different.

Moreover, the collapse of Thwaites is considered a risk factor for exposing nearby glaciers to seawater, potentially triggering a domino effect that could cause sea levels to rise by 3 meters (10 feet).

The underwater vehicle Icefin photographed under the ice near McMurdo Station. Image credit: Rob Robbins USAP Driver

Crucially, the underwater vehicle, Icefin, revealed the glacier melts fast when ice is sharply sloped at the point where it meets the ocean, and much more slowly when it is flat, making future melting hard to predict. One steep section of the glacier is melting six times faster than flat regions. Moreover, the main trunk of the glacier is more steeply sloped than the area studied here, suggesting melt rates could be higher.

Consequently, the hole was drilled in an area that not too long ago was still anchored to land – the grounding line has retreated 14 kilometers (8 miles) since the 1990s.

“Our results are a surprise but the glacier is still in trouble. If an ice shelf and a glacier is in balance, the ice coming off the continent will match the amount of ice being lost through melting and iceberg calving. What we have found is that despite small amounts of melting there is still rapid glacier retreat, so it seems that it doesn’t take a lot to push the glacier out of balance,” said Dr Peter Davis of the British Antarctic Survey in a statement.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned this week that sea level rise could cause a “mass exodus on a biblical scale”. The Thwaites Glacier could be key to whether that occurs. 

The papers are published in Nature, and are available here and here.

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On Tuesday, February 14, the residents of Pima County in Southern Arizona were told to evacuate or take shelter indoors after a truck carrying liquid nitric acid crashed and spilled its contents onto the surrounding road.  

The accident took place at around 2:43 pm and involved a commercial truck pulling “2,000 pounds” (~900 kilograms) of nitric acid, which crashed, killing the driver and disrupting the major east-west route that crosses much of the US’s South West. 

First responders, including the Tucson Fire Department and Arizona Department of Public Safety, soon evacuated everyone within a half-mile (0.8 kilometers) of the crash and instructed others to stay indoors and to turn off their air conditioning and heaters. Although the “shelter-in-place” order was later lifted, there are expected to be ongoing disruptions on the roads surrounding the crash site as the hazardous chemical is dealt with.  

Nitric acid (HNO3) is a colorless and highly corrosive liquid that is found in many common laboratories and is used in various industries such as agriculture, mining, and dye manufacturing. The acid is most often found in the production of fertilizers where it is used to produce ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) and calcium ammonium nitrate (CAN) for fertilizers. Nearly all nitrogen-based fertilizers are used for feedstocks and so there is a growing demand for them as the global population increases and places a greater need on food production.  

These substances are also used as precursors in the production of explosives and are listed for regulated control in many countries due to their potential for misuse – ammonium nitrate was actually the substance responsible for the Beirut explosion in 2020.  

Nitric acid is harmful to the environment and toxic to humans. Exposure to the acid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), can cause irritation to the eyes and skin and can lead to various delayed pulmonary issues, such as edema, pneumonitis, and bronchitis. The severity of these issues depends on the dose and duration of exposure.  

Footage and photos taken by members of the public show a large orange-yellow cloud billowing into the sky from the site of the Arizona accident. This cloud is produced by nitric acid when it decomposes and produces nitrogen dioxide gas.  

The nitric acid spill comes only 11 days after a freight train belonging to Norfolk Southern derailed in Ohio. This event also led to the evacuation of residents as the vinyl chloride carried in five of the rail cars caught fire and sent plumes of toxic hydrogen chloride and phosgene into the atmosphere.  

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Ten years ago today, Earth was struck by the most spectacular and dangerous meteor impact in living memory: the Chelyabinsk meteor. While the world got off relatively lightly from this incident – many casualties, but no fatalities – it was a stern reminder that the threat of meteors should never be underestimated. Just ask the dinosaurs.

Chelyabinsk: The largest meteor impact in living memory

On February 15, 2013, at 9:20 am as people were getting ready for the day, the sky above Russia lit up with a bright streak above Chelyabinsk Oblast in the southern Ural region. Shocked onlookers didn't know at the time, but this was the result of a space rock crashing to Earth. 

At an altitude of around 45 kilometers (30 miles), it slammed into the atmosphere at a speed of 19 kilometers per second (42,690 miles per hour), resulting in a violent shockwave that was roughly the equivalent of 440 kiloton explosion of TNT, according to NASA. 

Later research indicated that the celestial object initially measured around 20 meters (65 feet) wide and weighed approximately 12,000 tons. That’s relatively small for a meteorite, but it clearly packed a punch.

Windows shattered, car alarms went off, and roofs collapsed, resulting in the injury of some 1,500 people. Thanks to smartphones, vehicle dash cams, and security cameras, the event is perhaps the first time a prominent meteor strike was recorded from numerous angles simultaneously, allowing scientists to study it. 

Much of the meteor's mass burnt off as it tore through the atmosphere while other chips of the rock were flung across the Chelyabinsk Oblast. School kids and curious residents reportedly found fragments of the meteorite around the local area, but kept it quiet out of fear they might be taken away by scientists or state authorities. 

In the hours following the initial crash, a 6-meter (20-foot) wide hole was discovered in the frozen surface of Lake Chebarkul. After a recovery mission that took several months, researchers managed to pull out a 654-kilogram (1,442 pounds) meteorite from the bottom of the lake. The bulk of this incredible object now lies at the State History Museum of South Ural in Chelyabinsk.

The Chelyabinsk meteorite was a bit of a wake-up call of how a bigger meteorite impact might affect Earth, but we’re still surprisingly bad at predicting them. 

How do we predict meteor impacts? 

Earlier this week, a small meteor about 1 meter (3 feet) in diameter burned up over the Channel between France and the UK in the early hours of the morning. Remarkably, that was just the seventh time ever an asteroid impact has been predicted before it happened.

Scientists and space agencies around the world keep a close eye on the problem through the monitoring of near-Earth objects. Once found, the orbits of those objects can be determined and their future paths predicted to assess whether an impact is likely.

However, many potentially hazardous objects continue to remain undetected.

Humanity isn’t completely clueless about the issue though. Last year saw the success of NASA's incredible DART mission, where the agency purposely crashed a spacecraft into a celestial object for the first time, changing its orbit forever. It showed that we potentially possess the power to deflect a space rock that’s heading toward Earth.

That depends, however, on whether we spot the dangerous space rock before it’s too late. 

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Black holes today are much bigger than they were nine billion years ago, even compared to the size of their galaxies, observations have found. In an effort to explain the scale of this anomaly, astrophysicists have hit on an explanation for dark energy, the mysterious force causing the universe to fly apart at ever increasing rates. Black holes might actually be the source.

When astronomers used the apparent brightness of supernova explosions to measure the rate of expansion of the universe they expected to find it slowing down, and just wanted to see how much. Instead, to their astonishment, they found it was accelerating. A tiny proportion of the physics community remain unconvinced, but the data has been confirmed so many times there is overwhelming agreement the acceleration is happening and something called dark energy is responsible.

What dark energy is, however, remains a mystery, let alone where it comes from. Plenty of efforts have been made to answer this – there’s a guaranteed Nobel Prize for anyone who does so to general satisfaction – but so far none have gained widespread traction. A team spread across nine nations hope to change that with two new papers.

Like the original identification of dark energy, their papers came from a discovery that was not really on the researchers’ radar when they began. “This is a really surprising result,” said Dr Dave Clements of Imperial College London, in a statement emailed to IFLScience. “We started off looking at how black holes grow over time, and may have found the answer to one of the biggest problems in cosmology.”

A key obstacle to understanding dark energy can be summed up in one question: If there is a force pushing the universe apart, why do we see gravity attracting objects together? The one thing we know about dark energy is that it seems to only apply, at least strongly, at very large scales, so other forces dominate closer in.

Supermassive black holes therefore provide an interesting test case – they suck in material from such enormous distances that we might see the transition between the domination of gravity and dark energy in a way concealed by lesser objects.

Black hole growth is too slow and erratic to track its rate from what we can see occurring. However, by comparing the mass of a sample of distant black holes as they were billions of years ago with those around us in nearby galaxies, we can get a sense of average growth rates.

The team report in one paper that the nearby samples average seven to 20 times the mass of those seen nine billion years ago, relative to the size of their galaxies. That’s a growth rate that doesn’t fit with what we know about merger rates and consumption of stars that get too close, minus evaporation through Hawking Radiation.

However, if black holes contain vacuum energy that is linked to the expansion of the universe, they would grow faster. Indeed, the authors calculate, if supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies are producing dark energy it would account for most of what we think exists. Stellar black holes in galactic disks, and possibly halos, might account for the rest.

“We're really saying two things at once: that there's evidence the typical black hole solutions don't work for you on a long, long timescale, and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy,” Dr Duncan Farrah of the University of Hawai'i said.

“What that means, though, is not that other people haven't proposed sources for dark energy, but this is the first observational paper where we're not adding anything new to the universe as a source for dark energy: black holes in Einstein's theory of gravity are the dark energy.''

Such a big claim will undoubtedly face more scrutiny than the typical paper, and the authors acknowledge the possibility: “Selection and measurement biases are both underestimated.” They also suggest some future tests that could support or reject their theory. However, they consider a number of possible explanations for the unexpected growth they find to be unlikely, leaving the possibility of black holes as dark energy factories as the strongest contender.

Crucial to the finding is the long-standing observation that, in the nearby universe, “More massive black holes tend to reside in more massive galaxies.” The black hole masses in this study were compared with the mass of the visible stars in the galaxy, ruling out the possibility they had grown through more mergers than expected, or that the team were somehow studying undersized galaxies from billions of years ago. 

The papers are published in the The Astrophysical Journal  and The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

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Never-before-seen footage of Titanic's wreck is being released to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the movie Titanic. Peering around the murky depths of the Atlantic Ocean, the raw footage shows the world’s most famous shipwreck in all its rusting and decaying glory. 

The video footage was filmed during an expedition in July 1986 by researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Returning to the site just nine months after the discovery, the team used a small submarine called Alvin and the newly developed remotely operated vehicle, Jason Jr, to view the ship for the first time since its ill-fated voyage in 1912. 

The "unsinkable" ocean liner famously sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton in England to New York City. At least 1,500 passengers died and the wreck sunk to the seabed, some 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) below sea level around 740 kilometers (400 nautical miles) from Newfoundland in Canada.

The final resting place of the Titanic wasn’t discovered until September 1985, 73 years after it met its icy fate. Since then, fewer people have visited the Titanic’s wreck than have flown in space, but a small handful of expeditions have ventured to its wreck and returned with stunning footage.

You can view a short excerpt of the new footage here before it goes live later today.

A full cut of the newly released footage is being premiered later today on the WHOI YouTube channel at 7:30 pm EST (February 16 at 12:30  am UTC), or you can view it in the video embedded below. Lasting 1 hour and 21 minutes, it primarily consists of raw and unnarrated footage as the team explores the wreck lying on the sea bed. 

Most of this footage has never been released to the public, says the WHOI. They're releasing it to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 1997 movie Titanic directed by James Cameron.

“More than a century after the loss of Titanic, the human stories embodied in the great ship continue to resonate,” Cameron, ocean explorer and director, said in a WHOI statement sent to IFLScience. 

“Like many, I was transfixed when Alvin and Jason Jr. ventured down to and inside the wreck. By releasing this footage, WHOI is helping tell an important part of a story that spans generations and circles the globe.".

It’s good to catch a glimpse of the wreck while we still can as its days may be numbered. Expeditions in recent years have seen the ship becoming rapidly disintegrated and dissolved by rust, sea salt, bacteria, flocks of deep-sea creatures, and other forces of nature. 

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The tech king of Tesla and Space X has announced his intention to step down as CEO of Twitter. Humorously he declared in a tweet that he would vacate the position as soon as someone else could take the role of CEO.  The one thing I've noted about Musk is that he enjoys a controversial social media presence. This has also made him one of the most popular tech figures. 

He revealed this information in December 2022: what a way to end the year. He also further announced that he’ll be overseeing some of Twitter’s departments. He will be doing this until someone is ready and found suitable to replace him and this has created a great shift in the structure of Twitter's leadership. 

Why So Much Controversy on Twitter?

Elon Musk’s tweets on stepping down from the platform aren’t the only controversies surrounding Twitter. In October 2022 Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion and this brewed up a substantial amount of controversy and turbulence. As if this wasn’t enough he went on to dismiss half of the company’s employees and created concerns with the direction of the company. 

He also introduced a Twitter verification system that drew up mixed responses from its users and was never implemented. I wonder if all these controversies surrounding Twitter have anything to do with Elon Musk stepping down, well read on. Undoubtedly these actions have illustrated some worrying dynamics and complexity when it comes to acquisitions and tech industries. These controversies have generated significant backlash from advocacy groups, news organizations, and European officials. 

More Controversy: Floki’s Surge

Floki Inus’ surge came after Elon Musk’s announcement of his dog Floki becoming the new CEO of Twitter. This resulted in a 45% surge in its value and the coin is currently trading at 0.0000348248.

For those of you that don’t know what Floki Inus is: I will fill you in.  Floki was launched in 2021 as a meme-inspired cryptocurrency named after Elon Musk’s pet Shiba Inu dog, Floki. The currency has recently gained popularity.

Musk Vacating his Position as CEO

Now, this still has us wondering why in just three months Musk has decided to step down as CEO of Twitter. According to Musk, this is an ideal time for this transition which is set to be complete by the end of 2023. He believes that Twitter would have established a much more stable position as a social media landscape. Musk has always made clear the standards he wishes to see achieved by the social media landscape.

On that point, I put away wondering if the controversies could be driving away Musk. The new commitments made by Musk totally diminish my thoughts. Apparently, his decision to step down was also informed by a survey that involved Twitter followers in December last year. The results of the poll showed that 60% of those that participated in the survey supported his resignation. Their main concern was that Musk was being distracted from his other ventures such as Tesla. 

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Outbreak of Marburg, Ebola’s similarly deadly relative, spurs response race

Icefin the robot is designed to go where no human can, swimming off the coast of Antarctica under 2,000 feet of ice. Lowered through a borehole drilled with hot water, the torpedo-shaped machine takes readings and—most strikingly—video of Thwaites Glacier’s vulnerable underbelly. This Florida-sized chunk of ice is also known as the Doomsday Glacier, and for good reason: It’s rapidly deteriorating, and if it collapses, global sea levels could rise over a foot. It could also tug on surrounding glaciers as it dies, which would add another 10 feet to rising seas.

In a pair of papers published today in the journal Nature, scientists describe what Icefin and other instruments have discovered underneath all that ice. Simply put: trouble. Models of future sea-level rise characterize the bit of Thwaites that’s floating on the ocean—known as an ice shelf—as having a fairly simple, flat underside, but the robot found that 10 percent of it is way more complex. There are terraces, for instance, of vertical walls over 30 feet high where melting is happening much faster than in flat areas. That small portion is “contributing 25 percent of the melting that we see,” says Britney Schmidt, an Earth and planetary scientist at Cornell University, who leads the Icefin project. (She’s the lead author of one of the papers and coauthor on the other.) “So it's a really outsized impact.”

Hot-water drilling of the borehole in Antarctica

 Photograph: Peter Davis/British Antarctic Survey

As those features melt, they may be sending shocks through the system. “What we know about Thwaites is that it's falling apart,” says Schmidt. “We've been looking at it for the last 30 years, watching rifts and crevasses propagating across the system and destabilizing the whole ice shelf. And what we're showing here is the way that the ocean kind of works into these weak spots, and in a sense makes it worse.”

To deploy Icefin and other instruments, Schmidt and her colleagues drilled down near the glacier’s grounding line, the point where the ice lifts off the Antarctic land mass and starts floating on the sea. Thwaites’ risk of melting isn’t due to rising atmospheric temperatures above, but from rising ocean temperatures below. Its grounding line has retreated 10 miles inland since the late 1990s, which means that now more of the glacier’s ice is making contact with warm saltwater. A phenomenon known as tidal pumping is not helping: The ice heaves up when the tide comes in, allowing yet more water to rush underneath. 

Photograph: Peter Davis/British Antarctic Survey

Scientists have good estimates of where the retreating grounding line is, thanks to satellites watching for tiny changes in the ice’s elevation. But they haven’t had a good picture of what the glacier’s belly looks like at the grounding line, because it’s under thousands of feet of ice. “These data are really exciting because we're getting a look into a hidden system,” says University of Waterloo glaciologist Christine Dow, who studies Antarctic glaciers but wasn’t involved in the research. 

With Icefin, the researchers could remotely pilot a camera while measuring the salinity, temperature, and oxygen content of the water. “We saw that the ice base itself was very complex in its topography, so there's lots of staircases, terraces, rifts, and crevasses,” says British Antarctic Survey physical oceanographer Peter Davis, the lead author of one of the papers and coauthor on the other. “The rate of melting on different surfaces was very different.”

Where the glacier’s underside (or basal ice, in the scientific parlance) is smoother, melting is definitely happening, but at a much slower rate than where the topography is jagged. That’s because a layer of cold water rests where the ice is flat, insulating it from warmer ocean water like a liquid blanket. But where the topography is sloped and irregular, there are more vertical surfaces where warm water can attack the ice, including making incursions from the side. This melting creates a peculiar “scalloped” look, like the surface of a golf ball. 

These complex, expanding basal features could then influence the rest of the ice. “If you open up features underneath the ice, you also get similar reflections of them on the surface, because of the way that the ice is floating,” says Davis. “So there's a fear that if you're widening these rifts and crevices under the ice, you can destabilize the ice shelf, which could lead to greater disintegration over time.”

If you’re feeling relieved that the flatter bits of basal ice are insulated against melting to a certain degree—don’t be. “It sounds like what we're saying is that there's less melting than there was before, and that's not true,” says Schmidt. Instead, they’re showing that the dramatic deterioration of Thwaites has been happening under conditions that are milder than models previously estimated. “That's important,” she continues. “That means that it takes less to get this degree of change.”

Put another way: Thwaites’ underside may be much more sensitive than previously believed. “What it shows us is that it's easier, perhaps, to knock these systems out of equilibrium in the first place,” says Davis. “In the past, we have associated rapid retreat with rapid melting. And I think what the results are showing us is that you don't need rapid melting to drive retreat. What you do need, though, is a change in melting. So you need something to shift the system away from a balance.”

That’s especially troubling because it means that the retreat of the grounding line can’t be explained by sky-high rates of basal melt, says Alexander Robel, head of the Ice and Climate Group at Georgia Tech, who wasn’t involved in the new papers. And other factors could set off further melt. “If ocean temperature or ocean circulation were to change in the future,” says Robel, “we could potentially get even higher basal melt rates that would produce even faster grounding line retreat rates.”

Better understanding how Thwaites is crumbling is critical for projecting how quickly it’ll add to sea-level rise. Typically, forecasts are based on simplified models that represent the underside of ice sheets as flat or sloped—partly because instruments like Icefin are only just beginning to map them in detail, partly because of the computing power needed to parse such complexity over vast areas. 

But the complex features that Icefin has discovered could be essential for modeling the glacier in much finer detail. “This is such a key region for Antarctic stability,” says Dow. “Any data we're getting from there is going to be hugely valuable for trying to figure out what that system will do in the future.”

A Robot Finds More Trouble Under the Doomsday Glacier

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If the boxy Opportunity rover could elicit years of anthropomorphized love and goodwill, then surely Earthlings will warm to the idea of sending a snake-shaped robot to the moon. This robot—the brainchild of students at Northeastern University—is meant to wiggle across difficult terrain, measure water in the pit of craters, and bite its own tail to become a spinning ouroboros tumbling down the side of a lunar cliff. 

NASA’s annual Big Idea Challenge presents a new query each year that’s geared toward an engineering problem the agency needs to solve. In fall 2021, students from universities across the United States set out to design a robot that could survive extreme lunar terrain and send data back to Earth. The winning team, of students from Northeastern’s Students for the Exploration and Development of Space club, took home the top prize in November and now hope to turn their winning design into an advanced prototype that could actually be sent to the moon.

Using $180,000 of NASA funds, the students focused on designing a robot that could navigate Shackleton Crater—a 13-mile-wide basin near the lunar south pole where NASA confirmed the presence of water ice in 2018. Water is plentiful on Earth but a high-value commodity outside our atmosphere. Humans require water to survive, but it’s extremely heavy, and lugging it 240,000 miles from home is cost-prohibitive. So local water in ice form would be an enormous boon for NASA’s Artemis mission as it seeks to establish a lunar base. 

Before the agency can rely on this ice for crewed missions, however, it needs to confirm just how much is located in different regions of the lunar surface and what its chemical composition is. But there are a few challenges to getting data from a 2-mile-deep crater. One: The floor is in permanent shadow, which means temperatures hover hundreds of degrees below freezing. Two: The angle of incline from the rim to the floor is 30.5 degrees, steeper than Mount Everest. Three: The moon is sandy. Any robot attempting to traverse this terrain is going to have to survive bone-chilling temperatures, a precipitous descent, and a gritty environment. 

The students considered hopping, legged, and rolling robots, like the wheeled rovers already on Mars. But rolling robots would sink in the regolith and couldn’t safely navigate terrain as steep as the Shackleton rim. Legged robots also sink and are less stable in sandy environments. Hopping robots would have a difficult time launching and landing without sustaining damage or getting stuck. “We looked at this whole suite of different robot designs and thought, is there any way we could combine different locomotions?” recalls Yash Bhora, a physics major who helped build software for the team.

Bhora and his teammates considered a tumbling robot, one that could harness the partial gravity of the moon to propel itself down the crater more efficiently. But once it arrived at the floor, it would need a different type of functionality. “A tumbling robot by itself cannot really manipulate a big science instrument or maneuver as precisely as a walking robot,” says Matthew Schroeter, the team’s lead, who graduated from Northeastern in 2022 and now works at Honeybee Robotics. 

The key, they decided, was to mimic the movement of an Earth creature that has to deal with a grainy, hilly environment: the sidewinder. “The regolith and sand have similar properties. They’re both very porous. We looked at real snakes that use this locomotion called sidewinding to go up slopes using the friction of the sand, and we eventually came up with the design,” says Schroeter.

They dubbed it Cobra, which stands for Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator. The students first built a “Mini Cobra,” which at just under 2 feet long and 5 pounds is about a third the size of the final design. It is made of 11 linked carbon fibre and nylon units. Each houses a battery-powered actuator—essentially a motor—that can transform commands from a Raspberry Pi in the snake’s head into motion. Because it is modular, it can be manipulated into a sidewinding position to navigate flat, sandy areas like the bottom of a crater, and into a hexagonal wheel that can roll down steep slopes.

Cobra’s tail is designed to house a mini neutron spectrometer, which can measure changes in the energy of neutrons on the moon’s surface and identify hydrogen, and thus water, deep within Shackleton Crater. The team also built in the capacity for the robot to be fitted with radar sensors and an inertial measurement unit so operators on the ground can keep tabs on Cobra’s motion, speed, and location as it rolls and winds its way around.

To test these functions, the team sent the Mini Cobra flying down loading docks and through parking lots around Northeastern’s downtown Boston campus. One challenge was finessing the latching mechanism that connects Cobra’s head and tail when it switches into tumbling mode. It would sometimes latch too strongly, creating the potential for damaged wires or a lost connection. Bhora worked up to the last minute troubleshooting the issue in the robot’s software and eventually landed on a two-step process that prevented the robot from wobbling and created a secure latch.

In November, the team traveled to California’s Mojave Desert to demonstrate Cobra in terrain that resembles what the bot would have to navigate on the moon. They faced off against six other teams, which had brought legged robots, wheeled robots, a robot that lowered itself down steep terrain on a cable, and a Lego-like design from MIT that could be reconfigured into several shapes. When it was Cobra’s turn to test its mettle, it latched itself seamlessly into a circle and propelled itself down a steep hill, with the team cheering it on from behind. It side-wound its way into some sagebrush, but the operators wriggled it out of the prickly scrub and sent it on its way. The team was able to successfully demonstrate all of Cobra’s modes of locomotion and took home the Artemis Award, the competition’s top honors.

Past winners have occasionally gone on to further develop their concepts, and a couple of those are even being considered for integration into upcoming NASA missions. Other times, projects languish after team members graduate. According to Kevin Kempton of NASA’s Game Changing Development Program, one of the competition’s lead judges, it depends on the motivation of team members. “I try to tell the teams, the next step is to look for announcements of opportunity,” Kempton says. “NASA is always looking for low-cost payloads.”

In Cobra’s case, most of the team’s members are undergraduates still active in the space exploration club, and they want to ready the concept for an actual moon mission. That will take a bit of work. Most of Cobra’s components are 3D-printed materials that wouldn’t survive the harsh thermal gradients at the lunar poles, where sun-baked crater rims give way to ice-cold depths near the floor. To make the system space-ready, Cobra’s components will have to be built from sturdy metals, like titanium, which can withstand dramatic temperature and pressure changes and resist corrosion. 

And in the California desert, students commanded the robot from only a few steps away. But signals take about three seconds to travel from the Earth’s surface to the moon and back again, a lag that requires lunar systems to have some autonomous decision-making capabilities. 

“I always say to my students, if something is trivial on Earth, it doesn’t mean that it’s trivial on the moon or Mars,” says Alireza Ramezani, the team’s faculty advisor and a professor of engineering at Northeastern. But Ramezani says that a team of doctoral candidates is currently looking into the autonomy requirements for commanding the Cobra system, and that they have received queries from private robotics companies interested in partnering to further develop the project. The students will also enlist help from the university’s Institute for Experiential Robotics to develop Cobra into a completely space-ready system.

Ramezani specializes in bio-inspired robots and designed the Leonardo robot in 2019. The birdlike creation both walks and hovers—and can even skateboard—taking advantage of two modes of locomotion to stabilize itself over rough terrain. He says he is excited to see NASA endorse new, multimodal robotic designs, such as Ingenuity, the first helicopter deployed on Mars, which was carried there in the belly of the Perseverance rover and has since flown dozens of its own missions. 

“All of this shows that we are seeing a new era of space robot design, systems that can switch from one mode of mobility to another to accommodate all the tasks of their mission,” he says. “I think we will see more interesting robots down the road.” 

Rovers Are So Yesterday. It’s Time to Send a Snakebot to Space

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A revolution in weight loss is apparently underway. It started in 2021, when the FDA approved the diabetes drug semaglutide for weight loss. The weekly injectable—sold under the brand name Wegovy—can help users lose 5 to 10 percent of their body weight, leading commentators to describe the drug as both a “medical breakthrough” and a “silver bullet” for obesity. Elon Musk says he’s taking it, Kim Kardashian is rumored to be using it, and everyone from Hollywood to the Hamptons reportedly wants a prescription. 

Soon, there will be a new weight loss medication on the block—and it’s even more potent than its peers. Last fall, the FDA fast-tracked the review process for using tirzepatide as a weight loss drug after a clinical trial showed that people with BMIs labeled “overweight” or “obese” lost a staggering 22.5 percent of their body weight on the highest dose. If all goes according to plan, that will make Mounjaro the latest in a fast-growing biomedical sector—spanning everything from bariatric surgery to deep brain stimulation for binge-eating—that aims to combat, if not cure, the problem of “excess” weight. 

For pharmaceutical companies, the race to market is financially motivated: Wegovy and Mounjaro cost more than $1,000 a month. Weight loss drugs are rarely covered by insurance, but people who can afford them have proven they’re willing to pay. And the market seems effectively limitless: Despite an ongoing “war on obesity,” more than 1.9 billion adults globally are considered overweight or obese, and the number of prospective users is growing every year. Now doctors—desperate to treat what is widely seen as an “obesity epidemic”—are coming on board. In January, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended such medications for kids as young as 12. 

The victorious narratives gilding drugs like Mounjaro are already being positioned as a direct challenge to fat activism. For decades, the movement has pushed for social and economic opportunity for people of all sizes through civil rights, fat pride and liberation, and biomedical evidence itself. Thanks to prominent voices like Audrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes, many people now know that “lifestyle changes” like calorie restriction and exercise fail to produce sustained weight loss for 97 percent of people and that many dieters end up gaining back more weight than they lost. But what happens to the strength of these arguments when a weight loss drug seems to work?

Like other purported weight loss solutions, Mounjaro promises “to fix weight stigma by making you thinner, instead of removing the stigma,” says Susanne Johnson, a fat activist and family nurse practitioner in Pennsylvania. In so doing, these drugs and surgeries further exacerbate anti-fat discrimination. Instead of criticizing people in larger bodies for their perceived lack of willpower—that old “calories in, calories out” adage—people can now blame those in bigger bodies for something more akin to a techno-pessimist, or even anti-science, stance: “Just take the miracle cure!” 

The history of the weight loss industry is more akin to prospecting for gold or investing in crypto than transplanting organs and developing antibiotics; less a story of scientific progress than an endless cycle of wild speculation, where boom inevitably gives way to bust. Fen-Phen was a miracle until it was linked to heart valve damage. Intermittent fasting was going to fix what caloric restriction couldn’t until researchers showed the two produce exactly the same results. And then there’s the complicated case of bariatric surgery.

From their inception in the 1950s, operations like gastric bypass (which reroutes food away from the stomach, inducing malabsorption) and gastric sleeve (which involves partially amputating the stomach so it holds less food and produces fewer hunger hormones) have been sold as a potential panacea, says Lisa Du Breuil, a clinical social worker at Massachusetts General Hospital. While fewer than 1 percent of people who qualify actually undergo bariatric surgery, those who do can lose up to 70 percent of their “excess” weight (or the weight above a BMI of 24.9). 

But Du Breuil, who specializes in eating disorders and substance abuse disorders, has seen some of the worst of bariatric’s side effects. People can develop dumping syndrome—wherein sugar-rich meals leave the stomach too quickly, causing sweating, dizziness, rapid heart rate, and vomiting. Gastric bypass in particular raises the risk of postoperative alcohol abuse. Rates of suicide and self-harming behaviors also rise in the years after bariatric surgery. And even when people follow strict post-operative diets, malnutrition, tooth loss, gout, and new or resurging eating disorders are possible. “It can be really challenging to get a full picture,” Du Breuil says. She learns about new side effects all the time.

Semaglutide and tirzepatide—both part of a larger family of GLP-1 receptor agonists—were developed for diabetes management at lower doses. When pharmaceutical companies noticed their trial participants were also losing weight, they realized “if we can turn the volume up to 11, we can really enhance this side effect,” says Johnson, the nurse. “That means you’re also turning up the other side effects.” 

The primary complaints from users of Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro sound like the kind of thing you can fix with a bottle (or three) of Pepto Bismol: nausea, upset stomach, diarrhea, and what one patient called “power vomiting.” But these might be less like classic “side effects” of a drug than a mechanism of weight loss itself, as The Guardian recently reported. By making the feeling of eating (and, in some cases, even hydrating) actively disgusting to the user, the drug curbs their consumption—similar to the experience of bariatric patients, who can only fit a few ounces of food in their stomachs at a time. 

The list of complications doesn’t end there. For example, both GLP-1 receptor agonists may increase the risk of thyroid cancer—one of the many BMI-linked diseases that supposedly makes weight loss absolutely imperative for people in larger bodies. And there’s good reason to believe that other side effects will reveal themselves in years to come, as the number of long-term users grows. 

The biggest surprise for many prospective patients is that long-term weight loss isn’t guaranteed—a reflection, perhaps, of the faulty assumption that people are obese because they overeat. Current estimates suggest that the average bariatric surgery patient regains 30 percent of the weight they lost in the 10 years after surgery. One in four regain all of their weight in that time. And 20 percent of people don’t respond to surgery in the first place. 

The same is true for GLP-1 receptor agonists: If you stop injecting, the weight returns. 

In case it wasn’t clear by now, biomedical weight loss interventions often mimic the deadly logic of anorexia, bulimia, or other forms of disordered eating, says Erin Harrop, a clinical social worker and researcher. Harrop would know. At the height of their own eating disorder, Harrop wished they could fill their stomach with air instead of food, or cut their stomach out, or wire their jaw shut. Later, they learned these things exist—in the form of gastric balloons, gastric sleeves, and even a magnetic jaw trap. 

It’s no surprise, then, that some people who undergo bariatric surgery experience a resurgence of a preexisting eating disorder, or develop a new one. Frequent vomiting, never knowing what foods will upset your stomach, and feeling pressure to maintain a post-surgical weight—“you can create an eating disorder that way,” Du Briel says.

But semaglutide and tirzepatide promise to fulfill an even stranger fantasy: eliminating appetite itself. While a drug like Mounjaro works on numerous fronts—including preventing the body from storing fat and “browning” existing adipose tissue—it’s the feeling of being untethered from desire that seems to fascinate patients and physicians alike. People for whom the drug works often say, “I forget to eat,” says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Weight Center. 

If doctors really believe that obesity is the greater of any two evils, then this approach makes sense. When it comes to bariatric surgery, for example, a review of the medical literature suggests it is, on balance, associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality—or death of any cause*—*compared to patients with high BMIs who don’t go under the knife (though such studies are profoundly limited, as they often do not control for social factors, like income or education). Many hope that semaglutide and tirzepatide will one day prove just as vitalizing.

But eating disorders kill too. In many contexts, sustained hunger is considered a travesty. And desire—for food, or anything else—is a great way to know you’re alive. “It’s wild to me that we see no appetite as a positive thing,” says Shira Rosenbluth, an eating disorder therapist who works with people of all sizes. Anna Toonk agrees: “I realized that there are worse things than being fat,” she told The Cut last fall. “The worst thing you can be is wanting to barf all the time.” 

Ultimately, the proliferation of drugs like Mounjaro means medicine is not only in the business of dictating “normal” weights (a thing it still hasn’t quite figured out), but “normal” appetites. What was once an intuitive process, in which your body tells you what it needs, became a dictate under diet culture: You tell your body what it can have. Now medicine promises a radical reset: With the right drug, your body will hunger for nothing at all.

Weight loss technology can’t be stopped entirely—nor should it be. Everyone has the right to choose what they want to do with their bodies. But informed consent is built on information, and we may not have enough. Mounjaro was fast-tracked by the FDA based on studies designed to observe weight loss over just 72 weeks, a small fraction of the time real patients will be on the drug. At the very least, patients should be informed that in the first years after a drug hits the market, they are participants in an ongoing experiment. 

As biomedicine’s war on obesity continues, people must work harder to combat anti-fat bias—not on a technicality, but as part of the expansive vision of justice fat activists began articulating more than 50 years ago. For semaglutide, tirzepatide, bariatric surgery, and their ilk are neither miracles nor cures. There have always been fat people, and there always will be, whether they’re “non-responders” to treatment, refuseniks, or languishing on the waitlist. Notably, even those who experience dramatic weight loss after surgery or on injectables may still be overweight or obese, depending where they started. 

Perhaps most importantly, the American weight loss discourse must move away from a reflexive scientism, which has enabled biomedicine to subject the entirety of human experience to its single-minded scrutiny. Weight, like almost every aspect of embodiment, is not an exclusively biological phenomenon or a clear-cut medical “problem” to solve. It is shaped by countless factors, like power distribution in society, personal psychology, and that most frightening of forces: the desire for more.

If you or a loved one is struggling with an eating disorder, the [US] National Eating Disorders Association Helpline is available at (800) 931-2237.

The Future of Weight Loss Looks a Lot Like Its Past

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