In laboratory dish tests, extracts from the flowers of tall goldenrod (Solidago altissima) and the rhizomes of the eagle fern (Pteridium aquilinum) each blocked SARS-CoV-2 from entering human cells.

The active compounds are only present in miniscule quantities in the plants. It would be ineffective, and potentially dangerous, for people to attempt to treat themselves with them, the researchers stress. In fact, the eagle fern is known to be toxic, they warn.

"It's very early in the process, but we're working to identify, isolate and scale up the molecules from the extracts that showed activity against the virus," says Cassandra Quave, senior author of the study and associate professor in Emory School of Medicine's Department of Dermatology and the Center for the Study of Human Health. "Once we have isolated the active ingredients, we plan to further test for their safety and for their long-range potential as medicines against COVID-19."

Quave is an ethnobotanist, studying how traditional people have used plants for medicine to identify promising new candidates for modern-day drugs. Her lab curates the Quave Natural Product Library, which contains thousands of botanical and fungal natural products extracted from plants collected at sites around the world.

Caitlin Risener, a Ph.D. candidate in Emory's Molecular and Systems Pharmacology graduate program and the Center for the Study of Human Health, is first author of the current paper.

In previous research to identify potential molecules for the treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections, the Quave lab focused on plants that traditional people had used to treat skin inflammation.

Given that COVID-19 is a newly emerged disease, the researchers took a broader approach. They devised a method to rapidly test more than 1,800 extracts and 18 compounds from the Quave Natural Product Library for activity against SARS-CoV-2.

"We've shown that our natural products library is a powerful tool to help search for potential therapeutics for an emerging disease," Risener says. "Other researchers can adapt our screening method to search for other novel compounds within plants and fungi that may lead to new drugs to treat a range of pathogens."

SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus with a spike protein that can bind to a protein called ACE2 on host cells. "The viral spike protein uses the ACE2 protein almost like a key going into a lock, enabling the virus to break into a cell and infect it," Quave explains.

The researchers devised experiments with virus-like particles, or VLPs, of SARS-CoV-2, and cells programmed to overexpress ACE2 on their surface. The VLPs were stripped of the genetic information needed to cause a COVID-19 infection. Instead, if a VLP managed to bind to an ACE2 protein and enter a cell, it was programmed to hijack the cell's machinery to activate a fluorescent green protein.

A plant extract was added to the cells in a petri dish before introducing the viral particles. By shining a fluorescent light on the dish, they could quickly determine whether the viral particles had managed to enter the cells and activate the green protein.

The researchers identified a handful of hits for extracts that protected against viral entry and then homed in on the ones showing the strongest activity: Tall goldenrod and eagle fern. Both plant species are native to North America and are known for traditional medicinal uses by Native Americans.

Additional experiments showed that the protective power of the plant extracts worked across four variants of SARS-CoV-2: alpha, theta, delta and gamma.

To further test these results, the Quave lab collaborated with co-author Raymond Schinazi, Emory professor of pediatrics, director of Emory's Division of Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology and co-director of the HIV Cure Scientific Working Group within the NIH-sponsored Emory University Center for AIDS Research. A world leader in antiviral development, Schinazi is best known for his pioneering work on breakthrough HIV drugs.

The higher biosecurity rating of the Schinazi lab enabled the researchers to test the two plant extracts in experiments using infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus instead of VLPs. The results confirmed the ability of the tall goldenrod and eagle fern extracts to inhibit the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to bind to a living cell and infect it.

"Our results set the stage for the future use of natural product libraries to find new tools or therapies against infectious diseases," Quave says.

As a next step, the researchers are working to determine the exact mechanism that enables the two plant extracts to block binding to ACE2 proteins.

For Risener, one of the best parts about the project is that she collected samples of tall goldenrod and eagle fern herself. In addition to gathering medicinal plants from around the globe, the Quave lab also makes field trips to the forests of the Joseph W. Jones Research Center in South Georgia. The Woodruff Foundation established the center to help conserve one of the last remnants of the unique longleaf pine ecosystem that once dominated the southeastern United States.

"It's awesome to go into nature to identify and dig up plants," Risener says. "That's something that few graduate students in pharmacology get to do. I'll be covered in dirt from head to toe, kneeling on the ground and beaming with excitement and happiness."

She also assists in preparing the plant extracts and mounting the specimens for the Emory Herbarium.

"When you collect a specimen yourself, and dry and preserve the samples, you get a personal connection," she says. "It's different from someone just handing you a vial of plant material in a lab and saying, 'Analyze this.'"

After graduating, Risener hopes for a career in outreach and education for science policy surrounding research into natural compounds. A few of the more famous medicines derived from botanicals include aspirin (from the willow tree), penicillin (from fungi) and the cancer therapy Taxol (from the yew tree).

"Plants have such chemical complexity that humans probably couldn't dream up all the botanical compounds that are waiting to be discovered," Risener says. "The vast medicinal potential of plants highlights the importance of preserving ecosystems."

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Thousands of miles from home in the steamy Amazon rain forest in the mid-1800s, the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates had a problem. More than one, really; there were thumb-size biting insects, the ever-present threat of malaria, venomous snakes, and mold and mildew that threatened to overtake his precious specimens before they could be shipped back to England. But the nagging scientific problem that bothered him involved butterflies.

Bates had noticed that some of the brightly coloured Heliconius butterflies in the forest didn’t flit about like the rest; they moved more slowly. When he captured them and examined them under his makeshift microscope, he discovered that they weren’t really Heliconius at all, but astonishing look-alikes from unrelated families of butterflies.

By the time Bates’ discovery reached the scientific cognoscenti in England, Charles Darwin’s then new proposal of natural selection could explain why this brilliant mimicry occurred. Birds and other predators avoid Heliconius butterflies because they are toxic to eat, with a bitter taste. The mimics were not toxic, but because they looked so much like the foul-tasting Heliconius, they were less likely to be eaten. The closer the resemblance, the more potent the protection.

What Bates and many later evolutionary biologists couldn’t explain was how this mimicry was possible. Getting the right shades of aquamarine and fiery orange in the right places on the wings required a constellation of precisely tuned genes. Those traits would have to be inherited with perfect fidelity, generation after generation, to preserve the Heliconius disguise. Maybe real Heliconiusbutterflies could afford to deviate a bit in colouration because their toxins could still teach predators to stay away in the future, but the mimics needed to be consistently flawless replicas. Yet the random reshuffling and remixing of traits in sexual reproduction should have quickly disrupted the essential colouring patterns.

This colour plate illustration published by Henry Walter Bates (left) in 1862 shows four pairs of butterflies and species that mimic them. In each similar pair, the mimic is shown on top and the original is below it. A non-mimic species appears at the center.Courtesy of Wellcome Collection/Natural History Museum/Alamy

Today we know that in many species the answer is supergenes—stretches of DNA that lock several genes together into a single inheritable unit. “They’re kind of a wild card,” said Marte Sodeland, a molecular ecologist at the University of Agder in Norway. This aggregated form of inheritance “has obvious advantages, because it allows rapid adaptation, but there’s a lot we don’t know yet.”

Supergenes once seemed like an evolutionary oddity, but the rise of genetic sequencing has shown that they are far more common than researchers believed. Not all supergenes may serve a function, but work in just the past few years has revealed that traits in a wide range of animal and plant species might be driven by these groups of genes that function like a single gene. Supergenes help wild sunflowers adapt to a range of environments, such as sand dunes, coastal plains, and barrier islands. In other families of plants, they produce subtle but important variations in their sexual organs and fertility that help to prevent inbreeding. Research published last spring showed that in some fire ant species, supergenes determine which type of social organization predominates—whether a colony has a single breeding queen or more than one, and whether it produces more males or females. (Specific supergenes in humans haven’t been confirmed, but likely candidates have been found.)

Supergenes also seem to hold explanations for many long-standing mysteries of evolution, such as how species can sometimes adapt to new environments rapidly, how populations can sometimes evolve in different directions even while living close together, and why some species have “balanced lethal systems” of breeding, such that they must have two different versions of a chromosome to survive.

Supergenes have helped wild sunflowers adapt successfully to a diverse range of environments.Courtesy of AZ_Michael

But supergenes aren’t all-powerful. Recent work on the evolution of supergenes is painting a nuanced picture of their effects. These theoretical models and studies of real populations have shown that supergenes often accumulate harmful mutations far more rapidly than other pieces of DNA do, and this can gradually lead to degenerative effects that undermine the original benefits.

Separating the Genetic Laundry

The definition of a supergene is rather technical, and scientists still argue about its finer points even though the concept has been around since the 1930s. But at its simplest level, says Simon Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, a supergene is a group of genes that are inherited together as a unit, often with a lot of other noncoding DNA.

“You can continue to produce two distinct traits with multiple genes and not worry about them becoming jumbled up,” Martin said.

That jumbling often occurs during the production of egg cells and sperm. In that process, the maternal and paternal copies of chromosomes line up and randomly swap segments of DNA in a ballet called recombination. Recombination hedges nature’s bets about the value of different permutations of genes; it boosts genetic diversity and helps weed out harmful mutations.

In the distant past, the same mechanism that creates supergenes caused the Y chromosome (right) in mammals to become genetically isolated from its X chromosome partner (left). The Y chromosome then shrank and lost most of its genes.Courtesy of Biophoto Associates/Science Source

The superpower of supergenes is that they block this. Typically, supergenes contain DNA deletions, insertions, or inversions (sequences that were cut out and spliced in backward). As a result, those parts of the chromosomal DNA don’t align with a partner and are far less likely to recombine.

In the 1970s, researchers showed that this same mechanism—with misalignments in chromosomes blocking recombination in segments of chromosomes that then continue to lose genes—led to the evolution of Y sex chromosomes from X chromosomes in mammals. Sex chromosomes are essentially supergenes run amok. Both supergenes and sex chromosomes exist because there’s sometimes a benefit to having some sets of genes inherited together, says Deborah Charlesworth, one of the evolutionary geneticists who pioneered the sex chromosome studies and recently retired from the University of Edinburgh. In those cases, “it would be ideal to not have any recombination but to have the things that go well together stuck together for good,” she said.

To understand why that might be advantageous, think about doing laundry, says Emma Berdan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Say you have a basket of white towels and a basket of red towels. Recombination does the equivalent of tossing both loads into the same drum, flipping on the hot water, and pressing start. What results is a bunch of pink towels. But the evolutionary equivalent of pink towels often isn’t a problem, Berdan says: A blending of traits can be beneficial.

Sometimes, though, life benefits from keeping its genetic laundry separated. For Bates’ Heliconiusbutterfly mimics, having a mix of colour splashes from different genes could be disastrous. The butterflies only reap the reward of mimicry if they look enough like Heliconius to fool predators.

Courtesy of Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

That’s why many researchers have been probing how supergenes arise and what the consequences for species might be as their supergenes continue to evolve. Understanding the origin of a supergene is “one of the most challenging questions,” said Tanja Slotte, an evolutionary geneticist at Stockholm University who studies supergenes in plants. “And it’s not a given that it’s even always possible.”

In one recent effort, Katie Lotterhos, an evolutionary marine biologist at Northeastern University, built a computer model to study the first tentative steps taken on the path from inversion to supergene. Her model, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in August as part of a special issue on supergenes, showed that the larger the initial DNA flip-flop, the more likely a supergene was to evolve. The reason was simple: A larger inverted fragment of DNA was more likely to capture multiple genes and lock them together as a single entity. Any beneficial mutations arising within the inversion could then promote its spread as a supergene.

But the more important insight from Lotterhos’ model was that inversions themselves do not necessarily provide an evolutionary advantage. If a suite of genes is already well adapted to its surroundings, locking it into an inversion will not suddenly allow it to take off as a supergene. That fact may help to explain why complex vital traits aren’t routinely secured as supergenes: Ordinary selection pressures are often sufficient to preserve the traits.

The question of whether an adaptation precedes an inversion or vice versa, Lotterhos realized, might never be answerable. “What comes first, the inversion or the adaptation?” she said. “It’s probably a little bit of both.”

The Cost of Supergenes

Supergenes offer robust advantages in the inheritance of adaptive traits, but they come at a cost.

Think back to Berdan’s laundry analogy: Washing red and white towels in a single load does eliminate the colour differences between the two sets of linens. However, if you rip or stain a pink towel, you have an identical pink towel you can use as a backup. If one copy of a chromosome picks up a harmful mutation that breaks a gene, a functioning backup copy is likely to be on the matching chromosome to help the organism survive. And since recombination ensures that the mutation is inherited independently of other genes, natural selection can weed out the mutation over time.

For supergenes, however, that isn’t true. Since they rarely recombine, any harmful mutations they acquire tend to stay in place. The benefits of supergenes, then, could be accompanied by significant disadvantages. For example, Berdan and Benjamin Wielstra of the Institute of Biology Leiden have found that in the salamander called the crested newt, half of the eggs it lays aren’t viable because of all the mutations that have built up in one supergene. Their supergenes seem to be holding back their reproductive success.

Because of a supergene, there are distinct morphs (or forms) of the white-throated sparrow. These are males of the white (left) and tan morphs. To breed successfully, sparrows from one morph must mate with birds from the other.Courtesy of Jim Hudgins/USFWS; Kenneth Cole Schneider

Supergenes can also complicate the process of mating. In some species, supergenes create a breeding system that in effect has four sexes. Because of a supergene in the North American birds called white-throated sparrows, for example, there are two “morphs” with dissimilar colouration and behaviors. Not only do males have to find females, but they must find a partner from the opposing morph. Otherwise, offspring will die either from inheriting supergenes from both parents or from inheriting none. Only chicks that receive a “balanced lethal” inheritance of one supergene and one ordinary segment of chromosome survive.

With such a steep price, it’s a wonder that supergenes evolved at all, Berdan says. “Any set of variants is going to be really hard to maintain, especially over millions of generations,” she said. “That’s one of the big mysteries of supergenes.” She suggested that multiple types of selection might be working together to preserve supergenes, and that certain environments might be most conducive to their persistence in the population.

Ironically, one of the mechanisms that can sometimes preserve supergenes seems to be recombination—the phenomenon that they normally resist. Amanda Larracuente, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester, and her coauthors described such a case last April in eLife.

Larracuente wasn’t initially interested in supergenes or their evolutionary costs. Her focus was on selfish genes, segments of DNA that proliferate in populations without benefiting their hosts. She was fascinated by a selfish gene called Segregation Distorter (SD) that arose in certain fruit flies in Zambia. “It’s a sperm killer,” she explained, but it only kills sperm that doesn’t carry a chromosome with SD.

Sometime within the last 3,000 years, one version of SD ensnared a large piece of chromosomal DNA, creating a supergene known as SD-Mal that spread to fruit fly populations throughout Africa. “It’s really the ultimate selfish gene,” Larracuente said.

DNA sequencing and analysis by Larracuente, Daven Presgraves, and their colleagues showed that chromosomes with SD-Mal accumulate harmful mutations, as predicted by the near-complete lack of recombination between SD-Mal and its sister chromosome. But the researchers didn’t find as many mutations as they expected.

The reason, they discovered, is that occasionally a fly will inherit two chromosomes with SD-Mal—and those two supergenes are just similar enough to allow some recombination between them. That recombination in turn makes it possible for a few harmful mutations to be purged from the flies’ supergenes over time.

“As it turns out, just a little bit of recombination is enough,” Larracuente said. She and Presgraves are now looking for other SD supergenes in wild fruit fly populations for clues to the evolution and impacts of supergenes more generally.

Their results show that the purifying effects of recombination on genomes never cease to be important. The complex traits that the stable, predictable inheritance of supergenes makes possible may be invaluable in helping species adapt, but even the supergenes can benefit from mixing things up once in a while.

How Supergenes Beat the Odds—and Fuel Evolution

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Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble under the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.

But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.

How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.

American Public Media’s Emily Hanford uncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.

Guest host Katie Herzog talks to Emily about her groundbreaking reporting to ask how it all went wrong—and what we can do to make things right.

< Listen to the audio at the source page. >

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The Denver Broncos participate in Random Acts of Kindness Week each year, an annual tradition of celebrating and spreading kindness.

This year, the Broncos are encouraging fans to participate by providing simple suggestions for how to perform acts of kindness for segments of our community each day of the week.

Sunday, Feb. 12: Take part in a random act of kindness for a neighbor, friend or family member.

Monday, Feb. 13: Express your gratitude by calling, texting or sending a small gift to a coach in your life to say thank you.

Tuesday, Feb. 14: Select a DonorsChoose classroom (donations start at $1) and help students gain the tools and experiences they need for a great education.

Wednesday, Feb. 15: Encourage your children to take time after lunch or school to help their school's custodian keep their school clean.

Thursday, Feb. 16: Send a small token of thanks with your children to thank a caregiver, whether it's a daycare worker, nanny, family member or friend.

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Long-term exposure to air pollution raises the risk of depression, according to a pair of new studies published in the JAMA network of scientific journals.

A study published on Friday in JAMA Network Open found that long-term exposure to elevated levels of air pollution increases the risk of late-onset depression among the elderly.

The other study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, found that long-term exposure to even low levels of air pollutants was associated with increased incidence of depression and anxiety.

Air pollution has long been linked to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

The new studies add to a growing body of evidence that air pollution also affects mental health.

For the study of the effects of air pollution on elderly Americans, researchers from Harvard and Emory University examined the data of nearly nine million people on Medicare, the US government health insurance scheme for those aged over 64.

More than 1.52 million of them were diagnosed with depression during the study period of 2005 to 2016, according to Medicare claims.

"We observed statistically significant harmful associations between long-term exposure to elevated levels of air pollution and increased risk of late-life depression diagnosis," the researchers said.

"Socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals were observed to be at a much higher risk of late-life depression in this study," they said. "They are simultaneously exposed to both social stress and poor environmental conditions, including air pollution."

For the study, the researchers mapped pollution levels and compared them to the addresses of the Medicare patients.

The pollutants to which they were exposed were fine particulate matter such as dust or smoke, nitrogen dioxide, which stems mainly from traffic emissions, and ozone, which is emitted by cars, power plants, and refineries.

The researchers said the elderly may be particularly susceptible to pollution-linked depression because of their pulmonary and neural vulnerability.

"Although depression is less prevalent among older adults as compared with the younger population, there can be serious consequences, such as cognitive impairment, comorbid physical illness, and death," they said.

In the other study, researchers in Britain and China investigated the association of long-term exposure to multiple air pollutants and the incidence of depression and anxiety.

They studied a group of nearly 390,000 people, mostly in Britain, over a period of 11 years and found there was an increased risk for depression and anxiety even at pollution levels below UK air quality standards.

© Agence France-Presse

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Turkish police have already taken at least 12 people into custody, including building contractors.

Meanwhile, unrest in southern Turkey has disrupted rescue efforts in some places.

The number of people confirmed to have died in Turkey and Syria has risen to more than 30,000.

More arrests are expected - but the action will be seen by many as an attempt to divert overall blame for the disaster.

For years, experts warned that many new buildings in Turkey were unsafe due to endemic corruption and government policies.

Those policies allowed so-called amnesties for contractors who swerved building regulations, in order to encourage a construction boom - including in earthquake-prone regions.

Thousands of buildings collapsed during the earthquake, raising questions about whether the natural disaster's impact was made worse by human failings.

With elections looming, the president's future is on the line after spending 20 years in power.

Mr Erdogan has admitted shortcomings in the response, but, during one visit to a disaster zone, he appeared to blame fate. "Such things have always happened," he said. "It's part of destiny's plan."

On the sixth day after the quake hit, the situation is growing more desperate.

On Saturday, German rescuers and the Austrian army paused search operations because of clashes between unnamed groups in Hatay province. Security is expected to worsen as food supplies dwindle, one rescuer said.

"There is increasing aggression between factions in Turkey," Austrian Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Kugelweis said. "The chances of saving a life bears no reasonable relation to the safety risk."

The search for survivors resumed under the protection of the Turkish army.

Across southern Turkey and northern Syria, millions are homeless and temperatures continue to drop below freezing on a nightly basis.

The UN has warned that more than 800,000 people are without adequate meals, and its aid agency on the ground is warning the final death toll from the quake is likely to double.

In Syria, the death toll now stands at more than 3,500 - but new figures have not been published since Friday.

Hope of finding many more survivors is fading, despite some incredible rescues.

Among those rescued from the rubble on Saturday were a family of five in Turkey's Gaziantep province, and a seven-year-old girl in Hatay, who spent 132 hours under the rubble.

The quake was described as the "worst event in 100 years in this region" by the United Nations aid chief, who was in the Turkish province of Kahramanmaras on Saturday.

"I think it's the worst natural disaster that I've ever seen and it's also the most extraordinary international response," Martin Griffiths told the BBC's Lyse Doucet in Turkey.

Mr Griffiths has called for regional politics to be put aside in the face of the disaster - and there are some signs that this is happening.

The border crossing between Turkey and Armenia reopened on Saturday for the first time in 35 years to allow aid through.

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India’s potential from bio hydrogen itself can be 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen per annum.

Out of all aspects of the Hydrogen ecosystem, generation is the most important part. There are several ways of producing Hydrogen – grey (from fossil materials with CO2 let out in the air), blue (from fossil materials with CO2 stored or converted), and green (in which no additional CO2 is let out in the air). Focus on green Hydrogen is crucial for the fuel technology to be truly a game changer. Because it really addresses our core national issues that we talked about in the previous part of this article series.

Green hydrogen can be made by electrolysis (splitting water into its constituent elements – hydrogen and oxygen – by using electricity which necessarily should be green electricity i.e., generated by solar or wind or other renewable sources). The current cost of generation of hydrogen by electrolysis is in the region of ₹ 600-800 per kg. At this rate the cost per kilometre for an FCEV will be about 45–50% higher than that of a diesel vehicle for a similar longdistance heavy duty commercial operation. Clearly this is not an economically viable option today. However, the picture can change quite dramatically. Since green electricity can only be generated when the sun shines or the wind blows, for continuous hydrogen generation one would need energy storage when renewable energy is not available.

The primary deciders of hydrogen cost are the cost of the electrolyser, cost of storage and the cost of electricity. Electrolyser is a fairly well-known technology the cost of which is largely driven by the volume of production. The new hydrogen mission focuses on manufacture of electrolysers within the country. With the scale that one can envision both in solar as well as in production of electrolysers, it is anticipated that by the end of this decade the cost of green hydrogen can drop to $ 1/kg. At this rate the cost per kilometre of an FCEV will be around 25% less than the cost per kilometre of an equivalent diesel vehicle.

Green hydrogen can also be made by converting bio-waste or other biomass such as wheat straw, rice straw, cotton stalk, bagasse, forest residue, etc. into hydrogen through gasification or microbial route. The technologies for both these options have been developed by us here in India. We have worked with Agharkar Research Institute (Autonomous institute under DST) to develop a unique, high-yielding process that uses a novel microbial consortium to produce Hydrogen directly from biomass and methane thereafter. Through a collaboration with Ankur Scientific Technologies, we have developed a gasification-based Hydrogen generation process which would be better suited for woody biomass.
 

The Green Hydrogen Generation Challenge

Humans are naturally afraid of the dark. We sometimes imagine monsters under the bed and walk faster down unlit streets at night. To conquer our fears, we may leave a night light on to scare away the monsters and a light over the porch to deter break-ins.

Yet, in huddling for safety under our pools of light, we have lost our connection to the night sky. Star counts by public awareness campaign Globe at Night revealed that, between 2011 and 2022, the world’s night sky more than doubled in artificial brightness.

Yet local interventions can create meaningful change.

Light pollution is cutting us off from one of nature’s greatest wonders, harming wildlife and blocking research that could help fight climate change. Stars are more than pretty glimmers in the night sky. They have shaped the mythology of every human civilization. They guide birds on their astonishing migratory journeys. And now we need to do our bit to prevent light pollution so stars can be part of our future.

The human eye can detect around 5,000 stars in the night sky. But the light emitted by skyscrapers, street lamps, and houses obscures all but a handful of the brightest stars.

Our ancestors used the rising and setting of the constellations as calendars. They also navigated by the stars as they searched for new lands or traced nautical trade routes. Sailors don’t normally use the stars to navigate anymore, but they are still taught how to in case their navigation systems break down.

Migratory animals, including birds and insects, are drawn away from their natural flight paths by the beckoning “sky glow” of cities. In the summer of 2019, Las Vegas was invaded by millions of migrating grasshoppers, while the beams of New York’s 9/11 Tribute in Light are a magnet for flocks of migrating songbirds flying at night.

Disoriented by the bright city lights, birds crash into towering skyscrapers. Insect numbers are collapsing worldwide and light pollution is making matters worse by disrupting their nocturnal life cycles.

What is light pollution?

Light pollution is caused by the same physics that turns the sky blue during the day. Sunlight is made up of all the colors of the rainbow and each color has a different wavelength. The air that surrounds us is composed of tiny particles (such as oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules).

As light from the Sun makes its way through the air, it is scattered by these particles in random directions. Blue light (with shorter wavelengths) is scattered more than red light (which has longer wavelengths). As a result, our eyes receive more blue light from every direction in the sky.

At night, light scattered by the same air particles causes the sky to shine down on us. A small fraction of this sky glow is caused by natural sources, such as starlight and the Earth’s atmosphere. But most of the light that creates sky glow is artificial.

Light pollution also affects our ability to study the universe. Even modern observatories, built on remote mountaintops, are affected by the encroaching sky glow from growing, sprawling cities. Light pollution is so widespread that three-quarters of all observatories are affected.

Looking up

There is no reason to despair, though. We created light pollution; we can fix it.

Around the world, dark sky associations are working to educate the public about the hazards of light pollution, to lobby for legislation to protect dark sky reserves, and encourage people to reignite their connection with dark, star-studded skies.

Fighting light pollution begins at home. If you need to keep outside lights on for security, use shielded lamps that only shine downward. Use light bulbs that do not emit violet and blue light as this is harmful to wildlife. Smart lighting controls will also help reduce your house’s effect on wildlife and make it easier for you to observe the night sky.

You will also find interactive maps that show how polluted the skies are in your area. These maps are created from data gathered by satellites and by citizen scientists taking part in annual star counts. You can help darken our skies, too.

In the UK, the 2023 annual star count will take place on February 17-24. And, wherever you are in the world, you can always take part in the year-long Globe at Night star count whenever you want.

The task is simple: step outside on a clear night, count how many stars you can see in a well-known constellation, such as Orion, and report back.

To defeat light pollution, we need to know how severe it is and what difference national policies and local interventions (such as replacing the street lights in your town) make. In the UK, for example, star counts show light pollution may have peaked in 2020 and has started to decline.

Perhaps the most important aspect of star counts is that they shine a light on our vanishing night skies and galvanize us to take action. Ultimately, it’s up to each and every one of us to reduce our effect on the sky, by changing the way we light our homes and neighborhoods and by lobbying our representatives to pass dark sky legislation.

Or Graur, Reader in Astrophysics, University of Portsmouth. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Russia's state-owned space corporation, Roscosmos, reported Saturday that a Progress supply ship attached to the International Space Station has lost pressure in its external cooling system.

In its statement, Roscosmos said there was no threat to the seven crew members on board the orbiting laboratory. NASA, too, said the hatch between the Progress MS-21 vehicle and the space station was open. Notably, the incident with the supply ship came within hours of the safe docking of another Progress ship, MS-22, which is in good health.

Although the initial Roscosmos statement was vague about the depressurization event, Dmitry Strugovets, a former head of space agency Roscosmos' press service, later clarified it was a coolant leak. "All of the coolant has leaked out," he said via Telegram.

This is the second Russian spacecraft to suffer a cooling system leak in less than two months at the space station.

Déjà vu

On December 14 2022, as two cosmonauts were preparing to conduct a spacewalk outside the space station, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked nearby began to leak uncontrollably from its external cooling loop. This system carries heat away from the interior of the spacecraft.

This Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft had been due to bring cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, as well as NASA's Frank Rubio, back to Earth in March. Russian engineers eventually declared that a micrometeorite had struck the external cooling loop of the spacecraft, and deemed it unsafe to fly home.

In January, officials from Roscosmos and NASA said a replacement Soyuz spacecraft will launch to and autonomously dock with the station in February. The crew that would have flown in the damaged Soyuz MS-22 vehicle, including Rubio, will instead fly home in this Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft later in 2023. The leaky Soyuz MS-22 vehicle will make an autonomous return to Earth, bereft of crew, likely in March.

It is not clear how directly the leaky Progress and Soyuz spacecraft are related. According to one NASA source, however, there was some preliminary data received from the Progress vehicle that indicated a similar cooling system issue. External cameras showed flakes moving away from the Progress vehicle—frozen coolant—similar to that observed with Soyuz MS-22.

Growing list of failures

Roscosmos said Saturday the Progress incident "will have no impact on the future station program." This is likely true for Progress MS-21, at least. The spacecraft already has been packed with trash and other material to be removed from the station, and was due to leave next week, burning up in Earth's atmosphere during reentry.

However, it seems too early to make such a conclusion for future missions. A critical question is what caused the depressurization event observed Saturday. It seems improbable that a second micrometeorite would have struck as second Russian spacecraft in less than two months. This raises doubts about whether the Soyuz MS-22 failure was indeed a micrometeorite issue—Russia has never released images of the impact site—and instead perhaps a manufacturing defect.

A few hours after the Progress depressurization Saturday there are more questions than answers, but none of this will comfort NASA as it partners with Russia to continue operating the space station. This latest Soyuz and Progress failures are just two in a long line of recent issues, including the Nauka module's misfiring thrusters in 2021, a Soyuz booster failure in 2018 that forced Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague to make an emergency return to Earth, or another leaky Soyuz vehicle.

These are the kinds of problems that one might expect from a space industry in Russia that is reliant on aging infrastructure, aging technology, and quality control issues due to inadequate budgets.

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TURKEY AND SYRIA’S 7.8-magnitude quake on Monday is a brutal reminder that deep down, planet Earth still hides secrets. Scientists know full well that faults are prone to earthquakes, but they can’t tell when a shaker will strike or how big it’ll be. If they could, the death toll wouldn’t stand at over 20,000 so far—and rescuers are still scrambling to find survivors. 

Still, in recent years scientists have made progress in developing early earthquake warning systems, in which seismometers detect the beginnings of rumblings and send alerts directly to people’s phones. That alarm comes not days or hours before the quake strikes, but seconds. The planet’s seismic strikes are just too sudden for scientists to provide substantial warning times.

A novel technique, though, could one day boost those early warning systems, providing extra time for people to prepare for incoming quakes—although it’d still be on the order of a few seconds, depending on how close a person is to the epicenter. It’s called distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. Though the field is still in its infancy, DAS could tap into the fiber optic cables buried under our feet as a sprawling, ultra-sensitive network for detecting seismic waves. These cables are used for telecommunications, but they can be repurposed for sensing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions because the ground’s movement slightly disrupts the light traveling through the cable, creating a distinct signal.

DAS can’t predict earthquakes; it just detects early tremors. “Any system, whether it is a seismometer or fiber optic cable, cannot detect things before they happen at the sensor,” says geoscientist Philippe Jousset of the German Research Centre for Geosciences, who has used DAS to detect volcanic activity on Italy’s Mount Etna. “We have to have the sensor as close as possible to a source so that we can detect early. There are a lot of cables everywhere. So if we could monitor them all at once, then we would get information as soon as something is happening.” 

When a fault ruptures, it fires off different kinds of seismic waves. The primary ones, P-waves, travel at 3.7 miles per second. These aren’t super damaging to homes and other infrastructure. Secondary waves, or S-waves, are much more damaging, traveling at 2.5 miles per second. Even more destructive are surface waves, which move at about the same speed as S-waves or maybe a bit slower. These rip along Earth’s surface, leading to dramatic deformation of the ground. (They’re especially destructive because their energy is concentrated on a relatively flat plane along the surface, whereas P-waves and S-waves spread out more three-dimensionally underground, distributing their energy.)

Existing earthquake early warning systems, like the United States Geological Survey’s ShakeAlert, use seismometers to exploit the differing speeds of seismic waves. ShakeAlert consists of about 1,400 seismic stations across California, Oregon, and Washington, with plans to add nearly 300 more. These monitor for fast-moving P-waves, which forewarn of more damaging S-waves and surface waves on the way. If an earthquake strikes and at least four separate stations detect the event, that signal is sent to a data center. Should the system’s algorithms determine that the tremor will be above a magnitude 5, it’ll trigger an emergency alert to be sent to the cell phones of local residents. (Thanks to a ShakeAlert partnership with Google, it goes out to Android users if the magnitude is above 4.5.)

All this shuttling of data through modern telecommunications equipment happens at the speed of light—around 186,000 miles per second—which is much, much faster than destructive seismic waves travel. But how much warning a resident gets depends on how far away they are from the epicenter. If they’re right on top of it, there just isn’t enough time to get the alert before they feel shaking. Think of it like a thunderstorm: The closer you are to the lightning, the sooner you hear the thunder.

“Everything happens super fast,” says Robert-Michael de Groot, a member of the ShakeAlert operations team at the USGS Earthquake Science Center. “If you're far enough away, you may get a few seconds. And that's better than before earthquake early warning existed, where basically the only signal that you knew that something was going on was the ground was shaking.” 

With those few seconds, people can gather up their kids and get under a table. ShakeAlert basically outruns the earthquake, at least the bits of it that humans experience on the surface as intense shaking. “It's a race,” says de Groot. “People may feel a bump or something like that, but then, when the heavy shaking arrives, hopefully the alert would have been delivered and people would have been in position.”

DAS works on the same principle as ShakeAlert, only instead of seismometers monitoring for P-waves it uses vast spans of fiber optic cables. Scientists can get authorization to attach a device called an interrogator to unused cables. (Telecom companies often laid down more than they ended up needing.) This device fires laser pulses down the wire and analyzes tiny bits of light that bounce back when the fiber is disturbed. Because scientists know the speed of light, they can pinpoint disturbances based on the time it took for the signal to get back to the interrogator. 

Instead of taking seismic measurements at a single point, like a seismometer does, DAS is more like a miles-long string that forms one giant earthquake sensor. If there are a bunch of cables zig-zagging across a region, all the better. “One of the big advantages of DAS is actually a lot of those cables are already there, so it's readily available,” says Sunyoung Park, a seismologist at the University of Chicago.

DAS may also be able to gather data where there aren’t any proper seismic stations, like rural areas that have fiber optic cables stretching out beneath them. Because those cables are also under the sea—running along coastlines and connecting continents across oceans—they can pick up earthquakes there too. For those longer spans, researchers use “repeaters,” devices already placed every 40 miles or so along the cables that boost signals. In this case, instead of analyzing the light that bounces back to an interrogator, they analyze the signal that reaches each repeater. 

Last year, scientists described how they used a cable stretching from the United Kingdom to Canada to detect earthquakes all the way down in Peru. The technique was so sensitive that the cable even picked up the motion of the tides, meaning it could potentially be used to also detect tsunamis spawned by underwater earthquakes.

Every year, February 11 is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. This year, we have asked some of our team who their favorite female scientist of all time is and why. 

Answer by Laura Simmons, Editor and Staff Writer

Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923) was a mathematician, inventor, suffragist, and someone who didn’t let society’s expectations stand in the way of her scientific ambitions. A woman after my own heart.

Portrait of Hertha Ayrton by Héléna Arsène Darmesteter. Image credit: Art UK via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Born Phoebe Sarah Marks in 1854, she later restyled herself as “Hertha” after a poem of the same name by Algernon Charles Swinburne. She studied mathematics at Cambridge University, at a time when the institution did not award degrees to women, passing the final exams nonetheless. In further confirmation that we would definitely have been friends if we had ever met, she also led the Choral Society whilst at Girton College.

The then Ms. Marks started working as a math teacher in London but developed an interest in electrical engineering after studying at evening classes taught by celebrated physicist William Ayrton – the man who would soon become her husband.

Like so many other famous science stories (penicillin, anyone?), Ayrton’s first major piece of research came about as a result of an accident, when one of her husband’s papers on electric arcs was mistakenly chucked away. Ayrton took up the baton and became the first woman to read her resulting paper, discussing how modifications to the carbon electrodes could reduce the characteristic hissing of electric arc lamps, to the Institution of Electrical Engineers.

Early 20th century illustration of arc lamp carbon electrodes. Image credit: Whyte, Adam Gowans via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A few years later, Ayrton repeated the feat by becoming the first woman to present a paper on the hydrodynamics of sand ripples at the prestigious Royal Society. She was even awarded the Hughes Medal in 1906 – but, thanks to an antiquated law, as a married woman she was not permitted to become a Fellow.

Subsequent years found Ayrton taking an active role in the women’s suffrage movement, including providing her home as a refuge to suffragettes recovering from being on hunger strike. There was also a well-documented friendship with another icon among female scientists, Marie Curie, and contributions to the war effort during World War I – although her invention, the anti-gas Ayrton Fan, proved ineffective in combat situations, it was later adapted and used to protect miners and sewage workers.

Hertha Ayrton’s story is one that deserves to be remembered, not just for her scientific contributions, but as someone who championed the rights of women in science and beyond.

Answer by Charlie Haigh, Social Media and Marketing Assistant

Growing up fascinated with all things space, it always felt like astronomy was a man’s game. So when I first learned of the amazing women behind some of NASA’s greatest achievements, mathematician and “human computer” Dorothy Vaughan (1910-2008) instantly became one of my favorite women in science.

Dorothy Vaughan in her twenties. Image credit: BlackPast.org via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Joining what was then NACA in 1943 from her role as a high school math teacher, Vaughan worked in the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. While new legislation prohibited workplace discrimination, Jim Crow laws still required newly hired people of color to work separately from white employees. Vaughan was assigned a role in the West Area Computing unit with an all-Black team of women referred to as “human computers” because of their ability to complete complex mathematical calculations by hand.

Just six years after joining the company, Vaughan was assigned the role of acting head of the West Area Computing team, becoming the first Black supervisor at NACA, and one of very few female supervisors. Now filling a more senior role in the company, Vaughan used this opportunity to fight for the opportunities of other incredible women in the West Area Computing team.

With the introduction of FORTRAN, a programming language for numeric and scientific computing, Vaughan recognized the impact digital computing could have on herself and the other female human computers as NACA. So, after teaching herself to be proficient in FORTRAN and computer programming, she taught her coworkers too, helping to prepare them for the transition to digital computing.

Dorothy Vaughan retired from NASA in 1971 before passing away in 2008 at age 98. In 2019, she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and had the Moon’s Vaughan crater named in her honor. The legacy of her valuable work is continued through the incredible women and people of color now working at NASA.

Answer by Beccy Corkill, Custom Content Manager 

Elephants hold a dear place in my heart. Their extreme intelligence and infamous memories are something that has fascinated me for many years. That is the reason one of my favorite women in science is Dame Daphne Sheldrick (1934-2018) – she was someone who radically changed the elephant and rhinoceros conservation landscape.

Dame Daphne Sheldrick. Image credit: Joseph Sohm/ Shutterstock.com

In 1977, she founded the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, located in Nairobi, Kenya. She was one of the first people to develop a successful specialized milk formula and rearing method that has helped countless orphaned elephants and rhinos. Before this development, many would perish very quickly. But through her vitally important and pioneering work, Dame Daphne Sheldrick has helped rehabilitate and reintegrate over 230 orphaned elephants back into the wild.

Baby elephants drinking milk at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Image credit: Beccy Corkill/ IFLScience

In fact, you can actually go and visit the trust in Kenya. It is definitely worth the visit if you have the chance, and it is something that I have personally done myself. Seeing the adorable baby elephants running toward the crowd for a large bottle is something that is awe-inspiring but also something that is critically sad as the reason that these elephants are in the facility is laced with tragedy and loss.  

Alongside this amazing research and implementation, Dame Daphne Sheldrick was also a proactive animal welfare advocate. Throughout her career, she and her team worked tirelessly to bring attention to the elephant and rhino plight and helped expose the world to the illegal wildlife trade and ivory and rhino horn trade. This work has been influential in pushing stricter regulations and laws that help protect these animals.

River Hamza, as Brazil’s National Observatory unofficially named the beast, acts like drainage for the region and was discovered after Petrobras (an oil company) drilled hundreds of wells. They were drilled back in the 70s and 80s, but when scientists later took a look inside they discovered the monstrous waterway that was hiding underneath. It was after the leader of this team of researchers that the underground waterway was named.

It begins under the Andes in the Acre region and winds its way on through to the Solimões, Amazonas and Marajó basins before slipping out unseen into the Atlantic Ocean. The flowing river Amazon speeds along at around 5 meters (16 feet) per second. By comparison, the painfully slow-trickling Hamza moves along at a casual 1 millimeter (0.04 inches) per hour, writes The Guardian.

This super casual speed means that it’s not technically a river despite its unofficial name, as it’s not flowing sufficiently fast enough to earn the title. Instead, it’s a mammoth drainage system shuffling through porous rock and it’s very, very salty.

The Hamza flows in the same direction as the Amazon, from west to east, and is only slightly shorter in length. Where it differs significantly is in its width, which is around 100 times that of the Amazon, ranging from 200 to 400 kilometers (125 to 250 miles).

“It is likely that this river is responsible for the low level of salinity in the waters around the mouth of the Amazon,” Mongabay reports the National Observatory said. “The Amazon region has two discharge fluid systems: the surface drainage [through] the Amazon River… and the flow of groundwater through the deep sedimentary layers.”

The Hamza isn’t the only peculiar waterway in the region. Elsewhere in the Amazon you can find a river of boiling water. Shanay-timpishka – meaning “boiled with the heat of the Sun” – is remarkably huge considering there aren’t any volcanoes in the region, the bubbling cauldrons of molten rock that usually give rise to hot springs and dangerous natural hot tubs.

The hot water flows for 6.24 kilometers (3.9 miles), with an average temperature of 86°C (186.8°F), requiring an enormous amount of energy. Chemical analyses appear to indicate that it gets so hot by falling as rain which then bubbles up from Earth’s geothermal energy.

Then of course you have the Amazon itself, which actually flows backwards. It’s been doing this for tens of millions of years, but did you know that sometimes rivers will transiently change direction? And the effects can be deadly.

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The researchers found that, in aging, there is an overload of the protein SPT and others, all of which are needed to convert fatty acids and amino acids to ceramides. “The sphingolipids and ceramides are complex yet very interesting fat class, and there is high potential to further study their role in aging, as they perform many diverse functions,” says Dr. Pirkka-Pekka Laurila, a medical doctor and the lead author of the study.

Next, the scientists wanted to see whether reducing ceramide overload could prevent age-related decline in muscle function. They treated old mice with ceramide blockers, such as myriocin and the synthetic blocker Takeda-2, and used adeno-associated viruses to block ceramide synthesis specifically in muscle. The ceramide blockers prevented loss of muscle mass during aging, made the mice stronger, and allowed them to run longer distances while improving their coordination.

To study this effect more deeply, the scientists measured every known gene product in the muscle using a technique called RNA sequencing. “It turned out that blockade of ceramide production activates muscle stem cells, making muscles build up more protein and shifting fiber type towards fast-twitch glycolytic to produce larger and stronger muscles in aged mice,” explains Dr. Martin Wohlwend, the main collaborator in the study.

Finally, the scientists looked at whether reducing ceramides in muscle could also be beneficial in humans. They examined thousands of 70-80-year-old men and women from Helsinki and discovered that 25% of them have a particular form of a gene that reduces the gene products of sphingolipid production pathways in muscle. The people who had this ceramide-reducing gene form were able to walk longer, be stronger, and were better able to stand up from a chair, indicating healthier aging, similar to mice treated with ceramide blockers.

“These findings are very important as they provide us with a strong incentive to develop inhibitors which could be tested in humans,” says Johan Auwerx. The scientists are now embarking on collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry.

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A jerk is a measurement of a sudden acceleration change and is commonly used in fields such as engineering, sports science, manufacturing, and more. Researchers have now proposed that examining the impact of jerks can also offer deeper insights into gameplay. The game refinement theory posits that acceleration, or the rate at which information speed changes, represents the balance between certainty and uncertainty in a game. This balance is referred to as the game refinement value (GR) and serves as an indicator of a player’s level of engagement.

A new perspective, the motion-in-mind model, measures the uncertainty of progress in a game relative to two physical measures—velocity, which represents the win rate, and mass, which represents how hard it is to win. These physical values can be translated into psychological reactions. A jerk—denoted as AD, an abbreviation for addictive—can thus be interpreted as unpredictability or surprise. Games with a higher AD value are highly unpredictable and full of surprises, making them addictive.

Recently, a group of researchers led by Assistant Professor Mohd. Nor Akmal Khalid from the School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), has investigated the influence of jerks on game addiction through several popular card games—these included suits-irrelevant (Wakeng and Doudizhu) and suits-relevant (Winner, Big Two, and Tien Len) games. The study, which was co-authored by Professor Hiroyuki Iida of JAIST, was recently published in the journal IEEE Access.

Researchers from JAIST highlight the importance of cross points between GR (y = 1/2at2) and AD (y = 1/6jt3) curves, where the elementary components of play were identified and established the principle of play, based on data of card games and previously conducted studies on similar topics. Credit: Mohd. Nor Akmal Khalid from JAIST

 

Prof. Khalid discusses the motivation behind the research. “Card games are typical incomplete information games. Short, repeatable rounds, chances, and strategizing make them among the most entertaining, even addictive, games. We wanted to understand why this was so.”

The researchers first explored the rules, designs, and complexities of these games, using game refinement and the motion-in-mind model. Next, they performed two simulations with self-playing artificial intelligence (AI) agents. In the first experiment, the AI mimicked a fixed game played by contestants with different skill levels (weak, fair, and strong). In contrast, the second experiment comprised games of various sophistications played by a fixed AI level. The differences between two parameters were observed—first, the odds of winning (as seen in games with deterministic versus random odds), and second, the difficulty level (as seen in simple versus complex games). These analyses enabled researchers to compare the different card games.

The results demonstrate that skill and sophistication must match for reasonable GR (correlated with attractiveness) and AD (correlated with surprise) values. In addition, the games must also be balanced and fair enough, so that winning is not interpreted as just good luck. Take Doudizhu for example, which has nearly equal GR and AD values. This balance between uncertainty and unpredictability leads to a fast-paced game with frequent rewards and surprises. As a result, people want to play repeatedly, making Doudizhu the most popular and addictive card game.

Through the above investigation, the researchers discerned the principles of play for addictive entertainment. The four measures of the game progress model—game length, velocity, acceleration, and jerk—correspond respectively to reward cost, reward frequency, uncertainty, and unpredictability. Further, they determine game fairness, reinforcement, attractiveness, and surprise, respectively.

“These components highlight the potential of GR and AD measures as powerful tools to understand gameplay. They will prove useful in making games more attractive and educational. Not just games, the findings of this study can be extended to help make any normal and mundane activity engaging, enjoyable, surprising, and even addictive. In essence, the boundary between work and play can get blurred, leading to an ultimate sense of achievement and passion,” concludes Prof. Khalid.

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More than 100 people were detained across the 10 provinces affected by the quake, the state-run Anadolu News Agency reported on Saturday, and the Turkish Justice Ministry ordered officials in those provinces to set up “Earthquake Crimes Investigation Units.” It also directed them to appoint prosecutors to bring criminal charges against all the “constructors and those responsible” for the collapse of buildings that failed to meet existing codes, which had been put in place after a similar disaster in 1999.

In one example, Mehmet Ertan Akay, the constructor of a collapsed complex in the hard-hit city of Gaziantep, was detained in Istanbul on charges of involuntary manslaughter and violation of public construction law.

Mehmet Yasar Coskun, the constructor of a 12-story building in Hatay Province with 250 apartments that was completely destroyed, was detained on Friday at an Istanbul airport while trying to board a flight to Montenegro. Dozens of people are thought to have died when the building collapsed.

Two constructors of a collapsed 14-story building in Adana, who reportedly fled Turkey immediately after the quake, also were detained in Northern Cyprus, according to the Turkish-controlled Northern Cyprus administration.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, visited Diyarbakir Province on Saturday and insisted that this earthquake was “three times bigger and more destructive than the 1999 quake, the greatest disaster in our country’s recent memory.” While acknowledging that official response has been slow, he said that the country was not prepared for an earthquake of this size.

Mr. Erdogan, who faces a tough election battle in May, called for unity, saying: “Unfortunately some political parties, NGOs, still seek to attack immorally, impudently.” He vowed retribution on looters and said that all Turkish universities would switch to online learning so that survivors could live for now in state-run dormitories.

In the Saraykint neighborhood of Antakya, a newly built luxury building of 14 floors, with some 90 apartments, had collapsed on itself.

“The concrete is like sand,” said one man who declined to give his name, standing near the building as he watched rescuers work. “It was built too quickly.”

While Turkey has building codes put in place after the 1999 quake, residents said that they were often not applied because contractors can earn more money when they cut corners: mixing the concrete and using cheaper metal bars to gird pillars, among other things.

Mesut Koparal, a car dealer whose mother was killed in the quake, was furious at the state for not doing more to ensure buildings were constructed well.

“The state is responsible,” he said. “If you have a small amount of debt, the state chases you and finds you, but they don’t check the buildings.”

“I’m not an engineer, I’m not a contractor,” he added. “How would I know?”

His neighbor, Mehmet Celik, 38, a middle-school teacher, said the big problem was so-called amnesties for buildings that were not built according to code, which the government occasionally issues to effectively legalize such buildings. It’s good politics, because no one wants a building or apartment they had paid for to be condemned, he said. But then the building is vulnerable when a quake hits.

In the city of Adiyaman, the main thoroughfare felt like a construction site that sprawls out, block after block after block. But instead of putting up buildings, crews of workers, cranes, bulldozers and excavators were digging through the rubble of those that have collapsed.

Residents said rescue crews and aid were initially slow to arrive after Monday’s powerful earthquake, which killed more than 21,000 people in Turkey and nearly 4,000 in neighboring Syria. The crews now pack the main roadway.

Rescue workers, miners and uniformed soldiers stand atop piles of rubble and rest on the grassy median, warming themselves with wood fires that choke the air with smoke, and sipping lentil soup made in volunteer kitchens.

Adiyaman was badly damaged, with a number of buildings on each block along its main street now collapsed. Many others have cracked windows and walls, and none appear to have any inhabitants.

Prepared food, diapers and baby formula were being handed out at various distribution points. In an empty dirt lot, volunteers set up an open-air pharmacy to hear residents’ complaints and look at their medical records before fetching the proper pills or syrups from folding tables behind them.

At a medical tent next door, doctors offered free consultations to anyone who walked in. The most common complaints were wounds from shattered glass or falling bricks, respiratory illnesses aggravated by the cold weather and diarrhea from the lack of potable water for the droves of homeless people, said Dr. Firat Erkmen, the head of a medical association in Sanliurfa that sent a delegation of volunteers.

A million or more people in the affected region are thought to be without shelter in a cold winter, U.N. officials said, as local and foreign aid workers pushed to bring food, clean water and temporary housing to the affected areas, especially in northwest Syria, which has been largely cut off from outside aid because of political obstacles stemming from a 12-year civil war.

The earthquake left widespread destruction across southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, both in the last opposition-held territory in Syria’s northwest and in swaths of government-held territory, particularly Aleppo.

Humanitarian aid has been politicized for a long time in a divided Syria, with President Bashar al-Assad insisting that it be funneled through the central government, while most Western aid agencies want to deliver aid directly to the country’s northwest, which is held by Turkish-backed opposition forces.

Only one border crossing from Turkey into northwest Syria, Bab al-Hawa, has been authorized for aid deliveries by the United Nations Security Council, where Russia, which supports Mr. al-Assad, has refused to allow other crossing points to function. There were reports that the Syrian Red Crescent received permission to send 14 trucks of aid through the crossing to Idlib, accompanied by U.N. officials, but much more aid is needed.

The Syrian death toll is expected to grow considerably in the next few days, as a disorganized rescue effort gets into higher gear.

“Emergency response must not be politicized,” said Geir O. Pedersen, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, speaking after a meeting of a humanitarian task force in Geneva. “Our immediate asks are two: access and resources,” he added.

While aid has been pouring into Turkey, the situation in Syria is more chaotic and dire. Mr. Pedersen is only one of a number of U.N. officials expected to visit the country. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the World Health Organization, traveled on Saturday to Aleppo, and the U.N. aid chief, Martin Griffiths, is in Turkey and hoping to go to Syria, where Mr. al-Assad has been touring areas of devastation and blaming the West for shunning his government.

Mr. Griffiths acknowledged the particular difficulties of getting aid to Syria and said he planned to put more pressure on the Assad government to open up two other crossings. “It’s life and death,” he said, warning that the death toll could double.

One Syrian volunteer, Mohamed al-Shibli, said on Saturday that the Syrian White Helmets rescue group was now recovering only the dead. “Yesterday and today we haven’t found any cases alive,” he said.

Mr. al-Assad’s opponents say he is using the crisis to try to get sanctions lifted, and to argue that most Syrian aid funded by Europe and the United States goes through U.N. agencies and their local partners based in the capital. They say that Syria routinely blocks international aid to opposition-held areas in the north and siphons supplies for the rest of the country.

Mr. al-Assad, in turn, accused the West of playing politics. “The West prioritized politics over the humanitarian situation,” Mr. al-Assad said on Friday while visiting the devastated Aleppo neighborhood of Masharqa. “It’s natural that they politicize the situation, but there is no humanitarianism, neither now nor in the past.”

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department refused to lift sanctions on Syria, saying that humanitarian aid efforts were not impeded by the policy.

But the Treasury Department issued a six-month exemption from sanctions for all transactions related to providing disaster relief to Syria.

Rescue operations continued in Turkey, where 67 people had been pulled alive from the rubble in the past 24 hours, Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters overnight. He said that about 80,000 people were being treated in hospitals, while 1.05 million left homeless by the quakes huddled in temporary shelters.

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said on Saturday that nearly 93,000 survivors had been evacuated from the quake zone.

While Turkish officials have encouraged families to evacuate, many have been stymied. The Goclu family had heard about a bus to evacuate people, but when they arrived to take it, it had been canceled, Melek Goclu said. Her husband had booked plane tickets, but they had been canceled, too.

“We just want to leave,” she said, “but we can’t find a way.”

The post As Anger Swells Over Quake, Turkey Detains Building Constructors appeared first on New York Times.

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•     Case seeks class action status for students at 17 major schools

(Reuters) - A Chicago federal judge has handed a key victory to students suing a group of elite U.S. universities and colleges over their financial aid practices, saying they can question school officials and search for records about whether "wealth favoritism" played into admission considerations.

In his ruling on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly rejected a bid from six schools — Brown University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, University of Notre Dame and Yale University — for an order barring the plaintiffs from accessing admission and development records, including details about donations.

Brown and the other five schools must also allow senior university officials to sit for depositions on those matters, according to the court's ruling.

The prospective class action filed last year against 17 schools alleged a price-fixing conspiracy in which schools restricted financial aid, causing a class of potentially more than 200,000 students to over-pay for tuition by tens of millions of dollars. The lawsuit survived an early bid by the schools to dismiss it.

The schools have long denied taking a would-be student's financial need into account as part of the admission process.

Kennelly's order "will allow the plaintiffs to develop the evidence to prove our case," plaintiffs' lawyer Bob Gilbert, on the team leading the case, said on Thursday.

Attorneys for Brown and the other five schools did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. Representatives from those schools either declined to comment or did not respond to similar requests.

For their part, the defense lawyers for the schools won a chance on Wednesday to subpoena some financial aid application information from the parents of student plaintiffs in the case.

Attorneys for the student plaintiffs are seeking among other records "documents and communications concerning the consideration of donor or legacy status in admissions," including details about donations totaling more than $50,000.

"Records of donations of that magnitude in the President's office or Development office should stick out like needles that can be tracked into the Admissions office," the plaintiffs' lawyers told the court.

The plaintiffs' lawyers said evidence of donation records linked to the admissions process would undermine the schools' claims that a would-be student's potential for financial aid was not weighed.

Lawyers for the schools said in a court filing that the "plaintiffs' goal in pursuing such discovery is to harass and embarrass, rather than because it is relevant to their actual antitrust claim."

The defense lawyers also called the demand for admissions and development records "intrusive and burdensome."

The case is Henry v. Brown University, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, No. 1:22-cv-00125.

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University of Sydney scientists have discovered a protein in the lung that blocks SARS-CoV-2 infection and forms a natural protective barrier in the human body.

This protein, the leucine-rich repeat-containing protein 15 (LRRC15), is an inbuilt receptor that binds the SARS-CoV-2 virus without passing on the infection.

The research opens up an entirely new area of immunology research around LRRC15 and offers a promising pathway to develop new drugs to prevent viral infection from coronaviruses like COVID-19 or deal with fibrosis in the lungs.

The study has been published in the journal PLOS Biology. It was led by Professor Greg Neely with his team members Dr Lipin Loo, a postdoctoral researcher, and PhD student Matthew Waller at the Charles Perkins Centre and the School of Life and Environmental Sciences.

The University study is one of three independent papers that reveal this specific protein’s interaction with COVID-19.

“Alongside two other groups, one at Oxford, the other at Brown and Yale in the USA, we found a new receptor in the LRRC15 protein that can stop SARS-CoV-2. We found that this new receptor acts by binding to the virus and sequestering it which reduces infection,” Professor Neely said.

“For me, as an immunologist, the fact that there's this natural immune receptor that we didn't know about, that's lining our lungs and blocks and controls virus, that's crazy interesting.

“We can now use this new receptor to design broad acting drugs that can block viral infection or even suppress lung fibrosis.”

What is LRRC15?

The COVID-19 virus infects humans by using a spike protein to attach to a specific receptor in our cells. It primarily uses a protein called the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor to enter human cells. Lung cells have high levels of ACE2 receptors, which is why the COVID-19 virus often causes severe problems in this organ of infected people.

Like ACE2, LRRC15 is a receptor for coronavirus, meaning the virus can bind to it. But unlike ACE2, LRRC15 does not support infection. It can, however, stick to the virus and immobilise it. In the process, it prevents other vulnerable cells from becoming infected.

“We think it acts a bit like Velcro, molecular Velcro, in that it sticks to the spike of the virus and then pulls it away from the target cell types,” Dr Loo said.

“Basically, the virus is coated in the other part of the Velcro, and while it's trying to get to the main receptor, it can get caught up in this mesh of LRRC15,” Mr Waller said.

LRRC15 is present in many locations such as lungs, skin, tongue, fibroblasts, placenta and lymph nodes. But the researchers found human lungs light up with LRRC15 after infection.   

“When we stain the lungs of healthy tissue, we don't see much of LRRC15, but then in COVID-19 lungs, we see much more of the protein,” Dr Loo said.

“We think this newly identified protein could be part of our body’s natural response to combating the infection creating a barrier that physically separates the virus from our lung cells most sensitive to COVID-19.”

Pastel pop art illustration of human lung generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 [Credit: Greg Neely]

Implications of the research

“When we studied how this new receptor works, we found that this receptor also controls antiviral responses, as well as fibrosis, and could link COVID-19 infection with lung fibrosis that occurs during long COVID,” Mr Waller said.

“Since this receptor can block COVID-19 infection, and at the same time activate our body’s anti-virus response, and suppress our body’s fibrosis response, this is a really important new gene,” Professor Neely said.

“This finding can help us develop new antiviral and antifibrotic medicines to help treat pathogenic coronaviruses, and possibly other viruses or other situations where lung fibrosis occurs.

“For fibrosis, there are no good drugs: for example, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is currently untreatable.”

Fibrosis is a condition in which lung tissue becomes scarred and thickened, causing breathing difficulties. COVID-19 can cause inflammation and damage to the lungs, leading to fibrosis.

The authors said they are developing two strategies against COVID-19 using LRRC15 that could work across multiple variants – one which targets the nose as a preventative treatment, and another aimed at the lungs for serious cases.

The researchers also said that the presence or lack of LRRC15, which is involved in lung repair, is an important indication of how severe a COVID-19 infection might become.

“A group at Imperial College London independently found that absence of LRRC15 in the blood is associated with more severe COVID, which supports what we think is happening.” Dr Loo said. “If you have less of this protein, you likely have serious COVID. If you have more of it, your COVID is less severe.

“We are now trying to understand exactly why this is the case.”

The research involved screening human cell cultures for genes and investigating the lungs of human COVID-19 patients.

Declaration:  Professor Greg Neely is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) project grants, the NSW Ministry of Health, and a philanthropic donation from Dr John and Anne Chong. Dr Lipin Loo is funded by a Dr John and Anne Chong Fellowship for Genome Editing and seed funding from the Drug Discovery Initiative at the University of Sydney, and Mathew Waller is funded by a Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship from the Australian Government.

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The intentions of Spanish public railway operator, Renfe, were good: to renovate the 40-year-old railway fleet, increasingly subject to damage, in the regions of Cantabria and Asturias in the country's north. But the miscalculation that crept into the order details could cost Renfe dearly. The specified dimensions of the trains were too large.

So much larger in fact that if Basque railway manufacturer CAF had simply followed the instructions provided by Renfe in 2020, when it won the tender, the 31 trains it would have delivered would not have been able to fit through the tunnels. While the manufacturer came to the realization relatively early during the design stage, the delivery will still be delayed by two to three years and the project, initially estimated at €258 million, will suffer a massive yet-to-be-determined cost blowout.

"I hope that heads will roll!" said the president of the Cantabria regional government, Miguel Angel Revilla, on Thursday, February 2, without hiding his anger against what he called "monumental pig work." Spanish Minister of Transport Raquel Sanchez apologized and took the matter seriously, announcing on Saturday, February 4, the dismissals of the former head of material management at Renfe, who was in charge when the new trains were awarded, and the head of inspection and track technology at the rail network manager, ADIF. For now.

Submarines too heavy

In addition, internal audits have been requested at ADIF and at Renfe to examine the flaws that led to the blunder. On Wednesday, February 8, a working group of stakeholders in the case met to accelerate the rectification process. The 31 regional trains were originally scheduled to be delivered by 2024. Now the ministry hopes to have a new timeline for their delivery by this summer, at best.

In order to move as quickly as possible, Renfe will make one of its old trains available to CAF, so that the company has a physical reference. The purchase order is complex. When applying the current safety standards to the old network of narrow tracks, the width of the trains must be significantly reduced to maintain the minimum required clearance from the tunnel walls. This also means that the trains' carrying capacity is much lower than on modern infrastructure, which means suboptimal passenger service.

The miscalculation of the dimensions of these regional trains has caused a lot of controversy and mockery on social media. It is reminiscent of the construction of four S-80 submarines by the nationalized Spanish company Navantia that began in 2005. Although delivery had initially been scheduled for 2012 at a cost of €1.8 billion, the ultramodern vessels have swallowed up nearly €4 billion in public funds and are still yet to be delivered.

In the meantime, in 2013, the builder realized that the submarines weighed too much for their buoyancy to be guaranteed, and decided to lengthen them by nearly 10 meters. As a result of the modification, the vessels no longer fit in the submarine base in the port of Cartagena in the country's south, which needed to be enlarged. Their delivery is expected for 2023, more than 10 years behind schedule.

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Two enormous cracks in Earth's crust opened near the Turkish-Syrian border after two powerful earthquakes shook the region on Monday (Feb. 6), killing over 20,000 people.

Researchers from the U.K. Centre for the Observation & Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes & Tectonics (COMET) found the ruptures by comparing images of the area near the Mediterranean Sea coast taken by the European Earth-observing satellite Sentinel-1 before and after the devastating earthquakes.

The longer of the two ruptures stretches 190 miles (300 kilometers) in the northeastern direction from the northeastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea. The crack was created by the first of the two major tremors that hit the region on Monday, the more powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck at 4:17 a.m. local time (8:17 p.m. EST on Feb. 5). The second crack, 80 miles long (125 km), opened during the second, somewhat milder 7.5-magnitude temblor about nine hours later, COMET said in a tweet on Friday (Feb. 10).

Such ruptures appear commonly after powerful earthquakes, professor Tim Wright, who leads the COMET team, told Space.com in an email. These two fissures, however, are unusually long, a testament to the enormous amount of energy the earthquakes unleashed.

"The bigger the earthquake, the bigger the fault and the more it slips," Wright wrote. "This earthquake fault is one of the longest on record on the continents. Also very unusual to have two such large earthquakes happening within a few hours of each other."

The movement of the tectonic plates that caused the earthquakes was such that the cracks are clearly visible on the surface, running through towns and in some cases directly through buildings.

"We estimate presumably horizontal displacements of rarely up to 5 meters [16 feet]," COMET researcher Milan Lazecky told Space.com in an email. "Indeed, such large displacements of the terrain cannot be missed by people living in those regions."

Local scientists shared photographs of the surface cracks on Twitter (opens in new tab), confirming what satellites observed from space.

This area, north of Cyprus, is prone to powerful earthquakes, as three tectonic plates — the Anatolian, Arabian and African plates — meet here, creating pressure as they bump into each other. The Monday earthquakes, however, stood out with their ferocity and devastating effects, according to experts.

More than 20,000 people have been reported dead, and many victims are likely still buried underneath rubble as rescue operations proceed slowly, especially on the Syrian side, which has been ravaged by armed conflicts for years.

Since the earthquakes struck, satellites operated by governmental agencies as well as private companies have been assessing the damage. According to NASA (opens in new tab), the earthquakes erupted along a fault line 11 miles (18 km) below the surface. This shallow depth, NASA said in the statement, meant tremors propagated with vicious force, spreading hundreds of miles away from the epicenter.

Two enormous cracks in Earth's crust created by the devastating February 2023 earthquake in Turkey seen by the Earth-observing satellite Sentinel-1.

(Image credit: Copernicus/NERC/COMET)

"These were very large and powerful earthquakes that ruptured all the way up to the surface over a long series of fault segments," Eric Fielding, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement. "This generated extremely strong shaking over a very large area that hit many cities and towns full of people. The rupture length and magnitude of the magnitude-7.8 earthquake was similar to the 1906 earthquake that destroyed San Francisco."

Across the Turkish cities of Türkoğlu, Kahramanmaraş and Nurdaği, thousands of buildings have collapsed, burying their occupants and rendering thousands of people homeless.

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In 1495, Danish King Hans docked his ship Gribshunden off the coast of Sweden in preparation for a meeting with Swedish ruler, Sten Sture the Elder. His plan was to broker a deal that would give him control over Sweden as he had done with Norway, creating a united Nordic kingdom.

Unfortunately for Hans and many of his crew, the ship caught fire and sank. To give himself the upper hand, the King had filled his ship with both warriors and goods worthy of a rich and powerful man. The loss of the ship led to a change in plans—Hans attacked Sweden soon thereafter and conquered the country instead of negotiating for it. But the sinking of the ship also created a motherlode of artifacts for modern historians to study.

The wreck of the ship was found in the 1960s and was studied by marine archaeologists in the years thereafter, but not very thoroughly. The new study was launched in 2019 and continued through 2021. The team found that most of the expected artifacts had already been found in earlier expeditions, but something important had been overlooked—containers holding well-preserved plant material—more than 3,000 specimens.

Saffron from the Gribshunden shipwreck site. Plant parts of saffron: a–c) stigmas, d) petri dish showing a portion of the recovered saffron stigmas. Credit: PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281010

The researchers found spices such as nutmeg, cloves, mustard and dill. They also found samples of other plant material, such as saffron and ginger, peppercorns and almonds. Some of the spices would have come from as far away as Indonesia, suggesting that King Hans had developed an advanced trade network. The researchers also found snack items, such as dried blackberries, raspberries, grapes and flax, each find showing just how rich and powerful Hans had become. The researchers also found one non-edible plant, henbane, which, in the past, was used for medicinal purposes.

The researchers note that the plant specimens were in excellent condition due to the unique conditions of the site where the ship was found, a part of the Baltic Sea that is cold and low in salinity.

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Skyscrapers in the City of London would be required to dim their lights at night as part of proposals to reduce visual pollution and save energy.

Under the proposal from the City of London Corporation, property owners across the Square Mile – a 1.12 square mile zone in the centre of the capital whose boundaries stretch from the Temple to the Tower of London and from Chancery Lane to Liverpool Street – would be asked to switch off unnecessary building lights to create “brightness zones” governed by curfews.

City officials are concerned about energy wastage and light pollution caused by the unnecessary use of lights in office buildings that have few or no workers after a certain time of night.

“Over time, as new developments come forward that follow this guidance, we will transform the approach to lighting in the City,” the corporation said in a planning document setting out the proposal, the Financial Times reported.

Buildings would be asked to turn off or dim all external illumination other than that required for safety or crime prevention.

It would require internal lights to be dimmed significantly, though buildings in business areas would be allowed to have brighter lights if they are required by workers.

The City proposes the creation of three types of “brightness zone” with slightly earlier curfews set at 10pm for residential and heritage areas, 11pm for cultural and tourist areas and midnight for commercial, retail and transport hubs.

The corporation hopes the proposals will help it reach its target of achieving carbon net zero for the Square Mile by 2040.

City officials said efforts to tackle light pollution needed to be balanced with the fact that some people work through the night, especially when keeping international hours, while bars and restaurants are open until late.

“The City is a unique place in which 24/7 business districts and busy transport hubs rub up against historic buildings and residential neighbourhoods,” said Shravan Joshi, the chair of the City of London Corporation’s planning and transportation committee.

The corporation’s strategy “is aimed at ensuring an intelligent, sensitive approach to lighting, which ensures the City is safe and accessible, while protecting its historic character and the amenity of our residents”, he added.

The planning document, which was prepared with input from lighting architects Speirs Major, says that developments should “ensure all external and internal lighting is automatically turned off when not needed using [motion sensors] and/or time clocks or other automated control devices”.

Developers would have to agree during the planning process for new buildings. Owners of existing buildings would also be asked to follow the rules, although the local authority will have no legal power to enforce them so they would be asked to sign up to a voluntary charter.

The local authority will hold consultations on the planning document.

Melanie Leech, the chief executive of the British Property Federation, told the FT: “We should all do everything we can to reduce unnecessary light pollution and reduce energy use. The City of London’s consultation … should be helpful in providing leadership and clarity to developers, property owners and their customers.”

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At 30, she lived in Beijing and worked at one of the world’s largest tech firms. She had attended China's top school, Peking University, and gotten a master’s degree at Stanford. She felt the same pressure as anyone else to work hard, buy a home and settle down.

But last year, the striving that came so instinctively suddenly lost its meaning. She was exhausted by 12-hour workdays and long commutes, then nightmarish pandemic lockdowns. None of it seemed worth the financial payoff, the promise of which dwindled as the economy worsened.

“It just felt like my plan wouldn’t work anymore," she said.

Stuck at home, burned out, with murmurs of layoffs at her company growing, Chu began to realize that she didn't really like her work-driven life. So she started dreaming of a different one. In October, she quit her job, sold most of her possessions and moved to a provincial village some 800 miles from Beijing.

The growing aversion to conventional expectations — build a career, get married, buy a home, have children — is discouraged by the ruling Communist Party, which prizes social stability.

But China's economic slowdown, jarring after years of supercharged growth and exacerbated by harsh COVID restrictions, has forced many to put their lives on hold. Tech companies, once among the most reliable and coveted employers, have slashed jobs. Millions of college graduates are struggling to find work in the toughest labor market in decades.

Observers have noticed a growing malaise among a middle class weary of toiling in a hypercompetitive environment without much promise for material gain.

“The young generation has become more aware of the precarious situation that they are in," said Zhan Yang, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. "They don’t want to just be stuck in one job forever, so they are experimenting with different ways of living. It’s like a small social experiment is taking place in China.”

Exact figures on how many people are living such lifestyles are elusive. But surveys show a growing interest in jobs that are more accommodating to different schedules and locations.

The number of flexible workers, such as part-timers or freelancers, in China nearly tripled to 200 million over the course of 2021, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. In a 2022 report by Peking University and Chinese recruitment platform Zhaopin, about 73% of respondents wanted to become digital nomads.

Even before the pandemic, backlash was growing over the punishing hours in China's high-powered industries, a grind known as 996 — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Employees endured because they believed with enough ambition and grit, anyone could make their fortune. But social mobility has stalled in recent years, undermining that premise.

“It’s kind of like an adrenaline rush, a boost that drives people to work 996. But now the boost is gone,” Chu said. “People are saying, Whatever you do, you’re not going to get rich, you’re not going to make a lot of money, you’re not going to be successful. So why not do something you like?”

For Chu, that means leisurely mornings and afternoons spent writing, making videos and selling goods online. With income from those new endeavors, she calculates she has enough savings to support herself for a few years in smaller, cheaper cities as she fleshes out her longer-term plan.

For now, she’s settled in a once-bustling tourist town nestled between mountains and the shore of West Lake, a 40-minute drive from the city of Hangzhou.

She rents space in a villa that had been used as a hotel before the pandemic, living among the owner and his family — who moved in after tourism dried up — and often joining them for home-cooked meals. Around the village, neighbors tend to their vegetable fields and tea farms.

It’s a far cry from her life in Beijing, where she was often overwhelmed by work messages and demands. Worries about COVID tests or securing deliveries during lockdown exacerbated that fatigue, and the days began to blur together.

“There’s kind of a feeling, like what have I done for all these years? I’ve wasted so much time,” she said. “I can say I went to some good universities and worked at some big companies, but it’s not something you want to write on your tombstone, you know?”

Still, Chu doesn’t want to fully embrace the trend of tangping, or lying flat, a rejection of the country's rat race that gained popularity a few years ago. Disillusioned youth, tired of trying to fulfill societal expectations, relished the idea of giving up and just lying down. Others coined new variations, such as yangwoqizuo, or "sit-ups," which describes a cycle between struggle and capitulation. Chu said that doesn’t quite fit her current attitude either.

“I’m not giving up on myself and doing nothing, but I'm not standing up or running. I’m just sitting here doing things — but that’s what I think real life should be.”

She’s put off telling her parents that she left her job, because she doesn’t want them to worry. But she thinks they might come to understand. They live in Wuhan and were among the first to witness the devastation wrought by the pandemic; Chu believes they have also started to prioritize quality of life over traditional success.

For some in China that means leaving demanding jobs, trying to monetize hobbies, or hopping from town to town. Remote work hubs have popped up around the country; China's Instagram-like platform, Xiaohongshu, said searches for digital nomads surged 650% from January to August 2022. Social media users have begun documenting their transitory lifestyles — including stays in steeply discounted hotel rooms or tourist resorts left deserted during the pandemic.

Summer Li, who quit her job at an e-commerce startup early last year, used the proliferation of such posts to plan her own travels. In May, she moved to the southern tech hub of Shenzhen for one month before returning to Beijing. In August she spent another month in Kunming, the capital of the mountainous Yunnan province, followed by a brief sojourn in Jingdezhen, the "Porcelain Capital" of China, where she studied ceramics.

"I got this information because a lot of people are doing the same thing during COVID," said Li, who has been running an online jewelry business while on the road. "I just realized, I think going to work is not for me."

Chu had hesitated to give up her hard-earned job security, even as she watched friends quit work and travel. And when she first told her friends her plans to roam around China, many expressed concern, she said. After she started a video blog about her new life last month, friends and strangers reached out asking for tips on how to embark on similar journeys.

“In traditional Chinese society, many would think: People like you are not very good. They would say you are the unstable element of society,” Chu said. But lately, she has felt less pressure to settle down. “The good thing is that a lot of people are feeling the same way, that we don’t need to do the things that others want you to do.”

Last year, China's population shrank for the first time in six decades, threatening a demographic crisis with insufficient young people to work and support the elderly. To boost birthrates, local governments have begun offering more supportive policies for families raising young children, and they've promoted incentives to buy real estate during the housing downturn.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has warned the country’s youth against “lying flat,” even as employment prospects have dimmed. “Work is most glorious, our happy lives are created through work. Becoming rich or famous overnight is not realistic,” Xi said during a university visit in Sichuan province in June, according to state media.

But neither incentives nor admonishments have mitigated the spreading ambivalence. Some Chinese became so despondent last year that many began researching how to emigrate, spawning a new movement known as runxue, or "run philosophy."

Other countries, including Japan and South Korea, are experiencing similar struggles with a dejected younger generation, leading to low marriage and birth rates and putting pressure on governments to alleviate their citizens' financial stress.

“It’s basically an economic problem,” said Terence Chong, associate economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Young people, they think they have no hope, housing prices are so expensive, so they just limit how hard they work.”

Chinese officials have begun walking back harsh policies in an effort to boost the economy.

Last month, China suddenly relaxed its stringent zero-COVID policy. Since then, the virus has spread rampant throughout the country, overwhelming hospitals and straining medical supplies. However, it has allowed somewhat of a resumption of normal life and work, buoying hopes for an economic recovery.

Officials have also effectively declared an end to a years-long crackdown on private enterprise that battered tech companies and the for-profit education industry.

Even if the economy recovers, Chu can’t imagine going back to Beijing, or her former life.

“I think COVID gave me a chance to really reflect on myself,” she said. “If there was this opportunity to make a lot of money and be rich overnight, would I still be living the lifestyle I'm living right now? I don’t know, probably not.”

These days, Chu feels so removed from the rest of the world that she barely noticed when China lifted all COVID restrictions, until local villagers began to get sick. Even then, the outbreak felt milder than what she was hearing and reading about Beijing.

“If I turn off my phone, this place is like paradise,” she said. “I just hope that this life can last longer.”

At night, she often takes long walks around the tranquil village. She doesn’t remember the air ever smelling quite so sweet.

David Shen of The Times’ Taipei bureau contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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Caltech engineer Mory Gharib was poring over the digitized notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci one day, looking for sketches of flow visualization to share with his graduate students for inspiration. That's when he noticed several small sketches of triangles, whose geometry seemed to be determined by grains of sand poured out from a jar. Further investigation revealed that Leonardo was attempting to study the nature of gravity, and the little triangles were his attempt to draw an equivalence between gravity and acceleration—centuries before Albert Einstein would demonstrate this equivalence with his general theory of relativity. Gharib was even able to re-create a modern version of the experiment.

 

Gharib and his collaborators described their discovery in a new paper published in the journal Leonardo, noting that, by modern calculations, Leonardo's model produced a value for the gravitational constant (G) to around 97 percent accuracy. What makes this finding even more astonishing is that Leonardo did all this without a means of accurate timekeeping and without the benefit of calculus, which Isaac Newton invented in order to develop his law of universal gravitation in the 1660s.

 

"We don't know if [Leonardo] did further experiments or probed this question more deeply," Gharib said. "But the fact that he was grappling with the problems in this way—in the early 1500s—demonstrates just how far ahead his thinking was."

 

Leonardo was born in 1452, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary named Ser Piero d’Antonio and a local peasant girl named Caterina. Caterina was foisted off on a cowherd in a neighboring village, while Ser Piero married into a wealthy family. But he didn’t abandon his son. Leonardo grew up in his father’s household and received a solid education, and when his artistic talents emerged, he was apprenticed to Andrea del Verrochio, a prominent Florentine artist. In Andrea’s workshop, Leonardo learned the basics of painting and sculpting, grinding and mixing pigments, and perspective geometry. By the time he was accepted into the painters’ guild in 1472, he was already making sketches of pumps, weapons, and other ingenious devices of his own design, in addition to his art.

 

Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and descriptions of the anatomy of the human heart.

Public domain

 

Leonardo produced more than 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later gathered into codices), less than a third of which have survived. The notebooks contain all manner of inventions that foreshadow future technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges for clearing harbors and canals, and floating footwear akin to snowshoes to enable a man to walk on water.

 

Leonardo foresaw the possibility of constructing a telescope in his Codex Atlanticus (1490) when he wrote of “making glasses to see the moon enlarged”—a century before the instrument’s invention. And in 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, came across some recipes for mysterious mixtures while flipping through Leonardo’s notes. Vezzosi experimented with the recipes, resulting in a mixture that would harden into a material eerily akin to Bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 1900s. So Leonardo may well have invented the first manmade plastic.

 

The notebooks also contain Leonardo's detailed notes on his extensive anatomical studies. The artist occasionally received permission to dissect human corpses from local hospitals, studying some 30 cadavers in his lifetime, and the sketches of what he observed are mostly remarkably accurate. Most notably, his drawings and descriptions of the human heart captured how heart valves can ebb blood flow 150 years before William Harvey worked out the basics of the human circulatory system.

Leonardo noted link between gravity and acceleration centuries before Einstein

The Iguassu Waterfall and nearby forests straddle Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.