The study, "Do Religious/Spiritual Resources Moderate the Association Between Suffering and Religious/Spiritual Struggles?" appears in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. It relies on a three-wave panel of data examining 302 U.S. individuals suffering from at least one chronic illness. The research sheds light on suffering and religious turmoil, as well as the associated effects of religious involvement and commitment.

"We examined whether religious engagement and commitment was a protective factor against the turmoil and doubt people can face when going through terrible suffering—but the answer was no," said Blake Victor Kent, assistant professor of sociology at Westmont College. "In fact, in the face of suffering, those in the sample who were more religious were also more likely to experience doubt and confusion about their relationship with God."

A seven-item set of questions asked about suffering, along with seven items about religious and spiritual struggles. Sample statements about suffering included:

•     "The intensity of what I have been experiencing feels intolerable."

•     "I feel powerless to stop my current experience of suffering."

•     "What I have been experiencing threatens who I am as a person."

Sample religious and spiritual struggle items read:

•     "I questioned the power of God."

•     "I wondered whether God had abandoned me."

•     "I questioned God's love for me."

"We found that the more highly you cherish your relationship with God, the more likely you will struggle when you go through times of suffering," Kent said. "Research shows that religious commitments can help protect us from a host of challenging outcomes like loneliness or poorer mental health, but this study says doubt and confusion are not on the list."

Interpreting the results, the researchers, including co-authors Richard Cowden, Victor Counted, Edward Davis, Sandra Rueger, and Everett Worthington Jr., suggested one mistake people may make is to define doubt and confusion solely as "negative" experiences to be avoided, rather than possible avenues to spiritual growth.

"While no one likes to go through suffering, it may actually be a pathway toward greater spiritual endurance and character," Kent said, noting that most major religions anticipate suffering as an unavoidable aspect of human experience.

"The results actually make a lot of sense if you think about it. When you value your commitment to God then of course you're going to struggle when you suffer. There is simply more at stake in a relationship characterized by a high degree of investment, and in that sense it could be an affirmation of connection to God. It's certainly an opportunity to reevaluate how God might be present to you in the suffering."

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This was shown by a research published in the journal Nutrients, carried out by scholars of the University of Bologna and the Unversity Hospital of Bologna—Sant'Orsola Polyclinic. The investigation analyzed the association between coffee consumption and peripheral and central blood pressure parameters in a sample of the Italian population.

"The results obtained show that those who regularly drink coffee have significantly lower blood pressure, both on peripheral and central levels, than those who do not drink it," explains Arrigo Cicero, professor at the Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences at the University of Bologna and first author of the study. "This is the first study to observe this association in the Italian population, and the data confirm the positive effect of coffee consumption on cardiovascular risk," adds Prof. Claudio Borghi, who led the study.

Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in Italy and the world: it is estimated that almost 10 million tons of coffee were consumed globally in 2020 and 2021. Despite the long-standing fears of its negative health consequences, several benefits have long since emerged: a lower risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and certain neurodegenerative and liver diseases has been observed among regular coffee drinkers.

However, it is not yet clear what these benefits are due to, and they do not appear to be directly related to the effects of caffeine.

"Caffeine is only one of the several coffee components and certainly not the only one with an active role. Positive effects on human health have indeed been recorded even among those who consume decaffeinated coffee," says Cicero. "We know that caffeine can increase blood pressure, but other bioactive components in coffee seem to counterbalance this effect with a positive end result on blood pressure levels."

To investigate these effects, especially with respect to central blood pressure values, the scholars looked at a sample of 720 men and 783 women from a sub-cohort of the Brisighella Heart Study, which is an observational study coordinated by Claudio Borghi, professor at the Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences at the University of Bologna. Blood pressure levels and coffee consumption habits, along with a range of other clinical data, were compared for each selected individual.

"The results are very clear: peripheral blood pressure was significantly lower in individuals consuming one to three cups of coffee a day than in non-coffee drinkers," Cicero explains. "And for the first time, we were also able to confirm these effects with regard to the central aortic pressure, the one close to the heart, where we observe an almost identical phenomenon with entirely similar values for habitual coffee drinkers compared to non-coffee drinkers."

Indeed, data show lower values for coffee drinkers in both systolic and pulse pressure, and in both peripheral circulation and central aortic pressure. All results confirm the positive effects of coffee in mitigating the risk of cardiovascular disease.

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Creation of largest US lithium mine draws closer despite protest over land use

New battery seems to offer it all: Lithium-metal/lithium-air electrodes

NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan looks over the beach while standing at the Beach House at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on March 4, 2014. Image Credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

The house was damaged substantially by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. When it was reopened in 2018, it had undergone some substantial renovations, installing better facilities such as a new kitchen, bathrooms, and new connectivity as well as turning the upstairs into a more classical conference room where NASA employees can meet to discuss projects.

There is still evidence of its importance to the astronauts thanks to a series of mementos left by the exclusive former visitors. A wine bottle collection is displayed in one of the rooms at the beach house. The place is still being used – so the Artemis crew, the next group that will undertake the trip to the Moon, might also get to enjoy its privacy.

“The Beach House has been used as a conference center since the end of the Shuttle Program.  As such, it is open to NASA employees for meetings and other mission-related gatherings.  It will likely always be the touchstone by which astronauts judge their progress on the journey to space,” Mary MacLaughlin, Public Affairs Specialist of the NASA Kennedy Space Center, told IFLScience.

Sometimes, the best place to get ready for doing something incredible is a little house by the seashore.

"This is sacred sand out here, it really is. It's where people have made those final goodbyes, and some were final. There's no spouse, no astronaut walks that sand that doesn't know, that there is a possibility that this is forever," NASA astronaut Mike Mullane said in 2010. 

"As a spouse, you know you're coming out here to say goodbye, and you don't know if it's the last time," added his wife Donna.

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Image credit: SpaceX via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0

Five years ago yesterday, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched a Tesla into space, in a stunt that even the most hardened Musk haters would grudgingly admit is pretty cool. 

The Roadster has since been on one hell of a journey, driving away from Earth at the impressive speed of 26,619 kilometers per hour (16,540 miles per hour), with an arguably more impressive fuel efficiency of 8,511.4 kilometers per liter (20,020 miles per gallon). 

Since its launch on February 6, 2018, the car has orbited the Sun 3.3 times according to tracker Where Is Roadster, rolling as it goes.

The Roadster, assuming it isn't eroded by radiation or unlucky enough to get into the solar system's first space car crash (say with a meteorite), will continue in its orbit for a long time, crossing the orbit of Mars and Earth as it does so.

Though the car has not been tracked closely, in 2018 a paper did look at its orbit in an attempt to work out its fate. According to the paper, published in the journal Aerospace, the car will make a close approach to Earth in the next 100 years, coming closer to Earth than the Moon orbits. 

On a much longer timescale, the team calculated that the car has roughly a 22 percent probability of hitting Earth, a 12 percent chance of colliding with Venus, and about the same probability of hitting the Sun as hitting Venus. Fortunately for Musk, this will happen on a timescale of millions of years, and is unlikely to affect Tesla stock prices.

The Starman placed in the vehicle, assuming it is still intact and somehow achieves sentience, may pray for a sooner impact. While traveling through space, the dummy has listened to David Bowie's Space Oddity 496,287 times in one ear, and David Bowie's Life On Mars? has played in his other ear 668,726 times.

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An extremely large earthquake has occurred in the southeast of Turkey, near the border with Syria. Data from seismometers which measure shaking of the ground caused by earthquake waves suggest this this event, in the early morning of February 6, was a magnitude 7.8 out of 10 on the moment magnitude scale. Seismic waves were picked up by sensors around the world (you can watch them ripple through Europe) including places as far away as the UK.

This was a really big one.

The shaking caused by energy travelling outwards from the source or epicentre has already had terrible consequences for people living nearby. Many buildings have collapsed, at least 2,000 people are thought to have died across the two countries, and there are reports of damage to gas pipelines leading to fires.

A second very large earthquake of 7.5 magnitude also occurred in central Turkey around lunchtime.

Why this happened here

This area of Turkey is prone to earthquakes as it lies at the intersection of three of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust: the Anatolian, Arabian and African plates. Arabia is moving northwards into Europe, causing the Anatolian plate (which Turkey sits on) to be pushed out westwards.

Arabia is bumping into Eurasia and pushing Anatolia westwards … or to non-earth scientists, Syria is bumping into Europe and squeezing out Turkey. Image credit: Mikenorton/Nasa/wiki, CC BY-SA

The movement of the tectonic plates builds up pressure on fault zones at their boundaries. It is the sudden release of this pressure that causes earthquakes and ground shaking.

This latest earthquake is likely to have happened on one of the major faults that marks the boundaries between the Anatolian and Arabian plates: either the East Anatolian fault or the Dead Sea Transform fault. These are both “strike-slip faults”, which means they accommodate some motion of plates moving past each other.

‘Significantly bigger’ than previous earthquakes

While this area has many earthquakes every year caused by the ongoing motion of the tectonic plates, today’s earthquake is particularly large and devastating as so much energy was released. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) states that only three earthquakes bigger than magnitude 6 have happened within 250km of this location since 1970. At magnitude 7.8, the February 6 event is significantly bigger than ones the area has experienced before, releasing more than twice as much energy as the largest previously recorded earthquake in the region (magnitude 7.4).

Modern seismologists use the moment magnitude scale, which represents the amount of energy released by an earthquake (the Richter scale is outdated, though is sometimes wrongly quoted in the news). This scale is non-linear: each step up represents 32 times more energy released. That means a magnitude 7.8 actually releases around 16,000 times more energy than the more moderate magnitude 5 earthquakes that might usually happen in the region.

We tend to think of earthquake energy as coming from a single location, or epicentre, but they are actually caused by movement along an area of a fault. The bigger the earthquake the larger the fault area that will have moved. For something as large as this magnitude 7.8 there is likely to have been movement over an area roughly 190km long and 25km wide. This means the shaking will be felt over a very large area.

Severe to violent shaking (enough to cause significant property damage) is estimated to have been felt by 610,000 people in the surrounding area up to around 80km away north-eastwards along the tectonic plate boundary. Light shaking was felt as far away as Turkey’s largest city Istanbul (around 815km away), as well as Baghdad in Iraq (800km) and Cairo in Egypt (950km).

What about aftershocks?

After major earthquakes there will be many smaller earthquakes known as aftershocks as the crust readjusts to the changes in stress. These can continue for days to years after the initial event. In the first 12 hours after the initial tremor in southeast Turkey there were already three other earthquakes above magnitude 6.0. The first was a 6.7 which happened only 11 minutes after the first shock, and there have been hundreds of smaller magnitude aftershocks.

The second, magnitude 7.5 earthquake occurred further to the north on a different but adjacent fault system: the Sürgü Fault. Technically this one was powerful enough to count as a separate earthquake in its own right, though it is likely to have been triggered by the first earthquake, and it will generate its own series of aftershocks.

While aftershocks are usually significantly smaller than the main shock, they can have equally devastating consequences, further damaging infrastructure that was damaged by the first earthquake and hampering rescue efforts.

As the aftermath of these major earthquakes continues to be felt by the people living in this region, we can only hope that international aid gets to Turkey and Syria as soon as possible to help in ongoing rescue efforts, amid the ongoing aftershocks

Jenny Jenkins, Assistant Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Durham University

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

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What did our early ancestors eat? It’s one of the central questions in palaeoanthropology. If researchers can understand the diet of ancient hominins, this in turn provides clues as to what they looked like, where they lived, and how they socialized with each other. Now, a new Perspective paper has outlined the modern techniques that are allowing scientists, for the first time, to gather direct evidence of the “foodprints” of individual extinct hominins.

Historical dietary analysis

In the past, research went as far as being able to figure out the types of foods that our ancestors would have been capable of eating. Much of this was done by looking at the size, shape, and structure of teeth.

Teeth have been used as important evidence for researchers seeking to answer questions as diverse as when modern humans diverged from Neanderthals, how Homo naledi children grew up, and even the sex and age of an ancient murder victim.

These fossilized teeth were identified by researchers as belonging to a juvenile of the Homo naledi species. Image credit: Bolter et al., PLOS ONE 2020 (CC BY 4.0)

When it comes to diet, though, just observing the teeth themselves can only take us so far.

“Historically, studies of tooth size, shape, and structure have been the gold standard for reconstructing diet. They focus on species-level adaptations, and as such, they can set theoretical brackets for dietary capabilities within the context of specific evolutionary moments,” write the authors in their new paper.

So, we can say with some degree of certainty the types of foods that, say, Neanderthals were adapted to eat; but, what would take this to the next level would be to identify the specific foods that an individual Neanderthal chowed down on during their lifetime.

In recent years, newer techniques have made this sort of research a reality.

Analysis of dental calculus

Calculus forms on fossilized teeth as a result of the calcification of the bacteria in plaque – not the most pleasant image, maybe, but this stuff is invaluable when it comes to figuring out what our ancestors ate. Food particles can be captured within the calculus as it forms, leaving behind a mini fossil record of plants, proteins, and even ancient DNA that the individual had consumed before their death.

There are some limitations to the study of dental calculus. Often, this substance is removed when fossils are cleaned and processed. Sometimes, there simply may not have been enough of it there to start with. But if palaeontologists can get access to some preserved calculus, it can contain a wealth of useful information – the authors of the paper point to one study of an Australopithecus sediba individual that seemingly had a much more varied diet than their burial location would suggest.

Microwear

Fossilized teeth will exhibit signs of wear, which can be used to extrapolate the types of food they were once used to chew on. It is now possible to assess this wear at the microscopic scale, providing an unprecedented level of detail.

Microscopic scratches on the surface of a tooth are constantly added and removed over an individual’s lifetime, so looking at them can provide an idea of what the individual was eating during a very narrow timeframe. This can be helpful for analyzing seasonal dietary patterns, for example, but also introduces limitations. 

The paper authors refer to something called the “Last Supper Effect”, which refers to the idea that dental microwear may only be able to tell scientists about the last few weeks, or even days, of an individual’s life.

Still, analysis of microwear has led to some important insights. One study suggested that Australopithecus afarensis may have been able to maintain their preferred diet as their habitat and environment changed, or at least may have been able to access very similar foods, as their microwear patterns were so consistent over time.

Biogeochemistry

The final technique highlighted in the paper concerns the study of stable chemical isotopes, derived from food and water, in fossilized teeth and bones. The compositions of such isotopes provide a strong indicator of the types of foods that the individual was eating when these tissues developed.

Early biogeochemical analysis of carbon isotopes suggested the potential of this technology for dietary analysis. Specifically, researchers looked at the ratio of two isotopes, carbon-13 (13C) and carbon-12 (12C). Plants can be broadly categorized according to the pathway they use for photosynthesis, and the two categories differ substantially in their 13C/12C ratios – therefore, analyzing the carbon isotopes present in fossilized bones give us an idea of how much of each type of plant the individual was eating during their lifetime.

More recently, it revealed differences in how both Neanderthals and Upper Pleistocene modern humans exploited their natural environments, and the impact this had on European ecosystems.

Changing perspectives

According to the authors of the new paper, the progression of this field of study now means that palaeoanthropologists must begin to ask more specific questions, as dietary analysis starts to reveal more than ever about the behavior and lifestyles of our ancestors.

“Now that we have those techniques,” they write, “we should stop and realize that we may be standing in the midst of a paradigm shift in paleoanthropology as we move from inferences of possibilities to evidence of behavior.”

The Perspective is published in PNAS.

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These Goldwind turbines may look big, but they are about to be dwarfed by versions from the same company with more than twice the power. Image credit: Goldwind Technology

Wind turbines are getting ever larger, particularly offshore, but even by the standards of modern titans those being installed at the Zhangpu Liuao offshore wind farm are absolute beasts. According to the China Global Television Network, the farm is to be the first outing of the 16-megawatt turbine being produced by Goldwind Science and Technology Co., and will have a combined capacity of 400 megawatts.

The hub will sit 146 meters (480 feet) above the ocean, one and a half times the height of the Statue of Liberty’s torch. The blades will sweep out a diameter of 252 meters (827 feet), making each blade longer than a football pitch. The China Three Gorges Corporation, who are building the farm, estimate each turbine will produce enough electricity to power 36,000 typical Chinese households and prevent the release of 54,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

Larger turbines need longer blades to drive them, and therefore to be placed on higher towers. This has its advantages, since the wind is steadier and blows more frequently at higher altitude, but it also involves plenty of technical challenges. When wind farms were overwhelmingly on land, transporting the components by truck put something of a ceiling on the size of each turbine, reinforced by neighbors’ more strenuous objections to taller installations.

However, as the nations around the North Sea started moving more of their wind farms offshore, developers started to seize the opportunities provided by installation from ships. The first offshore wind farm, Vindeby, was built in 1991 and used 0.45 megawatts.

Once offshore wind farms with several hundred megawatts of total power started appearing they used turbines in the 3-4-megawatt range. Operating at an average of 40 percent capacity, as is common, a single turbine like this can produce enough power for up to 4,000 UK households.

Ten years ago when farms that size first started appearing offshore they needed large public subsidies. In a (very successful) effort to make offshore wind competitive with fossil fuels, manufacturers and developers decided fewer, more powerful turbines were the answer. The current largest offshore wind farm in the world, Hornsea 2, uses 8.0-megawatt machines. Last year also saw the commissioning of Moray East using 9.5-megawatt giants.

China, on the other hand, has continued to favor larger numbers of small turbines. It’s largest current offshore farm, Jiangsu Qidong, uses a mix of turbines from different manufacturers, but the average size is 6 megawatts – big if they were on land, but well behind the European offshore equivalents. The largest model featured on Goldwind’s website is 8.0 megawatts. 

Meanwhile Danish manufacturer Vestas are testing the prototype of their 15-megawatt V236.

However, when China decides to go big it seldom does things by halves. If the state-sponsored media outlets are to be believed, they have seized the lead in the massive turbine race. In addition to the behemoths reportedly being installed 33 kilometers (20 miles) off Fujian province, Haizhuang Wind Power has announced production of an 18-megawatt leviathan, and Mingyang Smart Energy have announced plans to “move beyond the 18 [megawatt] threshold”. One expert is predicting 25 megawatts soon. 

One aspect of offshore wind where Europe still has the lead is in floating wind farms. Although still largely experimental, floating platforms allow wind farms to be built in deeper waters which are usually further from shore and have steadier winds. The FloatGen test site off Brittany uses a 2-megawatt turbine, puny by these standards, but whose location has just allowed it to run at 60 percent capacity over the last three months.

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A third of those who dropped degree requirements did so for senior-level roles, a recent survey found.

The survey of HR managers by Intelligent.com found 53% of hiring managers said their company eliminated the requirement for a bachelor’s degree for some roles in the past year.

“For so many jobs, it is an arbitrary requirement. And it does eliminate people needlessly who could be great employees,” said Stacie Haller, a career coach who worked with Intelligent.com for its report.

There is another benefit from lowering the educational attainment requirements aside from attracting more candidates for job openings that companies are realizing.

“There is also a big chunk here about creating more equity and diversity. If you cannot afford to go to college to get a four-year degree, if it’s a financial reason or maybe a time reason, then you are already eliminated from all of those jobs,” Haller said.

What companies are increasingly focused on is experience, with 76% of hiring managers surveyed saying they favor real world skills over education.

Evaluating those skills in real-time is proving successful. The vast majority of companies now test candidates in the interview process, and 66% say they have candidates take an assessment to test hard skills. Sixty-four percent say they have applicants complete a test assignment.

Which professions are more likely to value experience over education?

“IT, which we know a college degree in computer science really doesn’t give those even in the upper echelons in those organizations what they need to successfully be in those positions. Also retail, construction, healthcare and social services,” Haller said.

More studies have shown a growing acceptance of professional certifications, associate degrees and boot camps as testament to education and skill, though Intelligent.com’s survey diverged somewhat from that, with just 24% of hiring managers saying their company sees value in certificate programs.

Haller notes this survey included more senior managers, who may have a bias before certificates began gaining credibility a few years ago, which she called old world thinking.

People can check out Intelligent.com’s full survey results and methodology online.

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Superbugs -- strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics -- are estimated to have killed 1.27 million people in 2019, and the World Health Organization says antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the top global health threats on the near-term horizon.

Up to 10 million deaths could occur every year by 2050 because of AMR, the UN says.

The disinfectants, antiseptics and antibiotics that can help microbes become stronger are everywhere, from toothpaste and shampoo to cow's milk and wastewater.

A new report Tuesday said pollution is a key driver in the "development, transmission and spread" of AMR, calling for urgent action to clean up the environment.

"With increasing pollution and lack of management of sources of pollution, combined with AMR in clinical and hospital settings and agriculture, risks are increasing," said the report from the UN Environment Programme.

Antimicrobial resistance is a natural phenomenon, but the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in humans, animals and plants has made the problem worse.

This means antibiotics may no longer work to fight the very infections they were designed to treat.

The UN report Tuesday said that pollution in the environment from key economic sectors has exacerbated the problem, namely from the pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing sectors, along with agriculture and health care.

Herbicides to control weeds on farms may also increase AMR, while heavy metals are also contributing to the problem.

Once antimicrobials enter the environment they seep into the food chain -- they've been found in fish and cattle -- and loop back into factories making everyday toiletries, for example.

'Silent pandemic'

Antimicrobial resistant genes are in waterways across the globe, from the Ganges River in India to the Cache la Poudre River in the US state of Colorado, the UN study found.

"This is a real issue, because rivers are often the source of our drinking water," Jonathan Cox, senior lecturer in microbiology at Britain's Aston University, told AFP.

"It's already the silent pandemic," warned Cox, who is not linked to the UN study. "It is becoming the next pandemic without us really recognising it."

Prevention is key, the UN said.

"Fuelled by population growth, urbanisation and growing demand for food and healthcare, we can expect an increase in the use of antimicrobials and in pollutant releases into the environment," it said.

The UN urged governments and international groups to address "key pollution sources", including sewage, city waste, healthcare delivery, pharmaceutical manufacturing and intensive crop sectors.

Cox said solutions need to be global, since AMR is so pervasive.

One answer is to focus on clinical approaches, such as improving rapid testing for infections so that antibiotics are not incorrectly prescribed.

Another is improving wastewater management to remove antimicrobials. But such processes are complicated and costly.

"The technology is out there, it just isn't being employed because governments don't care so much about the environment as they do about the bottom line," Cox said.

© 2023 AFP

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• The quantum simulators are made up of hybrid metal-semiconductors on a nanoelectronic circuit.

• Even the fastest digital computers can’t solve some pressing complex problems, including how to discover room temperature semiconducting materials. But these analog quantum simulators can.

We live in a digital age. Gone are the days of room-sized computers made from thousands of tubes or mechanical gears—and long gone are the ancient Roman days of the very first analog computers. But in the world of quantum computing, analog is alive and well. In fact, analog is one of the three major categories of quantum computers, and some of the world’s biggest companies have constructed analog creations.

But researchers from Stanford University and University College Dublin (UCD) developed a novel approach to constructing these machines by creating bespoke quantum computers with quantum components designed to solve specific questions. These aren’t room-sized machines like Charles Babbages’ 19th century creations; instead, they consist of hybrid metal-semiconductors on a nanoelectronic circuit. Essentially, the computers are measured in microns—not meters—and are called “quantum simulators.” A new paper published in in Nature Physics details the simulators in full.

“We’re always making mathematical models that we hope will capture the essence of phenomena we’re interested in,” Stanford researcher Goldhaber-Gordon said in a statement, “but even if we believe they’re correct, they’re often not solvable in a reasonable amount of time. [With a Quantum Simulator] we have these knobs to turn that no one’s ever had before.”

According to Goldhaber-Gordon, these analog devices create a “hardware analogy” to solve problems in quantum physics. To test the simulator, researchers used a simple circuit coupled together with two quantum components. Tuning electrical voltages, scientists created a state of matter called “Z3 parafermions,” which is when electrons have only one-third of their usual charge—the first time such a state was created on an electronic device in a lab. The idea is to scale up this simulator to solve more complex questions in quantum computing.

“Certain problems are simply too complex for even the fastest digital classical computers to solve,” Andrew Mitchell, director of the UCD Centre for Quantum Engineering, Science, and Technology (which only formed in 2021) said in a statement. “The accurate simulation of complex quantum materials such as the high-temperature superconductors is a really important example.”

Right now superconducting materials, the stuff that powers high speed trains and MRI machines, only work at extremely low temperatures. Using quantum simulators to discover room temperature superconducting materials would be a game-changer for the technology’s wider adoption. This is just one of the lingering questions the next generation of quantum simulators could help solve.

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After two years of data-taking and number-crunching, a team of astronomers has dropped a snapshot of, quite literally, cosmic proportions. It’s chock-full of stellar goodness: The image shows the reddish-brown dust clouds clumped along the centerline of our Milky Way teeming with over 3 billion pinpricks of light—nearly all stars, a faint neighboring galaxy here or there. 

The project, based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is called the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, and aims to index celestial objects located in our galactic plane. In January, the researchers published their second data release in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, making it the largest catalog, or index, of stars ever collected by a single instrument, and one of the few instances in which we’ve turned a camera toward the middle of our own galaxy. It’s a space selfie, if you will. 

But while the stars are the showstopper, the other point of this survey is capturing the elusive substance that drifts among them: dust. Because dust masks light, it distorts our view of the cosmos. Knowing how much is out there can help astronomers filter its effects from their data, and more accurately gauge the chemistry and position of stars. Over the next decade, scientists will use this catalog to flesh out galactic dust maps, track down ancient star systems, and study the formation and structure of our Milky Way.   

For the survey, the research team repurposed the Dark Energy Camera, or DECam, an optical instrument at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile that was originally built to study faint objects far away from the galactic plane. “We took this instrument that was made for cosmology,” says Eddie Schlafly, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, “and we pointed it right at the center of the galactic plane, where there’s tons and tons of stars and dust and gas and nebulosity.” The goal, he says, was to resolve as many individual sources of light as possible. 

That’s quite the tall order: Most astronomers stray from observing the galactic plane because it’s notoriously difficult to image. “The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. So most of its stars are in a flat pancake,” says Andrew Saydjari, a physics graduate student at Harvard University who spearheaded the survey. Unfortunately for observers on Earth, we sit smack in the middle of that pancake. It’s easy to see above or below our plane in that disc, where the stellar haze is thin. But peering into the center of the galaxy, or backward to the outer edge, is tough because the view is crowded. “A lot of the stars can appear like they’re on top of each other,” Saydjari says. 

Other stuff hanging around the galactic center doesn’t help. Some gas, for example, is hot enough to emit its own photons in a colour similar to starlight’s. And dust can make celestial objects appear fainter and redder than they actually are. Both of these can skew astronomers’ measurements of stellar brightnesses and positions.

The first DECam plane survey was publishedin 2017, an archive of around 2 billion celestial objects located up to 5 degrees above and below the galactic plane. The second release is a reprocessing of all that information, Saydjari says, plus new observations that more than double the total dataset. The basic setup of their experiment was the same: Each part of the sky was imaged the same number of times, at the same time of night, and in the same colours. But the researchers broadened their view to include measurements of everything up to a galactic latitude of 10 degrees above or below the plane. 

Saydjari also developed state-of-the-art software tools to better interpret this data. He wrote code to disentangle stellar photons from those emitted by hot gas, improving the accuracy of brightness measurements. He also updated the method used in the first data release to resolve individual light sources: Rather than identify each star one at a time, Saydjari enhanced the algorithm to model all objects in a single image simultaneously. This created a wealth of information about the locations and brightnesses of stars in five different photometric bands. (Each band, Saydjari says, is like measuring a star’s brightness through a piece of glass that filters out everything but a specific colour.)

Schlafly says the team’s long-term goal is to create detailed, three-dimensional maps of dust sprinkled across the Milky Way. This will help astronomers colour-correct their view of the stars. “Nearly all measurements in astronomy are of how bright an object is,” he says. “So we care about anything that impacts light.” 

Dust is the reason why, for example, the sun appears so red at dusk—if you want to know its true colour, you have to adjust based on the time of day that you’re measuring. In the same way, galactic dust maps will help astronomers do those corrections for cosmic measurements. Stellar colour and brightness are inherently linked to a star’s distance, chemical makeup, and temperature. That’s important for characterizing individual objects, but also helpful in understanding the distribution of different types of stars in the Milky Way.  

Dust is more than just a cosmological nuisance, though. “It’s extraordinarily important in the galaxy,” Saydjari says, even though it makes up less than 1 percent of the Milky Way’s total mass. Stars generate dust when they die, and they are, in part, born from it. It’s an essential ingredient of planetary formation: In some sense, Schlafly says, Earth is just a big pile of dust that coalesced a few billion years ago. What’s more, all of the chemistry in our galaxy—including the processes that eventually led to life—began with molecular hydrogen, which requires dust grains to help it fuse together. Knowing the size and density of galactic dust clouds is important for measuring how much chemical activity is churning in a particular region of space. 

Gautham Narayan, a cosmologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who was not involved in the work, believes these dust maps will be pivotal for up-and-coming southern sky scanners like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which aims to shoot a 10-year motion picture of the Milky Way to reveal how dark matter shapes galactic evolution. “Knowing how much dust there is on the line of sight as a function of distance in any direction will be tremendously valuable,” Narayan says. The DECam plane survey will also help cross-check early Rubin measurements, serving as a baseline to ensure the telescope is working as expected. 

Other scientists are excited about what this survey will uncover about our own galactic timeline. “I study the immigration history of the Milky Way,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology astronomer Rohan Naidu, who says that galaxies like ours are built from smaller star systems that merged together at some point. With datasets like this one, galactic archaeologists can begin to distinguish what came from where. “We can be able to say, ‘Here’s this family of stars that arrived together,’” he says.

Naidu thinks the survey can also help him characterize distant galaxies by unearthing the ancient systems our own galaxy absorbed. “Some of the first galaxies are buried right here within our own Milky Way,” he says, “within these very clouded regions that are very difficult to image, that this dataset has now produced one of the deepest, clearest views of.”

Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope have detected galaxies that might be 13.6 billion years old, but it will be a long time, if ever, before the tech is advanced enough to probe these distant systems on a star-by-star basis or inventory their chemical makeup. Identifying the oldest galaxies in our vicinity—and “studying them in gory detail,” Naidu says—is a first step toward building templates to understand what’s happening in the far-off universe. 

Schlafly says the next step is to patch together other projects with the DECam plane survey to create a holistic view of the entire southern sky. Combine that with data from Gaia—a European satellite measuring the motions and distances of stars—Narayan says, and astronomers are well on their way toward fleshing out a full, three-dimensional map of the Milky Way.

In the meantime, Schlafly encourages space enthusiasts to check out their team’s interactive data viewer, which lets users pan around our cosmic neighborhood like a Google Maps for the galaxy. “The images are captivating,” Schlafly says. “You can browse around here and find all kinds of cool, weird stuff going on.”

At Last, the Milky Way Gets a Better Close Up

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On paper, the Amazon rainforest is a static expanse: perpetually wet, impenetrable, consistently humming with biology. But in reality, the region endures periodic droughts when the rains dwindle, trees stress out, and wetlands parch. Boom and bust. As with forests around the world, that’s part of the natural order.

One of the drivers of Amazonian droughts may soon kick off, potentially piling yet more stress on an ecosystem already ravaged by the deforestation and fires caused by human meddling. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a Pacific Ocean phenomenon in which a band of water develops off the coast of South America that transitions from neutral to exceptionally cold or warm. The past few years of cold “La Niña” conditions are weakening, potentially giving way to warm “El Niño” conditions later this year, according to modeling by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And for the Amazon, that can cause drought.

It’s still too early to tell when El Niño will arrive, and how severe it may end up being. But scientists recall how bad things got during the El Niño eight years ago. “In 2015-2016, we observed that air temperature over Amazonia was the highest in maybe the last century,” says Juan Carlos Jiménez-Muñoz, a physicist and remote-sensing specialist at the University of Valencia. “In particular, over Amazonia [El Niño] suppresses the rain, and in general you can expect a widespread drought.” But, Jiménez-Muñoz cautions, “every El Niño is different—you can have different regional or local impacts.”

That’s because El Niño widely transforms atmospheric circulation. When that warm blob of water forms in the Pacific, it creates more evaporation, sending moist air into the sky. That water eventually falls as rain over the ocean. This messes with the Walker circulation, sending sinking, relatively dry air over the South American landmass, leading to less rain over the Amazon. “In general, the rain falls more on the ocean,” says Earth systems scientist James Randerson, of the University of California, Irvine. “It just doesn’t rain as much on global land. The continents lose water, especially South America.”

When El Niño isn’t active and conditions are normal, moisture evaporates off the Amazon and ascends to the sky before falling on the forest as rain. The Amazon may recycle up to half of its precipitation this way. “The Amazon is a factory of atmospheric moisture,” says Paola A. Arias, a climate scientist at the University of Antioquia in Colombia. “When you have these drought events, you also typically have reductions in this precipitation recycling.”

Because El Niños vary in their magnitude, they vary in how much they suppress rain over the Amazon. They also vary in where exactly they spawn droughts, and for how long. If the development of an El Niño is more focused in the central Pacific Ocean, it tends to create drought focused in the northeastern part of the Amazon. If it’s more focused in the eastern Pacific, the drought can be more widespread and last a bit longer. But for 2023, it’s too early to say how any of this will play out—Randerson says that scientists should have a better idea this spring. “The fact that we’re in this sustained La Niña for so long,” says Randerson, “I think it’s more likely that you’re going to shift to a stronger El Niño state.”

What’s abundantly clear right now is that climate change is driving temperatures ever higher and generally making droughts more frequent and intense. That creates unprecedented peril for the Amazon. “Deforestation is increasing, fires are increasing, and in general degradation of the forest is increasing,” says Jiménez-Muñoz. “Every future El Niño will occur in a global warming scenario, but also in a scenario where the Amazon forest is more degraded. So this will lead to potentially more and more damages in the future.”

The atmospheric issue is twofold: Drier air sucks more water out of soils and plants, plus there just isn’t as much rainfall to hydrate the enormous amount of vegetation in the rainforest. Plant species in wetter parts of the Amazon are particularly sensitive to drought, while in drier southern parts plants are adapted to ride out seasonal periods of dryness. But only to a point, especially considering that dry seasons are already getting longer. 

“They may be able to deal with a three-month, four-month, even five-month dry season. But then increase it by three weeks or a month or two months, and you may be in trouble,” says Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist at Yale University and Brazil’s Amazon Environmental Research Institute. “If plants are water-stressed, there is a greater chance that they’re going to drop their leaves and twigs to survive the drought. And that increases forest vulnerability.”

This vulnerability is particularly precarious along the forest’s edges. Deforestation is driven largely by ranchers and farmers clear-cutting to make way for their crops and animals. This leaves fragmented forest edges exposed to the dry open air, which desiccates plants that would normally enjoy the humidity of a thick canopy. Then people set fire to what they’ve clear-cut, leading to out-of-control blazes. 

If plants stressed by drought are dropping leaves, they’re piling up yet more fuel for these fires. At the same time, the air is drier and hotter—the perfect conditions for blazes to spread. “You’re undermining the ecological firebreak,” says Brando, “because you’re increasing the likelihood that what is on the ground is going to burn.”

Scientists are concerned that deforestation and wildfires are making the Amazon less resilient to dry spells. Last year, researchers published a paper showing that since the early 2000s, three quarters of the Amazon has been slower to grow back its biomass after being disturbed by changes like drought. Areas that get less rainfall, or that are closer to human activity, have been suffering more than wetter ones. This dynamic kicks off a nasty feedback loop: Less vegetation means fewer plants are sending moisture into the atmosphere, which would normally fall back on the Amazon as rain. With less moisture, degraded parts of the rainforest may be approaching a tipping point at which they will transform into grassy, savannah-like landscapes—a transition of no return.

Today in the journal Nature Climate Change, Brando and his colleagues calculate that as the world warms and dry periods intensify, the shrinking of South America’s humid regions could account for 40 percent of the biomass loss across all the world’s tropics. “When you look at the broader picture using our empirical models, dry-season intensity tends to increase in the southeast Amazon, and in the eastern Amazon especially,” says Brando. “And so there are very large losses of biomass in that region projected by our model.” 

Yet it isn’t fully clear how the frequency and severity of both El Niños and La Niñas will change as the world warms. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that both phenomena are likely to increase in frequency, with extreme El Niño events becoming twice as common in the 21st century compared to the 20th. But if La Niñas become more frequent, they would have the opposite effect on the Amazon. “If we do have more La Niñas, then the trend is to have more precipitation than usual,” says climate change ecologist David M. Lapola, who studies the Amazon at Brazil’s State University of Campinas. “It’s still an open field of active research. But if we base our knowledge on what the IPCC says, it points to a trend of drier climates.” 

Plus, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation isn’t the only driver of drought in the Amazon. The Amazon’s severe drought of 2005, for instance, was due to intense storms in the North Atlantic that—similar to El Niño—created atmospheric circulation that suppressed precipitation over the rainforest. 

Still, scientists are already finding that all these stressors—longer dry seasons, drought, deforestation, wildfires—are conspiring to flip a critical carbon switch. The Amazon’s vegetation absorbs CO2 and exhales oxygen as it grows. But if people chop down the forest and light it on fire, that carbon heads right back into the atmosphere. And less growth due to water stress means less CO2 gets sequestered and global temperatures will rise higher.

So instead of being a reliable tool for pulling our carbon emissions out of the atmosphere, the Amazon could be turning into a climate problem. Drought will only make matters worse. “There are some regions in the Amazon that are not able to capture carbon anymore—they are actually becoming a source of carbon, which is even more dangerous,” says Arias. “That is a physiological change that is already happening.”

A Looming El Niño Could Dry the Amazon

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The discovery could be bad news for global climate as well as local wildlife. Image credit: Florida Stock / Shutterstock.com

A nine-year-old boy from Pennsylvania who loves science and computer programming has become one of the youngest ever high school graduates, and he has already started accumulating some credits toward his college degree.

David Balogun recently received a diploma from Reach cyber charter school – based in his state’s capital of Harrisburg – after taking classes remotely from his family home in the Philadelphia suburb of Bensalem, the local television station WGAL reported on Saturday.

The achievement makes David one of the youngest known children to ever graduate high school, according to a list compiled by the history and culture website oldest.org.

The only person on that list younger than David is Michael Kearney, who still holds the Guinness world record for youngest high school graduate that he set when he was six in 1990, before obtaining master’s degrees at 14 and 18 and then winning more than $1m on gameshows. David would come in higher on that list than the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow, who was 11 when he finished high school.

David told WGAL that he already knows what he wants to dedicate his professional life to once he completes his education.

“I want to be an astrophysicist, and I want to study black holes and supernovas,” he said to the station.

David’s parents both have advanced academic degrees, but they told WGAL that it is challenging to raise a child with such an extraordinary intellect.

“I had to get outside of the box,” David’s mother, Ronya, said to the outlet. “Playing pillow fights when you’re not supposed to, throwing the balls in the house. He’s a nine-year-old with the brain that has the capacity to understand and comprehend a lot of concepts beyond his years and sometimes beyond my understanding.”

David told WGAL that some of his favorite teachers helped keep him engaged with his studies and pushed him to keep progressing.

“They didn’t bog me down,” he said. “They … advocated for me, saying, ‘He can do this. He can do that.’”

One instructor said to WGAL: “We’re just proud that we [were] able to individualize his instruction.”

David’s teachers also said that they learned from their uncommonly bright pupil, whose loved ones describe him as a computer programming and science whiz.

His science teacher, Cody Derr, remarked: “David was an inspirational kid, definitely one who changes the way you think about teaching.”

David, a member of the high intelligence quotient society Mensa, has done one semester at Bucks county community college since graduating from Reach charter. Meanwhile, he and his family have been doing their research into other colleges and universities to try to find the one that is best suited for a boy who – besides his academics – is pursuing a martial arts black belt, enjoys other sports and plays the piano.

“Am I going to throw my nine-year-old into Harvard while I’m living in [Pennsylvania]?” David’s father, Henry, said of the family’s college search.

“No.”

Unless, perhaps, it’s the right fit.

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Copenhagen:  Tremors from the powerful earthquake that rocked Turkey and neighbouring Syria on Monday were felt as far away as Greenland, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said.

"The large earthquakes in Turkey were clearly registered on the seismographs in Denmark and Greenland," seismologist Tine Larsen told AFP.

The first 7.8-magnitude quake struck at 04:17 am (0117 GMT) at a depth of about 17.9 kilometres (11 miles) near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, which is home to around two million people, the US Geological Survey said.

"The waves from the earthquake reached the seismograph on the Danish island of Bornholm approximately five minutes after the shaking started," Larsen said.

"Eight minutes after the earthquake, the shaking reached the east coast of Greenland, propagating further through all of Greenland," she added.

Later, another 7.5-magnitude quake struck southeastern Turkey.

"We have registered both earthquakes -- and a lot of aftershocks -- in Denmark and Greenland," she said.

Monday's quake is the deadliest in Turkey since a 7.4-magnitude one in 1999 when more than 17,000 people died, including about 1,000 in Istanbul.

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Everything from crayfish and cacti to freshwater mussels and iconic American species such as the Venus flytrap are in danger of disappearing, a report released on Monday found.

NatureServe, which analyzes data from its network of over 1,000 scientists across the United States and Canada, said the report was its most comprehensive yet, synthesizing five decades' worth of its own information on the health of animals, plants and ecosystems.

Importantly, the report pinpoints the areas in the United States where land is unprotected and where animals and plants are facing the most threats.

Sean O'Brien, president of NatureServe, said the conclusions of the report were "terrifying" and he hoped it would help lawmakers understand the urgency of passing protections, such as the Recovering America's Wildlife Act that stalled out in Congress last year.

"If we want to maintain the panoply of biodiversity that we currently enjoy, we need to target the places where the biodiversity is most threatened," O'Brien said. "This report allows us to do that."

U.S. Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat who has proposed legislation to create a wildlife corridor system to rebuild threatened populations of fish, wildlife and plants, said NatureServe's work would be critical to helping agencies identify what areas to prioritize and where to establish migration routes.

"The data reported by NatureServe is grim, a harrowing sign of the very real problems our wildlife and ecosystems are facing," Beyer told Reuters. "I am thankful for their efforts, which will give a boost to efforts to protect biodiversity."

HUMAN ENCROACHMENT

Among the species at risk of disappearing are icons like the carnivorous Venus flytrap, which is only found in the wild in a few counties of North and South Carolina.

Nearly half of all cacti species are at risk of extinction, while 200 species of trees, including a maple-leaf oak found in Arkansas, are also at risk of disappearing. Among ecosystems, America's expansive temperate and boreal grasslands are among the most imperiled, with over half of 78 grassland types at risk of a range-wide collapse.

The threats against plants, animals and ecosystems are varied, the report found, but include "habitat degradation and land conversion, invasive species, damming and polluting of rivers, and climate change."

California, Texas and the southeastern United States are where the highest percentages of plants, animals and ecosystems are at risk, the report found.

Those areas are both the richest in terms of biodiversity in the country, but also where population growth has boomed in recent decades, and where human encroachment on nature has been harshest, said Wesley Knapp, the chief botanist at NatureServe.

Knapp highlighted the threats facing plants, which typically get less conservation funding than animals. There are nearly 1,250 plants in NatureServe's "critically imperiled" category, the final stage before extinction, meaning that conservationists have to decide where to spend scant funds even among the most vulnerable species to prevent extinctions.

"Which means a lot of plants are not going to get conservation attention. We're almost in triage mode trying to keep our natural systems in place," Knapp said.

'NATURE SAVINGS ACCOUNT'

Vivian Negron-Ortiz, the president of the Botanical Society of America and a botanist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who was not involved in the NatureServe report, said there is still a lot scientists do not know and have not yet discovered about biodiversity in the United States, and that NatureServe's data helped illuminate that darkness.

More than anything, she sees the new data as a call to action.

"This report shows the need for the public to help prevent the disappearance of many of our plant species," she said. "The public can help by finding and engaging with local organizations that are actively working to protect wild places and conserve rare species."

John Kanter, the senior wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Federation, said the data in the report, which he was not involved with, was essential to guiding state and regional officials in creating impactful State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs), which they must do every 10 years to receive federal funding to protect vulnerable species.

Currently $50 million in federal funding is divided up among all states to carry out their SWAPs. The Recovering America's Wildlife Act, whose congressional sponsors say will be reintroduced soon, would have increased that to $1.4 billion, which would have a huge impact on the state's abilities to protect animals and ecosystems, Kanter said, and the NatureServe report can act as roadmap for officials to best spend their money.

"Our biodiversity and its conservation is like a 'nature savings account' and if we don't have this kind of accounting of what's out there and how's it doing, and what are the threats, there's no way to prioritize action," Kanter said. "This new report is critical for that."

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IN A WORLD-FIRST, Australia has announced it will officially recognize MDMA and psilocybin as medicines. 

On February 3, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)—the government authority responsible for regulating medicines—announced that starting July 1, 2023, authorized psychiatrists will be able to prescribe MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for treatment-resistant depression. Because the TGA has yet to approve any actual medicines that contain MDMA or psilocybin, patients will initially be receiving “unapproved” medicines containing the substances.

The decision came as a big surprise. At the end of December 2021, the same regulatory body decided against down-scheduling the drugs for use in a medical context. “When I woke up, my email was completely flooded with people saying: ‘Have you heard what’s happened?’ I was shocked by the decision,” says Simon Ruffell, a psychiatrist and senior research fellow at the Psychae Institute at the University of Melbourne.

Before advocates celebrate, experts warn that there are still many questions around just how many people will be actually able to access these treatments come July 1, as well as whether Australia has jumped the gun before gathering enough evidence on how to roll out these treatments effectively and safely. 

“I think it will take a while to ramp up,” says Daniel Perkins, adjunct associate professor at the Centre for Mental Health at Swinburne University and a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne. This is wise, he says: Let it gradually open up to see what works well and what does not. “They’ve probably intentionally done it this way.”

The path for a psychiatrist to get the all-clear to dole out the drugs could be lengthy and twisted. First, psychiatrists will need to be approved under Australia’s Authorised Prescriber Scheme, which means being endorsed by a human research ethics committee and then the TGA. For this, they’ll need to prove that they can clinically justify the treatment regime, that they will have proper governance over the treatment process, and that they will be using suitable measures to protect patients. What exactly these measures look like in practice have yet to be laid out in detail by the TGA.

Plus, the TGA has yet to provide any detail regarding the minimum training standards required for psychiatrists to become authorized prescribers. This makes exactly how these treatments will be prescribed ambiguous, considering the bedrock of evidence to support them involves patients receiving therapy from trained professionals alongside the drugs themselves. Because of this—and because the TGA has put the onus on the psychiatrist to demonstrate that their prescribing practices are appropriate—providing therapy in conjunction with the drugs will likely be required, says Rhys Cohen, who is on the non-executive advisory board of the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney and consults for the medical cannabis industry.

And not just any psychiatrist or psychologist can safely administer these kinds of therapies. Ruffell points out that in well-established Indigenous psychedelic practices around the world, people spend five to 10 years, at least, training to be able to work with these kinds of substances. “I think that a grave error would be to think that psychiatric and psychological qualifications are transferable to psychedelic substances without additional training.”

Another barrier to access will likely be cost. The treatments won’t be covered by health insurance, “so it’s probably initially going to be a therapy for relatively well-off people who have these conditions,” Perkins says. 

Some worry that Australia may be putting the cart before the horse in terms of the safety and long-term effects of these treatments. “We haven’t even looked at any longer term data yet,” says Ruffell. “The longest data that we have is 12 months. We don’t really know what happens later down the line.”

But on the other hand, “the benefit, particularly for the treatment-resistant conditions that they’re talking about—PTSD and depression—could be really huge,” says Perkins. 

Mostly, there’s a sense of surprise that Australia is first off the mark. At the beginning of 2023, Oregon became the first US state to allow adult use of psilocybin “under the supervision of a state-certified facilitator,” though the substance remains an unapproved investigational drug in the US for now. It’s been predicted that the US Food and Drug Administration will approve MDMA for the treatment of PTSD in 2024. Switzerland allows a limited number of psychiatrists to use LSD and MDMA to assist psychotherapy. How the scheme unfolds in Australia will likely impact whether other countries choose to offer the drugs for therapeutic purposes in the future—and that includes if it goes wrong and people get harmed. “I think the eyes of the world will be watching Australia now,” Ruffell says.

For Ruffell, the optimist in him is excited that psychedelic medicine is finally getting somewhere. “And then the pessimist is like, could this have a negative outcome?” he says. “I hope not. But that will be determined in the future.”

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High-calorie foods—high in fat, oil, and sugar—often taste delicious but can also cause overeating, leading to obesity and major health problems. But what stimulates the brain to cause overeating?

Recently, it has become clear that a gene called CREB-Regulated Transcription Coactivator 1 (CRTC1) is associated with obesity in humans. Studies on mice have shown that deleting CRTC1 results in obesity, suggesting that its presence suppresses the condition. However, the specific neurons responsible for suppressing obesity through CRTC1 and the mechanism behind it are still unknown, as the gene is expressed in all neurons in the brain.

Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have revealed that the transcription cofactor gene CRTC1 mediates the obesity-suppressing effects of melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R) by regulating appetite for fats and oils, high-fat diet metabolism, and blood sugar. Credit: Shigenobu Matsumura, Osaka Metropolitan University

 

To elucidate the mechanism by which CRTC1 suppresses obesity, a research group led by Associate Professor Shigenobu Matsumura from the Graduate School of Human Life and Ecology at Osaka Metropolitan University focused on neurons expressing the melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R). They hypothesized that CRTC1 expression in MC4R-expressing neurons suppressed obesity because mutations in the MC4R gene are known to cause obesity. Consequently, they created a strain of mice that expresses CRTC1 normally except in MC4R-expressing neurons where it is blocked to examine the effect that losing CRTC1 in those neurons had on obesity and diabetes.

When fed a standard diet, the mice without CRTC1 in MC4R-expressing neurons showed no changes in body weight compared to control mice. However, when the CRTC1-deficient mice were raised on a high-fat diet, they overate, then became significantly more obese than the control mice and developed diabetes.

“This study has revealed the role that the CRTC1 gene plays in the brain, and part of the mechanism that stops us from overeating high-calorie, fatty, and sugary foods,” said Professor Matsumura. “We hope this will lead to a better understanding of what causes people to overeat.”

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Researchers from Imperial College London’s School of Public Health have produced the most comprehensive assessment to date of the association between ultra-processed foods and the risk of developing cancers. Ultra-processed foods are food items that have been heavily processed during their production, such as fizzy drinks, mass-produced packaged breads, many ready meals, and most breakfast cereals.

Ultra-processed foods are often relatively cheap, convenient, and heavily marketed, often as healthy options. But these foods are also generally higher in salt, fat, sugar, and contain artificial additives. It is now well documented that they are linked with a range of poor health outcomes including obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The first UK study of its kind used UK Biobank records to collect information on the diets of 200,000 middle-aged adult participants. Researchers monitored participants’ health over a 10-year period, looking at the risk of developing any cancer overall as well as the specific risk of developing 34 types of cancer. They also looked at the risk of people dying from cancer.

The study found that higher consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with a greater risk of developing cancer overall, specifically with ovarian and brain cancers. It was also associated with an increased risk of dying from cancer, most notably with ovarian and breast cancers.

For every 10 percent increase in ultra-processed food in a person’s diet, there was an increased incidence of 2 percent for cancer overall, and a 19 percent increase for ovarian cancer specifically.

Each 10 percent increase in ultra-processed food consumption was also associated with increased mortality for cancer overall by 6 percent, alongside a 16 percent increase for breast cancer and a 30 percent increase for ovarian cancer.

These links remained after adjusting for a range of socio-economic, behavioral, and dietary factors, such as smoking status, physical activity and body mass index (BMI).

The Imperial team carried out the study, which was published on January 31 in the journal eClinicalMedicine, in collaboration with researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), University of São Paulo, and NOVA University Lisbon.

Examples of ultra-processed foods include fizzy drinks, mass-produced packaged breads, many ready meals, and most breakfast cereals.

 

Previous research from the team reported the levels of consumption of ultra-processed foods in the UK, which are the highest in Europe for both adults and children. The team also found that higher consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with a greater risk of developing obesity and type 2 diabetes in UK adults, and a greater weight gain in UK children extending from childhood to young adulthood.

Dr. Eszter Vamos, lead senior author for the study, from Imperial College London’s School of Public Health, said: “This study adds to the growing evidence that ultra-processed foods are likely to negatively impact our health including our risk for cancer. Given the high levels of consumption in UK adults and children, this has important implications for future health outcomes.

“Although our study cannot prove causation, other available evidence shows that reducing ultra-processed foods in our diet could provide important health benefits. Further research is needed to confirm these findings and understand the best public health strategies to reduce the widespread presence and harms of ultra-processed foods in our diet.”

Dr. Kiara Chang, first author for the study, from Imperial College London’s School of Public Health, said: “The average person in the UK consumes more than half of their daily energy intake from ultra-processed foods. This is exceptionally high and concerning as ultra-processed foods are produced with industrially derived ingredients and often use food additives to adjust colour, flavour, consistency, texture, or extend shelf life.

“Our bodies may not react the same way to these ultra-processed ingredients and additives as they do to fresh and nutritious minimally processed foods. However, ultra-processed foods are everywhere and highly marketed with cheap price and attractive packaging to promote consumption. This shows our food environment needs urgent reform to protect the population from ultra-processed foods.”

The World Health Organisation and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization have previously recommended restricting ultra-processed foods as part of a healthy sustainable diet.

There are ongoing efforts to reduce ultra-processed food consumption around the world, with countries such as Brazil, France, and Canada updating their national dietary guidelines with recommendations to limit such foods. Brazil has also banned the marketing of ultra-processed foods in schools. There are currently no similar measures to tackle ultra-processed foods in the UK.

Dr. Chang added: “We need clear front-of-pack warning labels for ultra-processed foods to aid consumer choices, and our sugar tax should be extended to cover ultra-processed fizzy drinks, fruit-based and milk-based drinks, as well as other ultra-processed products.

“Lower income households are particularly vulnerable to these cheap and unhealthy ultra-processed foods. Minimally processed and freshly prepared meals should be subsidized to ensure everyone has access to healthy, nutritious, and affordable options.”

The researchers note that their study is observational, so does not show a causal link between ultra-processed foods and cancer due to the observational nature of the research. More work is needed in this area to establish a causal link.

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Enlarge / A view of the Colorado River from the Navajo Bridge in Marble Canyon, Arizona on Aug. 31, 2022.

Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

 

In 2007, the seven states that rely on the Colorado River for water reached an agreement on a plan to minimize the water shortages plaguing the basin. Drought had gripped the region since 1999 and could soon threaten Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the largest reservoirs in the nation.

 

Now, that future has come to pass and the states are again attempting to reach an agreement. The Colorado River faces a crisis brought on by more than 20 years of drought, decades of overallocation and the increasing challenge of climate change, and Lake Mead and Lake Powell, its largest reservoirs, have fallen so low that their ability to provide water and generate electricity in the Southwest is at risk. But reaching consensus on how to avoid that is proving to be more challenging than last time.

 

“The magnitude of the problem is so much bigger this time, and it’s also so much more immediate,” said Elizabeth Koebele, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.

 

Monday night, six states in the Colorado River Basin submitted a plan to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency in charge of the damming and distribution of water in the West, laying out a potential way to protect the major reservoirs of Lake Powell and Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels, which could result in the loss of electricity for millions of Americans in the Southwest and largely block the river’s water from reaching Arizona, California and Nevada.

 

But California, the state that uses the greatest amount of water and has the strongest rights to the river, didn’t join the others that submitted the proposal to the federal agency. Instead, the state proposed its own plan with less drastic cuts. That means that for the second time in less than a year, the seven states that rely on Colorado River Water—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—yet again failed to reach an agreement to cut back water usage.

 

“Unfortunately, despite numerous meetings and intensive good faith efforts, a seven-state consensus was not reached,” California wrote in its letter outlining its proposal.

 

In 2007, when the interim guidelines for shortages in the lower basin of the river were established, the Bureau of Reclamation pushed for the states to come up with a consensus agreement, Koebele said. They did that, which helped inform the guidelines. Without a consensus, she said, the current proposals don’t carry the same weight.

 

The issue then was seen as a short-term problem, said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, an organization focused on freshwater issues in Nevada and Utah. Now, he said, stakeholders realize the river has changed for the long run.

 

“Nobody wants to give up what they’ve got going for themselves in any part of the basin,” he said. “That’s why this is painful.”

 

The January 31 deadline, however, was not for states to come up with a final solution on how to deal with the ongoing drought along the Colorado River and the need to drastically scale back the amount of water the states use. Rather, the timing was set by the states themselves to provide a model for the Bureau of Reclamation to evaluate as a potential alternative to either no action being taken, or the federal agency deciding itself how to cut back water usage along the river over the next three years.

 

“There’s a little bit more wiggle room than we initially thought” for coming up with an agreement, Koebele said.

 

In November, Reclamation announced it would conduct a supplemental environmental review of the 2007 interim guidelines with an eye toward confronting the low water levels of the reservoirs in the future. The supplement would modify the operations of the Glen Canyon and Hoover dams to avoid reaching water levels so low they could interrupt power generation or cease supplying downstream users in the coming years. The states have been asked to come up with a plan to cut between 2 and 4 million acre feet from the amount they are currently using.

“It is foreseeable that without appropriate responsive actions and under a continuation of recent hydrologic trends, major Colorado River reservoirs could continue to decline to ‘dead pool’—elevations at which water cannot be regularly released from a reservoir—in coming years,” the agency wrote last year.

 

Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said Reclamation gave the states the ability to be the “masters of their destiny” if they could muster the political will to reach a consensus. “The federal government gave the states essentially an option of coming to an agreement of: ‘You’ll have more control of your destiny if you do it through agreement, but if you don’t, we’re going to take action because not taking action is going to be too consequential.’”

 

Both plans are just proposals for Reclamation and the public to review, Roerink said, and neither will become the law. Tribes, academics, nonprofits focused on the river and “anybody that has a stake in the game” will need to provide input as well, he said.

 

The Consensus-Based Modeling Alternative submitted by the six states upstream of California is not a formal agreement on what will be done, but a proposal to have the Bureau of Reclamation model what the six states have agreed to consider to reduce water usage while working towards a separate agreement on new operating guidelines that would be implemented in 2027.

 

The current proposals are part of a plan to modify interim guidelines that are set to expire at the end of 2026. Reclamation is also in the process of conducting another environmental review for how the river will be governed in the future.

 

The Colorado River Compact, signed in 1922, is the foundation for how water is allocated among the seven states, which it divides into two regions—the Upper Colorado Basin, consisting of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, where most of the water in the river originates, and the Lower Colorado Basin, made up of Arizona, California, and Nevada, which have historically used more of the river’s flow. Under the compact, each region received 7.5 million acre-feet a year of what was assumed would be more than 16 million acre feet a year in the river. In reality, the river flowed with closer to 13.5 million acre feet a year, and in recent decades that amount has declined.

 

“Whatever we do in the short term will inform what we do in the long term,” Porter said. “So much of this is about whether or not the Colorado River can continue to supply as much water as it currently does to agriculture” because the bulk of the water goes to that sector.

 

Enlarge / A sunken boat has reemerged as unprecedented drought reduces Colorado River and Lake Mead to critical water levels on September 18, 2022 in Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada.

David McNew/Getty Images

 

The proposal submitted by the six states largely calls on further cuts for states in the Lower Basin to account for over 1.5 million acre feet of water lost due to evaporation and system losses, and takes further steps to protect Lake Powell and Lake Mead, such as increasing the cuts to water releases at the reservoirs’ current elevation levels, resulting in around 2 million acre feet of reductions.

 

At the current levels of Lake Mead, the six-state proposal calls for immediate deep cuts to the Lower Basin. California’s proposed cuts would be more modest—and the deepest reductions wouldn’t begin to match what the other states propose until the water level falls to some of the lowest shortage tiers.

 

Where the two plans differ, Roerink said, is that California’s plan would impose more cuts on the Upper Basin and calls for any further reduction to follow the law. That means less reduction of the supply to California due to its holding the strongest rights, and more to Arizona, which agreed to have junior water rights in 1968 in return for forming the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile long system that delivers Colorado River water to around 80 percent of the state’s population.

 

“California doesn’t have to do anything under the current law,” Roerink said.

 

Rebecca Mitchell, the Colorado Commissioner of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said in an emailed statement that the “Upper Division States regularly use less than half of our Compact apportionment and significantly less than the Lower Division States, who have been able to rely on reservoir storage in times of low flows.”

 

Nonetheless, Colorado and the other Upper Basin states remain committed to working with all parties, she wrote. While the proposal represents progress toward finding a solution, she wrote that “all basin states recognize that our work is not done” and that “this modeling approach simply provides a mechanism for the Bureau of Reclamation to begin analyzing options available to it to protect critical infrastructure at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.”

 

Tyler Cherry, a spokesperson with the Department of the Interior, which includes the Bureau of Reclamation, wrote in an emailed statement that the “ongoing conversations with the Basin states, Tribes, water managers, farmers, irrigators, and other stakeholders are helping to inform the supplemental process to revise the current interim operating guidelines for the operation of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams.”

 

“This will help ensure that any action from the Department is done with as much support and consensus as possible,” he wrote.

 

Koebele said the main controversy around the proposed Consensus-Based Modeling Alternative is that Lower Basin states have to cut back to offset water losses to evaporation from the entirety of the river and its reservoirs.

 

“The states really reached some disagreement with California, who would be responsible for taking the cuts that are associated with that evaporation and California argues that we should just account for it and reduce the total water supply, which doesn’t hurt them when they have the highest priority of the river,” she said.

 

Legally, priority for allocation of the Colorado River is given to users that were first to establish their rights to the water. California has the strongest water rights among the seven states that depend on the river. Last year, to address shortages at Lake Mead, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico were forced to take cuts to their supplies for 2023. But, thanks to its strong water rights, California was able to avoid them.

 

Porter, at Arizona State University, said the next few months will involve more discussions aimed at creating a consensus among all seven states. Reclamation expects to have the environmental review complete by this spring and a final decision by late summer. The models the Colorado Basin states and other entities submit will help guide that decision, but Reclamation will have the final say.

 

However, no agreement will be litigation-proof, Porter said.

 

“It wouldn’t be a huge surprise if a very senior water rights user sued if their water supplies were cut” by the federal government, Porter said.

 

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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The Grand Staircase is a 160-kilometer (100-mile) stretch of sedimentary rock that was first conceptualized by geologist Clarence Dutton in the 1870s. Dutton saw it as an immense stairway that at one end rises out of the Grand Canyon and at the other reaches up to a high plateau upon which sits Bryce Canyon National Park, representing a small sliver in the final step of this epic, 200-million-year-old formation.

Bryce Canyon’s emergence began around 50 million years ago when parts of Utah were still covered in an ancient lake and floodplain system during which time layers of sediments began to accumulate. As the land dried up and the layers were committed to the region’s geological record, the plateau was uplifted by plate tectonics, exposing the alternating layers of rock made up of different strengths and colorations.

Bryce Canyon’s rocks contain limestones, dolostones, mudstones, siltstones, and sandstones. As weathering broke down these layers at different rates, erosion stripped the weaker parts away until, eventually, they carved out hoodoos: a geological term used to describe rock spires carved out by natural forces.

Ice and rain are the key sculptors to thank for the staggering creation that is Bryce Canyon National Park, now home to the greatest concentration of hoodoos on Earth. The extreme elevation of the canyon is partially to blame, putting it at a height where freezing temperatures are experienced for more than half of the year.

The constant freezing and thawing of water in the rock results in what’s known as “ice wedging”, where water turning to ice expands and breaks the rock apart. These breaks often start as walls, then become holes, and later morph into hoodoos.

Considering ice and freezing temperatures have been so pivotal in Bryce Canyon’s formation, it’s a source of concern for geologists as to what might happen to the region in the face of the climate crisis. With freeze-thaw days apparently on the decline,

warming temperatures could erase Bryce Canyon’s iconic hoodoos. However, little research has been done on the topic and, as Clare Crise concluded for the National Park Service “without the science, we cannot hope to address or adapt to climate change’s impacts on them.”

How to get there

The closest flight destination is Cedar City Regional Airport, which is roughly a two-hour drive from Bryce Canyon National Park. For international flights, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City airports are good alternatives.

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For much of last year, tech companies stumbled. Digital ad sales plunged. E-commerce sputtered. IPhone production stalled. And investors lost faith.

It was the worst year that the tech industry had experienced on Wall Street since the financial crisis of 2008. Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta lost a combined $3.9 trillion in market value.

Now chastened, many tech companies have begun the year by championing a new and unfamiliar business strategy: austerity.

In recent months, several companies have said they are looking for ways to cut costs and eliminate futuristic projects that have become money pits. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta have each announced plans to lay off more than 10,000 workers.

It is an abrupt turn for an industry that became famous for its big salaries, extravagant offices and lavish perks, from free shuttle buses to free laundry services for employees. But as a boom that lasted 15 years comes to an end, shrinking profits are making tech executives rethink what they believed were important tools in an industrywide competition to hoard tech talent.

On Thursday, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said it was “committed to investing responsibly, with great discipline.” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, assured investors that the company would be “thoughtful and deliberate.” And Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, made his first appearance on a call with analysts since taking over from Jeff Bezos about 18 months ago and underscored how hard the company had worked to corral what looked like runaway costs.

Their message built on the tone that Mark Zuckerberg set for the industry on Wednesday when he called 2023 “the year of efficiency.” During a call with analysts, in which “efficiency” was said more than 30 times, Mr. Zuckerberg talked about spending less on infrastructure, removing layers of management and killing dead-end projects.

Investors are cheering tech’s new faith in financial discipline. Shares of Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, jumped more than 23 percent on Thursday, its biggest daily gain in nearly a decade. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple all rallied, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 3 percent.

“People wanted to get back in, and they wanted to figure out when the water is safe to wade into,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Evercore ISI, an investment firm. He added that the Federal Reserve’s decision on Wednesday to increase interest rates by a modest quarter-point helped tech companies as well, because it suggested that the central bank was getting inflation under control.

“You don’t need much good news for the stocks to outperform,” Mr. Mahaney said.

But shares of several of those companies dropped in after-hours trading on Thursday evening after they reported disappointing results for the most recent quarter, making it clear that tech’s business challenges remain.

On Thursday, Google reported its second decline in advertising, ever. Amazon said that its lucrative cloud computing business had slowed and that sales in its core e-commerce business had declined. And Apple posted its biggest decline in Christmas season iPhone sales since 2018.

On Wednesday, Meta reported that its sales in the final three months of last year had fallen 4 percent. Last week, Microsoft said spending on cloud computing was weakening.

The market’s reaction to lackluster tech earnings could be an indication of what is to come for the broader economy. Economists are trying to assess whether the economy can avoid a deep recession and achieve what some are calling a soft landing. If tech, as the most prominent industry to weaken last year, finds a bottom and begins to rebound, it would be an illustration of the relative strength of the broader economy, said Jason Furman, a Harvard economist.

“Six months ago, the economy was contracting and interest rates were rising, and there was a rebalance away from the pandemic,” Mr. Furman said. “That perfect storm,” he added, “isn’t true any more.”

Alphabet, Amazon and Apple all reported quarterly results that largely fell short of Wall Street expectations on Thursday. Alphabet posted its fourth consecutive decline in profit as it grappled with a slowdown in digital advertising. Advertising sales at YouTube, Google’s video platform, dipped nearly 8 percent to $7.96 billion, below the $8.2 billion expected by analysts.

As Google’s sales slow, Mr. Pichai said, the company is making various efforts to tame expenses. They include improving the financial performance of its phones and other gadgets, trying to make its cloud division profitable and strengthening YouTube’s business.

“I see this as an important journey to re-engineer the company’s cost base in a durable way,” Mr. Pichai said.

At Amazon, Mr. Jassy has been pushing to trim costs for the past year. The company has been working through plans to lay off 18,000 corporate and tech workers, it added fees for grocery deliveries that had once been free, and it cut back from a breakneck warehouse expansion that left it with too much space.

Still, Amazon barely eked out a profit, producing just $278 million in net income during the December quarter, as sales rose 9 percent from a year earlier to $149.2 billion.

During the call with analysts, Mr. Jassy said he had been focused on reducing the costs associated with fulfilling and delivering packages. The company vastly expanded its warehouses and hiring during the pandemic to keep pace with demand. Even after almost a year of pulling back expansion, he said, “there is a lot to figure out how to optimize and how to make more efficient.”

Apple lost an estimated $7 billion in iPhone sales during the December quarter when its largest iPhone factory in China was locked down because of a Covid-19 outbreak. The company offset those losses with strong sales of iPads, which increased 30 percent, and services such as subscriptions to Apple Music.

Mr. Cook said macroeconomic factors, including inflation and the war in Ukraine, had contributed to the company’s struggles. In the face of those challenges, the company said, it is reining in spending, which will help improve its profit margins.

“We’re doing a lot of work around costs,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer. “That is paying off.”

There are still regulatory efforts to curb the industry’s power, including a lawsuit that the Department of Justice brought last month against Google, claiming it has abused its position as an advertising technology monopoly. But the impacts of those actions are far in the future.

The tech industry has been relatively effective at holding regulators at bay. On Wednesday, a federal judge rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s request to stop Meta from buying a virtual reality start-up. Last year, Washington lobbyists effectively stymied bills in Congress that aimed to open up competition on app stores and prevent tech companies from giving their own products preference on their platforms.

“Some of the pressure has come off because these guys have been hit so hard and had to lay off so many people,” said Bob O’Donnell, president of Technalysis Research, a firm specializing in tech research. “There’s a realization that they’re not omnipotent after all.”

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