From January 17 to February 5, 1947, Yukon, northwest Canada went through a cold spell, hitting the lowest temperature of -64°C (-84°F) on February 3.

Weather observer Gordon Toole measured the lowest temperature at Snag's tiny airport. The thermometer he used didn't go below -62.2°C (-80°F), meaning he had to record it by marking an extra line. It was too cold for pens to function, so he had to scratch it onto the thermometer using a set of dividers.

At those temperatures, people's breath turned to a white powder in the air, making a tinkling sound as it did so. As delightful as that sounds, staying out in the weather for more than a few minutes would cause exposed skin to freeze, and hypothermia was a big risk.

One of the weirder effects, noticed by the residents of Snag, Yukon, where temperatures were coldest, was that sound began to travel differently. Toole, as he measured the temperature at the airport, could not see more than a few meters without his view being interfered by a cloud of frost fog. Yet he could hear dogs barking in the main village over 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) away, and ice that cracked in the White River about 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) away sounded "cracked and boomed loudly, like gun fire".

What caused these weird sound effects? Sound does not travel in the same way at different temperatures. As well as moving slower in the cold, sound also travels further, if you happen to be near to the ground. When air near the ground is cold and the air above it is warm, sounds are refracted by the warm air toward the surface. The sound then bounces between the ground and the warm air, traveling much further along the ground than in warmer temperatures.

“A temperature inversion caused sound waves to bend back toward the ground rather than escaping upwards,” Environment Canada’s senior climatologist David Phillips told the National Post. “People at the airport could clearly hear dogs barking in town and townspeople talking as if they were close by instead of 5 kilometres [3 miles] away.”

Adding to the disorientating effect of hearing conversations from miles away, and the icy fog that surrounded them and diminished their vision, people in the town could see clouds of their frozen breath linger in the air for minutes at a time.

“It was unique to see a vapour trail several hundred yards long pursuing one as he moved about outside," Toole said, according to website Canada's History. 

"Becoming lost was of no concern. As an observer walked along the runway, each breath remained as a tiny, motionless mist behind him at head level. These patches of human breath fog remained in the still air for three to four minutes, before fading away. One observer even found such a trail still marking his path when he returned along the same path 15 minutes later.”

If they had become lost, of course, they could merely have whispered that fact and be heard by a search and rescue team several miles down the road.

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Pity the dodo. First, Dutch colonists and their entourage of dogs, cats, and rats erased the birds from their native Mauritius in the late 17th century. Then later generations turned the fat, flightless creature into the butt of jokes for centuries to come. The chonky bird is a byword for clumsy obsolescence. Just look at it: It was practically asking to go extinct.

Except it wasn’t, of course. It was all our fault. The dodo was perfectly adapted to its environment. It was us humans who had to come along and ruin everything with our hunting, murdering, plundering ways. But now a biotech startup called Colossal Biosciences is trying to make amends for humankind’s past sins: It wants to de-extinct the dodo.

Bringing back the dodo isn’t the first audacious de-extinction project from Colossal. The startup—cofounded in 2021 by Harvard geneticist George Church and serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm—also has plans to bring back the mammoth and the thylacine. Or kind of, at least. The plan is actually to edit the genomes of living relatives of extinct creatures and so create animals that occupy similar ecological niches as their distant cousins. Not mammoths or dodos exactly, but what Colossal calls “functional” mammoths or dodos.

Whether creating a functional dodo technically counts as de-extinction is up for debate, but the project has piqued investors’ interest. Along with the dodo news, Colossal announced a $150 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $225 million. That’s big money in the conservation space—particularly for a biotech startup with just 83 employees. The US conservation nonprofit the Sierra Club, by way of comparison, raised about $100 million in donations in 2021.

But de-extincting the dodo won’t happen overnight. In 2021 George Church told Stat News that the project to resurrect the mammoth might take six years to produce a calf, and another 10 to 12 for that calf to reach sexual maturity. Resurrecting the dodo presents a whole different set of challenges, which we’ll get into later, so you can expect that project to take a good while too. While it has significant backing from its funders, Colossal will also have to find some other way to make money. And that’s when the company starts to look a lot less like a firm hellbent on one crazy idea and much more like a traditional biotech startup.

Cofounder Ben Lamm says that the focus at Colossal isn’t just on de-extinction. Along the way, he plans to spin out other startups and technology that can help fund their efforts—and maybe bring in a tidy profit. In September 2022, Colossal spun out its first startup, Form Bio, which launched with a $30 million Series A funding round. Form Bio is developing a software platform, designed to help scientists manage large and complicated datasets, that could be useful for drug discovery, gene therapy, and academic research.

Lamm says that Colossal won’t necessarily spin out companies every year, but one of Colossal’s aims is to figure out how its technology could be put to work beyond de-extinction. Colossal has a team dedicated to product development, and twice a month they join a meeting with the company’s biologists to try and figure out which elements of the company’s work could be turned into new companies or technology platforms.

This makes a lot of sense. De-extincting an entire species will require breakthroughs in all kinds of areas: gene editing and sequencing, artificial wombs, and so on. Lamm wants all the technology Colossal develops to have potential applications—and paying customers—in the world of human health care. “That’s fundamental to our technology strategy,” he says.

The founder has a few other ideas for potential revenue streams. One is a way for scientists to rapidly analyze gene-edited cells and check that the edits work as expected. He’s also excited by some of the work that Colossal’s embryology team is working on. “We think this has massive applications across all IVF,” he says. “But whether we’ll spin out an IVF company is unclear. Maybe we’ll just license those technologies or whatnot.”

It’s clear that the potential for new spin-outs is part of why venture capitalists are excited about de-extinction. But the flow of money toward biotech might be subtly reshaping how we think about conservation: Is it about leaving things alone, or modifying species—like Colossal intends to do—so they can survive a world that humans have created? The flow of resources into this sector may change the sorts of conservation practices people engage in, says Ronald Sandler, professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University in Boston.

“There’s a new set of potential tools here, a new set of possibilities and opportunities,” Sandler says. What isn’t clear is whether these new tools actually address why we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event, or if they just dangle a technological panacea for the problem, which is that humans are consuming much more of the world’s resources than they should. “There’s a risk of losing sight of what the real problem is that really needs to be solved,” Sandler says.

As well as these thorny philosophical questions, Colossal also has to contend with the scientific challenge of resurrecting an extinct bird species. Birds present some unique challenges to de-extinction because it’s much harder to access the genetic information inside bird embryos. Instead, Colossal plans to edit cells that become egg or sperm cells, and then implant those into developing bird embryos. The bird will then grow up with egg or sperm cells that contain the genetic recipe for a functional dodo—or something approaching that. Scientists can then breed these birds with the hope of eventually producing a bird that resembles the dodo. 

The dodo work builds on research by Beth Shapiro, lead paleogeneticist at Colossal and a professor at UC Santa Cruz. In 2022, Shapiro produced the first complete dodo genome. “Right or wrong, the dodo is the symbol of manmade extinction,” Shapiro says. Resurrecting the dodo will mean working on its closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon, which lives on islands and coastlines in Southeast Asia.

But the hope is that these projects could have benefits far beyond single species. “In the process we’re going to be working out some compelling things about life broadly and individual species in depth,” says Tom Chi, founder of At One Ventures, a climate-focused venture capital fund and Colossal investor. He points to the startup’s work on a vaccine for fatal elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus (EEHV) as one example where conservation could still benefit from Colossal’s work, even if it isn’t able to bring back the mammoth.

“We’re living in the old era of conservation right now,” says Chi. “And honestly, we are not winning that game at all.” Developing new tools like de-extinction could finally help conservation to address the sheer scale of species loss happening on Earth right now, he says. “In a deeply thoughtful way we can be folks that really tend to the health of our planet, that really build a deep compassion for other folks as well as others.”

Maybe. But there’s also a danger that de-extinction technology just puts a modern spin on one of the age-old problems of conservation: A few charismatic species are saved while the rest of nature burns. That doesn’t have to be the case. Genetic sequencing is a powerful tool for helping conservationists, and we desperately need to understand more about the animal kingdom. It might just be that the least moonshot-y parts of Colossal’s work are the bits that end up having the biggest impact.

Why Bother Bringing Back the Dodo?

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Billions of years ago, our solar system coalesced within an interstellar molecular cloud, a nursery made up of gas and dust that clumped together to form stars, asteroids, and planets—eventually, our own Earth. Somewhere along that cosmic timeline, the amino acids that preceded life appeared. These molecules chain together to form the proteins responsible for nearly every biological function. But where those amino acids come from has been an enduring mystery. Did these biological building blocks somehow arise from the prebiotic conditions of early Earth, or was our planet seeded with these ingredients from elsewhere in the universe? 

Some astronomers think life’s heritage must have begun off-planet, because amino acids have been discovered in meteorites, celestial time capsules composed of the same primitive materials from which our solar system formed. (A meteorite is a fragment of an asteroid or any other space rock that has fallen to Earth.) But despite their best efforts, scientists can’t pin down exactly how these molecules got there. Experiments in the lab can’t reproduce what’s found in nature. 

A team of researchers at NASA’s Cosmic Ice Laboratory set out to investigate this discrepancy by simulating the chemical activities of interstellar molecular clouds and asteroids, two places known to form amino acids.  While they didn’t solve the mystery, the results they published in early January hint that something complicated is happening to produce the distribution of materials found in meteorites. 

Knowing where these amino acids come from could say something about the possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos, says Danna Qasim, an astrochemist at Southwest Research Institute who led the study. If they came from asteroids in our own solar system, it might mean these ingredients are unique to our region of the universe. But if they were birthed by our parent molecular cloud, Qasim says, “that tells us this cloud essentially has a frozen starter kit to life that’s been distributed to other solar systems—and potentially other planets.” 

Amino acids are easy enough to create. Past studies have shown that, under the right conditions, they arise when cosmic rays irradiate interstellar ice, and from the chemistry churning inside the bellies of asteroids. Short chains of amino acids can even spontaneously form on stardust. But other experiments prove that these molecules could have once been generated on our planet: inside ancient, deep sea hydrothermal vents, or when lightning struck the organic molecular soup of early Earth. 

Yet these molecules by themselves—and even the proteins they form—are not life, any more than a silicon wafer alone is a computer, says study co-author Jason Dworkin, an astronomer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “That wafer is necessary if organized in a particular way, connected to a power supply, and encoded with software that permits it to do something,” he says. Similarly, the true seeds of life must be able to carry out characteristic functions like making energy, replicating, and passing down traits to offspring. 

Nailing down the source of prebiotic amino acids, then, is a first step toward uncovering the processes that trigger biology. Still, it’s been hard to figure out which of these pathways—stardust or primordial soup, undersea vents or irradiated space ice—lead to life. “Getting amino acids is relatively straightforward,” says Dworkin. “But getting the amino acids used in biology is more of a mystery.” 

Nearly a hundred different types of amino acids have been observed in meteorites, but only a dozen of the 20 that are essential for life have been found. Biological amino acids also have a peculiarity that gives them away: They all have a “left-handed” structure, whereas abiotic processes create left- and right-handed molecules in equal measure. Several meteorites discovered on Earth have an excess of left-handed amino acids, Dworkin says—the only non-biological system ever observed with this imbalance. 

For this experiment, the team tested the theory that amino acids were first created within interstellar molecular clouds, then rode to Earth inside asteroids. They decided to recreate the conditions these molecules would have been exposed to at each stage in their journey. If this process produced the same assortment of amino acids—in the same ratios—as those found in recovered meteorites, it would help validate the theory.

The researchers began by creating the most common molecular ices found in interstellar clouds—water, carbon dioxide, methanol, and ammonia—in a vacuum chamber. Then they bombarded the ices with a beam of high energy protons, mimicking collisions with cosmic rays in deep space. The ices broke apart and reassembled into larger molecules, eventually forming a gunky residue visible to the naked eye: chunks of amino acids. 

Next, they simulated the interior of asteroids, which contain liquid water and can be surprisingly hot: between 50 and 300 degrees Celsius. They submerged the residue in water at 50 and 125 degrees Celsius for different lengths of time. This boosted the levels of some amino acids, but not others. The amount of glycine and serine, for example, both doubled. The alanine content stayed the same. But their relative levels remained consistent before and after the chunks were plunged into the asteroid simulation—there was always more glycine than serine, and more serine than alanine.

This trend is noteworthy, Qasim says, because it shows that conditions within the interstellar cloud would have had a strong influence on the makeup of amino acids inside the asteroid. But ultimately, their experiment ran into the same problem other lab studies have: The distribution of amino acids still didn’t match that found in real meteorites. The most notable difference was the excess of beta-alanine over alpha-alanine in their lab samples. (In meteorites, this typically occurs the other way around.) If there’s a recipe for creating life’s precursors, they hadn’t found it. 

That’s likely because their recipe was too simple, Qasim says: “The next experiments need to be more complicated—we need to add more minerals, and consider more relevant asteroid parameters and conditions.” 

But there’s another possibility. Maybe the meteoritic samples they’ve been using for comparison are contaminated. As the meteorites crash-landed, they could have been changed by their interactions with Earth’s atmosphere and biology, as well as centuries of geological activity that has melted, subducted, and recycled the planetary surface. 

One way to test this is by using a pristine sample as the starting point: This September, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will bring home something like a 200-gram chunk of the asteroid Bennu.  (That’s 40 times bigger than the last sample we got of untouched space rock.) A quarter of the sample will be analyzed for amino acids, which will help nail down the source of discrepancies between lab studies and meteorites. It could also uncover what other fragile materials are present in asteroids, but can’t survive the trip to our planet without the protection of a spacecraft. That information would help Qasim’s team perfect their recipe. 

The rest of the Bennu sample, like those from the Apollo mission 50 years ago, will be tucked away in airtight containers to give not-yet-born scientists a chance to analyze the asteroid with not-yet-invented techniques and technologies. “This is the legacy of sample returns,” says Dworkin, who is a project scientist for OSIRIS-REx. Lab experiments like these, he says—those simulating the conditions of space—are critical for interpreting these samples. A better understanding of asteroid chemistry will come in handy when analyzing the retrieved space rock, and help scientists figure out which of their theories best match up with nature. 

There’s also a third way to think about this issue: Maybe we are looking too far from home. Maybe the unique conditions that give rise to biology happened here, not in space. 

Yana Bromberg, a bioinformatician at Rutgers University, thinks the secret to life will be found in Earth-based biological records, rather than geological ones. “Rocks have a tendency to get ground up and cycled,” she says. “It’s hard to trace history this way.” Instead, Bromberg looks for the genetic blueprints for making cellular energy, a process that could have been invented by—and inherited from—ancient proteins created from Earth’s initial ooze. Last year, she published work showing similarities in the cores of modern proteins used by different organisms, hinting that they may trace back to the same ancestry.

But while she favors a planetary origin, Bromberg doesn’t think only Earth could give rise to life: “My suspicion is that you can make amino acids from any primordial soup, regardless of the planet you are on,” she says.

“Maybe there is this special, unique, niche environment that only existed in one place, and then things got spit out. That would be cool to know,” says planetary scientist Aaron Burton, who analyzes astromaterials at NASA’s Johnson Space Center to understand what chemical processes could have led to life. His gut tells him that biology emerged on Earth—but that’s not the impetus driving his research. “Wherever we think it started, how did it start there? That, for me, is the interesting question. And then we’ll answer ‘where’ along the way.” 

It’s possible that the answer to whether life started on Earth or in space is: both. Maybe in Earth’s case, “space was irrelevant except for the delivery of raw materials,” Dworkin says, and everything important subsequently happened here. But it’s also possible that the same chemical processes are also playing out in deep space—they do, after all, use the same ingredients. That could mean there are many environments brimming with the potential for life in our universe, both on the ground and in the heavens.

Did the Seeds of Life Ride to Earth Inside an Asteroid?

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In the village of Melness, a frayed twist of bungalows and old stone buildings on Scotland’s desolate northern shore, April is a month of new beginnings, when the dark and strung-out Highland winter finally unfurls into a tentative spring, and pregnant ewes balloon like airships in the wind-swept hills. As the 2015 lambing season neared its start, the villagers began the usual preparation of their small plots of rented land, called crofts, for farm and pasture. Behind the crofts and croft houses was the bog: an immense, bronze-hued ocean of deep peat, stretching into the horizon.

For Dorothy Pritchard, a retired schoolteacher and chair of the Melness Crofters’ Estate, an organization that owns and manages the crofting land, this spring would be stranger than usual. Over the past several weeks, she had been mulling a plan that could upend the town’s quiet routine.

On the last day of the month, she walked into the estate office, a dirty, white bungalow opposite the village nursing home, for a meeting with the estate board. Many of the members were from families that had been working the land for generations, and Pritchard sought to preserve their way of life. As the crofters took their seats on plastic chairs around the table, Pritchard announced that she had an idea. It might sound crazy at first, she cautioned, but give it an open mind: How about building a spaceport on the empty peatland out back?

The estate office rang out in guffaws. Rockets lifting off in nebulas of smoke from the bog, inclining to their flight path over Tommy’s shop in Talmine, cracking the sound barrier over the summer wildflowers on Achininver Beach? It was hard to imagine. And there were concerns. Melness, made of nothing but mountains and peat and sea and weather, was a tranquil place. Would rockets not ruin it? Would they have to fence off the common grazing land? Would they have to leave their homes on launch days? Would it be safe? 

Pritchard told them she’d initially shared their fears. When she first envisioned rockets taking off, she pictured a boggier, less clement Cape Canaveral: explosions, showers of fiery debris. Behind the Melness houses, on the far side of a grassy ridge, unrolled a section of peat bog called the Moine. Although the land might not have looked like much to outsiders, it was part of a massive, irreplaceable sink of carbon that had accumulated over millennia, holding almost as much carbon dioxide as the UK emits in a year—and areas of it are highly combustible.

Pritchard was reassured, though, by the fact that the project had government support. It had come to her through the local development board, in conjunction with a UK effort to elbow its way into the global space industry. Building a commercial spaceport in Melness—one of three proposed vertical launch sites in rural Scotland where there is good access to polar orbits—could help the UK become the first country in Europe to launch a small satellite.

Pritchard’s own hopes for the spaceport were humbler but no less urgent. In it she saw a way to preserve Melness’ crumbling future. Her father had been a crofter who, like many in the village, worked at the nuclear power plant down the coast and built offshore oil rigs. She’d started lambing at 8 years old, and her childhood memories were crowded with weekend dances that once surged with dapper teens from Strathy to Durness. By 2015, though, the oil industry was declining, the nuclear plant had been deactivated, the dance halls were empty, and the school rolls were dwindling. The town was down to a single hotel, a single store, a single nursing home. Every year, Pritchard saw her former students reach their late teens and flee to the cities down south: Inverness, Aberdeen, even Edinburgh. Keeping youngsters on the good side of Ben Loyal and Ben Hope, the two peaks that overshadow Melness, had become her obsession.

The village had already cycled through several failed economic projects, including a leisure center, a wind farm, a new pier, and a tropical shrimp farm. Worse, in the absence of a self-sustaining industry, it was being steadily transformed by an outsider—the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, who owns the fast-fashion company Bestseller. 

Povlsen is the richest man in Scotland and its largest private landowner. He has acquired thousands of hectares of land around Melness, citing a mission to rewild the landscape and repair the damage caused by overgrazing. But his ideas for developments—including a brewery, an events space, and luxury resorts for “forest bathing”—are targeted at ultra-wealthy ecotourists. In the eyes of many locals, his investments bring to the fore the ballooning cost of real estate in the area.

Pritchard asked the estate members to consider the spaceport. It offered Melness a new vision for the future, she told them. It could give them a decent rental income and reliable employment. It could mean a revival of this place after a deep winter.

After some hesitation, the board agreed to explore the idea. Pritchard was hopeful. At the same time, she knew the spaceport might not be enough to save Melness. There was a chance that it would bring disaster.

 

Sheep graze on the edge of the North Sea. 

Photograph: Anna Huix

On a high rock between Melness and its sister city Tongue stands the stout ruin of Castle Varrich. The castle is on the territory of Clan Mackay, a Highland clan with roots in the Middle Ages. The Gaelic origin of Mackay, the area’s most common family name by far, is Mac Aoidh: son of fire.

Pritchard is a Mackay on her mom’s side, and her worries about the depopulation of the Highlands reach back as far as her family’s history. Much of Scotland's land is owned by wealthy individuals—a higher percentage than any other country in Europe. From the late 18th century, landowners mercilessly drove Highlanders out of townships along the fertile inland valleys to make room for sheep, which turned a greater profit than farming. This campaign of occasionally violent dispossession is known as the Highland Clearances.

In Sutherland, the county that contains Melness, the Duke and Countess-Duchess, together with Patrick Sellar, the notorious “factor,” or manager, of the Sutherland Estate, were particularly cruel in their administration of the evictions. The Clearances reached their crest here in 1819, a year known in Gaelic as bliadhna na losgaidh: the year of the burnings. The homes of the members of Clan Mackay, sons and daughters of fire, were scorched to the ground.

Pritchard’s ancestors were forced onto barren crofts, in settlements on the edge of inhospitable coasts. “They belonged to the ground,” Kirsteen Mackay, a Melness crofter, told me, “and people came in and took it away.” Inland folk for centuries, they struggled to learn how to fish, and many left for North America. Meanwhile, boundless herds of sheep set to work constructing the barren landscape characteristic of the Highlands today. The ancient pine and birch forests were turned into seas of open heath.

After the price of wool cratered at the end of the 19th century, the Highlands’ economy shifted to deer stalking, and red deer, equally rapacious, took over from sheep. Today, areas from which communities were cleared—some of which now belong to Povlsen—are designated “wild land” by the Scottish government. 

Highland landlords still lease crofts to the descendants of cleared families. For those in Sutherland, the evictions are a persistent memory and haunt contemporary conflicts over land. Compared to much of the Highlands, though, the status of the land in and around Melness is unusual: 5,000 hectares belong to the crofters themselves. 

This situation is due to Michael Foljambe, the eccentric English owner of an extensive tract that had included Melness. In 1995, Foljambe decided to give his land away. Two-thirds of his landscape of burns, lochs, beaches, and bog went to his London relatives. For the final third, though, Foljambe did something unprecedented. After long discussions with Pritchard’s father, Frank Gordon, Foljambe decided that the land should be given to the people who had worked it since the Clearances. The children of the people in the cemetery by the sea. 

The crofters were ecstatic. The land, they thought, had long belonged to them, at least in spirit—but now they would be protected from a landlord’s whims and fancies. There was a catch, though. The crofters had to generate income and jobs, and build housing, but now without Foljambe’s cash. From then on, finding income was always a struggle, while the region’s population declined.

In 2012, Foljambe’s relatives sold their portion of the land to Povlsen. Povlsen was fond of the Highlands, having visited from Denmark as a child. He’d already bought his first estate there years earlier, and with this purchase his total land holdings amounted to some 47,000 hectares. He had started a company called Wildland, with a mission to reseed the landscape and repair the damage caused by centuries of overgrazing.

In photographs, Povlsen looks impish—bald head, neatly trimmed beard, boyish face. He is not a popular figure around Melness. Povlsen owns several properties in nearby Tongue that he has kept empty for years, including what was once the town’s only supermarket. He also bought the area’s only gas station. Land prices have swelled, in part due to investments in carbon credits; Wildland has sold carbon credits by restoring peatlands in an estate further south. In 2020, the price of Scottish estates rose by 87 percent compared to the previous year, while in 2021, farmland prices increased by 31 percent. As a result, locals are being outpriced while the value of Povlsen’s land increases, further limiting the financial resources of residents to take him on. When Ellen Henderson, who grew up along the coast from Tongue, tried to purchase the building that once housed Tongue’s bank, she was outbid by Wildland. “He is a tsunami of money,” she told me.

Povlsen has spoken about being a custodian of the landscape and about his deep love for the area. He claims to be repeopling as well as rewilding, generating work in hospitality and construction. His company hires local construction firms and employs 20 people in the Melness area, a figure that will grow as his new developments open. Many residents, though, would prefer to have a diverse economy. Some are furious, seeing Povlsen as the Highlands’ latest arrogant landlord. 

According to Pritchard, Povlsen treats the area as a tourist village. “He’s not from here, and he doesn’t understand the culture,” she told me. On Facebook, she referred to Povlsen as “the return of the Duke of Sutherland” and complained that his company “has the cheek to constantly use the phrase ‘our community.’” The name Wildland doesn’t help: Some residents suspect he would prefer the area to be empty.

Once the spaceport idea was introduced, it did not take long for the community to see how it might solve their long-standing problems. The area might finally, they thought, blast out from the history of inequity that had sucked them in like a peat bog.

By 2018, debate over the spaceport had reached every person in town. The local development board, now partnered with aerospace startup Orbex, was holding regular drop-in sessions to calm jitters, and eventually, many residents came to hope that they would soon see a 62-foot-tall rocket with payloads of microsatellites thrusting over their homes, blasting toward polar orbit within spitting distance of the post office. Others were not so convinced. In November, the crofters held a vote on whether to continue supporting the spaceport project. The result, in the end, was 27 votes for, 18 against. “We were for it,” said Pritchard, “but not at any cost.”

The arguments fractured the once cozy community. John Williams, a retiree to Melness from the south of England, set up an organization to protest the spaceport. In spite of his “incomer” status, he amassed some support in the village. “If you can imagine a rocket going wrong, you’ve got the equivalent of a 20-meter blowtorch,” he told me. That, on the peat bog, would be like setting a coal field on fire.

The environmental concerns are serious. The Moine is part of a much larger area known as the Flow Country: 200,000 hectares of delicate peat that has been hoarding carbon since the end of the Ice Age. Six months after the vote, a catastrophic wildfire burned 5,700 hectares of the Flow Country and doubled Scotland’s carbon emissions for the year. If rocket fuel, or sparks, were to come into contact with peat, there is an increased risk of wildfires, Roxane Andersen, a peat scientist, told me. Pritchard’s anxieties, however, had by this time been allayed. “I don’t think there’s been a more examined piece of ground,” she said. 

What about human safety? Gordon McEwan, whose home is near the proposed launch site, is anxious about falling rockets. In a meeting with Orbex and other crofters, he shared his concern that the launch exclusion zone was too small. When the rocket lifts off, the zone will have a radius of less than 2 kilometers. Orbex’s response was to trust the regulators. “You can’t randomly launch things of this nature,” Chris Larmour, the CEO of Orbex, told me. “We are a heavily regulated industry.” A Highland newspaper reported, though, that at a space industry event in 2021 he’d admitted he wouldn’t want one in his backyard either.

According to Orbex and the development board, the economic benefits will outweigh these risks. They expect the spaceport to create around 40 jobs—from security and engineering to marketing roles—in an area with a population of several hundred. Some workers, they think, will commute from bigger towns on the north coast, but others may settle in the Melness area, boosting the school rolls. A report commissioned by the development board predicted that during the first two years of its operation, the spaceport would add several million dollars worth of gross value to Melness and Tongue’s economy, and attract thousands of visitors—a big boost for tourism.

Spaceports, though, are rarely a solution to the problems faced by marginalized areas, and they have a history of leaving local communities in the dust. They require sparsely populated land, usually near the equator, to profit from the higher speed of the earth’s rotation at equatorial latitudes, or in the far north or south, for easy access to polar orbits. They tend to be situated, then, in places like the Highlands—places that have long been considered peripheral and where the land carries fraught histories of marginalization, oppression, and colonization.

Yet to the crofters, the spaceport has come to represent their independence. Melness will need some development if it is to survive. Faced with a choice between another landowning capitalist and a spaceport, the crofters tend to side with the spaceport.

Despite their disagreements with Povlsen, many residents I spoke to felt profound sympathy for him when, on Easter Sunday 2019, he and his family were among the victims of a bomb attack at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sri Lanka. Three of Povlsen's four children were killed. The church in Tongue held a special service, and the townspeople came out to grieve.

In August 2019, Pritchard and the crofters reached an agreement with the development board: 12 launches per year, for £70,000 (about $85,000) a year in base rent. Objections started to flow in. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds came out against the project, as did 1,075 signatories of a petition against the spaceport. Povlsen also voiced his disapproval. His 62-page report argued that the spaceport could disrupt breeding bird seasons and damage everything from water quality to the look of the land. It said that another proposed spaceport was in a better location, that the spaceport would harm the peatlands, that the economic benefits had been overstated. Ultimately, the Highland Council’s planning committee granted permission for the spaceport in a unanimous decision—but Pritchard did not celebrate. She may have sensed the fight against Povlsen was just beginning.

Povlsen swiftly filed a lawsuit, asking the Scottish Court of Session to cancel permission, and paid the legal fees of three crofters in another legal challenge. “Are we to have no developments along the North Coast unless they have the permission of Mr. Povlsen?” Pritchard wrote on a Facebook page. “To take that sort of opportunity away from our young people is unforgivable.”

Then, in November 2020, Povlsen invested £1.43 million in a competing spaceport project in the Shetland Islands. That site is not surrounded by peat bog, but the crofters were outraged. “If it’s really an environmental issue,” Pritchard said, “why did he go and build a much bigger spaceport with three launch pads and bigger rockets?”

On a drizzly afternoon last May, I met Thomas MacDonell, Povlsen’s director of conservation, in a grand 19th-century country house two and a half hours south of Melness. The building was once the home of a duchess; today it is Wildland’s headquarters. Povlsen bought a nearby estate, called Glenfeshie, in 2006, when it was 18,000 hectares of overgrazed and degraded birch and pine forests. MacDonell, having grown up in the area, was eager to help Povlsen rewild.

MacDonell is tall and silver-haired, and he exudes the calm vigilance of a deer stalker. He and I climbed into his black Volkswagen pickup. He drove me around Glenfeshie, gesturing at the landscape and describing how he and Povlsen had culled 15,000 deer and planted 5 million trees, with the goal of encouraging patchworks of ecosystems to exist side by side. They’d initially met opposition from sheep farmers and fierce resistance from the owners of hunting lodges, but he endeavored to show me that by now, Wildland’s 200-year plan to regenerate Glenfeshie had started to bloom. As we traversed the bumpy gravel paths, MacDonell cast his eyes over the hills, proud that they were thickly carpeted with trees. I saw young and old birches standing together, an indicator of sustainability. Dead wood, MacDonell told me, was providing habitat for woodpeckers and tree creepers.

The next morning we drove toward Kinloch Lodge, an old shooting lodge that Povlsen had transformed into luxury accommodations, a few miles from Melness. It radiated mid-century Scandi immoderation. Everything down to the shiny brass buckles on a row of smart green canvas backpacks wafted a mood of comforting, glossed-over extravagance. When I entered the kitchen, I observed a lobster lunch cooking in an antique French oven that MacDonell, unprompted, told me had cost £23,000.

We followed a dirt track to a river, which MacDonell said would soon be shrouded in a cathedral of willow trees, cooling the water. Salmon can’t live in water that is too warm, he explained. MacDonell then spotted a fragile plant, hidden in the heather. It was a foot high and looked to me like a birch sapling. “It’s probably about 50 years old,” he said, examining the tree’s delicate stem. Deer had been stunting its growth for half a century.

Here, a 20-minute drive from the spaceport site, the landscape did seem to be finally spluttering back to life. MacDonell told me that Wildland’s opposition to the spaceport in Melness was rooted in preserving this fragile regrowth. But he admitted that the aesthetics were also a concern. Povlsen does not like certain signs of civilization to be visible on his land. Wildland dug trenches to bury the telephone cables that run across Glenfeshie. A spaceport was totally incompatible with Povlsen’s efforts to turn the area into a sanctuary for lavish ecotourism—a place, as Wildland’s marketing copy puts it, “where the world can’t find you.”

In August and September 2021, the Scottish courts sided with the spaceport. Povlsen continued to invest in his rewilding and ecotourism projects in the area, but he did not appeal. It was a win. The crofters, expelled centuries ago from the fertile valleys to the wild coasts, where locals are increasingly priced out by tourists, had fought back against the country’s richest landowner. For once, they had won. 

When I met Pritchard and three other directors last May, they were fresh from the Orbex factory near Inverness, where they had seen the rocket for the first time. Pritchard had offered to take me to the spaceport site, so I trailed her car south along the Kyle, past the Melness graveyard, and onto the road that traverses the Moine. After a few miles, we pulled into a small rest stop on the side of the road. The Flow Country’s great carbon sink stretched out to the south. I wiped the rain off a pair of binoculars and focused on a spot a couple of kilometers north of the road. Orbex now has several launch contracts with satellite companies, and there, above a patch of darker bog, I saw a small hill where, later this year, construction on the spaceport will begin.

The wind was vicious, and convoys of supercars were zipping past at frightening speeds. The road across the Moine forms part of the North Coast 500 scenic route, another regional development scheme and a magnet for Ferraris and Lamborghinis. (Povlsen is a major investor.) We sheltered in Pritchard’s vehicle, which shook from the extravagant traffic. She cast her eyes over the sea of heather to the mountains. “I don’t think this is a ruined landscape,” Pritchard said. “Crofters have been managing this land sustainably for generations.”

Will the spaceport save Melness? For a community that has long been a forgotten corner, the promise of a cosmic horizon has metaphorical force. It may not, however, be the fix locals are counting on. The new Scottish space industry is enriching the high-tech economies of cities like Inverness, but it is doubtful that the first wave of engineering jobs will go to locals, as Pritchard hopes, due to a lack of relevant expertise. Ultimately, it is difficult to justify increasing the threats to the fragile carbon sink. Plus, NASA has found that as many as one in 20 rocket launches end in failure; to those under the azimuth, that is not a reassuring number. And yet, in spite of all of that, Sutherland Spaceport, as it is now known, represents a rare victory for the downtrodden in one of the most unequal parts of the Western world.

On my last day in Melness, the rain hesitated, so I took a hike from Tongue up to the ruin of Castle Varrich, now owned by Wildland. The path up the hill to Clan Mackay’s ancient tower leads through a Povlsen birch woodland. Swallows were diving above streams fringed with purple wildflowers, and bees hummed in the sunny clearings. The forest was scattered with wind-felled trees with roots swinging in the breeze that, somehow, managed to keep growing. I stepped into the castle, which Wildland had restored in 2018, and climbed up a metal staircase to a viewing platform, installed by Wildland. At the top I had a clear view of the Moine. On launch days, it occurred to me, there would be few spots better than this one—the wind-battered stronghold of Clan Mackay turned jewel of Wildland Ltd.—to watch a rocket ascend into the thermosphere.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

The Spaceport at the Edge of the World

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NASA’s Martian rover has finished hoarding samples that might contain proof of ancient life

The study focused on a person’s functional connectivity — a measure that tests how well different brain regions interact with one another.

According to the study authors, this is the first controlled experiment to show evidence of humans showing altered brain network connectivity as a result of air pollution exposure.

“For many decades, scientists thought the brain may be protected from the harmful effects of air pollution,” says Chris Carlsten, a professor and head of respiratory medicine and the Canada Research Chair in occupational and environmental lung disease at UBC, in a university release. “This study, which is the first of its kind in the world, provides fresh evidence supporting a connection between air pollution and cognition.”

The team briefly exposed 25 healthy adults to either diesel exhaust or filtered air in a lab. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure their brain activity before and after each exposure. One of the areas they looked at for possible changes is the brain’s default mode network (DMN). The DMN includes several brain regions connected together that play a part in people’s internal thoughts and memories. The fMRI scans show that people exposed to diesel exhaust have lower DMN activity compared to the air-filtered group.

fMRI shows decreased functional connectivity in the brain following exposure to traffic pollution. (Credit: University of British Columbia)

“We know that altered functional connectivity in the DMN has been associated with reduced cognitive performance and symptoms of depression, so it’s concerning to see traffic pollution interrupting these same networks,” explains study first author Jodie Gawryluk, a psychology professor at the University of Victoria. “While more research is needed to fully understand the functional impacts of these changes, it’s possible that they may impair people’s thinking or ability to work.”

The good news is that the neurological effects from diesel exhaust were temporary. Every person exposed to air pollution had their brain activity return to normal. However, the study authors speculate that long-term exposure, like sitting in gridlock traffic every day, may cause more permanent damage. While we don’t know how much car exhaust could cause long-lasting brain damage, Dr. Carlsten says it’s better to minimize any exposure in the first place.

“People may want to think twice the next time they’re stuck in traffic with the windows rolled down,” says Dr. Carlsten. “It’s important to ensure that your car’s air filter is in good working order, and if you’re walking or biking down a busy street, consider diverting to a less busy route.”

The study is published in Environmental Health.

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David Masopust has long imagined how to push immune systems to their limits—how to rally the most powerful army of protective cells. But one of the big mysteries of immunology is that so far, nobody knows what those limits are. So he hatched a project: to keep mouse immune cells battle-ready as long as possible. “The idea was, let’s keep doing this until the wheels fall off the bus,” says Masopust, a professor of immunology at the University of Minnesota.

But the wheels never fell off. He was able to keep those mouse cells alive longer than anyone thought possible—indeed, much longer than the mice themselves.

When your body first detects foreign bacteria, cancer, a virus, or vaccine, the immune system’s T cells log the presence of that invader, kill the cells it’s infected, and form new T cells that carry the memory of how to fight it. Should the same intruder return later on, that protective T-cell army will swell to meet it. 

But researchers have noticed that if you stimulate these T cells too many times, they’ll get exhausted—they’ll become less responsive to threats and eventually die. “It was a concern,” says Masopust. “Raising too large of an army would turn the army into a bunch of zombie soldiers.” Immunologists have considered this a fundamental limit on T cells’ capacity to fight threats. Masopust, however, wasn’t sold. “We wanted to test this principle.”

His team’s experiment began by dosing mice with a viral vaccine that stirs up T cells. About two months later, they gave them another shot to rally the cells again for stronger immune memory. Then a third boost two months later. At this point, the immunized mouse T cells were absolutely amped. “They were too good at destroying whatever I gave them,” Masopust says. “The viruses get snuffed out too quickly.” 

This didn’t satisfy Masopust, so his team took cells from the immunized mice’s spleens and lymph nodes, expanded the cell populations in test tubes, injected about 100,000 into new mice, and began immunizing them the same way. Once again, the mice got three shots over about 6 months. And once again, the T-cells kept fighting.

So the scientists repeated the process again, taking the cells from this second generation of mice and injecting them into a third. And a fourth. And ultimately a seventeenth. They had created a kind of relay, in which the immune cells passed from one generation of mice to another eventually outlived the original mice. (They also outlasted the gigs of the first two researchers assigned to the project.) In results published on January 18 in Nature, Masopust’s team reports keeping this T-cell army alive and active for 10 years—longer than four mouse lifespans. It’s the first evidence of such extreme longevity.

“T cells are born to be sprinters, but can be trained to become marathon runners” thanks to repeated exposure to a challenge—like a virus—followed by rest periods, Masopust says. The genetic changes exhibited by these cells after 10 years of this “training” may well describe what an extraordinarily fit T cell looks like. Masopust thinks that researchers can glean lessons from this experiment in order to treat cancer, create better vaccines, and understand or even slow human aging: “It’s spun off into so many different interesting questions that transcend immunology.”

“It’s probably one of the most extraordinary papers in immunology that I’ve seen, easily in the past decade,” says John Wherry, director of the Institute of Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “It tells us that immunity can be incredibly durable, if we understand how to generate it properly.” 

Andrew Soerens, a postdoctoral immunologist who inherited the project 21 immunizations in, didn’t expect it to become his main responsibility. “It felt like it could be the worst project ever, because it had no endpoint in mind. Or, it could be pretty cool because it was interesting biology,” he recalls. 

This project is not something a researcher would ever write a grant proposal for. It’s an exploration that threatens to reverse an entrenched idea—that T cells have an intrinsically limited capacity to fight—with no guarantee of success. “It’s almost a historically monumental experiment to do. No one does an experiment that lasts 10 years,” says Wherry. “It’s antithetical to funding mechanisms, and a five-year funding cycle—which really means every three years you have to be doing something new. It’s antithetical to the way we train our students and postdocs who typically are in a lab for four or five years. It’s antithetical to the short attention span of scientists and the scientific environment we live in. So it really says something fundamental about really, really wanting to address a critically important question.”

Indeed, the project remained unfunded for the first eight years, surviving just on lab members’ spare time. But its central question was ambitious: Must immune cells age? In 1961, microbiologist Leonard Hayflick argued that all of our cells (except eggs, sperm, and cancer) could only divide a finite number of times. In the 1980s, researchers advanced the idea that this might play out through the erosion of protective telomeres—a sort of aglet at the end of chromosomes—which shorten when cells divide. After enough divisions, there’s no more telomere left to protect the genes. 

This project challenged the Hayflick limit, and it soon commanded most of Soerens’ time: He’d run down to the mouse colony to immunize, take samples, and start new cohorts of T-cell armies. He’d count cells and parse the blend of proteins they produced, noting what had changed over the years. Such differences can indicate changes in a cell’s genetic expression—or even mutations in the gene sequence.

One day, a change stood out: high levels of protein associated with cell death, called PD1. It’s usually a sign of cell exhaustion. But these cells were not exhausted. They continued to proliferate, combat microbial infections, and form long-lived memory cells, all functions the lab considered markers of fitness and longevity. “I was kind of shocked,” Soerens says. “That was probably the first time that I was actually very confident that this was something.” 

So the lab kept going, and going. Finally, says Masopust, “the question was, how long is long enough to keep this going before you’ve made your point?” Ten years, or four lifetimes, felt right. “An extreme of nature demonstration was where it was good enough for me.” (For the record: All those cell cohorts are still going.)

Susan Kaech, a professor and director of immunobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, points out that long-lived immune memory isn’t groundbreaking itself—human T cells can survive for decades if they remain unassailed. What’s really unprecedented is that these have been subjected to a 10-year beatdown: “It’d be like running a marathon every month,” says Kaech, “and you never got winded and your time never got longer.”

To Kaech, who was not involved in the study, the results hint that we’d benefit from tailoring vaccination programs to T cells, and beefing up the immune response by repeatedly challenging those cells, as Masopust’s triple-immunization strategy did for the mice. And immunologists have seen—with SARS-CoV-2 for example—that T cells bring the longest-lasting immunity. “As we saw the [SARS-CoV-2] virus mutate away from our antibody responses,” she says, “people were still protected—in part because they had a wide array of memory T cells that recognized other parts of the virus.”

The new study may also provide insights for treating cancer. Tumors hammer T cells nonstop, and eventually wear them down. “We see this exhaustion and this functional impairment kick in. We don’t really know exactly why,” says Jeff Rathmell, an immunologist at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the work. “The whole goal of cancer immunotherapy is to overcome that. And this just shows you that it’s not like the cells have any intrinsic limit. They can continue to go and go and go.”

Rathmell thinks the insights from this paper might help advance a new approach called CAR-T therapy, in which doctors take a patient’s T cells and genetically modify them to better attack their tumor. Masopust’s team doesn’t yet know what genetic changes explain the mouse cells’ extraordinary fitness, but he and Rathmell think that mimicking those changes could make CAR-T more powerful. 

Alternatively, if the long-lived cells produce more of a certain protein that could support immune cell function in patients with cancer, chronic viral infections, or autoimmune diseases, that could be useful information for drug developers.

He and Wherry hope that Masopust’s mice can be a model for healthier aging. As people get older, their immune health declines as some T cells stay healthy, but others die or tire out. Pinpointing which genetic changes explain why some cells can achieve extreme longevity may offer clues about how to extend human immune health. “If T cells can stay alive forever,” Wherry wonders, “how do we actually keep the good T cells around?”

There are other big questions to answer, too, like why these mouse cells were able to proliferate without becoming cancerous—do they have some outrageous knack for repairing themselves to prevent mutation? Why does rest between viral challenges seem to be so important, and how long does that rest have to last? And was Hayflick perhaps too pessimistic? “The Hayflick limit has been around forever. But this data would say that it’s incomplete, or maybe even just wrong,” says Rathmell. “I mean, talk about a finding that changes dogma.”

The Case of the Incredibly Long-Lived Mouse Cells

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The iceberg calved when the crack known as Chasm-1 fully extended through the ice shelf. The break off is the second major calving from this area in the last two years and has taken place a decade after scientists at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) first detected growth of vast cracks in the ice.

The Brunt Ice Shelf is the location of BAS Halley Research Station. BAS glaciologists, who have been monitoring the behavior of the ice shelf, say that the area of the ice shelf where the research station is located currently remains unaffected by the recent calving events.

The glaciological structure of the Brunt Ice Shelf is complex, and the impact of calving events is unpredictable. In 2016, BAS took the precaution of relocating Halley Research Station 23 km inland of Chasm-1 after it began to widen. 

Halley VI Research Station on the Brunt Ice Shelf. Credit: BAS

 

Since 2017, staff has been deployed to the station only during the Antarctic summer (between November to March). Currently, 21 staff are on station working to maintain the power supplies and facilities that keep the scientific experiments operating remotely through the winter. Their work will continue until they are collected by aircraft around February 6.

Professor Dame Jane Francis, Director of BAS says:

“Our glaciologists and operations teams have been anticipating this event. Measurements of the ice shelf are carried out multiple times a day using an automated network of high-precision GPS instruments that surround the station. These measure how the ice shelf is deforming and moving, and are compared to satellite images from ESA, NASA and the German satellite TerraSAR-X. All data are sent back to Cambridge for analysis, so we know what is happening even in the Antarctic winter – when there is no staff on the station, it is dark for 24 hours and the temperature falls below minus 50 degrees C (or -58°F).”

Graphic shows Chasm-1 has calved a huge iceberg the size of Greater London. Credit: BAS

 

Professor Dominic Hodgson, BAS glaciologist adds:

“This calving event has been expected and is part of the natural behavior of the Brunt Ice Shelf. It is not linked to climate change. Our science and operational teams continue to monitor the ice shelf in real-time to ensure it is safe, and to maintain the delivery of the science we undertake at Halley.”

About Halley VI

Halley VI Research Station is an internationally important platform for atmospheric and space weather observation in a climate-sensitive zone. In 2013, the station attained the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) Global station status, becoming the 29th in the world and 3rd in Antarctica.

Halley VI Research Station sits on Antarctica’s up-to-150-m-thick Brunt Ice Shelf. This floating ice shelf flows at a rate of up to 2 km per year west towards the sea where, at irregular intervals, it calves off icebergs.

Halley VI Research Station has been unoccupied during the last six winters because of the complex and unpredictable glaciological situation.

The changes in the Brunt Ice Shelf are a natural process. There is no connection to the rapid calving events seen on Larsen C Ice Shelf which had extensive surface meltwater at the time of its collapse, and no evidence that climate change has played a significant role.

During the 2016-17 Antarctic Summer season (Nov-March), in anticipation of calving, the eight station modules were uncoupled and transported by tractor to a safer location upstream of Chasm-1.

Over the summer 2018-19, BAS installed an autonomous power generation and management system – Halley Automation project – which provides a suite of scientific instruments with power even when there are no staff at the station. This system has proved effective in running through more than eight months of darkness, extreme cold, high winds and blowing snow and delivering important data back to UK.

There have been six Halley research stations on the Brunt Ice Shelf since 1956.

About Chasm-1

In 2012, satellite monitoring revealed the first signs of change in a chasm (Chasm-1) that had lain dormant for at least 35 years.  This change had implications for the operation of Halley VI Research Station. In the 2015-16 field season, glaciologists used ice penetrating radar technologies to ‘ground truth’ satellite images and to calculate the most likely path and speed of Chasm 1. Chasm-1 has continued to grow since 2015 and by December 2022 extended across the entire ice shelf marking the beginning of the calving event.

About the A74 iceberg

In October 2016, a new crack known as Halloween Crack was detected some 17 km to the north of the research station across the route sometimes used to resupply Halley. By late 2020 another new crack had appeared further north, and an iceberg (now known as A74) calved in February 2021. This iceberg has now drifted away from the Brunt Ice Shelf into the Weddell Sea.

About the new iceberg

The new iceberg formed along the line of Chasm-1 and is slightly larger than A74. It is likely to follow the path of A74 in the Antarctic Coastal Current and BAS glaciologists will track its movement. It will be given a name by the U.S. National Ice Center.

The Brunt Ice Shelf is probably the most closely monitored ice shelf on Earth. A network of 16 GPS instruments measure the deformation of the ice and report this back on an hourly basis. European Space Agency satellite imagery (Sentinel 2), TerraSAR-X,

NASA Worldview satellite images, US Landsat 8 images, ground penetrating radar, and on-site drone footage have been critical in providing the basis for early warning of changes to the Brunt Ice Shelf. These data have provided science teams with a number of ways to measure the cracks with very high precision. In addition, scientists have used computer models and bathymetric maps to predict how close the ice shelf was to calving.

About Halley science

• Ozone measurements have been made continuously at Halley since 1956 (which led to the discovery of the ozone hole in 1985, and since that time, its slow progress towards recovery)
• Monitoring of space weather undertaken at Halley contributes to the Space Environment Impacts Expert Group that provides advice to UK Government on the impact of space weather on UK infrastructure and business.

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After a failure 4 months ago, the New Shepard spacecraft remains in limbo

One of these moments came in the 1970s when oil giant Exxon chose to ignore its own commissioned research on the impact of fossil fuels. A new analysis published in the journal Science has found that Exxon’s forecasts from that era have proven incredibly accurate, yet it did not act to prevent its own predictions from happening.

Instead, the company chose to maintain its role as an oil company and fund people to question the science and delay a coherent response. Staggeringly, in 1996 the company’s chief executive, Lee Raymond, referred to “the unproven theory that [fossil fuels] affect the earth’s climate”. The company, now known as ExxonMobil, denies the allegations, saying “those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions”.

So what if the senior executives of Exxon had seen their own research as a business opportunity? Here’s one way things might have worked out.

Ahead of the emissions curve

Following the publication of terrifying research by Exxon in the late 1970s and the “energy crisis” in 1979, the policy direction of the US changes forever.

Nasa’s earth sciences funding is soon increased. The agency responds enthusiastically by launching several satellites which over the 1980s confirms the Exxon research beyond any reasonable doubt – the world is indeed warming, thanks to human-caused emissions.

Senator (and in this world future president) Al Gore invites Nasa’s James Hansen to present his findings, supported by the work of Exxon, to congress. As a result the US government commits to a net zero carbon economy by 2000. (A similar presentation happened in our world but, faced with greater scientific scepticism, it didn’t have much immediate policy impact.)

Solar provides power – and food

Following this, Exxon establishes a massive solar thermal power plant in the Californian desert. Unfortunately, complex engineering and intermittent energy production make it a challenging addition to the US energy grid. However, after ten years of research, the tech is exported to Egypt and Morocco where the output was more than enough to power these countries.

Further research results in enormous economic growth as the technology not only produces power but food through the use of seawater greenhouses. By 2000, North Africa is the main exporter of large solar power plants around the world. This economic success is matched in northern Europe with government-supported firms developing offshore wind turbines and tidal power throughout the 90s.

Petrol becomes a quaint hobby

Back in the US, Exxon teams up with General Motors to develop in the late 1980s the first production electric vehicle, the EV1. (This existed in our world too, but not until a decade later). The car uses Nasa-patented batteries and space-age materials to produce cars that outperform petroleum vehicles in every area but extreme range.

Exxon’s PR machine devises a “plugging into the Sun” programme promoting micro rooftop solar panels that refuel the EV1s for free. Millions of systems are manufactured and installed by subsidiaries of Exxon making it the wealthiest “energy” company on the planet.

The micro-grids developed for car charging are also suitable for developing countries without large electrical grids. A second wave of development occurs, this time driven internally by countries across the southern hemisphere. Exxon is held up as alleviating extreme poverty across the world and improving the lives of billions.

By the late 1990s, huge “liquid metal” batteries allow inter-seasonal energy storage, creating an energy reserve sufficient to allow the roll out of large wind and solar projects around the world. This makes coal and oil too expensive for energy production and its use is ramped down and eventually put into the history books by 1997.

The use of petroleum and gas does continue in the domestic sector, but construction moves beyond the need for active heating and cooling by the end of the decade and use of petroleum cars is seen as a quaint hobby for those that wish to use this very risky fuel.

Collapse averted

The age of oil is not entirely over. Demand for petrol continues at a level that oil companies are still able to make a small profit (environmentalists claim the oil companies are making “gas cars” cool so they don’t lose their final market).

However, seeing the opportunity for the manufacture of gasoline, many renewable energy firms begin the manufacture of “synth oil”, another space age output. The mineral oil companies push back but are unable to compete with the extremely low energy prices of synth oil as it uses virtually free energy from renewable energy systems off-peak.

By the 2000s, human society produces barely any greenhouse gases for manufacturing, transport or energy. Things are not perfect, and there are concerns about poverty, conflict, resources running out and the ecological impact of 8 billion humans and their dietary choices. The challenge for a stable, sustainable human society continues.

But climatic collapse – as we understand it in our world today – has largely been avoided.

And Exxon? Much like in our own timeline, Exxon is one of the world’s largest companies. But its massive rollout of distributed solar systems has also made it one of the world’s most liked companies.

In our world, former US vice president Al Gore won the Nobel peace prize in 2007 together with the UN’s climate advisory body, the IPCC. In this world, Gore still gets a Nobel for his work in the 1990s, but shares it with Exxon CEO Lee Raymond – there is less need for an IPCC as scientists were listened to three decades previously.

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People are exposed to numerous chemicals throughout their lifetimes. These chemicals can be from the air, foods, personal care items, household products and medications. Unfortunately, exposure to certain chemicals can cause harmful health effects,

including cancer. Substances that cause cancer are called carcinogens. Familiar examples include tobacco smoke, radon, asbestos and diesel engine exhaust.

To protect the health of the public, national and international health agencies evaluate many new and existing chemicals to determine if they are likely to be carcinogens in a process called cancer hazard identification. If agencies judge the chemicals to be carcinogenic, they conduct further assessments to determine the level of risk, and legislators may put regulations in place to limit, or completely halt, the production and use of these chemicals.

I am a scientist who studies how the human body processes foreign chemicals, like environmental pollutants and drugs, and the effects of these chemicals on health. As part of my work, I have participated in chemical and cancer hazard identifications for several agencies, including the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. Here’s how chemicals can cause cancer, and how we classify chemicals based on on how carcinogenic they are – sometimes with controversial results.

Glyphosate, an herbicide used in products like Roundup, was classified by the IARC as carcinogenic to humans in 2015. Image credit: FrankHH/Shutterstock.com

How do chemicals cause cancer?

The mechanisms behind how toxic chemicals can lead to cancer are complex.

After a person is exposed to a carcinogen, the chemical is generally absorbed into the body and distributed into different tissues. Once the chemical has moved into the cells, it often undergoes chemical reactions that convert it into other forms.

The products of these reactions can directly or indirectly affect the cell’s genes. Altering genes, which contain the cell’s instructions on how to produce specific molecules, or the processes that regulate them can ultimately result in dysfunctional cells if the genetic damage isn’t repaired. These cells don’t respond normally to cellular signals and can grow and divide at abnormal rates, which are characteristic features of cancer cells.

How are chemicals classified for carcinogenicity?

To help safeguard the public and reduce the incidence of cancer, several agencies have developed procedures to classify and categorize chemicals based on their potential to be carcinogenic.

Among them are the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC Monographs; the National Toxicology Program, or NTP; and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. In general, these agencies examine a critical question: How strong is the evidence that a substance causes cancer or biological changes that could be related to cancer in people? Understanding the procedures used to answer this question can help with interpreting the decisions these agencies make.

The procedures used by the IARC – because of its long history, credibility and strong international reputation – provide a good example of how this process works. It’s designed to be transparent and minimize bias, spanning over a year from selecting a chemical for evaluation to its final classification.

In this process, the IARC selects and invites a panel of scientific experts on the chemical to be evaluated. The panel does not conduct new research on its own, but carefully reviews all available papers in the scientific literature on the chemical’s carcinogenicity in cell and bacterial cultures, animals and people. To assess the strength of the evidence, the panel carefully considers the number of studies that are available and the consistency of the results, as well as the scientific quality and relevance of each study to cancer in people.

Chemicals can be carcinogenic to varying degrees.

After discussing and deliberating on the results, the panel makes a final consensus classification. This classification places the chemical into one of four groups: Group 1 indicates that the chemical is carcinogenic to people, Group 2A that it is probably carcinogenic to people, Group 2B that it is possibly carcinogenic to people, and Group 3 that it is not classifiable. A Group 3 classification does not indicate that the compound is not carcinogenic, but rather that the panel could not draw a conclusion about whether there is a causal link between the chemical and cancer from available studies. For example, exposure to several chemicals can make it unclear which ones are responsible for a later cancer diagnosis.

During its 50-year history, the IARC has evaluated and classified over 1,000 chemicals and other hazards. Many of these classifications have had broad societal implications, such as those for tobacco smoke, ambient air pollution, diesel engine exhaust and processed meat. All were classified as Group 1, or confirmed to be carcinogenic to humans. Electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile phones was classified as Group 2B, or possibly carcinogenic, and red meat was classified as Group 2A, or probably carcinogenic. Though they haven’t directly led to any regulations, these classifications have motivated additional scientific studies. While the IARC can advise regulators, it’s up to countries to implement policies.

It is important to note that classifications do not indicate the size of the risk but are important in supporting health agencies worldwide as they implement actions to limit exposures to known, probable and possible carcinogens. In 2020, when the IARC classified opium consumption as Group 1, or carcinogenic to humans, this led the government of Iran to implement policies to reduce opium addiction in the country.

Controversies in carcinogenicity classifications

Though classifications from the IARC are based on robust scientific evidence, some have proved to be controversial.

For instance, in 2015, the IARC evaluated the carcinogenicity of glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller found in products like Roundup, which is produced by Monsanto. A panel of 17 experts from 11 countries systematically reviewed results from over 1,000 scientific studies and classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” or Group 2A.

Owing to its widespread usage and multibillion-dollar market value, a cancer classification decision for glyphosate has significant potential financial and legal consequences. Following its evaluation, the IARC received support from many regulatory and scientific bodies but was criticized by others. Other agencies, including the EPA, have seen similar controversies and politicization of their hazard identifications and regulatory decisions.

I believe that agencies like the IARC play a critical role in evaluating the health effects of certain chemicals and in reducing exposure to potential carcinogens. Helping people better understand how these agencies evaluate chemicals can go a long way to ensure transparency and help protect environmental and public health.

Brad Reisfeld, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Colorado State University

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

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Shark fans, look away: it seems some of us may have been unknowingly eating some of the oceans’ most remarkable and endangered apex predators. A new study used DNA barcoding to analyze the contents of “flake” –  an umbrella term used for fish fillets – sold across South Australia, and found that much of the product being sold contained shark species that weren’t meant to be in the mix, including the short-fin mako and smooth hammerhead.

The gummy (Mustelus antarcticus) and New Zealand rig (Mustelus lenticulatus) sharks both fall under the umbrella term flake, as sustainably fished shark species recommended for consumption by the Australian Fish Names Standard (AFNS). However, the classification system isn’t mandatory in Australia, which leaves room for other shark species being wrongfully included in flake products.

“Ultimately, the lack of clear national guidelines or labelling laws that safeguard authenticity and compliance on the sale of shark meat (e.g., show species or origin of catch) potentially opens the door to fraudulent practices,” wrote the researchers behind the new study.

“Flake is a key part of traditional fish and chip sales in Australia, and this study aimed to evaluate the mislabelling rate associated with shark products sold under the umbrella term ‘flake’ and compare it with the AFNS recommended guidelines and list of commercial designations.”

Their DNA barcoding technique used the mitochondrial COI gene to identify species included within flake, and look for sharks not included under the AFNS guidelines and possibly even threatened species. Not all samples were able to return a clean sequence, possibly due to lower DNA quality or damage from being processed and cooked.

Of those that were able to return a sequence, they found at least nine species of sharks, including species that fall under the IUCN Red List as threatened, and sharks that are under Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) protection.

Only 27 percent of samples tested adhered to the AFNS guidelines of containing gummy shark, demonstrating that the wiggle room for squeezing in other species is being exercised. The food fraud may be being committed knowingly or unknowingly, but regardless it demonstrates that improper regulation is putting threatened species at risk, and preventing consumer confidence in what we are eating when we order fish and chips.

“Ultimately, the umbrella term flake allowed for species misrepresentation but DNA barcoding was an effective tool to test ambiguous labelling in processed and cooked shark meat products,” concluded the authors, “and can guide policy, management, and compliance efforts to mitigate mislabelling, empowering consumers to make informed decisions and champion sustainable seafood.”

The study was published in the journal Food Control.

Source

On Halloween day 1941, the 14-year long effort to carve 18-meter (60-foot) tall faces into the side of Mount Rushmore was finally completed. Forming the iconic Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, the structure displays the profiles of US presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. But did you know behind these stoney facades sits an enormous incomplete hidden chamber?

Carved by Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the faces making up the “Shrine of Democracy” were chosen to represent the nation’s birth, growth, development, and preservation.

The original plans, however, intended to include figures more relevant to the west, including Sioux chief Red Cloud. A leader of the Oglala Teton Dakota, Red Cloud fought to protect the western territories from US government efforts to build roads across Native American land between 1865 and 1867.

But after Borglum was assigned the role of lead sculptor, the plans were scrapped in favor of including figures with more national, as opposed to local, significance.

Suffragette Susan B. Anthony was also intended to be featured on the structure, to recognize her role in establishing equal voting rights for women through her formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. However, these plans were also scrapped, as the bill proposing her inclusion came in too late after construction had already begun.

In addition to sculptural changes, Borglum had initially intended to carve a written description detailing the nine most important events in US history between 1776 and 1906 into the rockface surrounding the gargantuan sculptures. However, this plan too was scrapped after establishing how unfeasibly large the text would need to be to be legible from the ground.

Borglum instead decided to create a large room inside the structure called The Hall of Records, which would be accessible through a cavern at the back of the mountain. With the room measuring 24 by 30 meters (80 by 100 feet), he planned to erect a 243-meter (800-foot) granite staircase leading to a doorway 6 meters (20 feet) high and 4 meters (14 feet) wide carved into the outside rock.

At the entrance of the hall, a 12-meter (38-foot) bronze eagle was planned to sit above the door, along with the words “America’s Onward March”. The enormous room was intended to house glass cabinets containing the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and other historical documents.

Additionally, the room was to serve as his artist’s statement, allowing Borglum to detail the story and meaning behind his work. Borglum intended the chamber to be reserved for future civilizations, with the thought that the presently recognisable faces may one day become a mystery of forgotten origin.

These plans, however, never came to fruition. Following Borglum’s death in 1941, before the completion of the chamber, plans to continue the works were scrapped and the sculpture was instead declared complete in the same year.

The incomplete entrance to The Hall of Records. Image credit: NPS, Mount Rushmore National Memorial

The structure standing today is an inaccessible 5-meter (18-foot) doorway leading to a partially constructed 23-meter (75-foot) long empty room, with ceilings reaching 11 meters (35 feet).

Despite never finishing construction of the chamber, a repository of records was added to the Hall of Records' door in 1998. Inside the repository, carved on porcelain enamel panels, is the story of how Mount Rushmore came to be, a brief history of the four featured presidents, a biography of the sculptor, and words from the Declaration of Independence.

Engraved on the capstone casing for the repository of records is Borglum’s quote:

"...let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away." 

Source

Selfie mania in wild beauty spots is definitely a thing – but this camera hog had no real idea what she was doing.

When a curious bear stumbled upon a wildlife motion-activated camera near Boulder, Colorado, she ended up triggering hundreds of “selfies”, officials have said.

Coyotes, beavers, mountain lions, black bears, all kinds of birds and many other creatures inhabit the landscape outside town, and Boulder’s open space and mountain parks department – which states its function as preserving and protecting the natural environment and land resources – set out to monitor them.

But they were amazed when they checked one camera out of many they have placed across thousands of acres and found that out of 580 images on it about 400 were of one bear, NBC News reported.

A black bear was caught on a wildlife camera posing for hundreds of ‘selfies’. Photograph: City Of Boulder Open Space And Mountain Parks

In one shot, the bear was snapped popping its tongue out. Photograph: City Of Boulder Open Space And Mountain Parks

Another shot captured the bear in three-quarter pose. Photograph: City Of Boulder Open Space And Mountain Parks

‘Is this my best side?’: yet another view of the ‘selfie-crazy’ bear. Photograph: City Of Boulder Open Space And Mountain Parks

Most animals don’t notice the cameras, but officials said the bear appeared enthralled by this one.

“In this instance, a bear took a special interest in one of our wildlife cameras and took the opportunity to capture hundreds of ‘selfies’,” an open space and mountain parks spokesperson, Phillip Yates, told NBC in a statement this week.

“These pictures made us laugh, and we thought others would, too,” Yates added.

The bear can be seen from a number of angles, full face staring into the lens, just a paw, tongue out, a backside walking away and various other shots.

The department uses images recorded by the cameras to map wildlife habits and habitat, and to monitor land use and protection needs for wilderness areas.

Source

6.8 million dead

Since early 2020, more than 6.8 million deaths from COVID-19 have been officially recorded, out of 752 million cases worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 27.

The United Nations' health agency, however, considers the figures to be greatly underestimated, saying the real toll could be two to three times higher.

13 billion jabs

Some 13.25 billion anti-COVID vaccine shots have been administered around the world, according to Our World in Data (OWID) on January 30.

While 69.4 percent of the world's population has received at least one dose, only 26.4 percent has in lower-income countries.

Six out of 10 in lockdown

At the height of the first wave of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, more than 4.5 billion people in 110 countries or territories were forced or called on to stay at home to fight the spread of the virus, according to an AFP count on April 17, 2020.

That represents nearly 60 percent of the world's population.

Eight schoolchildren out of 10 at home

On April 20, 2020, schools and universities were closed in 151 countries, affecting 1.29 billion youths, or 81.8 percent of schoolchildren and students around the world, according to UNESCO.

Hundreds of billions of masks

On public transport, in schools, in shops and even in the open air, masks have become the most symbolic accessory of the pandemic.

From March to end December 2020, China alone exported 224 billion masks around the world, according to Chinese customs figures.

3.1 percent global GDP drop

By bringing activity to a halt in numerous economic sectors, the pandemic led to a 3.1 percent fall in global gross domestic product in 2020, according to the World Bank. By comparison, GDP fell by 1.3 percent in 2009 during the sub-prime crisis.

GDP then bounced back by 5.9 percent at the world level in 2021.

135 million jobs lost

The pandemic had a heavy impact on employment, with 135 million jobs lost in 2020, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

Although the situation has started to pick up, 56 million more people are out of work in 2022 than before the pandemic, and an estimated 37 million are expected to remain so in 2023.

60 percent fewer air passengers

Air travel was hard hit by the pandemic with its lockdowns and border closures. In 2020, the number of passengers more than halved, down 60 percent compared to 2019, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). The aviation industry has yet to fully recover.

In 2022, the number of passengers is expected to be 27 to 29 percent lower than that of 2019.

5.2 percent less carbon emissions

Carbon emissions dropped by a record 5.2 percent in 2020, according to the Global Carbon Project (GCP) in November 2022.

That was not sufficient to stop global warming and its impacts in their tracks. The decrease was over a short period. Emissions are expected to hit record levels in 2022.

A quarter more depressions

Cases of anxiety and depression around the world increased by 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic, according to the WHO in March 2022.

Blaming the unprecedented stress caused by social isolation during the pandemic, it said young people and women were the most badly affected.

© 2023 AFP

Source

In 1999, biologist Günter Blobel won the Nobel Prize for his work in protein synthesis, but this new AI powered tech may already be outpacing it. ProGen speeds up the creation of new proteins, which can be used for many things like medicines or breaking down plastic in landfills, presumably aiding us in avoiding the looming Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505.

"The artificial designs are better than ones made by the normal process," said James Fraser, a scientist involved in the project. "We can now make specific types of enzymes, like ones that work well in hot temperatures or acid."

To make ProGen, the scientists at Salesforce fed the system amino acid sequences from 280 million different proteins. The AI system quickly made a staggering one million protein sequences, of which 100 were picked to test. Out of these, five were made into actual proteins and tested in cells. That's just 0.0005% of the generated results! It seems like the next frontier is to develop an AI to test all the possibilities. Two of the artificial enzymes were just as good at breaking down bacteria as the natural enzymes found in egg whites. Even still, the two were only 18% alike.

ProGen was made in 2020 using an LLM originally made for writing text, similar to ChatGPT. The AI system learned the rules and structure of proteins by looking at a lot of data. With proteins, there are a tremendous number of possibilities, but ProGen can still make working enzymes, even when there is a wide variation among the results.

"This is a new tool for protein engineers and we're excited to see what it can be used for," said Ali Madani, a scientist involved in the project. This project seems incredibly valuable, and must have cost Salesforce a fortune to get going, so we're surprised to see that the code for ProGen is available on Github for anyone who wants to try it (or add to it).

Source: Salesforce via New Scientist

Scientists at Salesforce develop proteins with AI that can eat trash

The flight tracker that powered @ElonJet has taken a left turn

One of the oldest and simplest problems in geometry has caught mathematicians off guard—and not for the first time.

Since antiquity, artists and geometers have wondered how shapes can tile the entire plane without gaps or overlaps. And yet, “not a lot has been known until fairly recent times,” said Alex Iosevich, a mathematician at the University of Rochester.

The most obvious tilings repeat: It’s easy to cover a floor with copies of squares, triangles or hexagons. In the 1960s, mathematicians found strange sets of tiles that can completely cover the plane, but only in ways that never repeat.

“You want to understand the structure of such tilings,” said Rachel Greenfeld, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “How crazy can they get?”

Pretty crazy, it turns out.

The first such non-repeating, or aperiodic, pattern relied on a set of 20,426 different tiles. Mathematicians wanted to know if they could drive that number down. By the mid-1970s, Roger Penrose (who would go on to win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on black holes) proved that a simple set of just two tiles, dubbed “kites” and “darts,” sufficed.

It’s not hard to come up with patterns that don’t repeat. Many repeating, or periodic, tilings can be tweaked to form non-repeating ones. Consider, say, an infinite grid of squares, aligned like a chessboard. If you shift each row so that it’s offset by a distinct amount from the one above it, you’ll never be able to find an area that can be cut and pasted like a stamp to re-create the full tiling.

The real trick is to find sets of tiles—like Penrose’s—that can cover the whole plane, but only in ways that don’t repeat.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

Penrose’s two tiles raised the question: Might there be a single, cleverly shaped tile that fits the bill?

Surprisingly, the answer turns out to be yes—if you’re allowed to shift, rotate, and reflect the tile, and if the tile is disconnected, meaning that it has gaps. Those gaps get filled by other suitably rotated, suitably reflected copies of the tile, ultimately covering the entire two-dimensional plane. But if you’re not allowed to rotate this shape, it’s impossible to tile the plane without leaving gaps.

Indeed, several years ago, the mathematician Siddhartha Bhattacharya proved that—no matter how complicated or subtle a tile design you come up with—if you’re only able to use shifts, or translations, of a single tile, then it’s impossible to devise a tile that can cover the whole plane aperiodically but not periodically.

Mathematicians conjectured that Bhattacharya’s two-dimensional result would also hold in higher-dimensional spaces. Just as no aperiodic two-dimensional tile exists, they supposed that no suitable three-dimensional block (or more complicated tile) exists, and so on in an arbitrarily large number of dimensions.

This hypothesis was dubbed the periodic tiling conjecture.

In a preprint posted in November, Greenfeld, along with Terence Tao of UCLA, finally settled the conjecture—but not in the way mathematicians had anticipated. They constructed a tile that can aperiodically fill a high-dimensional space but cannot do so periodically, thus disproving the conjecture.

Rachel Greenfeld wants to find just how crazy tilings can get.Photograph: Dan Komoda/Insitute for Advanced Study

“That was a surprise. I expected the conjecture to be true in all dimensions,” said Mihalis Kolountzakis, a mathematician at the University of Crete. “But I guess in high enough dimensions, intuition does not go very far.”

The strange tile isn’t just noteworthy for pushing the boundaries of what’s geometrically possible and what’s not. It’s also intimately connected to questions beyond geometry—including ones about the limits of logic itself.

The Pivot

In 2019, Greenfeld arrived at UCLA as a postdoctoral researcher, and she and Tao—having both worked independently on another problem related to translational tilings—set their sights on proving the periodic tiling conjecture.

Since the conjecture was already known to be true in one and two dimensions, they sought to prove it in three: to show that if you can shift copies of one shape to tile all of three-dimensional space, then there must be a way to tile the space periodically.

They made some progress, re-proving the conjecture in two dimensions using different techniques—ones they hoped would be applicable to the three-dimensional case. But then they hit a wall. “At some point, we got frustrated and said, ‘OK, maybe there’s a reason why we can’t prove this conjecture in higher dimensions. We should start looking for counterexamples,’” Tao said.

They combed the literature for other aperiodic constructions, starting with the first one: the set of more than 20,000 tiles, published in 1964, that could cover the plane through translations, but only aperiodically. They then got to work developing new techniques for constructing a single aperiodic tile.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

They started with a change of setting. Say you want to tile two-dimensional space. Instead of trying to tile a continuous plane, consider a two-dimensional lattice, an infinite array of points arranged in a grid. You can now define a tile as a finite set of points on that grid; if you have a proper tiling, then you can cover every point in the lattice exactly once by making copies of that finite set of points and sliding them around.

Proving the “discrete” periodic tiling conjecture for high-dimensional lattices is a slightly different problem than proving the continuous version of the conjecture, as there are tilings that are possible in lattices but not in continuous space. But they’re related. Greenfeld and Tao planned to come up with a discrete counterexample to the conjecture that they could then modify to work in the continuous case as well.

In the summer of 2021, they came close, finding two tiles in a very high-dimensional space. The tiles can fill the space they inhabit, but only aperiodically. “This is not enough,” Greenfeld said. “Two is very close, but tiling by two tiles is much less rigid than tiling by a single tile.” It would take another year and a half for them to assemble a true counterexample to the periodic tiling conjecture.

Tile Sandwich

They started by creating a new language, rewriting their problem as a special kind of equation. The unknown “variable” in this equation—what they needed to solve for—represented all possible ways to tile a high-dimensional space. “But it’s hard to describe things with just one equation,” Tao said. “Sometimes you need multiple equations to describe a really complicated set in space.”

“The moment you have even two tiles, they can talk to each other and do really complicated things,” said Terence Tao.Photograph: Alyssa Bierce/UCLA

So Greenfeld and Tao reframed the question they were trying to solve. They realized that they could instead devise a system of equations, where each equation would encode a different constraint on their solution. This let them break up their problem into a question about many different tiles—in this case, tiles that all cover a given space using the same set of translations.

For instance, in two dimensions, you can tile the plane with a square by sliding it up, down, left or right, one unit at a time. But other shapes can also tile the plane using the exact same set of shifts: for example, a square with a bump added to the right edge and removed from the left edge, like a jigsaw puzzle piece.

If you take a square, a puzzle piece, and other tiles that use the same set of shifts, and then stack them together like cold cuts in a sandwich, you can construct one tile that uses a single set of translations to cover three-dimensional space. Greenfeld and Tao would need to do this in many more dimensions.

“Since we were working in high dimensions anyway, adding one more dimension didn’t really hurt us,” Tao said. Rather, it gave them the additional flexibility they’d need to get their hands on a good solution.

The mathematicians sought to reverse this sandwich-building procedure, rewriting their single-equation, high-dimensional tiling problem as a series of tiling equations in lower dimensions. Those equations would later dictate what the higher-dimensional tile construction would look like.

Greenfeld and Tao thought of their system of tiling equations as a computer program: Every line of code, or equation, is a command, and in combination the commands can generate a program that achieves a specific goal. “Logic circuits are built up of very basic objects, these AND gates and OR gates and so forth, each of which is not very interesting,” Tao said. “But you can stack them together, and you can make a circuit that will draw a sine wave or communicate on the internet.”

“So we started viewing our problem as kind of a programming problem,” he continued. Each of their commands would be a different property that their final tiling needed to satisfy, so that the program as a whole would guarantee that any tilings fitting all the criteria must be aperiodic.

The question, then, became what kinds of properties they needed to encode in all those tiling equations to make that happen. A tile in one layer of the sandwich, for instance, might be shaped in a way that would only permit certain kinds of movements. The mathematicians would have to build up their list of constraints carefully—so that it wouldn’t be so restrictive as to preclude any solutions whatsoever, but would be restrictive enough to exclude all periodic solutions.

“The game here is to construct the correct level of constraint,” Greenfeld said, “to encode the correct puzzle.”

Infinite Sudoku

The puzzle that Greenfeld and Tao hoped to program with their tiling equations was a grid with an infinite number of rows and a large but finite number of columns. The mathematicians sought to fill every row and diagonal with particular sequences of digits that corresponded to the kinds of constraints they could describe with tiling equations: something they likened to a giant sudoku puzzle. The pair then found sequences that were aperiodic—meaning that the solution to the associated system of tiling equations was also aperiodic. “There’s basically only one solution to this puzzle, and it’s this funny thing that’s almost but not quite periodic,” Tao said. “That took a lot of time to find.”

“This sort of thing, where you study functions that are almost periodic but not quite, is something that has been around in mathematics,” said Izabella Łaba, a mathematician at the University of British Columbia. “But this is a very different way to use that type of structure.”

As Iosevich put it, Greenfeld and Tao “created a completely elementary object and lifted it up to a situation where things look more complicated.”

Tao explores tiling configurations with his children’s toys in a picture taken by his co-author Rachel Greenfeld.Photograph: Rachel Greenfeld

In doing so, they constructed a high-dimensional aperiodic tile—first in the discrete setting, then in the continuous one. Their tile is so complicated, so full of twists and holes, that it barely tiles space. “It’s a nasty tile,” Tao said. “We did not make any attempt to make this tile pretty.” He and Greenfeld didn’t compute the dimension of the space it lives in; they just know it’s massive, possibly as large as 2100100. (If you tried to write this number out in the pages of all the books in the world, you’d run out of paper.) “Our proof is constructive, so everything is explicit and computable,” Greenfeld said. “But because it’s very, very far from being optimal, we just didn’t check it.”

Indeed, the mathematicians think they can find aperiodic tiles in much lower dimensions. That’s because some of the more technical parts of their construction involved working in special spaces that are conceptually “very close to being two-dimensional,” Greenfeld said. She doesn’t think they’ll find a three-dimensional tile, but she says it’s feasible that a 4D one could exist.

And so, Iosevich said, they didn’t just disprove the periodic tiling conjecture: “They did this in the most humiliating fashion possible.”

Foray Into Incompleteness

The work marks a new way to construct aperiodic tiles—one that Greenfeld and Tao now think could be applied to disproving other tiling-related conjectures. That, in turn, will likely allow mathematicians to push even further at the boundaries of where complexity can arise. “There does seem to be this emerging sort of principle that higher-dimensional geometry is just nasty,” Tao said. “That pathologies can show up, and that the intuition that we get from two and three dimensions can be misleading.”

The work also taps into questions not just about the boundaries of human intuition but about the boundaries of mathematical reasoning. In the 1930s, the mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that any logical system that’s sufficient for developing basic arithmetic is incomplete: There are statements that can be neither proved nor disproved within that system. Mathematics, it turns out, is full of “undecidable” statements.

In a similar vein, it’s also full of computationally undecidable problems—problems that cannot be solved by any algorithm in a finite amount of time. Mathematicians discovered in the 1960s that problems about tilings can also be undecidable. That is, for some sets of shapes, you can prove that it’s impossible to figure out, in finite time, if they tile a given space or not. (The only way to do so, in principle, would be to consider all possible ways to lay tiles next to one another, until the end of time.)

“It’s a very simple-to-state problem, but nonetheless beyond the scope of mathematics,” said Richard Kenyon, a mathematician at Yale University. “It’s not the first example of this situation where a certain mathematical theory is undecidable or incomplete, but it’s really the most down-to-earth one.”

Last year, Greenfeld and Tao found that a general statement about pairs of high-dimensional tiles is undecidable: They proved that nobody will ever be able to figure out if certain pairs of tiles can be made to entirely cover the space they inhabit (whether periodically or aperiodically).

Could a statement about a single tile also be undecidable? It’s been known since the 1960s that if the periodic tiling conjecture were true, then it would always be possible to determine whether any given tile could cover the plane.

But the opposite is not necessarily true. Just because an aperiodic tile exists, that doesn’t imply that an undecidable one does.

That’s what Greenfeld and Tao want to figure out next, using some of the techniques they developed for their recent result. “It’s quite plausible, we think, that the language we created should be able to create an undecidable puzzle,” Tao said. “So there may be some tile for which we will never be able to prove it tiles space or doesn’t tile space.”

To prove that a statement is undecidable, mathematicians typically show that it’s equivalent to another question that’s already known to be undecidable. As a result, if this tiling problem turns out to be undecidable as well, it can serve as one more tool for demonstrating undecidability in other contexts—contexts well beyond questions about how to tile spaces.

In the meantime, though, Greenfeld and Tao’s result serves as a warning of sorts. “Mathematicians like beautiful, clean statements,” Iosevich said. “But don’t believe everything you hear … Unfortunately, it’s not a fact that all interesting statements in mathematics need to be pretty, and that they need to work out the way we want them to.”

‘Nasty’ Geometry Breaks a Decades-Old Tiling Conjecture

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Tuesday, January 31

• The first mission next week is the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying 54 Starlink satellites. Like last time, these are new “Mini” satellites equipped with anti-reflective coatings to make them less of a nuisance to astronomers. The mission will take off at 8:27 a.m. UTC from Florida. If you want to tune into the coverage, just head to SpaceX’s website at launch time.

Sunday, February 5

• The first launch on Sunday will come from SpaceX. It’ll launch a Falcon 9 carrying the Amazonas Nexus communications satellite for Hispasat. The satellite will apparently operate for about 15 years providing service over the Americas and the North Atlantic air corridors. Similar to SpaceX’s launch earlier in the week, this mission should also be available to stream, however, no launch time has yet been provided.
• The second launch of the day will come from Russia. Roscosmos, the country’s space agency, will launch a Proton M rocket carrying the fourth Elektro-L weather satellite, which will be placed in a geostationary orbit. This mission has been delayed a number of times going back to 2019. The mission will launch at 9:12 a.m. UTC but it’s unclear if there’ll be a live stream.

Recap

• The first launch last week was Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket carrying three satellites for HawkEye 360. The mission was dubbed “Virginia is for Launch Lovers” and took off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.

• Next up, we saw the launch of a Mitsubishi H-IIA rocket carrying the IGS Radar-7 satellite from Japan. We don’t usually see this rocket launch that much so it’s an interesting watch.

• Finally, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying the Starlink 69 mission to orbit. It launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

That’s all for this week, TWIRL coverage will resume in late February.

TWIRL 102: SpaceX to launch the Amazonas Nexus satellite and anti-reflective Starlink sats

Last summer, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observed dust blowing 85 miles from its source, Lake Abert and Summer Lake, two dried-up saline lakes in southern Oregon. This has happened before: Saline lakebeds are some of the West’s most significant sources of dust. California's Owens Lake is the nation's largest source of PM10, the tiny pollutants found in dust and smoke, while plumes blowing off the 800 square miles of the Great Salt Lake’s exposed bed have caused toxin-filled dust storms in Salt Lake City.

Saline lakes are rapidly losing water to climate change and agricultural and urban uses, becoming some of the West’s most threatened ecosystems. Now, new legislation is offering some support. On December 27, President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan Saline Lake Ecosystems in the Great Basin States Program Act, which allocates $25 million in funding for research and monitoring at saline lakes across the Great Basin. While this funding is an important step, it cannot give the lakes what they really need: more water.

The Interior West is full of salt lakes, created when snowmelt pools in the valley bottoms of the Basin and Range region. The valleys have no outflow, so the water remains until it evaporates, leaving behind the particles that were suspended in it. These accumulate over time, giving the lakes a high salinity.

“It creates a unique system that supports brine shrimp and alkali flies that can feed incredible populations of migratory birds,” said Ryan Houston, executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, which seeks to conserve Oregon’s high desert, including Summer Lake and Lake Abert.

Yet this balance of runoff, salts, and evaporation also makes saline lakes highly sensitive to climate change. Decreasing snowpack and increasing evaporation due to higher temperatures means that there is less water in the lakes and a higher concentration of salt. That stresses shrimp and flies, which have adapted over time to specific salinities, and it also exposes dry lakebeds, creating dangerous dust storms.

Decades of diversions for agricultural and municipal use have also taken the lakes’ water. California’s Owens Lake, for instance, has been almost completely dry for nearly a century since its water was diverted to Los Angeles. A report released this month by Utah scientists and conservation organizations warned that the combination of water diversions and climate change has put the Great Salt Lake on track to disappear within five years. 

Many see poor air quality as the main reason to save the lakes. But the dust is a sign that the entire ecosystem is withering. Saline lakes are key stops on the Pacific Flyway, the bird migration route that extends from Alaska to Patagonia, Chile. “That we’re worried about dust says to me that we’ve already gone past the point of Lake Abert being lost as part of the Pacific Flyway, its most important ecological value,” said Houston. Over 80 species of birds either inhabit or migrate through Lake Abert, and 338 species depend on the Great Salt Lake.

The new legislation will create a research and monitoring program aimed at conserving salt lakes, including Lake Abert, Summer Lake, the Great Salt Lake, California’s Owens and Mono lakes, and Nevada’s Ruby and Walker lakes. According to David Herbst, a biologist who began conducting research at Mono Lake in the 1970s, because only a “small core of scientists” conducts research on saline lakes, there’s a strong need for more monitoring by federal and state agencies.

Geoffrey McQuilkin, executive director of the Mono Lake Committee, said via email that the act is important “because it funds scientific research that will inform how to successfully manage valuable habitats to preserve their many benefits in the era of climate change.” Clayton Dumont, tribal chairman of the Klamath Tribes, whose traditional territory borders Lake Abert, said, “We’re glad to see anything that will help restore that unique ecosystem.”

This isn’t the first federal program dedicated to the lakes. The 2002 Desert Terminal Lakes Program provided over $200 million to support the conservation of Nevada's saline lakes through scientific research and purchase water rights. The $858 billion defense spending act passed just two weeks ago included $10 million for saline-lakes-related projects to be undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers. And at the state level, Utah’s 2022 Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Act created a $40 million trust directed at conservation of the lake.

But some advocates say that monitoring and research isn’t enough. “This is great! But it doesn't get water to Great Salt Lake,” the organization Save Our Great Salt Lake posted to its Instagram account after the bill passed the Senate.

The question of refilling the lakes is trickier. Water rights are governed by states, making it harder for the federal government to step in. “For lakes where basic measurement, basic monitoring, and some of the basic science is lacking—that's where the federal government and other scientists can come in and provide a tremendous amount of support and information that advocates can use,” said Houston.

Still, most are optimistic now that more attention is being paid to the lakes. “Unfortunately, it’s an exciting time because there’s a crisis,” said Houston. “But it’s an exciting time in terms of a lot of people talking about it.”

The American West’s Salt Lakes Are Turning to Dust

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In 2023, radiologists in hospitals around the world will increasingly use medical images—which include x-rays and CT, MRI, and PET scans—that have been first read and evaluated by AI machines. Gastroenterologists will also be relying on machine vision during colonoscopies and endoscopies to pick up polyps that would otherwise be missed. This progress has been made possible by the extensive validation of “machine eyes”—deep neural networks trained with hundreds of thousands of images that can accurately pick up things human experts can’t. 

One of the most exciting new capabilities of AI is to instruct untrained and uninitiated people to acquire medical-grade images through a smartphone. Someone without any medical knowledge will be able to pop an ultrasound transducer into a smartphone’s base and, with a little gel on its tip, instantly acquire high-quality images. The AI algorithm instructs the person to move the transducer up or down, clock- or counterclockwise, and it will automatically capture the image when it meets the objective standard. This will extend the ability to perform medical imaging of most parts of the body (except the brain), anywhere, anytime, and by anyone. Concurrently, algorithms are also being developed for automated accurate interpretations. In 2023, we will see more of this in remote parts of the world, perhaps best exemplifying the potential for AI to reduce health inequities. 

The same deep-learning democratization is progressively taking hold for patients as well, who can already be notified by their smartwatch’s algorithm that they have an abnormal heart rhythm (such as atrial fibrillation). In 2023, this will extend to preliminary diagnosis of all skin lesions, urinary tract infections, children’s ear infections, and an increasing number of common conditions that are not life-threatening.

These are the early steps towards a virtual health coach to ideally prevent conditions that a person is at increased risk for manifesting, which in 2023 will be used for managing specific conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, or even depression, with the help of chatbots and human coaches in the background when necessary.

In 2023, clinicians will also be aided by AI in their daily tasks—particularly by being liberated from the job of painstakingly typing medical data into the computer. This burden not only contributes to burnout among physicians, but markedly detracts from the patient interactions. Natural language processing and machine learning now enable synthetic notes to be created automatically from the conversation between doctors and patients at the visit or bedside. 

We have seen the beginning of use of AI for remote monitoring, which is already preempting the need for hospitalization for patients with Covid-19 by real-time data capture from wearable sensors. That will only increase in 2023. We still need more validation trials to show that algorithms can accurately anticipate early signs of clinical deterioration and intervene, but the implication for avoiding a large proportion of hospital stays looms large.

Nevertheless, there remains a dire need to reduce bias and promote privacy and security in the application of medical AI. Privacy AI computing is starting to take off with the use of federated and swarm learning, as well as with the increasing application of edge computing, which uses algorithms fully operating on the smartphone. In 2023, these strategies will be explored more fully, in a much-needed effort to not only fully investigate the potential for AI in health and medicine but also to address its potential flaws and pitfalls.

Doctors, Get Ready for Your AI Assistants

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While stress is an unavoidable aspect of life, studies continue to show too much can have a detrimental impact on both health and well-being.

More specifically, excess stress can lead to high blood pressure, increasing cardiovascular morbidity and coronary heart disease risk. With all that in mind, study authors from the Universities of Maynooth and Limerick set out to better understand how reactions to stressful events impact our future health, as well as if there are any factors that can play key stress-buffering roles.

The research team suggests that while prior research has shown that gratitude and affect-balance (balance of positive to negative emotions) play key stress-buffering roles, up until now there has been woefully few studies examining the impact of these variables on cardiovascular recovery from acute psychological stress. Study authors chose to focus on this consideration, as well as whether or not affect-balance moderates the relationship between gratitude and cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress.

Being grateful lowers blood pressure

The actual research portion of this project took place at Maynooth University and encompassed a total of 68 undergrad students (24 men, 44 women) between the ages of 18 and 57. The experiment featured lab tasks which induced stress among the participants, while researchers measured cardiovascular reactivity and recovery in response to the stress.

The ensuing results reveal that a state of gratitude predicts lower systolic blood pressure responses throughout the stress-testing period. This means, study authors say, that gratitude promotes a unique stress-buffering effect on both reactions to and recovery from acute psychological stress. The team also found that affect-balance amplifies the effects of grateful feelings.

In conclusion, study authors believe these findings hold clinical usefulness. There are numerous low-cost gratitude interventions that can help promote improved well-being. For instance, one earlier study found cardiac patients who make use of gratitude journals have better cardiovascular outcomes than those who do not. Those earlier projects, in combination with these latest findings, strongly suggest that gratitude is a useful tool in the fight against stress and poor cardiovascular health.

The study is published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

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