The death toll came a week after China said nearly 60,000 people had died with COVID in hospitals in just over a month—but there has been widespread skepticism over official data since Beijing abruptly axed anti-virus controls last month.

China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a statement on Saturday that 681 hospitalized patients had died of respiratory failure caused by coronavirus infection, and 11,977 had died of other diseases combined with an infection over the period.

The figures do not include anyone who died at home.

Airfinity, an independent forecasting firm, has estimated daily COVID deaths in China will peak at about 36,000 over the Lunar New Year holiday.

The firm also estimated that more than 600,000 people have died from the disease since China abandoned the zero-COVID policy in December.

China has passed the peak period of COVID patients in fever clinics, emergency rooms and with critical conditions, Guo Yanhong, an official from the National Health Commission told a news conference on Thursday.

'No second wave'

Tens of millions of people have traveled across the country in recent days for long-awaited reunions with families to mark Sunday's Lunar New Year, raising fears of fresh outbreaks.

China's transport authorities have predicted that more than two billion trips will be made this month into February, in one of the world's largest mass movements of people.

President Xi Jinping Wednesday expressed concerns over the spread of the virus in rural China, much of which lacks medical resources.

But a top health official said China would not experience a second wave of infections in the months after the festive migration, because nearly 80 percent of the population had already been infected by the virus.

"Although a large number of people traveling during the Spring Festival may promote the spread of the epidemic to a certain extent... the current wave of epidemic has already infected about 80 percent of the people in the country," Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the CDC, said in a post on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform on Saturday.

"In the short term, for example, in the next two to three months, the possibility of... a second wave of the epidemic across the country is very small."

Residents in central China's Wuhan, where the first coronavirus infections were reported in late 2019, celebrated the arrival of the Year of the Rabbit on Saturday night with fireworks, flowers and offerings to loved ones they lost to the virus.

© 2023 AFP

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Archaeologists discovered a new papyrus of Egyptian Book of the Dead

Monday, January 23

• The first launch this week comes from Rocket Lab, which will send an Electron rocket to space carrying a number of small radio frequency monitoring satellites from Hawkeye 360, a radio frequency geospatial analytics provider. The satellites being launched are called Hawk 6A/B/C and the mission has been called “Virginia is for Launch Lovers”. The satellites will help to monitor air, land, and sea transportation and assist with emergencies. This mission launches from 11:00 p.m. UTC from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island. A stream will be available on Rocket Lab’s website.

Tuesday, January 24

• The second mission of the week will see SpaceX launch a Falcon 9 carrying 54 Gen2 Starlink “Mini” satellites. If you use a satellite tracking app, these satellites will be designated Starlink Group 5-2 if you want to try looking for them. While apps will show the position of the satellites, they could prove hard to see has SpaceX has applied an anti-reflective coating to them. It’s not clear how much this will reduce their reflectivity but it could address the concerns of astronomers who have complained about satellites ruining the night sky. The mission will take off at 9:52 a.m. UTC from Cape Canaveral in Florida and will be streamed on the company’s website.

Wednesday, January 25

• The final mission we have locked in for the week will see a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket launch the IGS-Radar 7 reconnaissance satellite for the Japanese Ministry of Defense. IGS in the payload’s name is short for Information Gathering Satellite. It will be operated by the Cabinet Satellite Information Center and help bolster Japan’s national defence and assist with civil natural disaster monitoring. It’s due to take off at 1:20 a.m. UTC from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan.

Recap

• The first launch last week took place on Wednesday, a Falcon 9 launched by SpaceX carrying the US Space Force’s GPS III satellite.

• The second and final launch was also a Falcon 9 but this time carrying 51 Starlink satellites.

That’s all for this week, be sure to check in next time.

TWIRL 101: SpaceX to launch Starlink satellites with anti-reflective coating

The lights at Massachusetts' Minnechaug Regional High School burn ever bright. They actually never turn off. They can't turn off. The smart lighting system for the entire building is broken, and it's stuck in the "on" position. It has apparently been this way for over a year now, and the electric bills are really starting to pile up.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” the school district's assistant superintendent of finance, Aaron Osborne, told NBC News. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”

The school's entire "green lighting system," some 7,000 lights, was installed over a decade ago and was supposed to save money, but according to the report, "the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021" and no one has been able to turn off the lights for the following 17 months. Teachers are adjusting by unscrewing light bulbs at the end of the day and throwing some breakers not connected to vital parts of the school. Dimming the lights to show movies or something projected on a whiteboard has also been difficult: The lights are on full brightness all the time.
 

News Editor Lilli DiGrande, writing for Minnechaug student newspaper, The Smoke Signal, did some great reporting on the situation a month after it started. The smart lighting company that installed the lights over 10 years ago, 5th Light, has apparently changed hands several times now and is currently owned by a company called Reflex Lighting. According to the Smoke Signal report, what's left of 5th Light no longer has access to the old, proprietary software to fix anything, so "fixing" the system means replacing it with new hardware.

The problem with new parts is that this has all been in the middle of the pandemic and a huge chip shortage, so the parts have been back-ordered and delayed several times. The process of fixing the system was originally supposed to start in February 2022, but they can't get the parts. The next missed date was October 2022, and the school isn't expecting a repair until February 2023. The lights remain on.

A lesson in proper smart building design

Even if you aren't in charge of the lighting design of a giant building, there's a valuable lesson here for anyone getting involved with smart home/building technology: make technology an addition to your setup, not a dependency. You still need to install physical light switches in every room, but as a bonus, you can pick light switches that are also controllable via some kind of network. All sorts of smart light switches meet this requirement—normal paddles or even toggles that can also be controlled via Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, probably Ethernet, or whatever you want. This way, if the Internet is down, or some server explodes, or some cloud company shuts down, the lights will still work.

What you definitely shouldn't do is hard-wire the electricity to be always on and then hope the network to the light fixtures or light bulbs will be around to power them off. That's apparently what happened at this school, and now taxpayers are paying the price.

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However, you don't have to wait until February to catch a glimpse of the comet, as it is already visible in the sky during late night and early morning. Stargazers have been tracking the comet's path for several weeks and had a great view of it on January 12th when it made its closest approach to the sun, a maneuver known as perihelion.

Here’s everything that we know about the green comet so far.

C/2022 E3 was first detected by astronomers in March 2022, when it was traveling through the solar system at a distance of 399 million miles (642 million km) from the sun, within the orbit of Jupiter. At that time, it was relatively faint, about 25,000 times fainter than the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye. However, researchers were able to make out a distinct tail or coma, which confirmed that it was a comet, not an asteroid. Asteroids are made of rock, while comets are made of ice and dust particles that vaporize as they approach the sun, creating a visible tail. Both asteroids and comets orbit around the sun.

By January 12th, 2023, the comet had moved much closer to Earth, about 300 million miles (482 million km) closer, and was visible in the night sky near the northern constellation of Corona Borealis. Since then, it has continued moving westward across the sky. According to experts, the comet will be visible to the naked eye by the third week of January, and it should be easy to spot if you have a clear view of the sky and you know where to look for it.

On the nights of January 26th and 27th, the comet may be visible just east of the Little Dipper's bowl. By February 1st, when the comet makes its closest approach to Earth, it will appear near the constellation Camelopardalis, in close proximity to the Big Dipper. These are approximate locations, and the comet's position in the sky may vary slightly due to its motion. It's always recommended to check with local observatories or sky maps for the most accurate and up-to-date information.

Around February 5th and 6th, a few days after its closest approach to Earth, the comet will move across the night sky to the west of the star Capella and then it will appear to enter the constellation Auriga. After that, it will continue moving down towards Taurus, becoming increasingly faint as it moves away from Earth, and back out towards the edge of the solar system. 

Why is this comet green?

The comet itself is not naturally green, but its head appears to emit a green glow due to a rare chemical reaction. The green coloration is likely caused by diatomic carbon (C2), which is a simple molecule comprised of two carbon atoms bonded together. When ultraviolet light from the sun causes this molecule to decay, it emits a green glow that can persist for numerous days. This is according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

This unique green light does not reach the comet's tail, or coma, which is made of gas. The gas in the coma is created by solar radiation, specifically, sunlight causes the comet to sublimate, or change from a solid to a gas without passing through the liquid phase. This gas creates the tail that streams behind the comet, which is often seen as blue in color due to the ultraviolet light.

Unfortunately, if you live in the southern hemisphere, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get to see the comet until its closest approach to Earth. Thereafter, it’ll be visible in the South for a short while before fading from view. We don’t know when this comet will return, but it likely won’t be within the lifetime of anyone alive today.

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No, I wasn't in a good mood. It had been raining here in the Bay Area for fourteen years. At least, that's what it felt like.

Yes, I got grouchy. What are you going to do about it?

At times like these, I sit and read, sit, and watch sports, or sit on my stationary bike, read, and watch sports.

Once a day, I ventured to the mailbox, just to see which nefariously-minded financial planner, mortgage broker, or realtor was trying to hawk their soiled wares.

There was only a postcard from a terrible plumber, but there were a couple of Amazon packages on the doorstep.

With a suitably absent mind, I picked them up and took them inside. It looked like I'd been ordering books again, a difficult habit to shake.

Then, I looked at the parcel on top and stared for a few seconds.

Here was a typical Amazon bubblewrap envelope. It contained just the one book, a paperback. Yet someone at Amazon had decided to slip it into a plastic bag, to protect it a little more from the downpour.

Perhaps this happens to you all the time. Perhaps you live somewhere where it rains far more than here. To me, this simple gesture conjured a real human being who'd bothered to consider the weather and do something to please another human being.

Just because.

The plastic bag was similar to the ones which you put your fruit into at the grocery store. It wasn't Amazon branded. It was just a simple, transparent plastic bag, tied in a knot at the top.

So I contacted Amazon to ask who in the supply chain may have been responsible for this tiny kindness. Was it someone at the warehouse? Was it the driver? Is there, in fact, some sort of company policy with respect to delivering packages in bad weather?

Sadly, I received no revelations from the company.

In our greed and laziness -- oh, come on, please admit it -- we often forget the people who work hard and, all too often, thanklessly. They deliver us something we might easily find in a store. If only we shifted ourselves off of the sofa and toward the door.

They go to warehouse work in the rain, while we work from home.

They drive vans filled with surveillance technology to bring the nation its hairspray, underwear, and household goods. Sometimes, they don't even have time for urination.

Meanwhile, they're not even treated so well at work. Amazon still hasn't quite sold the world on its benevolence as an employer. Somehow, every time one listens to an Amazon executive, the only feeling it incites is a shiver.

Yet still someone, somewhere, still bothered to consider the lazy oaf at home that is me.

Many say brands are created by brilliant minds and oddly-dressed ad agency personnel.

Very often, though, it's the actions of individual employees that reinforce, and sometimes even create, a positive image for a brand.

If only all companies could treat their employees as if they understood that.

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• The possibility of a big Covid-19 rebound in China over the next two or three months is remote as 80% of people have been infected, a prominent government scientist said on Saturday.

• China has passed the peak of Covid patients in fever clinics, emergency rooms and with critical conditions, a National Health Commission official said on Thursday.

The possibility of a big Covid-19 rebound in China over the next two or three months is remote as 80% of people have been infected, a prominent government scientist said on Saturday.

The mass movement of people during the ongoing Lunar New Year holiday period may spread the pandemic, boosting infections in some areas, but a second Covid wave is unlikely in the near term, Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said on the Weibo social media platform.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese are traveling across the country for holiday reunions that had been suspended under recently eased Covid curbs, raising fears of fresh outbreaks in rural areas less equipped to manage large outbreaks.

China has passed the peak of Covid patients in fever clinics, emergency rooms and with critical conditions, a National Health Commission official said on Thursday.

Nearly 60,000 people with Covid had died in hospital as of Jan. 12, roughly a month after China abruptly dismantled its zero-Covid policy, according to government data.

But some experts said that figure probably vastly undercounts the full impact, as it excludes those who die at home, and because many doctors have said they are discouraged from citing Covid as a cause of death.

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Twitter was sued yesterday by a consulting firm that says it was never paid for work it did on the lawsuit that forced Elon Musk to complete his purchase of the company.

Charles River Associates (CRA) says it was hired by Twitter in August 2022, shortly after Twitter sued Musk over his refusal to complete their $44 billion merger agreement. Musk finally completed the purchase in late October after it became clear that he was likely to lose in court.

From August 15 to October 27, "CRA provided all requested expert consulting work and services to Twitter and its legal counsel in connection with the Musk Litigation and pursuant to the terms and conditions of the Contract," according to the lawsuit filed yesterday in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston, Massachusetts. The lawsuit said that "Twitter has breached the Contract by failing to pay all of the CRA Invoices," which added up to $2.19 million.

CRA is seeking the full amount owed on the invoices and double or treble damages due to Twitter's "deceptive, intentional breach of the consulting agreement, plus interest, costs, and legal fees." CRA's lawsuit is one of several alleging that the Musk-owned Twitter has refused to pay bills for services provided before he bought the company.

Software vendor Imply Data previously alleged that Twitter failed to pay a $1,092,000 invoice and apparently intends to stiff Imply on another $7 million worth of payments on a contract that expires in late 2024. Additional breach-of-contract lawsuits allege that Twitter failed to pay $136,000 in rent at a San Francisco office tower and $197,725 for private jet services.

Twitter didn’t respond to payment requests, lawsuit says

The new lawsuit said that "CRA and its Senior Consultant, Professor Mark Zmijewski, were retained by Twitter to provide economic consulting services related to Professor Zmijewski's anticipated expert rebuttal report and expert rebuttal testimony, which were to be in rebuttal of the expert report and testimony of one of the experts for the Musk parties, Yvette Austin Smith."

CRA's work included "research and analysis underlying the expert opinions to be included in the expert rebuttal report," preparation of drafts of the report, "and other expert consulting and litigation support at the direction of Twitter's legal counsel," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit describes CRA's attempts to get paid for its work after Musk reluctantly completed his purchase of Twitter instead of continuing to fight the lawsuit. CRA said it received no response to a series of messages it sent about the unpaid invoices during the month after Musk's purchase.

Twitter also hasn't followed the agreed-upon process for objecting to the invoices, CRA said. "Twitter agreed pursuant to the terms of the Contract that any 'objection with respect to CRA's invoices must be made by the client in writing within five (5) business days following receipt of the invoice to which objection is made,'" the lawsuit said. "Twitter has never provided any objection to CRA with regard to the CRA Invoices."

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been on a cost-cutting tear over the last six months, shutting down various projects inside the company. This Friday, the ax has finally fallen on a big chunk of Google's workforce. In its largest layoff ever, Google says it will cut 12,000 jobs across Google and its parent company, Alphabet. The cuts represent about 6 percent of Google's workforce and match similar recent moves by Microsoft and Amazon.

Pichai announced the layoffs on the Google blog, saying US employees who are being let go have already been informed. For international employees, Pichai said that "this process will take longer due to local laws and practices." Pichai blamed the layoffs on the economy, saying, "We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

As always, Pichai talked up AI as the future of the company, saying, "Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry." Google has struggled to monetize much of its AI work, though. The highest-profile Google AI product is the Google Assistant, but that is reportedly seeing reduced support after plans to monetize it failed (Amazon Alexa is facing a similar fate). Deepmind wowed the world with its ability to take on top players of the complicated game "Go," but that project never translated into any kind of business.

The buzzy new thing in AI is a collection of bots that take on creative tasks, like the ChatGPT chatbot and artwork generators. The rise of those projects has damaged Google's reputation as a leader in AI and caused Pichai to declare a "code red" at the company. While Google is supposedly working on a chatbot product, in a world where useful tools like Alexa and Google Assistant don't make any money, it's unclear why a creative writing bot would be any different.

Pichai's cost-cutting mission started in July when he said the company's productivity was "not where it needs to be." Google then killed the hardware division's laptop efforts, spun off Project Loon, cut the Area 120 "idea incubator" group in half, killed Google Stadia, decided to invest less in Google Assistant, merged Waze into Google Maps, cut 15 percent of Alphabet health company Verily's workforce, and cut 17 percent of the staff at the "Intrinsic" Alphabet robotics company.

Pichai says there will be a town hall on Monday.

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Wedged into the side of a cliff, this palace is an incredible site. Image credit: 365 Focus Photography/Shutterstock.com

Cliff Palace is like few other buildings on planet Earth. Found in the rocky cliffs of Colorado’s Montezuma County, this giant dwelling was constructed over 750 years ago and provides an invaluable insight into how Native Americans lived in the centuries before colonization. 

Unfortunately, the condition of Cliff Palace is being slowly deteriorated by the forces of weather and time. Paired with this, climate change threatens to bring more disruption to this vulnerable region, meaning this beautiful piece of history has an uncertain future.

Who built Cliff Palace?

Cliff Palace was made out of sandstone, mortar, and wooden beams by the Ancestral Pueblo people during a period of their culture dubbed Pueblo III (approximately 1150 to 1300 CE). This period is defined by the construction of these multi-storied cliff dwellings that often take on a square, right-angled shape.  

It's a distinctive style that can be seen throughout the evolution of Pueblo architecture, even the Pueblo Revival movement that emerged in the Southwestern US during the early 20th century. 

Inside Cliff Palace, there are many Ancestral Puebloan wall murals. Often consisting of triangles, dots, and geometrical designs painted in red, some researchers believe they are a type of calendar informed by the movement of the skies above. 

A closer look at the Cliff Palace. Image credit: Sopotnicki/Shutterstock.com

Why is Cliff Palace important?

Among the hundreds of these structures found in North America, Cliff Palace is the biggest cliff dwelling of them all. It can be found in Mesa Verde National Park, where at least 600 other smaller cliff dwellings lie. 

Recent studies have found that it likely contained 150 rooms and had a population of approximately 100 people, according to the National Park Service. It’s not certain what it was used for, but it’s believed to be an important building used as a “social, administrative site with high ceremonial usage.”

Even today, the site still holds a huge amount of importance to the Laguna Pueblo people. 

“Even though we physically moved away, the spirits of my ancestors are still here. If you stop for a minute and listen, you can hear the children laughing and the women talking,” explains TJ Atsye, a Laguna Pueblo person and park ranger at the Mesa Verde National Park.  

"You can hear the dogs barking and the turkeys gobbling. You can hear and feel the beat of the drums and the singing. You can smell the cooking fires. You can feel their presence, their warmth, their sense of community," adds TJ.

Cliff Palace a few years after Europeans encountered it in 1891. Image credit: Gustaf Nordenskiöld/Finnish National Board of Antiquities/Public Domain

When was Cliff Palace discovered?

When Cliff Palace was first “rediscovered” by European colonizers in 1888, it was showing severe signs of wear and tear from natural processes. European settlers then made things worse through commercial exploration and archeological work, leaving the once-grand palace in a state of disarray. 

As you can see from old photos of Cliff Palace, the site has seen extensive restoration work over the past centuries that have helped restore its former glory. 

Today it stands in much better stead and remains open to visitors most of the year at the Mesa Verde National Park, a World Heritage Site and an International Dark Sky Park.

The future of Cliff Palace 

Now, however, the structure is endangered by the new threat of climate change. The main fear is that extreme weather fluctuations will result in freeze-thaw cycles, in which water seeps into the stone, then freezes and expands, forming cracks in the rock.

Paired with this, the area is also braced for an increased number and severity of wildfires, which will bring its own challenges to the Pueblo structures.

The cost of our rapidly changing world is usually counted in economic losses and the impact on human life. As valuable as those concerns are, it’s worth considering that the historical memory of humanity is also imperiled by the climate crisis. 

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It’s amazing how creepy the nighttime can be, so it’s perhaps no surprise that people tend to experience more paranormal activity after lights out. According to new research, an inability to sleep well could make the night appear even more alive, leading to stronger beliefs in ghosts, demons, aliens, and the afterlife.

A number of previous studies have linked such convictions to specific sleep disorders. These include sleep paralysis, which entails a temporary inability to move upon waking or falling asleep; and exploding head syndrome, characterized by hearing loud bangs while nodding off. Given that both these conditions are associated with hallucinatory phenomena – including the sudden appearance of shadowy figures by one’s bedside – it’s understandable that those who experience such somnolent mischief might be more inclined to believe in the paranormal.

Indeed, such ideas are even encouraged by numerous cultural explanations for these sleep disorders. In Egypt, for instance, sleep paralysis is often said to be caused by nefarious spirits call jinn, while some Italians blame the condition on an evil cat-like witch called Pandafeche.

Taking a more scientific approach, the study authors analyzed the responses of 8,853 people to a survey about sleep quality and paranormal beliefs. In particular, they sought to determine how sleep impacts people’s convictions regarding the existence of ghosts and demons, the continuation of the soul after death, and the possibility of aliens having already visited Earth.

Overall, they found that such beliefs are more common among those who get fewer hours of sleep per night, take longer to fall asleep, struggle with insomnia or report “lower sleep efficiency.” Most strikingly, they found that around two-thirds of those who experienced sleep paralysis or exploding head syndrome were convinced that aliens had already walked amongst us, compared to just 3.4 percent of the total sample.

Just under 60 percent of participants who had undergone sleep paralysis also said they thought near-death experiences prove that the soul lives on after death, while those with stronger insomnia symptoms were more likely to believe in the devil.

“As [sleep paralysis] involves different types of hallucinations, including auditory and visual, and [exploding head syndrome] typically involves a bang, our findings suggest that the belief in aliens may be associated with sleep disturbances that produce sounds or images,” write the study authors. “One explanation for these associations is therefore that someone experiencing sounds or images associated with sleep could interpret this as evidence that aliens or other supernatural beings exist.”

Further research will be required to test this theory and examine the causal associations between sleep quality and paranormal beliefs. In the meantime, the researchers say their findings could help clinicians diagnose sleep disorders among patients who endorse such ideas.

Ultimately, though, they say that the “mechanisms underlying these associations are likely complex, and need to be further explored to fully understand why people sometimes report 'things that go bump in the night'.”

The study appears in the Journal of Sleep Research.

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The longest lightning bolts on Earth can extend for hundreds of kilometers, but even the longest produced by our planet’s clouds are dwarfed by the kind of discharges the Sun can produce. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has caught a plasma discharge 500,000 kilometers long (which could wrap around the equator 12 and a half times) in the shape of a lightning bolt shooting through the Sun's atmosphere. 

The Sun is approaching the peak of activity in its canonical 11 years cycle. There is an increase in the number of flares and coronal mass ejections, some even reaching our planet like the one that grazed us yesterday leading to increased activity in the Northern and Southern Lights.

Connected to this increase in activity is the increase in sunspots splotching the surface of the Sun. These regions are slightly cooler than the rest of the surface and are caused by magnetic fields rising from below the solar surface.

The magnetic field lines near sunspots can easily get messy as the Sun rotates. They tangle, cross, and reorganize, and these processes can release those flares and coronal mass ejections. Or in this case, just a harmless plasma discharge across the Sun, which still looks very cool. 

Spaceweather.com reports that this “bolt” connected two sunspots, AR3192 and AR3190. The latter is pretty big. If you have eclipse glasses you should be able to see it with the naked eye without much trouble. A reminder though, for the love of your eyes, do not look at the Sun without proper glasses. 

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A spectacular aerial view of the Eye captured by NASA. Image credit: Blueee77 / Shutterstock

It’s possible to love both scientific validity and the idea of hypothetical beasts, which is exactly why our eyes went out on stalks when we spotted a new preprint that explores the theory that Loch Ness Monster sightings might actually have been European eels. The “eel hypothesis” suggests that particularly large Anguilla anguilla might be enough to trick the eye into thinking you’d seen a mythical, loch-dwelling animal, but do the stats on eels back up the theory?

The Loch Ness Monster’s size estimations range from around 1 to 2 meters (3.3 to 6.6 feet), based on the Surgeon’s Photograph, and 15 to 20 meters (49 to 66 feet), based on the Flipper Photograph. The preprint authors note that estimations about Loch Ness’s biomass don’t really tie in with the larger of the two proposed sizes, and Carl Sagan’s work into collision physics could be translated to imply that if Nessie was on the smaller side, there might be several contained within the body of water.

“Thus, if there are any, there may be many,” wrote the authors. “If it’s real, could it be an eel?”

To find out, the researchers looked at catch data from Loch Ness to ascertain the number of eels and their average body sizes when they were pulled from the enormous body of water. It revealed that the distribution is skewed towards the smaller A.

anguilla sizes, leading them to conclude that your chances of finding not just an eel, but a large one (minimum 1 meter) in the loch are about 1 in 50,000.

“However, this is not quite the ‘monster postulated,” explained the authors. “Indeed, the probability of finding a 6-meter [20-foot] eel in Loch Ness is essentially zero; too low for the software used to provide a reliable estimate.” 

“Thus, while large eels may account for some eyewitness sightings of large, animate objects rising to the loch surface, they are unlikely to account for 'sightings' of extraordinarily large animals, which may instead be accounted for by wave phenomena, the occasional stray mammal, or other.”

Pretty unlikely, then, but where did the eel hypothesis come from? 

In the 1970s, a scientific slip up led biologist Roy Mackal to conclude that massive eels might well exist in the loch after collecting a skewed sample from baited traps. It’s not a completely ridiculous leap when you consider the defining features of Nessie: a head sat atop a long, slender neck, extreme flexibility, a sect of pectoral fins, and dark coloration.

Mackal was also far from alone, as other naturalists suggested that mega-eels may migrate transiently to the loch from the River Ness. Meanwhile, a 2018 eDNA study found bucketloads of A. anguilla material, possibly pointing towards big, girthy eels.

But alas, if the preprint’s findings endure, it seems this particular mystery can’t be pinned on “super” eels. Now, who’s going to tackle the possibility of a giant earthworm?

The preprint has not been certified by peer review and was shared in bioRxiv.

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Amazon was hit with an unusually forceful safety citation by federal investigators in the US today. The findings appear to back up what some workers at the company have long alleged: that the online retail giant’s warehouse and fulfillment facilities are designed for speed over safety, causing lower-back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders at high rates.

The citation released by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration today concluded that Amazon was “failing to keep workers safe.” The company did not properly protect them from hazards likely to cause “serious physical harm,” the agency claims. Despite years of allegations from workers and state-level investigations into Amazon’s injury rates, today’s action brought the first federal fines imposed on Amazon for worker musculoskeletal injuries.

“The citations are actually very substantive,” says Debbie Berkowitz, a former senior adviser for OSHA and a worker safety fellow at Georgetown University. The investigation was unusually large for OSHA, and it is the agency’s first to require that Amazon implement basic ergonomic principles to prevent injury, she says. The same investigation led OSHA in December to cite Amazon for failing to record and report work injuries and illness.

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel says the company intends to appeal the agency’s findings. “We’ve cooperated fully, and the government’s allegations don’t reflect the reality of safety at our sites,” she says. “The vast majority of our employees tell us they feel our workplace is safe.”

The federal government doesn’t provide specific ergonomics guidance, and Amazon has invested significant time and money in lowering musculoskeletal risk, Nantel says, citing Amazon data that shows injury rates falling almost 15 percent between 2019 and 2021.

OSHA’s findings today echo research from a coalition of labor unions based on past injury data from the agency that concluded Amazon’s warehouse injury rates are often at least double that of Walmart, its nearest competitor in size and scope. During the 2022 holiday season, warehouse workers described to WIRED their personal battles with exhaustion from overwork, wrist injuries, loud noise, and high-speed productivity expectations.

The severity of the condemnation in the new federal citation was not matched by the penalty. If Amazon loses its planned appeal, it will have to pay a proposed fine of $60,269—a trifling amount relative to its nearly $1 trillion market capitalization.

OSHA fines for very specific, repeated, and drastic violations can increase to millions of dollars. The oil company BP has faced multiple fines amounting to over $10 million for spills and refinery accident-related violations. But the cap on fines for the types of safety violations that can cause back injuries, fractures, or sprains is much lower, creating little financial incentive for companies to change. “OSHA's fines have historically been incredibly low, but the company got the highest fines possible, I believe, for every violation cited,” Berkowitz of Georgetown says.

OSHA generally tries to persuade companies like Amazon to prevent future injuries through detailed letters of inspection that include suggestions to improve processes causing injury. Those “hazard” letters were sent on January 17 to three Amazon facilities that OSHA inspected during the course of this investigation, in Deltona, Florida; Waukegan, Illinois; and New Windsor, New York.

One letter sent to the Waukegan facility describes more than 20 sprains, fractures, bruises, and lacerations to feet, arms, faces, and other body parts caused by workers losing control of packages weighing over 50 pounds.

Another, sent to the Deltona facility, described “inadequate supervision of clinical personnel with appropriate clinical skills” at Amazon’s internal clinic for workers, including incidents where athletic trainers conducted or supervised examinations beyond the scope of their licensing. “Amazon does not appear to have any quality management processes in place for its clinical staff with major deficiencies in documenting care. This represents a dramatic deviation from standard practices for clinicians in the US,” the inspectors at the Deltona facility wrote in the letter.

OSHA does not appear to be finished with Amazon. Details in the hazard letters and the scope of the findings suggest an ongoing investigation and likely more citations and fines, Berkowitz says. The agency said today that it continues to investigate three additional Amazon facilities, in Aurora, Colorado; Nampa, Idaho; and Castleton, New York.

“While Amazon has developed impressive systems to make sure its customers' orders are shipped efficiently and quickly, the company has failed to show the same level of commitment to protecting the safety and well-being of its workers,” said Doug Parker, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health in OSHA’s announcement today. Amazon may soon be fighting more than one citation from the agency.

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Are animals capable of understanding human language?

Can they sense when they need help?

In this amazing video, you'll be able to see some incredible examples of animals that asked people for help!

From a tiny bird asking for food to a whale that got stranded in shallow waters, this video will leave you in awe.

Don't miss out on these amazing stories and discover how animals are able to ask for help!

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Mike LaPointe has the envious job of figuring out how to get space exploration to the science fiction future.

He and his colleagues fund high-risk, high-reward projects as part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, which last week announced grants to 14 teams exploring fantastical ideas. Many of them won’t pan out. But some—perhaps the lunar oxygen pipeline or the space telescope mirror that’s actually built in space—could become game changers.

“We’re looking at anything from back-of-the-napkin kind of concepts to things that are conceptualized but not developed yet,” LaPointe says. “These are things looking 20 to 30 years down the road to see how we could drastically improve or enable new types of NASA missions.” For example, while efforts to slightly boost a chemical rocket engine’s efficiency would be laudable, that’s not far out enough for the program. A proposal for a completely new system that could replace chemical rockets would fit right in.

NASA awards these grants annually, mostly to academic researchers in the United States. This new batch of awards is for Phase 1 projects, which each receive $175,000 to conduct a nine-month study that researchers will use to lay out their plans in more detail, run tests, and design prototypes. A promising few will make it to Phase 2 and get $600,000 for a two-year study. After that, NASA will award $2 million to a single exceptional project to fund a two-year Phase 3 study. 

Some of the competitors may ultimately find a home at NASA or with a commercial partner; others may have an indirect effect on space exploration by paving the way to spin off technologies. For example, the startup Freefall Aerospace’s inflatable space antenna began as an NIAC project. A NIAC proposal for a rotorcraft on the Red Planet inspired the Martian helicopter Ingenuity.

One of this year’s winners is a proposal to design a habitat assembled from building materials grown on Mars—substances generated by fungi and bacteria. It’s hard to send big, heavy things, like a housing structure, to space. The launch cost is prohibitive, and you have to squeeze it atop a rocket and stick the landing on Mars too. But this project, developed by mechanical and materials engineer Congrui Jin and her colleagues at the University of Nebraska, explores the idea of self-growing building blocks. 

These fungi or bacteria start small, but they gradually grow filaments and tendrils to fill the space available to them. “We call them self-healing materials,” says Jin, whose research group has used them to create biominerals and biopolymers that fill cracks in concrete. “We want to take it one step further to develop self-growing materials.”

In a bioreactor on Mars, such materials would grow into sturdy bricks. The process would be costly on Earth, but since the Red Planet lacks concrete and construction workers, it could make more economic sense there. During her NIAC study, Jin plans to determine whether the growing process could be sped up from months to days, and how long the materials could survive in the harsh Martian environment.

It’s not the first time NIAC has funded an experiment aimed at using mushrooms to grow structures in space—a different “mycotecture” project was one of last year’s winners. But this team’s project will focus on using a different aspect of the fungus: the minerals it forms in certain conditions, like calcium carbonate, rather than the root-like threads called mycelia.

Another NIAC winner proposes designing a giant moon-based pipeline that could deliver much-needed oxygen to astronauts on a future lunar base. Thanks to NASA’s ongoing Artemis program, astronauts will arrive as soon as 2026. Longer future missions will require supplies of oxygen that last for weeks or months—and possibly for use as rocket fuel. Ferrying tanks of oxygen to space is just as problematic as launching building materials, but making the gas on the moon could be a better option. Oxygen is available as a byproduct of mining for water ice using a process called electrolysis.

However, there’s a logistics problem: A moon mining operation might not be right next to camp. Lunar ice abounds within permanently shadowed craters, but those are also the coldest places on the moon, and it can be hard to communicate to and from them. One option is to make the oxygen at a crater site and haul it back to base on a rover, says Peter Curreri, a former NASA scientist and cofounder and chief science officer of the company Lunar Resources. But, he points out, “producing oxygen in one place and moving it, using compressed canisters or dewars with robots, is very expensive and unwieldy.” 

His team’s proposal is to figure out how to build a 5-kilometer pipeline connecting two areas. It would be built in segments by robots, using metals like aluminum extracted from lunar regolith. The segments would be welded together, and the pipe would run in a trench or on a stand—not so different from oil pipes on Earth. It would allow an oxygen flow rate of 2 kilograms per hour, enough for NASA’s future astronauts’ needs. Curreri and his colleagues are currently conducting a feasibility study, considering the potential costs, the best architecture for the pipe, and whether repairs could be completed by rovers.

Some of the other grant winners have a more astronomical bent. For example, Edward Balaban, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, is investigating using the near-zero gravity of space to shape fluids for mirrors or lenses for giant space telescopes. These would be more powerful than current telescope mirrors, which are often made out of a special type of glass and are vulnerable to impacts by micrometeoroids and shaking during the launch process. The diameter of a mirror also determines how far a telescope can resolve an object in deep space, but today that’s limited by the size of the launch rocket.

“The James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror, 6.5 meters in diameter, is an engineering miracle. It took a lot of creativity and technical risk to fold it in this origami fashion to fit into the shroud of the launch vehicle,” says Balaban—and then the delicate structure had to survive the violence of launch. “If we try to scale that further, it just becomes more expensive and complex.” 

Instead, with his “fluidic telescope” concept, one need only launch a frame structure—such as an umbrella-shaped satellite dish—and a tank of mirror liquid, like gallium alloys and ionic liquids. After launch, the liquid would be injected into the frame. In space, droplets stick together because of surface tension, and the pesky force of Earth’s gravity doesn’t get in the way and distort their shape. This will result in an incredibly smooth mirror without the need for mechanical processes like grinding and polishing, which are used for traditional glass mirrors. It would then be attached to the telescope’s other components through an automated process. 

Using tests on a plane and on the International Space Station, his team has already learned how to make lenses with liquid polymers, and they determined that the volume of the liquid sets the degree of magnification. With the NIAC funding, they’ll prepare for the next step: conducting a test of a small liquid mirror in space later this decade. Their goal is to eventually design a 50-meter mirror, but since this technology is scalable, Balaban says one could use the same physical principles to engineer a mirror kilometers wide. JWST’s large mirror makes it one of the most sensitive telescopes ever built, but, he argues, to keep making advances, it may be necessary to build bigger mirrors with this new method. 

Zachary Cordero, an MIT astronautics researcher, leads another new project to develop an in-space manufacturing technique called bend-forming. It involves bending a single strand of wire at specific nodes and angles, then adding joints to make a stiff structure. Cordero and his team are working on a particular application: designing a reflector for a satellite in high orbit, which could monitor storms and precipitation by measuring moisture changes in the atmosphere. 

As with several of the other winners, his proposal takes on the challenge of building really big things in space, despite the size and weight constraints of rocket travel. “With conventional reflectors, the bigger you make these things, the worse the surface precision, and eventually they’re basically unusable. People have been talking about ways to make 100-meter or kilometer-scale reflectors in space for decades,” he says. With their process, one could launch enough material for a 100-meter dish on a single rocket, he says.

Among the other 14 winners: a proposal to deploy a seaplane to fly on Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, and one for a heated probe to penetrate the ocean of its neighbor, Enceladus, which is enclosed by a thick outer layer of ice that behaves like rock, thanks to the below-freezing temperatures.

While some of these projects won’t succeed, the program helps NASA test the bounds of what’s feasible, LaPointe says: “If a project fails, it’s still useful to us. If it works, it could transform future NASA missions.”

It’s Not Sci-Fi—NASA Is Funding These Mind-Blowing Projects

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Rocket Report: SpaceX reaches ‘ludicrous’ cadence; ABL explains RS1 failure

Meet the real zombifying fungus behind the fictional Last of Us outbreak

LAST YEAR, LARRY Paxton was looking at the edge of space when he saw something he shouldn’t. A physicist at Johns Hopkins University, Paxton uses satellite-based instruments that look down on the region of space just above the atmosphere.

They see in spectrums of light that we can’t, like the far ultraviolet, monitoring for things like odd space weather. But in late January, his team observed something unusual on a scan: Part of the map had gone dark. The rays of far UV light were being absorbed by molecules of some sort, resulting in a dim splotch roughly the size of Montana. 

The source soon became clear: the Hunga Tonga volcano, which had just erupted in the South Pacific. Those molecules—enough water, Paxton’s team later determined, to fill 100 Olympic swimming pools—had been jettisoned skyward faster than the speed of sound by an explosion unlike anything previously recorded on Earth. “This is an enormous amount of water to get injected that high,” says Paxton, who presented his research a few weeks ago at the American Geophysical Union. “It’s an extraordinary thing.” 

One year later, scientists studying virtually every facet of the Earth, from the mantle to the oceans to the ionosphere, have had a moment similar to Paxton’s, stunned by some superlative discovery generated by the Hunga eruption. In recent months, scientists have observed new vibrational waves that ricocheted around the globe, triggering tsunamis in distant ocean basins, and seen the highest concentration of lightning ever recorded. The newly cosmic water molecules represented the very top of an enormous plume that filled the upper atmosphere with enough water to trap heat underneath, likely warming the Earth slightly for the next few years, according to Holger Vömel, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. 

The January 15, 2022 explosion was obviously strange. But now researchers are asking: Just how singular was it? The answer has implications for the hundreds of underwater volcanoes dotting the Earth’s oceans. “The Hunga eruption highlights a new type of volcano, and new types of underwater threats,” says Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland. And yet only a handful of underwater volcanoes have been the site of extensive research. Those include the Axial seamount, which lies a few hundred miles off the coast of Oregon and has been studied since the 1970s, and the long-active Kick ’em Jenny near the Caribbean nation of Grenada. Both receive regular visits from research cruises and are covered with sensors that monitor for rumbles.

But many more are found in remote arcs of the Pacific, far from big cities or ports where research vessels make harbor. Their closest neighbors are small island nations, like Tonga, that don’t have dedicated volcano-monitoring programs or much capacity to install seismic monitors. That’s in part due to geographical problems. Tonga, for example, is a line of islands, which isn’t great for triangulating the sources of seismic waves—and staffing and funds can be scarce in countries where the population is similar in size to a large US town. There are international options, like the US Geological Survey’s Seismic Monitoring Network, that offer global coverage for unusual geologic activity, but the stations are generally too few and far between to pick up the softer rumbles foretelling a coming undersea eruption, says Jake Lowenstern, director of the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program at USGS.

Most of those eruptions have no chance of matching the explosiveness of Hunga Tonga. But the event awakened the world to the possibile activity of these volcanoes, says Sharon Walker, an oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory. “While events like this don’t happen very often, my feeling is that we do not want them to happen on our watch,” she says.

It’s clear that Hunga involved an unusually explosive recipe that may not be easily replicated. For about a month, the eruption had progressed as expected—moderately violent, with gas and ash, but manageable. Then everything went sideways. That appears to be the result of at least two factors, Cronin says. One was the mixing of sources of magma with slightly different chemical compositions down below. As these interacted, they produced gasses, expanding the volume of the magma within the confines of the rock. Under tremendous pressure, the rocks above began to crack, allowing the cold seawater to seep in. “The seawater added the extra spice, if you like,” Cronin says. A massive explosion ensued—two of them actually—which blew trillions of tons of material straight out through the top of the caldera, some of it apparently all the way to space.

Both of those explosions produced big tsunamis. But the biggest wave came later—potentially caused, Cronin thinks, by water flooding into the kilometer-deep hole suddenly dug out of the seafloor. “That’s something really new for us,” he says—a new type of threat to consider elsewhere. Previously, scientists thought that this kind of volcano could only really produce a big tsunami if a side of a caldera collapsed. The bottom line, he says, is that submarine volcanoes are more diverse, and in some cases more capable of extreme behavior, than anyone thought. 

But the process of piecing the eruption together has also highlighted the challenges of studying submarine volcanoes. A typical mapping expedition will involve a large, fully crewed research vessel, equipped with multibeam sonar that maps the seafloor for changes and a battery of water sampling instruments that search for chemical signs of ongoing activity. But taking a boat over a potentially active caldera is risky—not so much because the volcano might blow, but because the gas bubbles burbling up might cause a ship to sink. In Tonga, researchers solved that problem with smaller ships and an autonomous vessel. 

Even Tonga, which has been visited four times in the past year due to an influx of research funding to groups studying the eruption, isn’t likely to get another big crewed mission in the next few years, Cronin says. The cost is just so high. It would likely take decades to survey every volcano in detail, even just those in the Tongan arc. This is a shame, Walker says, because those kinds of expeditions are one of the few ways scientists get close enough to actually see how volcanoes are behaving. An ideal scenario would involve more funding for those missions, as well as investment in improving new technology, like the autonomous vessels, which can be tricky to operate in the treacherous open ocean. 

Without them, scientists are stuck watching from a distance. This is hard to do when you’re trying to observe underwater events—but not impossible. Satellite technology can spot objects known as pumice rafts—sheets of buoyant volcanic rock that bob on the water’s surface—as well as algal blooms, which are nurtured by the minerals released by volcanoes. And the USGS, as well as counterparts in Australia, are in the process of installing a network of sensors around Tonga that can better detect volcanic activity, combining seismic stations with sound sensors and webcams that watch for active explosions. Ensuring it stays up and running will be a challenge, Lowenstern says—a matter of keeping the systems connected to data and to power sources and ensuring Tonga can staff the facilities. He adds that Tonga is just one of many Pacific nations that could use the help. But it’s a start. 

One of the benefits of studying the Hunga volcano so closely is that researchers have now identified new volcanic features to watch out for. Over the next few years, Cronin foresees a process of identifying which volcanoes require more attention. On their final Hunga voyage of 2022, Cronin’s team made use of the time on the ship to visit two other submarine volcanoes in the area, including one about 100 miles north with a mesa-like topography that resembles Hunga before its eruption. The maps will be a baseline for future surveys that manage to get out on the water, a way for researchers to figure out how much action is happening underneath sea and rock. So far, Cronin reports, the ocean is quiet.

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Drinking a daily cup of tea could have potential benefits for your health as you age, but even if you’re not a tea drinker, you can still reap the benefits of flavonoids through other dietary options. Flavonoids are naturally occurring substances found in many common foods and drinks such as black and green tea, apples, nuts, citrus fruits, berries, and more.

Flavonoids have long been recognized for their health benefits, but new research from Edith Cowan University (ECU) suggests they may be even more beneficial than previously believed. The Heart Foundation supported a study of 881 elderly women (median age of 80) which found that those who consumed a high level of flavonoids in their diet were less likely to have extensive build-up of abdominal aortic calcification (AAC).

AAC is the calcification of the abdominal aorta — the largest artery in the body which supplies oxygenated blood from the heart to the abdominal organs and lower limbs — and is a predictor of cardiovascular risks such as heart attack and stroke. It has also been found to be a reliable predictor for late-life dementia.

ECU Nutrition and Health Innovation Research Institute researcher and study lead Ben Parmenter said while there were many dietary sources of flavonoids, some had particularly high amounts.

“In most populations, a small group of foods and beverages—uniquely high in flavonoids—contribute the bulk of total dietary flavonoid intake,” he said. “The main contributors are usually black or green tea, blueberries, strawberries, oranges, red wine, apples, raisins/grapes, and dark chocolate.”

The flavonoid family

There are many different types of flavonoids, such as flavan-3-ols and flavonols, which the study indicated appear to also have a relationship with AAC. Study participants who had a higher intake of total flavonoids, flavan-3-ols, and flavonols were 36-39 percent less likely to have extensive AAC.

Black tea was the study cohort’s main source of total flavonoids and was also associated with significantly lower odds of extensive AAC. Compared with respondents who didn’t drink tea, participants who had two-to-six cups per day had a 16-42 percent less chance of having extensive AAC.

However, some other dietary sources of flavonoids such as fruit juice, red wine, and chocolate, did not show a significant beneficial association with AAC.

Not just tea

Though black tea was the main source of flavonoids in the study — likely due to the age of the participants — Mr. Parmenter said people could still benefit from flavonoids without putting the kettle on.

“Out of the women who don’t drink black tea, higher total non-tea flavonoid intake also appears to protect against extensive calcification of the arteries,” he said. “This implies flavonoids from sources other than black tea may be protective against AAC when tea is not consumed.”

Mr. Parmenter said this was important as it allows non-tea drinkers to still benefit from flavonoids in their diet.

“In other populations or groups of people, such as young men or people from other countries, black tea might not be the main source of flavonoids,” he said. “AAC is a major predictor of vascular disease events, and this study shows intake of flavonoids, that could protect against AAC, are easily achievable in most people’s diets.”

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This is shown by a study in the journal Science based on a worldwide Citizen Science project on light pollution that has collected data over the last eleven years.

People around the world are seeing fewer and fewer stars in the night sky. The change in star visibility can be explained by an increase in the sky brightness of 7-10 percent per year. The rate of change is faster than satellite measurements of artificial light emissions on Earth would at first suggest. This is the finding of a study published in the journal Science, conducted by a research group led by Christopher Kyba of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum with colleagues from the GFZ and the US National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab. They analyzed more than 50,000 naked-eye observations by citizen scientists around the world from 2011 to 2022 as part of the “Globe at Night” Citizen Science Project. The results show that citizen science data are an important supplement to previous measurement methods.

Light Pollution Impact – From excellent dark sky (left) to inner city sky (right). Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, P. Marenfeld

Light pollution background

Over a large part of the Earth’s land surface, the sky continues to glow with an artificial twilight long after sunset. This “skyglow” is a form of light pollution that has serious effects on the environment and should therefore be the focus of research, as Constance Walker, co-author of the study and head of the Globe at Night project of NSF’s NOIRLab since its inception, emphasizes. After all, many behaviors and physiological processes of living creatures are determined by daily and seasonal cycles – and thus influenced by light. “Skyglow affects both diurnal and nocturnal animals and also destroys an important part of our cultural heritage,” says Walker. The appearance of the night sky is changing, with negative effects on stargazing and astronomy.

Astronaut photographs of parts of Calgary (Canada) show examples of how lighting changed from 2010-2021: New lighting has been installed and many streetlights have been converted from orange high pressure sodium to white LED. (Note: The photos are not taken with the same settings, and have different spatial resolution. Thus, the 2010 photo appears somewhat brighter. Credit: Images courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center, georeferencing by GFZ Potsdam

Need for suitable measurement methods

The change in skyglow over time has not previously been measured globally. While it could in principle be measured by satellites, the only current sensors that monitor the entire Earth do not have sufficient accuracy or sensitivity.

A promising approach is therefore to use the observational power of people using the human eye as a sensor, and in doing so – within the framework of Citizen Science experiments – to rely on the power of the crowd. The “Globe at Night” project, initiated by the US National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, has been running since 2006. People all over the world can participate in this project.

With Citizen Science…

Participants look at their night sky, and then report which of a set of eight star charts best matches what they see using an online form. Each chart shows the sky under different levels of light pollution.

“The contributions of individual people work together as if they were a global sensor network, making new science possible,” says Christopher Kyba from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam and the Ruhr University Bochum.

Together with his GFZ colleague Yigit Öner Altıntas and Constance E. Walker and Mark Newhouse from NOIRLab, he has analyzed data from 51,351 participants around the world taken on cloud- and moon-free nights between 2011 and 2022. They were obtained from 19,262 locations worldwide, including 3,699 locations in Europe and 9,488 locations in North America.

In order to calculate a rate of change in sky brightness from this data and to take into account that the observers were also at different locations over the years, they made use of a global model for sky brightness based on satellite data from 2014.

…to surprising findings

“The rate at which stars are becoming invisible to people in urban environments is dramatic,” sums up Christopher Kyba, lead author of the study. The researchers found that the change in the number of visible stars can be explained by increases in night sky brightness. In Europe, they found a 6.5 percent increase in brightness per year matched the data; in North America, it’s 10.4 percent.

To put these numbers into a more understandable context, Kyba explains the consequences for seeing stars in a place with a 9.6 percent per year increase, which was the average over all locations worldwide. “If the development were to continue at that rate, a child born in a place where 250 stars are visible will only be able to see 100 stars there on his 18th birthday.”

Based on the slower growth in upward emissions seen in satellite data, the researchers were surprised by the speed of this development in skyglow. In fact, for the locations of the observers, the artificial brightness measured by satellite had slightly decreased (by 0.3 percent per year in Europe, by 0.8 percent in North America).

Causes for the difference between measurements from Earth and from space

Christopher Kyba believes that the difference between human observation and satellite measurements is probably due to changes in lighting practices: “Satellites are most sensitive to light that is directed upwards towards the sky. But it is horizontally emitted light that accounts for most of the skyglow,” Kyba explains. “So, if advertisements and facade lighting become more frequent, bigger or brighter, they could have a big impact on skyglow without making much of a difference on satellite imagery.”

Another factor the authors cite is the widespread switch from orange sodium vapor lamps to white LEDs, which emit much more blue light. “Our eyes are more sensitive to blue light at night, and blue light is more likely to be scattered in the atmosphere, so contributes more to skyglow,” Kyba says. “But the only satellites that can image the whole Earth at night are not sensitive in the wavelength range of blue light.”

Limits of the study and further potential

However, the Citizen Science approach also has its limitations. For example, the number of participants from different regions of the world determines the significance of spatial and temporal trends. So far people from North America and Europe have had the largest participation in the experiment, and half of the Asian contributions come from a single country: Japan. “The most data comes from the regions of Earth where skyglow is currently most prevalent. That’s useful, but it means that we can’t say much about skyglow change in regions with few observations,” Kyba emphasizes. Especially in developing countries, rapid changes in artificial skyglow are suspected, but there have been few observations so far.

Two conclusions: Lighting policy and Citizen Science

The researchers draw two main conclusions from their findings: On the one hand, they show that current lighting policies, such as the use of LEDs, have not yet brought about any improvement, at least on a continental level, despite growing awareness of light pollution.

“And on the other hand, we were able to demonstrate that the Citizen Science data represent an important supplement to the previous measurement methods,” Kyba emphasizes.

Constance Walker adds, “If we had broader participation, we could identify trends for other continents, and possibly even for individual states and cities. The project is ongoing, so feel free to take a look tonight and let us know what you see!”

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