Moderna's mRNA-based vaccine against RSV (respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus) was effective at preventing disease in older adults, according to preliminary, top-line results of an ongoing phase III clinical trial the company announced Tuesday.

Moderna said it will now seek regulatory approval for the vaccine in the first half of this year.

According to the company, the vaccine was 83.7 percent effective at preventing RSV-associated lower respiratory tract disease (RSV-LRTD) involving two or more symptoms in adults age 60 and over. It was 82.4 percent effective at preventing RSV-LRTD with three or more symptoms in the same group. No safety concerns were identified.

The findings are another positive sign for mRNA vaccine platforms generally, which Moderna and other pharmaceutical companies have quickly shifted to for fighting various other infections and diseases given the global success of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. mRNA-based vaccines are now in development for everything from seasonal flu to HIV and certain cancers.

RSV has been among the top priorities for vaccine development. The seasonal respiratory virus is potentially lethal to young children, as well as the elderly. This was particularly noticeable last year, as RSV and other seasonal viruses caused unusually large off-season waves of infection in the wake of SARS-CoV-2's disruptive spread. Typically, RSV sends around 3.6 million children worldwide to the hospital each year and kills over 100,000 children under 5. Just in the US, RSV sends an estimated 58,000 to 80,000 children under 5 to the hospital each year, killing between 100 to 300, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For older adults in the US, the virus sends about 60,000 to 120,000 to the hospital, killing 6,000 to 10,000.

Researchers have been working on an RSV vaccine for decades. In the 1960s, tragedy struck an early vaccine trial, virtually halting progress. It was only in the last decade or so that researchers could fully understand and overcome the failure.

Now, with decades of foundational research, Moderna's mRNA-based candidate is just one of several in the works. In August, Pfizer announced that its protein-based RSV vaccine was about 86 percent effective in older adults. Two months later, the company announced its vaccine was 82 percent effective at preventing severe RSV in the first three months of an infant's life after vaccinating pregnant trial participants. And in October, GSK announced that its protein-based RSV vaccine was about 83 percent effective against disease in older adults.

For Moderna's trial, the company enrolled approximately 37,000 adults 60 years or older in 22 countries. The interim analysis was based on 64 cases of RSV-LRTD with two or more symptoms, of which 55 occurred in the placebo group, the company reported. There were 20 cases of RSV-LRTD with three or more symptoms, of which 17 cases were observed in the placebo group.

"Today's results represent an important step forward in preventing lower respiratory disease due to RSV in adults 60 years of age and older," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in the press release. "These data are encouraging, and represent the second demonstration of positive phase 3 trial results from our mRNA infectious disease vaccine platform after Spikevax, our COVID-19 vaccine." Bancel went on to say that the company will be focusing on preventing respiratory viruses, in particular, with its platform. In addition to the RSV vaccine candidate, "we are committed to developing a portfolio of respiratory mRNA vaccines to target the most significant viruses causing respiratory disease, including COVID-19, influenza, and human metapneumovirus."

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Private investment in the space sector declined by 58 percent in the year 2022, according to a new Space Investment Quarterly report from the firm Space Capital.

The $20.1 billion in private market equity investment last year is the lowest annual total since 2015, said Chad Anderson, the founder and managing partner of Space Capital. While early stage investments were largely unchanged, the large decline came in late- and growth-stage companies.

The report cites several factors for the pullback, including the fastest interest rate hike cycle since 1988, a challenging investment environment, and a continued economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, Anderson told Ars that another factor was the relatively poor returns of space-based companies that have gone public via the Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) process, dating to 2019 when Virgin Galactic did so. According to an analysis by SpaceWorks, $100 invested in a "new space" index of stocks in January 2021 would be worth about $15 today, compared to $127 for a traditional space stock index.

SPACs whacked

"The poor performance of SPAC companies has certainly influenced investor attitudes," Anderson said. "This is just one of several factors influencing investor sentiment, but it definitely is significant. Amid the general pullback in technology investing, space companies are often viewed as a higher risk category, and SPAC underperformers like Virgin Galactic are clearly driving those perceptions."

Anderson said it typically takes about six to eight years for a company to progress from its initial round of seed funding to an initial public offering of stock. By this yardstick, many of the space companies that have gone public via the SPAC process did so prematurely—not just pre-revenue, but in some cases pre-product.

Some of these companies, such as Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, and Momentus, still lack a viable commercial product years after going public. While these companies may have needed public funding to survive their early development years, this additional scrutiny has made innovating much more challenging.

"It is difficult to build a core product, fail, pivot, and innovate as a public company," Anderson said. "The public markets prefer operational stability and predictable revenue. It’s no wonder that many of these companies have disappointed."

Focus on fundamentals

With that said, Anderson believes that some SPAC companies are beginning to demonstrate their viability. Moreover, he said, some "incredible" space companies have been working in the background for several years. These companies will be ready to go public, via a traditional initial public offering, within a few years.

As for other notable tidbits in the report, Anderson called attention to SpaceX's capital raise of $2 billion in 2022, the company's second-largest annual raise. SpaceX has sought this additional funding as it has worked to bring two large development projects—the Starlink Internet constellation and the Starship launch system—online.

China also appears to be closing its gap with the United States in private investing in the space economy, Anderson said. Chinese companies have attracted 35 percent of all Space Applications investments, for example, compared with 41 percent for US companies. This is being driven by China's e-commerce and location-based services boom.

Looking ahead in 2023, Anderson sees another difficult year for space startups due to the lack of investment capital available for small companies to draw upon. However, he views a shift from "momentum investing" to a greater focus on fundamentals as a positive trend, which will benefit quality space companies in the long run.

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Humans are complex machines, with moving parts that bend, squish, stretch, flow, quiver, and beat. Scientists are now plugging into these energy sources to solve a common problem afflicting sensors, wearables, and implanted medical devices—the dreaded flat battery.

Devices that are self-powered by design could be the solution, and researchers have discovered that the human body itself can be a handy power source—just in time to power the exploding market in wearables. “Electroceuticals” are starting to challenge pharmaceuticals in medicine, so more people will depend on devices such as implanted electrostimulators and pacemakers in order to stay healthy.

“Biobatteries” and energy scavenging could make these devices energy-autonomous, removing the need for invasive surgery to replace dead batteries. As a bonus, this wireless world would avoid implanted charging cables being dislodged or becoming infected—problems that are all too common today.

Scientists have been working on body-powered devices since the early 2000s—until now, the tech has been too energy-hungry for the minute amounts of electricity that can be harvested from humans. But after two decades of advances, today’s devices consume ultra-low amounts of energy, throwing open the gate to myriad ideas and prototypes that draw power from the people.

A cellular powerhouse

Your cells are basically batteries—biochemical ones that convert sugary fuel into energy. German startup CELTRO is tapping into this living power source by utilizing arrays of microneedles to harvest tiny amounts of energy from hundreds of thousands of cells. CELTRO’s first product will be a tiny autonomous pacemaker. “A muscular contraction, like the heart, starts at one point and then propagates through the whole heart muscle,” says CEO and cofounder Gerd Teepe. “Our idea was to harvest energy at multiple points to use this avalanche effect.” As well as harvesting energy, the multifunctional microneedles will plug into cardiac tissue to monitor the heart and deliver a helping electrical boost to restore pacing, if needed. In 2021, CELTRO raised seed funding for lab-based proof of concept studies.

Paper fuel-cells

French startup BeFC is building biobatteries with green credentials. Its fuel cell uses layers of carbon, cellulose, and glucose—plus a sprinkling of proprietary enzymes. Adding a drop of fluid—say, blood or urine—sets off a reaction that generates electricity. The paper patches could power single-use diagnostic devices and continuous monitoring sensors, such as glucose-monitoring kits for people with diabetes. After use, the cells can even be composted—unlike other miniature batteries that are eventually binned or incinerated. BeFC is currently raising Series A funding and expects to hit the market in 2024 with its first products.

My quivering heart

Paris-based CAIRDAC is designing a pacemaker that’s powered by the heart itself. Its leadless pacemaker is packed into a capsule containing a piezoelectric energy harvester—a pendulum that swings through heartbeats, blood flow, and vibrations. The oscillations are converted into electricity and stored until the device senses that the heart needs a jolt to reset the rhythm. The startup recently raised €17 million (around $18.3 million) in Series A financing to continue preclinical testing and move toward human trials.

Interior illumination

Solar panels are becoming a common household sight, and they could soon be lighting up med tech, too. Researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, have found that a solar panel placed under the skin still yields up to 10 percent as much electricity as one in direct sunlight—enough to power an ultra-low consumption sensor. A couple of hours in the sun can run an implantable temperature sensor for 24 hours, and the researchers say the best place for it is between the neck and the shoulder.

The hydroelectric heart

Mini-turbines could harness blood flow and turn it into electricity, according to researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland. They’ve designed a torpedo-shaped turbine that could be implanted into a blood vessel in the heart, generating electricity from blood flow, much like a hydroelectric power station. A big challenge, as yet unsolved, is how to avoid blood clots forming on the blades of the turbine, but in lab simulations the turbine generated enough energy to power commercially available leadless pacemakers.

Piezo patches

Italian startup PiezoSkin says it has developed an ultra-thin piezoelectric skin patch that can simultaneously measure movements and draw power from them. In one study, it used the patch to monitor neck movements in people with dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing—but the firm’s biocompatible film could also harvest power from other body movements and vibrations for sensors and wearables.

Feeling the heat

Humans radiate around 100 watts a day in thermal energy, and according to Swiss startup Mithras, harnessing this heat could power wearable biosensors and even implanted devices. Its thermoelectric generators, known as TEGs, create electricity by exploiting the temperature difference between the body and the environment. Mithras estimates that with a 5 degree Celsius difference, a 12-square-centimeter TEG skin patch could completely power a cochlear implant. 

This article was originally published in the January/February 2023 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

The Battery That Never Gets Flat

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Up to that point, I had avoided fieldwork. To an undergraduate studying ecology, bending over plants for 10 hours a day seemed a lot less interesting than identifying big-picture trends in large data sets. But I knew potential graduate schools would likely view my lack of field experience as a hole in my resume, and my mother thought I should work for a few years to explore my interests before pursuing further education. So, I applied to field-based summer positions after graduation and landed a job assessing sage grouse habitat in Utah. It felt like a necessary evil before I could move on to bigger, more “intellectual” things.

Medieval monks were, in many ways, the original LinkedIn power users. Earnest and with a knack for self-promotion, they loved to read and share inspiring stories of other early Christians who had shown remarkable commitment to their work. There was Sarah, who lived next to a river without ever once looking in its direction, such was her dedication to her faith. James prayed so intently during a snowstorm that he was buried in snow and had to be dug out by his neighbors.

But none of these early devotees could ward off distraction like Pachomius. The 4th-century monk weathered a parade of demons that transformed into naked women, rumbled the walls of his dwelling, and tried to make him laugh with elaborate comedy routines. Pachomius didn’t even glance in their direction. For early Christian writers, Pachomius and his ilk set a high bar for concentration that other monks aspired to match. These super-concentrators were the first millennium embodiment of #workgoals, #hustle, and #selfimprovement.

Even if you’re not beset by demons, it turns out there’s a lot that medieval monks can teach you about distraction. Our present-day worries about self-motivation and productivity might feel like the product of a world plagued by distracting technologies, but monks agonized about distraction in much the same way more than 1,500 years ago. They fretted about the demands of work and social ties, bemoaned the distractions presented by new technologies, and sought out inspiring routines that might help them live more productive lives. Forget Silicon Valley gurus. Could it be that early Christian monks are the productivity heroes we’ve been searching for all this time?

Jamie Kreiner thinks so. She’s a medieval historian and the author of a new book called The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction, which examines how early Christian monks—men and women living between the years 300 and 900—strengthened their concentration. Monks had a very good reason for their obsession with distractedness, she says: The stakes couldn’t be higher. “They, unlike everyone else, had devoted their entire lives—their entire selves—to trying to concentrate on God. And because they wanted to achieve single-mindedness and found it so hard, that’s why they ended up writing about distractedness more than everyone else.”

One of the main ways that monks encouraged each other to stay focused on their prayers and studies was by sharing tales of extreme concentration. Sometimes they were inspirational, like the story of Simeon the Stylite, who lived atop a pillar and never became distracted, even when his foot was grossly infected. At other times the stories were designed to keep monks humble. A first-millennium Latin text called Apophthegmata Patrum contains the story of a monk who had a great reputation for concentration, but who had heard of a grocer in a nearby town who had even better concentration skills. When he paid the grocer a visit, the monk was stunned to find out that his store was in a part of town where people sang lewd tunes nonstop. The monk asked how the grocer was able to concentrate among such vulgar music. “What music?” responded the grocer. He was so busy focusing that he hadn’t even noticed anyone singing. 

These kinds of stories reminded monks just how hard it was to stay focused. They weren’t expected to be concentration machines. They too would come up short every now and then. “Acknowledging that upfront is a kind of compassion,” says Kreiner. “Monks are really good at being compassionate to each other, and to how hard it was to really follow through on stuff.” Freeing ourselves from distraction is really difficult. We don’t have to feel awful about not always matching up to our lofty goals.

But modern hustle culture isn’t always so forgiving, says Kreiner. In the world of online self-help influencers, it’s down to the individual to change their world. You too can be successful—but only if you want it enough. Or as Love Island star Molly-Mae Hague put it on the Diary of a CEO podcast: “You’re given one life and it’s down to you what you do with it.”

The thing about overhauling your life, though, is that the real world tends to get in the way. No matter how much you try to shut the outside world out, it has a way of creeping in and putting ruin to your plans—and that applies just as much today as it did a millennium ago. Frange the monk lived alone inside an old pharaonic tomb close to the modern-day Egyptian city of Luxor, but even the life of a hermit wasn’t devoid of distractions. Frange left behind shards of pottery that show he was in touch with over 70 correspondents. He fielded requests from people asking to have their livestock and children blessed. He asked to borrow books and invited people to visit. But sometimes he wrote of his wish to be left alone.

“Monks’ solutions were a lot more sensitive to the fact that we’re social beings who are constrained by our environment and resources,” says Kreiner. Like us, they had competing demands on their time and had to balance the dedication to their inner lives with the roles they played in their communities. Monks weren’t afraid to acknowledge both sides of their lives. Frange was—and I’m sure he would agree with this—#authentic. He knew that even the spiritual work of achieving single-mindedness would sometimes butt up against his other demands, but that the “real world” wasn’t something he could turn his back on. Flashy hermits who shunned all interactions were the social media showoffs of their days, but they weren’t the only ones who could live meaningful, focused lives.

Early Christian devotees also loved searching for ways to get the most out of their days. Just as we obsess over the bizarre routines of tech bros today, the 4th-century theologian Augustine of Hippo wished that he knew more about the productivity tips of the apostles. In The Work of Monks, Augustine wondered how Paul had divided up his day. If only Paul had written his routine down, then monks would have some useful guidance to follow, Augustine griped. Other monks wrote their own guides: The 6th-century Rule of Saint Benedict set out a strict routine monks should follow, including advice on when and what to eat, how long to work, and how to keep a routine while traveling.

“Monks would have really appreciated how writers of today love to obsess about the schedules of other writers,” says Kreiner. But like virtual workgroups where writers check in with each other to make sure everyone is staying on track, these routines could also serve a deeper purpose. “Usually you would do these routines with other monks. There was a sort of esprit de corps and mutual support that a routine would really foster.” If you’ve got a difficult deadline looming, why not share that burden with a friend or colleague who can hold you to account in a supportive way?

Of course, even the best routine could be derailed by new technologies. In the 4th century, a strange innovation started to provoke suspicion and intrigue among monks: the codex. An early precursor to the book, codices offered a more elegant way to organize long texts compared with the scrolls that had been the most popular way of storing writing until then. With its easy-to-count pages and pillow-like form, some monks feared that the codex would distract monks from the content of its pages.

But others saw the potential of this new technology to supercharge their learning. They added their own comments in the margins of codices and highlighted important passages to help commit them to memory. “When modern critics of distractedness suggest that we should be reading more books, they owe something to monks’ efforts to make this technology a more effective partner in their own struggles to concentrate,” writes Kreiner. New technologies offer ways to go deeper into our work, but only if we use them in the right way.

Maybe monks aren’t the technophobes we might imagine them to be. Today, nuns on TikTok are using the platform to bring the world inside their cloisters. Kreiner imagines that even early Christian devotees would try their hand at social media. Saint Jerome basically invented subtweeting, after all. “He was so judgmental that when he’d say stuff, other monks would worry that he was talking about them,” Krieiner says. “He always had some kind of beef or argument to pick with somebody.”

Instead of turning to modern-day productivity gurus like Tim Ferriss, perhaps there’s some wisdom to be gained by exploring the lives of the original workaholics. Just like us, they struggled with self-doubt and looked for inspiration in the lives of others. They traded barbs and obsessed over the best working routines. But even the most dedicated monks knew that achieving absolute single-mindedness could only ever last for a fleeting moment. After all, they were only human.

Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk

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1923 cartoon predicts 2023’s AI art generators

Meteorite hunters in Antarctica have recently discovered five new space rocks that crash-landed to Earth, including one that weighs a hefty 7.6 kilograms (16.7 pounds). Around 45,000 meteorites have been located in Antarctica over the past century, but only about a hundred or so are this size, meaning the find is pretty special. 

“Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even tiny micrometeorites can be incredibly scientifically valuable, but of course, finding a big meteorite like this one is rare, and really exciting,” Maria Valdes, a research scientist at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago, said in a statement. 

“Studying meteorites helps us better understand our place in the universe. The bigger a sample size we have of meteorites, the better we can understand our Solar System, and the better we can understand ourselves,” she explained.

Finding meteorites in Antarctica can be a grueling but fruitful endeavor. Statistically speaking, meteorites are just as likely to land anywhere on Earth, although scientists have found significantly more fallen meteorites in Antarctica than in the rest of the world. 

Happy days! The researchers celebrating their discovery. Image credit: Maria Valdes

How come? First of all, the black asteroids are simply easy to spot against the stark white landscape. Secondly, the environmental conditions of Antarctica are ideal for the preservation of space rocks, effectively acting as an asteroid refrigerator that keeps them on ice until scientists are lucky enough to stumble on them. 

Elsewhere in the world, the damp and balmy conditions can corrode the asteroids before they're discovered, but that isn’t a problem in the driest and coldest place on planet Earth. 

However, asteroid hunting here isn’t without its challenges. Antarctica is desperately remote, and work here can be psychologically testing for some. Scientists doing research here will be stationed for months at a time in this profoundly unusual environment, cut off from their loved ones and home comforts. 

Life as a scientist in Antarctica ain't always glamorous. Image credit: Maria Valdes

Obviously, it can be damn cold too. To find meteorites, researchers must trawl across vast ice fields, sleeping in tents that feel the sting of the sub-zero temperatures. That said, it’s summertime in Antarctica at the moment, so conditions aren’t too severe, with average temperatures laying around -10°C (14°F). 

Valdes notes that this means it was actually colder back home in Chicago around late December than in Antarctica on some days. 

“Going on an adventure exploring unknown areas is exciting, but we also had to deal with the fact that the reality on the ground is much more difficult than the beauty of satellite images,” added Vinciane Debaille of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

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The new COVID-19 variant CH.1.1, named Orthrus, may be running rampant across the UK, and could soon take over from the current most dominant variants, according to government data. Orthrus may be responsible for around 25 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the UK, but some regions may be seeing it in 100 percent of cases, states the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). 

The UK is monitoring both CH.1.1 and XBB.1.5, which are both Omicron subvariants, as they appear to have a growth advantage over previous variants. Currently, BQ.1 is dominant in the UK and remains the largest cause of COVID-19 infection, though that may soon change. XBB.1.5 remains at low prevalence. 

Orthrus first emerged in November and has rapidly spread to counties across the UK, becoming dominant in Northumberland, Oxford, and North West Leicestershire, among others. In Blackburn, the upper estimate places a chance of 100 percent of COVID-19 cases being a result of Orthrus. 

The UKHSA will continue to monitor variants using genomic mapping, in the hopes of anticipating potential variants of concern. 

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The wall can be seen as a symbol that we all need to extend a hand to those who need help.

And when it's a bit chilly and cold outside, people need an opportunity to pick up a warm piece of clothing here, says director Sanna Detlefsen from Östergötland's City Mission. 

High pressure on the City Mission

There are many who are struggling financially right now with inflation and higher interest rates, and the City Mission has seen that the basic need for food and clothing has increased by 20 percent in recent months.

We have enormous pressure on the City Mission and there are people who sometimes have work and work - but can't make it work anyway, says Sanna Detlefsen.

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Ramesses II, or Ramesses the Great as he was also known, was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who ruled for 66 years during the Nineteenth Dynasty, and was possibly the Biblical pharaoh that persecuted the Israelites in the Book of Exodus. Portrayed as a handsome man in many statues and drawings, he may have died in his 90s but we now have a good idea of how he may have looked in his prime at around 45. 

The Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University and an Egyptian mummy expert and radiologist have teamed up to "digitally unwrap" his mummy and reveal the face of Ramesses II.

To recreate the pharaoh's face, head of radiology at Cairo University Dr Sahar Saleem reprocessed old CT scans of the mummy she had taken between 2005 and 2009, and then used modern software to create a 3D model of his head.

"The software identifies the properties of the various layers of materials on the mummy's face, such as overlying linen bandages, and allows for the digital unwrapping of the pharaohs," professor Sahar Saleem of Cairo University told Auntminnieineurope.  "The visualization of fine facial features such as ear piercings and hairstyle was also made possible by modern image reconstruction software."

The Face Lab then used this to create an approximation of what Ramesses II would have looked like, using software designed to be used in forensic investigations. The software adds layers of muscle and tissue onto the bones beneath, giving a surprisingly accurate depiction of what a person looks like. Sure, we can't tell this from the above scan, what with Ramesses being born over 3,000 years before us. However, by providing CT scans of living people's skulls (and nothing else), the team can then compare their approximation to the real thing.

"We have tested our methods using CT [scans] from living donors and we have evaluated the facial reconstruction using geometric comparison that shows approximately 70 percent [of the] surface of the facial reconstruction with less than 2 millimeters of error," director of Face Lab, Caroline Wilkinson, told Newsweek.

For Ramesses II, the team had extra help as the mummification preserved extra clues, such as hair patterns. The team consulted with Egyptology experts for help with skin, eye, and hair colors based on what would be Ramesses' most likely appearance. 

As well as an image of Ramesses II at his time of death, the team was able to produce approximations of how he would have looked at an earlier age.

"We know how skulls and faces age, and it is possible to predict how a person looked at a younger age by removing some of the skeletal and soft tissue changes associated with old age," Wilkinson continued, "such as wrinkles, drooping nose and ears, jowls, tooth loss."

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Scientists appear to have solved a mystery of physics that has puzzled people for centuries.

Leonardo’s Paradox, named after Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci who observed the phenomenon, centres on the way air bubbles appear to zigzag or spiral as they rise through water.

The polymath was unable to explain why bubbles move in this manner – rather than rise in a straight line, as physics would suggest – but did find a correlation between the size of a bubble and its movement: the unexpected motion only occurs once a bubble achieves a spherical radius of roughly 1 millimetre.

For more than 500 years, scientists studying fluid dynamics have also been unable to come up with a satisfying explanation for why this occurs – until now.

Two researchers from the University of Seville and the University of Bristol used a mathematical framework to simulate air bubbles rising through water, calculating they become unstable once a critical radius of 0.926mm is reached.

This is due to the pressure of the water surrounding the bubbles forming subtle deformations in their shape, causing the wobble motion.

Their findings were detailed in a study, titled ‘Path instability of an air bubble rising in water’, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday.

“It has been documented since the Renaissance that an air bubble rising in water will deviate from its straight, steady path to perform a periodic zigzag or spiral motion once the bubble is above a critical size,” the paper stated.

“Yet, unsteady bubble rise has resisted quantitative description, and the physical mechanism remains in dispute. Using a numerical mapping technique, we for the first time find quantitative agreement with high-precision measurements of the instability.”

The researchers conclude that the discovery of the mechanism opens up the possibility for further study of “small contaminations, present in most practical settings, which emulate a particle somewhere in between a solid and a gas”.

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After over 15 years of research, scientists have at last revealed the secrets of a very special synapse. Buried deep in the inner ear, these synapses can process signals faster than any others in the body, but neuroscientists could not figure out how this was possible – until now.

Humans, along with many other animals, rely on a delicate system of structures that allow us to walk and turn our heads without getting dizzy and falling over. This is known as the vestibular system – and when it goes wrong, it can lead to conditions like vertigo and other balance disorders. An estimated one in three Americans over the age of 40 are affected; treatment can be tricky, and patients are at risk of falls, causing further injury.

The reflexes driven by the vestibular system are the fastest anywhere in the nervous system. Previous studies uncovered that this was down to a special type of synapse, which can transmit information without the usual 0.5-millisecond delay that neurotransmitter-based signaling requires.

This superfast process was termed “nonquantal transmission”. However, although scientists had been able to put a name to the phenomenon, they still weren’t fully sure how it worked. The new study, led by a team at Rice University, has provided some answers.

The inner ear contains extremely sensitive cells called hair cells. As the name suggests, bundles of hair-like sensors on these cells detect movements of the head via the surrounding fluid. They transmit information to neurons that connect directly to the brain, providing constant updates so we can remain upright and keep our vision steady.

The neurons meet the hair cells at a cuplike structure called a calyx. As you can see in the diagram below, the calyx surrounds the end of the hair cell, leaving a minuscule gap – the synaptic cleft.

The hair cell (blue) is surrounded by the cuplike calyx (green) of its partner nerve cell. Ions flow through channels on either side, creating an electrical potential across the synaptic cleft that allows information to flow at superfast speeds. Image credit: Aravind Chenrayan Govindaraju/Rice University

“The vestibular calyx is a wonder of nature,” said study co-author Anna Lysakowski, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a statement. “Its large cup-shaped structure is the only one of its kind in the entire nervous system […] We’ve been trying to figure out its special purpose for a long time.”

The authors created a computer model to simulate nonquantal transmission, looking specifically at what was going on inside the synaptic cleft. They observed that the speed of transmission at these synapses was down to changes in electrical potential, by tracking the flow of potassium ions through channels in the hair cell and across the cleft.

“The mechanism turns out to be quite subtle, with dynamic interactions giving rise to fast and slow forms of nonquantal transmission,” said corresponding author Rob Raphael.

“The key capability was the ability to predict the potassium level and electrical potential at every location within the cleft,” added co-author Ruth Eatock, from the University of Chicago.

The team concluded that it was the very shape of the calyx itself that makes this type of transmission possible, and suggest in their paper that “this mechanism of electrical transmission between cells may act at other synapses.”

This work has been a long time coming for co-author Imran Quraishi in particular. Now an assistant professor at Yale University, Quraishi began working on an early version of the computer model during his graduate studies in Raphael’s research group. Over the intervening years, more and more evidence to support the idea of nonquantal transmission had come to light, but the underlying mechanism was still unclear.

“The unfinished work had weighed on me,” Quraishi said. Thankfully, though, help came in the form of graduate student Aravind Govindaraju, who took up the reins of the project in 2018.

As Raphael puts it, the culmination of all this work has provided science with some long-awaited answers.

“For the past 30 years – since the original observation of nonquantal transmission – scientists have wondered, ‘Why is this synapse so fast?’ and, ‘Is the transmission speed related to the unique calyx structure?’ We have provided answers to both questions.”

The paper is published in PNAS.

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After more than five years, the second data release from the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) has been published and it was certainly worth the wait. Astronomers have imaged a staggering 3.32 billion objects in this new survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. 

This incredible astronomical feat is publicly accessible and took 21,400 exposures combined into 10 terabytes of data. The images cover about 6.5 percent of the night sky, stretching across the 130 degrees in length that the plane of the Milky Way inhabits. If you take the full Moon as your unit of area of the sky, you’d need 13,000 full Moons to cover it completely:  a vast area full of intriguing astronomical sources.

The main article image and the full set of observations seen in this work compared to the full plane of the Milky Way. Image Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” said lead author Andrew Saydjari, from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, in a statement. 

“Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”

Identifying the celestial objects in those tens of thousands of observations is no easy task. The plane of the Milky Way has interstellar dust and gas that blocks starlight as well as the brightness of diffuse nebulae, which can mess with the measurements of the individual brightness of stars. The whole region is so crowded that some stars look like they are right on top of each other too. Thanks to a new data-process approach, the team was able to get this survey where all these 3.32 billion objects are recognizable.

The full area covered by the suvery. Image Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

“Since my work on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey two decades ago, I have been looking for a way to make better measurements on top of complex backgrounds," said Douglas Finkbeiner, a professor at the Center for Astrophysics, co-author of the paper, and principal investigator behind the project. “This work has achieved that and more!"

The Dark Energy Camera conducted the Dark Energy Survey between 2013 and 2019. It is installed on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and clearly, it continues to deliver incredible observations.

Together with other surveys, this work is pushing beyond the current understanding of our galaxy.

“When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way's disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars,” explained co-author Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute. “With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way's stars and dust in unprecedented detail.”

The data release is presented in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement.

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Air traffic controllers watched as objects materialized on their radar screens and flew over the White House and the Capitol—air space that was restricted. “It was very erratic. It went left and right,” one of the air traffic controllers would later say. “We knew it wasn’t an airplane, because a plane flies in one direction. But it was a strong signal, just like an airplane.” A Capital Airlines pilot reported seeing six fast-moving lights that had “no tail, no recognizable shape … just bright lights against a dark sky” over the course of 14 minutes. Air Force radar also picked up the objects, whatever they were, but they vanished just as fast as they were spotted. Scrambled jets sent to investigate found nothing.

At that point, UFOs were a hot topic in the U.S., thanks in part to an article that had appeared in an April 1952 issue of LIFE magazine called “Have We Visitors From Space?” What was happening in D.C. would prove to be “the climax of the 1952 flap,” Curtis Peebles wrote in Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the UFO Myth, and kicked flying saucer obsession into high gear. “Unidentified flying objects exploded into the public consciousness then,” Mark Rodeghier, scientific director for the Center for UFO Studies, told The New York Times in 2018. “There was concern in a way you hadn’t seen before.”

The press went wild. “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL,” screamed just one headline about the incident, which made news around the country—and the world.

Perhaps these headlines were what inspired evangelical minister Reverend Louis A. Gardner to write physicist Albert Einstein asking for his opinion on flying saucers. Did he believe saucers came from space—specifically Mars or Venus, Gardner wondered? Or were UFOs some kind of military technology experiments created by the U.S. Air Force … or America’s foes?

At this point in his career, Einstein was one of the most renowned scientists in the world. He’d released his theory of general relativity, nabbed the Nobel Prize for Physics, spoken out against racism in America, and urged former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt to pursue nuclear research, influencing the creation of the Manhattan Project (a fact he would come to regret). And he was still performing research at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, even though he had technically retired in 1945.

Einstein was famous, and busy—so one could have forgiven him for if he had chosen not to reply to Gardner’s query. But he did reply, on July 23, 1952, writing on letterhead from the Institute for Advanced Study.

Einstein on flying saucers. / University of Southern California/GettyImages

“Dear Sir,” Einstein wrote. “Those people have seen something. What it is I do not know and am not curious to know. Sincerely yours, Albert Einstein.”

It’s an interesting response from a man who typically championed curiosity. “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing,” he once said. In fact, just a few months before Gardner wrote to him, Einstein told his biographer, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

Whatever his reasons for not being curious about what, exactly, people were seeing in the skies across America, Einstein’s succinct response to Gardner made news around the U.S. (Some of the stories even featured photos of a giddy Gardner holding the letter.) “Saucers not Einstein’s Dish,” one paper punnily headlined a piece about the letter. “Curious About Sky Disks? Not ‘The Brain,’” read another.

Reverend Louis A. Gardner holds his letter from Einstein. / University of Southern California/GettyImages

Also making the news? More UFOs over D.C., which appeared in the sky on July 26 and 27. Radar spotted as many as 14 objects in the sky. One sergeant at Andrews Air Force Base saw “a bluish white light move … at an incredible rate of speed. … These lights did not have the characteristics of shooting stars. There was no trails and [they] seemed to go out rather than disappear, and traveled faster than any shooting star I have ever seen.”

The Air Force received a record-breaking 500 reports of UFOs that month. They denied that what had been seen was any craft of theirs, and ultimately blamed what had happened (which would come to be known as “the Washington Invasion”) on the weather and meteors—but true believers, and those who had seen the phenomena themselves, weren’t convinced.

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The largest whales got to be so big and cancer-free thanks to four key genes. Image credit: Chase Dekker / Shutterstock.com

The blue whale is not only the biggest animal on Earth, but it’s also the largest ever to have existed on the planet. They can reach lengths of 33 meters (108 feet), and are three times the weight of the second largest fin whales, but how did they get so be so big?

New research has pinned down the pivotal role four genes played in not only promoting the enormous body sizes of whales, but also protecting them from the increased risk of cancer that typically affects larger animals. The cetaceans owe a lot to GHSR, IGFBP7, NCAPG, and PLAG1.

Identifying these four pivotal genes started with looking at a group of nine. Five of these related to the growth hormone/insulin-like growth factor axis, and the other four were associated with big body sizes in the hoofed animals, Artiodactyls, which despite being land-dwelling animals are actually related to whales.

The researchers on the study wanted to investigate the role of these genes across 19 species of whales, including seven giants that were classed as whale species over 10 meters long and included sperm whales, bowhead whales, gray whales, humpback whales, North Pacific right whales, fin whales, and – of course – blue whales.

If you need some context to visualize the enormity of these animals, here’s how the smallest and biggest whales in the ocean compare against humans, an early cetacean mammal (Pakicetus), plus a pig who counts as one of those distantly related hoofed animals we were talking about. Oh, and Godzilla.

Image credit: (C) IFLScience

For the two groups of genes, researchers were able to identify four that were positively associated with the big boys of whales, with GHSR and IGFBP7 falling into the growth hormone/insulin-like growth factor axis group, and NCAPG and PLAG1 from the big, hoofed animal group. It’s therefore the researchers’ conclusions that these are four key ingredients to growing massive whales, but two of the genes in particular may have further influence in these animals’ risk of disease.

“There’s a joke that whales should be born with cancer and not even able to exist,” Vincent Lynch, from the University at Buffalo, New York – who is not an author on the new study – told New Scientist. “They’re just too big.” 

Whales seem almost perfectly designed to get cancer. As well as growing to enormous sizes they also live for ages: the bowhead whale in particular is thought to be one of the longest-living animals on the planet, with a maximum lifespan thought to stretch over two centuries. Age and size are both risk factors for cancer, but two of the genes identified in this new study may explain why whales still don’t get it.

Both GHSR and IGFBP7 from the growth hormone/insulin-like growth factor axis group may suppress whales’ cancer risk. This is because the GHSR gene influences the cell cycle (cancer is a disease caused when cells divide uncontrollably and spread into surrounding tissues), while IGFBP7 is already known to suppress several cancers.

So, the oceans' whales are free to get as big as they like seemingly free of the threat of cancer, and we humans were lucky enough to get to share the planet at a time when they reached their most ridiculous. Now, if we could just keep them from going extinct, that would be great.

The study was published in Scientific Reports.

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"Even people who have protection from vaccination or a recent case of COVID-19 have been infected," says Yale Medicine infectious diseases specialist Scott Roberts, MD.

It also has impeccable timing, emerging just as the cold weather kicked in and people gathered inside to celebrate the holidays.

So what does all this mean? We spoke with Dr. Roberts, who answered questions about XBB.1.5.

Where did XBB.1.5 come from?

You might have heard of an omicron subvariant called "XBB" that swept through Singapore last fall. XBB.1.5 is a descendent of that strain.

XBB.1.5 was first identified in the United States in New York in October 2022. Both XBB and the Kraken version (XBB.1.5) are recombinant (or hybrid) virus subvariants, meaning they are made up of two strains—in this case, two offshoots of the omicron BA.2 sublineage. It is believed that both strains infected one person and mixed to form the hybrid XBB, which spawned additional mutations. "Flu viruses do this all the time," says Dr. Roberts. "It may not mean anything different, except that this is another way the virus can mutate and something to keep an eye on."

Why is it nicknamed 'Kraken'?

The Kraken is an enormous mythical multi-tentacled sea monster, like a giant squid or octopus, in Scandinavian lore. XBB.1.5 was nicknamed "Kraken" by some scientists online who were noticing its rapid spread.

How transmissible is XBB.1.5?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called XBB.1.5 the most transmissible omicron strain so far. In the U.S., it has spread like wildfire in the New England area, where infections rose over a short period of time to more than 81% of cases as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the second week of January.

So far, national statistics are lower and vary by region—that same week, XBB.1.5 infections were less than 9% in the Midwest area that includes Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. But, overall, national numbers have been climbing. For example, at the beginning of December, XBB.1.5 made up less than 2% of COVID-19 infections in the country; by the end of the second week of January, that figure was 43%. If you want to check for updates, the CDC tracks the progress of SARS-CoV-2 variants currently circulating.

Does XBB.1.5 cause severe disease?

There is no evidence yet that XBB.1.5 causes more severe disease than other omicron strains. "Studies are ongoing, but I suspect that it's probably not more severe," Dr. Roberts says. That said, there have been increases in hospitalizations in the Northeast, he explains, adding that this may be because there are more people getting infected, in general, including those who are older and more prone to infection, severe disease, and death from COVID-19.

How well do vaccines work against XBB.1.5?

It will take time to gather the long-term data to show how well vaccines work against XBB.1.5. But Dr. Roberts says those who got the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna bivalent booster are likely to have some decent protection, especially against severe disease and death. Those boosters target the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, in addition to the original virus, so it might be expected that they would work at least to some extent against another omicron strain. "We are urging people to get the bivalent booster if they haven't already," Dr. Roberts says.

How well can we expect treatments to work?

Paxlovid and some other antiviral treatments, like remdesivir, are expected to be effective against XBB.1.5, Dr. Roberts says. But the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), while it continues to await data, has said it does not anticipate that Evusheld, a COVID-19 preventive treatment, will neutralize XBB.1.5 because of the subvariant's similarity to other variants not neutralized by Evusheld (XBB, for example).

Should people be concerned about a new wave of COVID-19 cases?

"Even with an increase in cases, the numbers have been lower than with previous surges, and at this point, the virus has mutated to become milder," Dr. Roberts says. "I hope this can reach a stage where infection shouldn't have a major impact on our lives."

It's important to remember that there will still be people who are at high risk for serious disease because they are older or immunocompromised, and they risk infection from those who aren't taking mitigation measures, he says. Also, experts still don't know enough about who is at risk for Long COVID, a condition marked by sometimes serious symptoms that can continue long after the infection is cleared.

Another issue is that the more infections there are, the more opportunities the virus has to evolve further, he adds. With that in mind, Dr. Roberts recommends people get vaccinated and then live their lives as safely as possible with respect to factors such as age, health status, and other people in their lives who may be at higher risk. Current recommendations for mitigation measures, such as wearing a mask, social distancing, testing, and more, are available on the CDC's website.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced in an email to employees reported in Time that the layoffs mark “less than 5 percent of our total employee base, with some notifications happening today” adding “while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we will continue to hire in key strategic areas [such as] new computer platform [using advances in artificial intelligence]”. In other moves related to this belt-tightening strategy, the company will also be making changes to its hardware portfolio and consolidating its leased office locations.

In a regulatory filing processed on Wednesday. The company said the layoffs were a response to “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities.” This certainly ties in with the wider woes that have been affecting tech’s biggest players with the likes of Amazon, Meta, and Twitter, among others cutting significant chunks out of their workforces over recent months too. Microsoft was keen to point out, however, that it wasn’t cutting as many workers as it had taken on during the COVID-19 pandemic with a global rush from users toward working online.

It is likely, however, that over-enthusiastic hiring practices and growth projections have contributed to this round of layoffs. With the tech sector in general still growing and hiring more workers than ever before, it is clear that the problem is more related to the underlying aspects of the system that these massive tech companies thrive in rather than an aversion to tech in general. Things have slowed down a little globally and when you are chasing perpetual growth, people lose jobs when things slow down.

The fact that the tech sector is still growing is the only silver lining in this story for the workers who are losing their jobs. It is highly likely that their skills will be valued somewhere else and with more and more jobs becoming available that offer telework opportunities, the search for new work is no longer confined to geographic localities.

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BA.5, BQ.1.1, and XBB? It’s no wonder people are struggling to keep all the circulating variants of COVID-19 straight right now. Whether you want to call them “alphabet soup,” “Scrabble,” or “Kraken,” we’ve been reminded time and again that it’s not the name of the subvariant that matters, but rather the way it interacts with our immune systems. And as we enter into our fourth year with COVID-19, scientists are most concerned with how well prior infections, vaccinations, and boosters can protect us against emerging variants of the virus.

The answers are starting to roll in—and they’re not looking great for us. In a letter published on Jan. 18 in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory detail the nasty abilities of variants BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 to escape incapacitation from COVID-specific antibodies. This is cause for concern because as the authors wrote, these variants “may reduce the efficacy of current mRNA vaccines.”

Before Aug. 31 in the U.S., available COVID-19 boosters were monovalent, meaning they contained viral genetic material from one strain of the virus. The updated boosters are bivalent and were created with genetic material from the original COVID-19 strain as well as Omicron variant strains with the hope of offering better protection against new and emerging variants.

Unfortunately, these early data seem to show that two of the newest variants can dodge even the bivalent boosters. In their study, the researchers took serum samples from 16 people who received a monovalent booster in 2021, 15 who received a monovalent booster in 2022, and 18 people who received a bivalent booster in September 2022. In all three cohorts, the concentration of neutralizing antibodies—which immobilize copies of the virus and prevent them from infecting cells—fighting the original Wuhan strain shot up after participants received boosters, from the hundreds or thousands to the tens of thousands.

But their immune response against some of the newest viral variants was severely diminished, even compared to ones that came directly before. The authors found that neutralizing antibody concentrations to variants BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 were between 53 and 232 times lower than those to the original strain of COVID-19, depending on the booster received. These variants were even better than a recent Omicron variant at evading the immune system and escaping neutralizing antibodies.

On Jan. 11, the World Health Organization released a risk assessment about XBB.1.5, writing that BQ and XBB variants are “the most antibody-resistant variants to date” but cautioning that “[t]here is currently no data on real world vaccine effectiveness against severe disease or death” for these variants.

It’s clear that these variants aren’t good news, but future research is needed to suss out just how bad they will turn out to be. This study is one early indication that as sick as we might be of the COVID-19 pandemic, we aren’t out of the woods just yet.

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Carnivorous oyster mushrooms can kill roundworms with “nerve gas in a lollipop”

Posted by Twitter user @psychunseen, the winds seem to create an ethereal howl across the structure, which is so loud people can hear it in their cars as they drive over.  

While it sounds a little creepy to people crossing, the noise is causing a huge disturbance to local residents who currently have to deal with constant screeching whenever winds start to pick up. 

The noise is thought to originate from a retrofit of the bridge in 2020, in which the structure was secured in case of high winds and a railing was added that had thinner slats than previously, in part to deter suicides. It quickly became apparent that this came with some unintended side-effects, though, as high winds of 35.4 kilometers per hour (22 miles per hour) or more coming from the west create a low-pitched tone, and winds of 43.5 kmph (27 mph) or more create a higher frequency tone. The lower tone is most problematic as it appears to travel the furthest, but together they create a bridge that sings quite often. 

Luckily, such issues are taken quite seriously and engineers have already devised a plan to fix them. Taking the railings to a wind tunnel allowed them to analyze just how the sound is created and to find a way to stop it from happening, which they have now outlined in a proposal. 

The winning solution was a series of U-shaped clips that would be placed at each end of every slat to disrupt the airflow passing through and prevent the small vortexes that are thought to be creating the noise. The clips reduced all sounds by 75 percent and only made an audible noise in incredibly high winds of 101.4 kmph (63 mph) and above. 

According to the engineers, it is the most cost-effective solution, but installing clips to both sides of all 12,000 slats on the new railings won’t come cheap - the new modifications will cost around $450,000 (£364,000) to complete. 

“The proposed solution will be invisible to most Bridge users and, importantly, will not affect the Bridge’s structural stability during sustained high winds. Installation is expected to be complete in the first half of 2023,” the proposal says. 

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A) Map circling Middle Island in the Recherche Archipelago (Bay of Isles). The sampling sites in Lake Hillier. C) A cross-section diagram of the sampling depths. D) How the samples were prepared for metagenomics and rRNA gene sequencing/amplification. Image credit: M Sierra et al, 2022. Environmental Microbiome. Open Access CC BY 4.0

The tests revealed a rich roster of extremophiles, organisms that have adapted to survive in harsh conditions that would be inhospitable to other species. In the case of our salty pink Lake Hillier, many of the microbial species had evolved to tolerate high salt levels and the coloration of these went some way towards explaining the lake’s peculiar color.

“Lake Hillier is composed of a diverse set of microorganisms including archaea, bacteria, algae, and viruses,” the study authors concluded. “Our data indicate that the microbiome in Lake Hillier is composed of multiple pigment-producer microbes, including Dunaliella, Salinibacter, Halobacillus, Psychroflexus, [and] Halorubrum.”

The colors of these microbial species range from blue, to orange, and through to red, which they believe could explain why the end result is a very peculiarly pink lake. These colors come from the carotenoids they contain, which are thought to provide some protection against high saline environments – so Flinders wasn’t entirely wrong when he said the pink was because of the saltiness.

Science aside, Western Australia’s pink lake is a breathtaking sight to see, set against the untouched islands of the Recherche Archipelago Nature Reserve that’s home to seals, dolphins, and migrating whales.

Marine mammals and bubblegum-pink lakes? Don’t mind if we do.

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Here's a fun little fact: Google Images was created because of Jennifer Lopez, aka J. Lo. This bit of Internet history trivia was recently brought to our attention by Twitter user mattxiv.

This can't be true, can it? Well we dug around a little and discovered that yes, this is basically the case.

In 2000, Jennifer Lopez wore a Versace silk green dress to the 42nd Grammy Awards. The low-necklined dress drew a baffling amount of coverage around the world. 

"It didn’t seem that out there to me. It was a good-looking dress," she eventually said of the hoo-ha. "I had no idea it was going to be such a big deal."

The dress didn't just impact regular media, but had a lasting effect on Google's search engine. The dress was being searched for in large volumes.

“People wanted more than just text," former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained in Project Syndicate in 2015.

"This first became apparent after the 2000 Grammy Awards, where Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention.  At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: J­Lo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.”

Cathy Edwards, director of engineering and product for Google Images, later told GQ that this was "completely true". However, she added the caveat that the small team at the time had already wanted to create an image search, but didn't know how much resource to prioritize to the project. 

After the Jennifer Lopez dress debacle, “it became so clear that this was important", and the company set out to create it.

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The population of China has dropped for the first time since the 1960s, with the country’s birth rate slipping to a record low of -6.77 births per 1,000 people.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced on Tuesday that the population stood at 1.4118 billion at the end of 2022, a decrease of 850,000 from 2021. This trend, they say, is mainly driven by a drop in the birth rate which has resulted in more people dying than being born. 

The number of newborns in China fell, with 9.56 million children being born in 2022, a decrease of 1.06 million from 2021. Simultaneously, the population is aging, with the number of people aged 60 or over increasing by 12.68 million in 2022.

“The slight decline in China's total population in 2022 is mainly due to the decrease in the number of births. One reason is that the number of women of childbearing age continues to decrease. In 2022, the number of women of childbearing age aged 15-49 in China decreased by more than 4 million compared with 2021, of which women of childbearing age aged 21-35 decreased by nearly 5 million,” explained China’s National Bureau of Statistics

“The second is because the birth rate continues to decline. Affected by various factors such as changes in fertility concepts and delays in marriage and childbearing, the fertility level of women of childbearing age continued to decline in 2022,” it added. 

None of this is will come as a surprise to China. By looking at the statistics from 2021, it became clear that China’s population was soon going to shrink for the first time in decades. Based on this trend, a report by the United Nations indicated that India will take the crown of the world’s most populated country away from China by 2023. 

In 2021, China unveiled a policy to allow and actively encourage couples to have up to three children in a pushback against their sharp decline in birth rates. This marked a radical shift from the People's Republic of China's infamous “one-child policy” introduced in the late 1970s and '80s in a push to control the country's booming population. This controversial policy ended in 2015, allowing couples to have two children after it was realized the policy was causing population numbers to slip too severely.

A similar population plunge is expected to take place in many other parts of the planet. In 2020, a massive study projected that the global population will decline within the next century, for the first time since the Black Death in the 14th century. The global population was forecasted to grow over the next few decades and peak in 2064 at around 9.7 billion people, before falling to 8.8 billion by 2100. 

According to this study, up to 23 countries could see their populations shrink by more than 50 percent in this century, including Japan, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and South Korea. The only parts of the world that are forecasted to see a rise in population numbers are North Africa, the Middle East, and – most prominently – Sub-Saharan Africa.

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It looks like NASA will finally have an astronaut live in space for a full year