That's where the concept of "catching up on sleep" comes in: You try to squeeze in extra hours of sleep on the days following a bout of poor sleep. For example, sleeping in on the weekends.

But do those extra hours of sleep actually protect you from the health risks of sleep deprivation?

Study results are mixed on the matter, but after checking out the research and chatting with some experts, we can say it seems possible to catch up on sleep, but it's difficult to achieve.

Why it's hard to catch up on sleep

Psychiatrist and sleep medicine expert, Alex Dimitriu, is of the mindset that you can catch up on sleep, but only if you haven't let your sleep debt grow too great. By definition, one hour of sleep lost equals one hour of sleep debt.

"If the sleep debt is greater, the time to recover becomes markedly longer, and complete recovery may not be possible, so it's important to not let sleep debt go too far," Dimitriu, founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry & Sleep Medicine, told Insider.

Keeping your sleep debt in check is important because "long-term, not getting sufficient sleep can lead to medical problems such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, increased risk of cancer, and immune dysfunction," said James A. Rowley, former president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation.

Perhaps the most intriguing results of sleep debt and recovery time came from one small study that proposed for every one hour of sleep debt, a person would need four consistent nights of seven to nine hours of quality Zzzs to fully recover.

So, if you need seven hours of sleep per night but only get six during the work week, you'd accumulate five hours of sleep debt come Friday.

According to the study's predictions, this means you'd need about 20 days of consistent quality sleep to fully recover.

So, sleeping in for a few hours on the weekend probably isn't going to fix that.

"While one can make up an hour or two on weekends, one cannot make up getting insufficient sleep for the whole week just by sleeping those extra hours," Rowley said.

That said, in 1963, a then-17-year-old stayed awake for 11 days for a science project. He dealt with temporary nausea and memory loss, but said that after sleeping 14 hours, he felt back to normal.

While that's not an experiment that Dimitriu would like to see his patients or anyone else repeat, it's worth noting that there's more room for studies on how periods of extended sleep affect the health risks of people who are already chronically sleep deprived.

And if the weekend is the only time you can find for sleep, it's "better to increase [sleep hours] on the weekend rather than not doing it at all," biological psychology professor at Stockholm University told Insider's Lyndsay Dodgson.

So what can you do if you're like one-third of Americans who are getting fewer than six hours of sleep a night?

How to pay back sleep debt

Paying back sleep debt is like paying back credit card debt: Try to pay all, or as much, of the total balance so that the debt doesn't grow too large.

That means not waiting until the weekend to try and catch up on an entire week's worth of lost sleep. Instead, if you miss an hour or two of sleep, try making up for it immediately the following day, either with a nap – 20 to 30 minutes is best – or get a good night's sleep the following evening.

Most important, however, is that you set a sleep schedule and stick to it. "Sleep loves regularity and rhythm," Dimitriu said, because it keeps a consistent circadian rhythm.

Circadian rhythm, often called your internal clock, affects a whole host of important bodily functions, including temperature regulation, hormone control, memory, focus, and – of course – sleep.

Keeping a consistent sleep schedule – aka going to bed and waking up at the same time every day – is one key way to maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm and, subsequently, a healthier you. That's why sleeping in may not be the best option, and brief naps could be better.

Of course, this is all easier said than done, and not everyone can change their schedules to allow for more sleep.

For example, if you're working night shifts, have multiple jobs, or need to get the kids out early in the morning, you're more likely to have sleep debt but have less flexibility to address it. Do the best you can to get as much sleep as possible.

"In those circumstances, even finding an extra 15 minutes per night can be a big difference," Rowley said.

It may also be worth thinking outside the box. For example, a recent study found that when people switched from a 5-day work week to a 4-day work week, the percentage of those getting fewer than seven hours of sleep a night dropped from 42.6 percent to 14.5 percent.

However, you decide to try and pack in more sleep, just remember that sleep isn't a luxury, it's a necessity.

"Sleep should be considered the same as diet and exercise, one of the pillars of overall good health, and should be prioritized just like they are," Rowley said.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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Wednesday, January 18

On Wednesday, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the GPS III-6 satellite for the United States Air Force. The satellite is also named Amelia Earhart, after the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and later disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. With the new satellite, GPS users around the world will benefit from improved positioning, navigation, and timing services. The launch is due at noon UTC from Cape Canaveral.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was the Ceres-1 rocket carrying five satellites. It’s a rocket developed by the private Chinese firm Galactic Energy. It launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center and delivered the satellites to low Earth orbit.

Next, we got Virgin Orbit’s Start Me Up mission which launched from the UK. The Cosmic Girl aircraft released the LauncherOne rocket mid-flight. The mission was ultimately a failure after the rocket came crashing to Earth.

Next up, a Falcon 9 carried 40 OneWeb satellites to orbit from Cape Canaveral where they will be used to beam internet back to Earth.

Later in the week, a Long March 2C took off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center carrying the APStar-6E satellite which will provide telecommunication services in Southeast Asia.

Also blasting off from China was a Long March 2D carrying Yaogan-37 and Shiyan-22A/B from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. They are both remote sensing satellites that will perform various tasks including space environment monitoring, urban planning, smog detection and more.

Finally, a Long March 2D took off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center carrying 14 satellites into space.

That’s all for this week, check back next time!

TWIRL 100: SpaceX to launch Amelia Earhart satellite for improved GPS services

The government has been widely accused of underreporting the number of coronavirus fatalities since the abandonment of its zero-COVID policy.

Only a few dozen deaths had been recorded officially in December before Saturday's announcement, despite evidence of crematoriums and hospitals being overrun.

But a National Health Commission (NHC) official said Saturday that China had recorded 59,938 COVID-related deaths between December 8 and January 12.

The figure refers only to deaths at medical facilities, with the total number likely to be higher.

The data includes 5,503 deaths caused by respiratory failure directly due to the virus, and 54,435 deaths caused by underlying conditions combined with COVID, Jiao Yahui, head of the NHC's Bureau of Medical Administration, told a news conference.

Beijing revised its methodology for categorising COVID fatalities last month, saying it would count only those who die specifically of respiratory failure caused by the virus.

This was criticised by the World Health Organization, which said the definition was too narrow.

Late in the day, the World Health Organisation issued a statement saying Beijing had shared a raft of data with the Geneva-based agency, in addition to the information shared at the press conference—but that more was still needed.

The WHO "requested that this type of detailed information continue to be shared with us and the public", the statement said.

The request was made during talks between WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and China's Health Minister Ma Xiaowei, the statement said.

Tedros "reiterated the importance of China's deeper cooperation and transparency on understanding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic", the WHO said.

Beijing, however, has repeatedly insisted it has been transparent with the international community about its data, urging the WHO to "uphold a scientific, objective and just position".

'Not necessary'

Health officials had insisted Wednesday it was unnecessary to dwell on the exact number of fatalities, and the NHC no longer releases an official daily COVID death toll.

"I don't think it is necessary to look into the cause of death for every case at present. The key task during the pandemic should be treatment," the head of a government-appointed expert panel said during a news conference.

Another expert suggested at the same press conference that China could determine the number of COVID deaths after the fact by looking at the overall excess mortality rate.

Independent infection models have painted a grim picture of what the eventual toll might be.

University of Hong Kong researchers have estimated nearly one million Chinese may die this winter.

And health risk analysis firm Airfinity forecast 11,000 deaths and 1.8 million infections per day, with a total of 1.7 million fatalities by the end of April.

The Britain-based research firm has said its model is based on data from China's regional provinces before changes to reporting infections were implemented, combined with case growth rates from other former zero-COVID countries when they lifted restrictions.

Elderly at risk

Health officials said Saturday the average age of those who had died was 80.3 years, with more than 90 percent of fatalities above 65 years old.

Most suffered from underlying conditions, they said.

Millions of the elderly in China are not fully vaccinated, with President Xi Jinping's government criticised for not prioritising immunisation campaigns among the country's most vulnerable citizens.

During an outbreak in Hong Kong last year, vaccine hesitancy among older people was a major factor in the high death toll.

Of the more than 10,500 deaths in that wave, 67 percent were unvaccinated, and more than 95 percent of the dead were aged 60 or above, according to the Hong Kong government.

Officials also suggested on Saturday that the peak of the current wave might have passed.

Just under 2.9 million patients visited fever clinics on December 23, they said, but that figure had dropped to 477,000 nationwide by January 12.

They said the number of severely ill patients in hospitals was still high but that the peak appeared to have been in early January.

The priority, they said, was to monitor the situation in rural areas and focus on early detection and treatment for the most vulnerable.

© 2023 AFP

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After a slow start, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket is about to hit its stride

Exactly where and when did the Anthropocene begin? Scientists are attempting to answer this epochal question in the coming months by choosing a place and time to represent the moment when humanity became a “geological superpower,” overwhelming the natural processes that have governed Earth for billions of years.

They could decide the start is marked with a bang, thanks to the plutonium isotopes rapidly blasted around the planet by the hydrogen bomb tests that began in late 1952, or with a shower of soot particles from the surge in fossil-fuel power plants after the Second World War.

Or they may choose the postwar explosion in artificial fertilizer use and its profound impact on the Earth’s natural nitrogen cycle. Microplastics, chicken bones, and pesticide residues may also be among the eclectic signs used to bolster the definition of the Anthropocene. Other possible signs may be found in lake beds in the US and China, Australian corals, a Polish peat bog, the black sediments beneath the Baltic Sea, and even the human debris accumulated under Vienna.

An international team of almost 40 scientists, who have been commissioned by the official guardians of the geological timescale, must select a place where layered deposits show the clear transition from the previous age to the new one. The team has come up with a short list of 12 sites that have now begun a series of votes—but there can be only one winner. Humanity has unquestionably changed the Earth far beyond the stability of the Holocene, the 11,700-year period during which all civilization arose, and which will end with the declaration of the Anthropocene. The atmosphere, lakes, and oceans, and the living world have all been transformed by greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and the destruction of wildlife and ecosystems. Humans also now have a greater effect on shaping the surface of the Earth than natural processes, shifting about 24 times more material than is moved by rivers.

Defining the Anthropocene is vital, researchers say, because it brings together all the impacts of humans on the world, thereby providing a platform for holistic understanding and, hopefully, action to repair the damage. From a scientific perspective, a precise definition is essential for a clear basis for debate.

The first stage of voting is already underway. The site will need to show “specific physical properties in sediment layers, or strata, that capture the effects of recent increases in human population; unprecedented industrialisation and globalisation; and changes imposed on the landscape, climate, and biosphere,” according to a recent paper in the journal Science by Leicester University’s Colin Waters and University College London’s Simon Turner, the chair and secretary respectively of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG).

But creating a new unit of time is a big decision in geological circles, and, in parallel, the AWG has also to achieve a bigger task—persuading geologists that a new epoch is justified at all.

Both tasks come down to identifying clear markers of change, and hundreds of scientists are doing just that. The broad markers of anthropogenic transformation include rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, recorded in trapped air bubbles in ice cores, and the huge change in the populations and locations of species, with human and livestock numbers soaring and spreading as those of wild animals plunge and vanish.

But other markers offer the “golden spike” needed for a precise definition and enabling strata to record a sharp, clear rise. Principal among these is the distinctive fingerprint of radioactive isotopes, particularly plutonium, produced by Cold War H-bomb tests, the first of which was carried out by the US on November 1, 1952, on the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands.

Scores of aboveground tests soon followed, with some even rocketed into the stratosphere. The fallout from the tests was fast and global, circling the planet within about 18 months, until atmospheric testing was banned in 1962.

“For a short period of time, they tested their new arsenal a lot,” said Turner. “That’s why you have this very unique, time-specific, global marker which is so useful for our work.”

Another useful marker are tiny spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs), a type of tough fly ash only produced by the high-temperature burning of coal or heavy oil. “They take off with the sudden increase in numbers of thermoelectric plants after World War II,” said Turner. “They’re good at traveling on a continental scale, and you find them globally because lots of continents produced them.” Work done for the AWG has revealed SCPs in Antarctic ice cores for the first time.

Plastic pollution is also a marker of the Anthropocene, the scientists said. “The 1950s is when you start to see the majority of the polymers that we're familiar with being invented and starting to appear in products,” said Waters, with nylon essentially replacing silk around the Second World War, for example.

Plastic waste can now be found from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench, giving a global signal. Other scientists found in 2019 that plastic was being deposited into strata, and they suggested the stone age and iron age was being followed by a plastic age. However, the sharpest rise in plastic pollution comes a couple of decades after the plutonium isotopes from the H-bomb tests, though both have the advantage of never having appeared in the geological record before.

Some scientists have suggested broiler chicken bones as a marker of the Anthropocene, with their production soaring from the Second World War onwards. Furthermore, agricultural breeding means their skeletons and genetics are clearly different from those of their wild ancestors.

“Chickens are now far and away the biggest population of birds on the planet,” said Waters. “But also two-thirds of the mass of large mammals on the planet are domesticated species—cows, sheep, pigs, etc. That is clearly a big change to the populations of species, particularly given the diminishment of natural species.” The World Wildlife Fund estimates an average 70 percent reduction in the population size of wild animals. These biological changes are large but more gradual than other markers, Waters said.

Invasive species introduced by humans to new regions can also be markers, the scientists said. The inadvertent import of alien species in the ballast water of ships arriving in San Francisco from Asia transformed the San Francisco Bay. “There was a point where 98 percent of the mass of all of the animal species in the bay were actually invasive,” Waters said. Pollen from introduced plant species, such as the trees used in commercial forestry, can also record change.

Chemical and metal pollution show up in sediments too, said Turner: “The Green Revolution was based on artificial fertilizers and pesticides, and so you see that in sediment cores. The whole cocktail of industrial chemicals just exploded postwar.” Whether the chemicals persist in the environment long enough to be markers of the Anthropocene remains to be determined.

The 12 potential locations for the site that will define the new epoch all display some of the markers, but they are very varied. “Because the Anthropocene has not been formally accepted, we’re still trying to prove to people that this is not something localized, it is something you find and correlate in a whole host of different environments,” said Waters.

“They all illustrate this dramatic Anthropocene transformation very well. But the sites which really stand out are the ones where you can actually see an annual resolution of layers,” said Turner, including some of the lake, coral, and polar ice sites. “It’s quite astonishing that these sites detail planetary changes at annual resolutions.”

All have pros and cons. The 32-meter-long Palmer ice core from the Antarctic Peninsula is the longest record of the Anthropocene, but its remote location means the trace of some of the markers is often faint. The Baltic Sea sediments switch from pale to black as the Anthropocene starts. This is caused by pollution-fueled algal blooms sucking all the oxygen out of the water. But the sediments do not have annual laminations. The archeological site in central Vienna gives a 200-year record, dated by artefacts, but has gaps in the record because of redevelopments.

The choice of site, and therefore the official time and place for the dawn of the Anthropocene, is in the hands of the 23 voting members of the AWG, but it will then have to be passed by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, then the International Commission on Stratigraphy, and finally be ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences. There is a deadline too: the International Geological Congress in South Korea in 2024, when the mandate of the AWG expires. “It’s been pretty much stated that we’ve got until then to get this done,” said Waters.

Naomi Oreskes, a professor at Harvard University and a nonvoting AWG member, said: “As geologists, we were trained to think that humans were insignificant. That was once true, but it no longer is. The evidence compiled by the AWG demonstrates beyond any doubt that the human footprint is now in evidence in rocks and sediments. The Anthropocene is primarily a scientific concept, but it also highlights the cultural, political, and economic implications of our actions.”

UCL’s Mark Maslin, who coauthored The Human Planet with Simon Lewis, said: “I think the Anthropocene is a critical philosophical term, because it allows you to think about what impact we are having, and what impact we want to have in the future.”

Maslin and Lewis previously proposed 1610 as the start of the Anthropocene, representing the huge and deadly impact European colonists had on the Americas and consequently the world. But Maslin said agreeing on a definition was more important than precisely where it is placed.

“Up until now, we have talked about things like climate change, the biodiversity crisis, the pollution crisis as separate things,” he said. “The key concept of the Anthropocene is to put that all together and say humans have a huge impact on the earth, we are the new geological superpower. That holistic approach then allows you to say: ‘What do we do about it?’”

When Did the Anthropocene Actually Begin?

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Although China has largely abandoned COVID-19 case reporting, evidence of its massive wave of infection readily shows up in airports outside its borders.

On a December 26 flight from the southeastern city of Wenzhou to Milan, Italy, 42 percent of the 149 passengers on board tested positive for COVID-19 upon arrival, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Eurosurveillance.

The Italian researchers behind the study also looked at test-positivity rates of three other flights from eastern cities in China to Italy, two to Milan and two to Rome, all at the end of December. Collectively, 23 percent of the passengers from the four flights (126 of 556 passengers) were positive for SARS-CoV-2. The other three flights had positivity rates of 19 percent, 11 percent, and 14 percent.

The passengers were tested either with rapid-antigen tests or PCR tests. Positive antigen tests were confirmed with PCR tests. The testing most likely captured people with mild or asymptomatic cases, as well as those who had recently recovered. PCR tests can remain positive for weeks following an infection.

Similar to the Italian data, The Washington Post reported about a week ago that it had seen data from the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency indicating that 23 percent of short-term visitors from China to Korea (314 out of 1,352 tested at the airport) were positive for SARS-CoV-2 between January 2 and 6.

The rates betray mass infection in China, which is expected, but not well documented. When China abruptly scrapped its zero-COVID policy last month, it ditched mass testing and largely gave up reporting cases. Meanwhile, the virus has been ripping through a population that is, as the Italian researchers note, "a highly vaccinated but infection-naïve population."

Current models estimate that there could be 1.5 million new infections daily in China, and over 1 million could die in the coming weeks. Health experts are particularly concerned about the spread of disease amid the upcoming Lunar New Year on January 22, when tens of millions of people in China travel to see family for the festivities. The movement is expected to shift high transmission from big cities to more vulnerable rural areas.

Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, told The Washington Post that the infection rates so far are "completely consistent with forecasts that the majority of the population of major cities have already been infected."

One point of good news is that the Italian researchers did whole genome sequencing of the virus from 61 passengers and, in that sampling, did not find any new or alarming variants. The sampling turned up omicron sublineages BA.5.2, BF.7, and BQ.1.1, which have been seen elsewhere. The data matches what has been reported elsewhere and from China.

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Late in the evening of Jan. 10, 2023, an important digital system known as NOTAM run by the Federal Aviation Administration went offline. The FAA was able to continue getting necessary information to pilots overnight using a phone-based backup, but the stopgap couldn’t keep up with the morning rush of flights, and on Jan. 11, 2022, the FAA grounded all commercial flights in the U.S. In total, nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. Brian Strzempkowksi is the interim director of the Center for Aviation Studies at The Ohio State University and a commercial pilot, flight instructor and dispatcher. He explains what the NOTAM system is and why planes can’t fly if the system goes down.

What is NOTAM?

Aviation is full of acronyms, and Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, is one acronym that pilots learn early on in their training. A NOTAM is quite simply a message that is disseminated to flight crews of every aircraft in the US.

The NOTAM system is a computer network run by the Federal Aviation Administration that provides real-time updates to crews about situations relating to weather, infrastructure, ground conditions or anything else that may affect the safety of flight.

Trained professionals—like air traffic controllers, airport managers, airport operations personnel, and FAA personnel in charge of national airspace infrastructure—can access the system and enter any information they need to share broadly.

Pilots, air traffic controllers, and anyone else who needs to know about flying conditions can access the NOTAM system and make appropriate changes to planned flights. It’s similar to checking the traffic on your phone or on the local news before you head to work in the morning. A traffic report will inform you of potential hazards or backups on the roadways that may lead you take a different route to work.

What’s in the NOTAM system and how is it used?

NOTAMs are issued for a wide range of reasons. Some of the notices are good to know but don’t affect a flight—such as personnel mowing grass alongside a runway or a crane working on a building next to the airport. Others are more critical, such as a runway being closed because of snow, ice or damage, forcing a plane to take off or land on a different runway. Changes in access to airspace are also logged with a NOTAM. For example, airspace is always closed above the president and when he or she travels; a NOTAM will alert pilots to changes in airspace closures.

Pilots review these NOTAMs during their preflight briefings. Generally this is done digitally using a computer, but pilots and air traffic controllers can also access the system by calling flight service briefers, who can share live weather and NOTAM information. Airline pilots also rely on their dispatchers to relay any relevant NOTAMs not only before but also during the flight.

The NOTAMs themselves use a lot of abbreviations and are often cryptic to nonaviation folks, but a small amount of text can carry a lot of information. Hundreds of different acronyms can convey a range of information, from taxiway closures to certain types of airport lighting being out of service to a notice that some pavement markings may be obscured.

But not all NOTAMs are straightforward. I remember once seeing a notice from an airport alerting pilots that a fire department was conducting a controlled burn of a house nearby.

Why can’t you fly if the NOTAM system is down?

The Federal Aviation Authority requires flight crews to review NOTAMs before every flight for safety reasons. Without access to this information, a plane cannot legally depart, because there may be an unknown hazard ahead.

As an example, a pilot departing Seattle to fly to Miami would need to know that the Miami airport is open, that the runways are clear and that all the navigational sources—like GPS signals and ground-based navigation antennas—that a pilot may use while in the air are working. Theoretically, they could call the Miami airport and ask, and then call the person who oversees every navigational aid on their route, but that would take a lot of time. A much more efficient way to gather this information before and during a flight is to use the NOTAM system.

At the end of the day, the NOTAM system is about safety. When the system is down, pilots can’t fly as safely. It is for good reason that planes don’t go anywhere unless the NOTAM system is up and running.

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WASHINGTON, Jan 14 ― Friday the 13th proved lucky for one lottery player in the US state of Maine, whose winning ticket is worth an estimated US$1.35 billion (RM5.9 billlion), Mega Millions officials announced Saturday.

The winner’s identity has yet to be announced, but only one person matched all six numbers, thereby claiming the second-largest jackpot in Mega Millions history (someone in South Carolina won US$1.53 billion in 2018).

“Congratulations to the Maine State Lottery, which has just won its first-ever Mega Millions jackpot,” said Pat McDonald, lead director of the Mega Millions Consortium. “It’s the fourth billion-dollar jackpot in Mega Millions history.”

The big win was the lottery’s seventh on a Friday the 13th ― a date normally considered unlucky ― since the game began in 2002.

In the latest drawing, Mega Millions said, 14 people in 10 states matched the five white-ball numbers (30, 43, 45, 46, 61) to win US$1 million each, but only the single ticket-holder in the northeastern state of Maine also guessed the gold Mega Ball number: 14.

The jackpot had been growing since October 14, when winning tickets in California and Florida shared a prize of US$502 million.

The next drawing is Tuesday, with a jackpot set back to the starting value of US$20 million. ― AFP

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Sorry to be a buzz-kill, but that nightly glass or two of wine is not improving your health.

After decades of confusing and sometimes contradictory research (too much alcohol is bad for you but a little bit is good; some types of alcohol are better for you than others; just kidding, it’s all bad), the picture is becoming clearer: Even small amounts of alcohol can have health consequences.

Research published in November revealed that between 2015 and 2019, excessive alcohol use resulted in roughly 140,000 deaths per year in the United States. About 40 percent of those deaths had acute causes, like car crashes, poisonings and homicides. But the majority were caused by chronic conditions attributed to alcohol, such as liver disease, cancer and heart disease.

When experts talk about the dire health consequences linked to excessive alcohol use, people often assume that it’s directed at individuals who have an alcohol use disorder. But the health risks from drinking can come from moderate consumption as well.

“Risk starts to go up well below levels where people would think, ‘Oh, that person has an alcohol problem,’” said Dr. Tim Naimi, director of the University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. “Alcohol is harmful to the health starting at very low levels.”

If you’re wondering whether you should cut back on your drinking, here’s what to know about when and how alcohol impacts your health.

How do I know if I’m drinking too much?

“Excessive alcohol use” technically means anything above the U.S. Dietary Guidelines’ recommended daily limits. That’s more than two drinks a day for men and more than one drink a day for women.

There is also emerging evidence “that there are risks even within these levels, especially for certain types of cancer and some forms of cardiovascular disease,” said Marissa Esser, who leads the alcohol program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The recommended daily limits are not meant to be averaged over a week, either. In other words, if you abstain Monday through Thursday and have two or three drinks a night on the weekend, those weekend drinks count as excessive consumption. It’s both the cumulative drinks over time and the amount of alcohol in your system on any one occasion that can cause damage.

Why is alcohol so harmful?

Scientists think that the main way alcohol causes health problems is by damaging DNA. When you drink alcohol, your body metabolizes it into acetaldehyde, a chemical that is toxic to cells. Acetaldehyde both “damages your DNA and prevents your body from repairing the damage,” Dr. Esser explained. “Once your DNA is damaged, then a cell can grow out of control and create a cancer tumor.”

Alcohol also creates oxidative stress, another form of DNA damage that can be particularly harmful to the cells that line blood vessels. Oxidative stress can lead to stiffened arteries, resulting in higher blood pressure and coronary artery disease.

“It fundamentally affects DNA, and that’s why it affects so many organ systems,” Dr. Naimi said. Over the course of a lifetime, chronic consumption “damages tissues over time.”

Isn’t alcohol supposed to be good for your heart?

Alcohol’s effect on the heart is confusing because some studies have claimed that small amounts of alcohol, particularly red wine, can be beneficial. Past research suggested that alcohol raises HDL, the “good” cholesterol, and that resveratrol, an antioxidant found in grapes (and red wine), has heart-protective properties.

However, said Mariann Piano, a professor of nursing at Vanderbilt University, “There’s been a lot of recent evidence that has really challenged the notion of any kind of what we call a cardio-protective or healthy effect of alcohol.”

The idea that a low dose of alcohol was heart healthy likely arose from the fact that people who drink small amounts tend to have other healthy habits, such as exercising, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and not smoking. In observational studies, the heart benefits of those behaviors might have been erroneously attributed to alcohol, Dr. Piano said.

More recent research has found that even low levels of drinking slightly increase the risk of high blood pressure and heart disease, and the risk goes up dramatically for people who drink excessively. The good news is that when people stop drinking or just cut back, their blood pressure goes down. Alcohol is also linked to an abnormal heart rhythm, known as atrial fibrillation, which raises the risk of blood clots and stroke.

What types of cancer does alcohol increase the risk for?

Almost everyone knows about the link between cigarette smoking and cancer, but few people realize that alcohol is also a potent carcinogen. According to research by the American Cancer Society, alcohol contributes to more than 75,000 cases of cancer per year and nearly 19,000 cancer deaths.

Alcohol is known to be a direct cause of seven different cancers: head and neck cancers (oral cavity, pharynx and larynx), esophageal cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer and colorectal cancer. Research suggests there may be a link between alcohol and other cancers as well, including prostate and pancreatic cancer, although the evidence is less clear-cut.

For some cancers, such as liver and colorectal, the risk starts only when people drink excessively. But for breast and esophageal cancer, the risk increases, albeit slightly, with any alcohol consumption. The risks go up the more a person drinks.

“If somebody drinks less, they are at a lower risk compared to that person who is a heavy drinker,” said Dr. Farhad Islami, a senior scientific director at the American Cancer Society. “Even two drinks per day, one drink per day, may be associated with a small risk of cancer compared to non-drinkers.”

Which condition poses the greatest risk?

The most common individual cause of alcohol-related death in the United States is alcoholic liver disease, killing about 22,000 people a year. While the risk rises as people age and alcohol exposure accumulates, more than 5,000 Americans in their 20s, 30s and 40s die from alcoholic liver disease annually.

Alcoholic liver disease has three stages: alcoholic fatty liver, when fat accumulates in the organ; alcoholic hepatitis, when inflammation starts to occur; and alcoholic cirrhosis, or scarring of the tissue. The first two stages are reversible if you stop drinking entirely; the third stage is not.

Symptoms of alcoholic liver disease include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and jaundice — a yellow tinge to the eyes or skin. However, symptoms rarely emerge until the liver has been severely damaged.

The risk of developing alcoholic liver disease is greatest in heavy drinkers, but one report stated that five years of drinking just two alcoholic beverages a day can damage the liver. Ninety percent of people who have four drinks a day show signs of alcoholic fatty liver.

How do I gauge my personal risk for alcohol-related health issues?

Not everyone who drinks will develop these conditions. Lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise and smoking all combine to raise or lower your risk. Also, some of these conditions, such as esophageal cancer, are pretty rare, so increasing your risk slightly won’t have a huge impact.

“Every risk factor matters,” Dr. Esser said. “We know in public health that the number of risk factors that one has would go together into an increased risk for a condition.”

A pre-existing condition could also interact with alcohol to affect your health. For example, “people who have hypertension probably should not drink or definitely drink at very, very low levels,” Dr. Piano said.

Genes play a role, too. For instance, two genetic variants, both of which are more common in people of Asian descent, affect how alcohol and acetaldehyde are metabolized. One gene variant causes alcohol to break down into acetaldehyde faster, flooding the body with the toxin. The other variant slows down acetaldehyde metabolism, meaning the chemical hangs around in the body longer, prolonging the damage.

So should I cut back — or stop drinking altogether?

You don’t need to go cold turkey to help your health. Even reducing a little bit can be beneficial, especially if you currently drink over the recommended limits. The risk “really accelerates once you’re over a couple of drinks a day,” Dr. Naimi said. “So people who are drinking five or six drinks a day, if they can cut back to three or four, they’re going to do themselves a lot of good.”

Light daily drinkers would likely benefit by cutting back a bit, too. Try going a few nights without alcohol: “If you feel better, your body is trying to tell you something,” said George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Notably, none of the experts we spoke to called for abstaining completely, unless you have an alcohol use disorder or are pregnant. “I’m not going to advocate that people completely stop drinking,” Dr. Koob said. “We did prohibition, it didn’t work.”

Generally, though, their advice is, “Drink less, live longer,” Dr. Naimi said. “That’s basically what it boils down to.”

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Water is urban planners’ nemesis. Because the built environment is so impervious to liquid, thanks to all that asphalt, concrete, and brick, water accumulates instead of seeping into the ground. That’s how you get the extreme flooding that has plagued California for weeks, so far killing 19 people and causing perhaps $30 billion in damages.

Traditionally, engineers have treated stormwater as a nuisance, building out complex infrastructure like drains and canals to funnel the deluge to rivers or oceans before it has a chance to puddle. But in California and elsewhere, climate change is forcing a shift in that strategy. As the world warms, more water evaporates from land into the atmosphere, which itself can hold more water as it gets hotter. Storms in the Golden State will come less frequently, yet dump more water faster when they arrive. Stormwater drainage systems just can’t get the water away fast enough.

To prepare for this soggy future, engineers are turning to another plan for flood control, forcing water to seep underground into natural aquifers. Such a plan will simultaneously mitigate flooding and help the American West store more water despite a climate gone haywire. “We need to think a little bit more creatively about: How do we most effectively utilize basically these huge underground sponges that we can use to supply potable water?” says Katherine Kao Cushing, who studies sustainable water management at San José State University.

California’s water system is built for a squirrelly Mediterranean climate. Rains in the autumn and winter fill up a system of reservoirs, which feed water across the state throughout the bone-dry summer. But that system strains during a drought, like the one that’s been ravaging the state: The past three years have been the driest three-year period since 1896. (Drought can actually exacerbate flooding, since parched ground doesn’t absorb water as well.) Before this series of storms hit, some of California’s reservoirs had almost dried up. Now statewide reservoir storage is nearing the historical average. That’s how epic this rainfall has been.

Snowpack is also important. It grows at high altitudes through the winter, then melts and feeds reservoirs as temperatures rise. But climate models predict that a significant fraction of the state’s snowpack will be gone by 2100, says Andrew Fisher, who runs the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Recharge Initiative, which studies groundwater resources. “Some of the models say all of it,” Fisher adds. “Let that sink in for a second. That’s more water than behind all the dams in the state. It’s very sobering because there is no way we’re going to double the number of dams.”

To hydrate its people and agriculture, California is stepping up water conservation efforts, like getting more low-flow toilets into homes and paying people to rip out their lawns, which are terrible for all kinds of reasons beyond their thirstiness. It’s recycling wastewater from homes and businesses into ultra-pure water you can actually drink. But most of all, it’s trying to hold onto its sporadic rainwater, instead of draining it away, building out infrastructure to create “sponge cities.” These are popping up all over the world; the concept has been widely deployed in China, and city planners in places like Berlin in Germany and Auckland in New Zealand are using it to come to grips with heavier rainfall.

“One of the big ones is to get more water in the ground—and I would argue this is not even a choice at this point,” says Fisher. “The risk of running low on critical water if we do not do this is 100 percent. It is a stone-cold guarantee that if we do not put massive amounts of water underground, we are not going to solve this problem.”

In California, Los Angeles is leading the way. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has invested $130 million in stormwater capture projects, like the Tujunga Spreading Grounds shown above—150 acres of dirt basins that average 20 feet deep. Stormwater is pumped into these bowls and seeps underground for later extraction; the agency expects it to provide enough water for 64,000 households a year.

The state’s traditional water infrastructure can help charge the spreading grounds even more, says Art Castro, watershed manager for the agency. If a dam needs to release water to keep from overflowing, it can send that surplus to LA, where it’d be stored subterraneously. The same can be done in more rural areas, where open land is plentiful. It’s essentially a way to bank water for times of need. “It’s almost a perfect marriage,” Castro says.

Historically, some parts of California have done the opposite: They’ve over-extracted groundwater. This initiates a phenomenon called land subsidence, when a drained aquifer collapses like an empty water bottle, dragging the land down with it. By 1970, the land in California’s agriculture-heavy San Joaquin Valley had sunk up to 28 feet.

The southern parts of the state have also relied heavily on water piped from Northern California and the colourado River. But the river is drying up, and the supply up north travels through water infrastructure that criss-crosses fault lines. “In the case of a major earthquake, we’re not going to be able to fix those aqueducts overnight,” says Castro. “So that’s why it’s imperative that we have ample supply underneath our feet to tap into.”

Still, large spreading grounds aren’t the right solution in every case. In Los Angeles, there isn’t always space for 150 acre-projects, so the water department has deployed strips of greenery along roadsides, shown above, to help water seep underground. (Another popular sponge-city strategy that doesn’t require open green spaces is to use pervious pavers, concrete blocks with gaps that let water through. You could even make a parking lot of it.) LA is also developing a system of inflatable dams that will funnel stormwater into permeable structures under existing parks. Both of these smaller-scale projects would collect water and mitigate neighborhood flooding. They’re also a form of water strategy diversification, allowing for multiple sources in case one fails.

All told, the agency estimates that between October 1 2022 and January 10, it had soaked up nearly 11 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to serve about 140,000 households for a year. The city’s goal is to be able to capture nearly 50 billion gallons by 2035.

The California government is also stepping up, providing $350 million in grants to water agencies to develop groundwater projects. “Because of climate change, these more dramatic swings of really severe wet years and then severe droughts are just making it even more important that these programs and efforts move forward,” says Paul Gosselin, deputy director of the California Department of Water Resources’ sustainable groundwater management program. “We have probably eight to 12 times the capacity to store water in basins than all the surface-water reservoirs combined. So that storage capacity is there, ready for the taking.”

The solution to both California’s drought and the current biblical flooding has been hiding underground all along. “I want to emphasize that people all over the world are working on this—this is not a new idea,” says Fisher. “I think we are a little bit slow sometimes in the States, and even in California, to adopt some of these measures. And part of it is that we’ve been able to get by for decades without doing this.” That luxury has clearly passed.

The Key to California’s Survival Is Hidden Underground

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Google mentioned that the CCI’s actions strike “a blow at the ecosystem-wide efforts to accelerate digital adoption” in India. It continued by adding that due to Android’s use of open-source software, manufacturers have made more affordable smartphones for users. It argues that Google’s efforts helped incentivize manufacturers as the number of smartphone users rose.

Google also highlighted that Android powers a large part of India’s Jandhan - Aadhar - Mobile trinity, helped provide electronic devices in times of COVID, and helped generate employment in the economy. Thus, arguing that the CCI puts all of these at risk.

It debated that various versions of Android would prevent the existence of a “consistent and predictable ecosystem” and added that devices incompatible with these versions would restrict Google from providing its users with security features. This would make them vulnerable to cybercrime, malware, and bugs. Additionally, the country would see an increase in the prices of smartphones as OEMs would have to finance consistent security updates on users’ devices since Google’s safety features would not be available. Furthermore, Google argued that app developers would experience higher costs leading to more user exclusion. It mentioned:

“In a forked Android environment, small developers will be forced to prioritize which of the various incompatible Android ‘forks’ they write and maintain apps for, as their costs will increase with each additional version they support.”

The company concluded by saying there is a need to come together to provide secure and safe smartphones to users in India. It said “Foundational disruptions” could negatively affect efforts made by OEMs, developers, as well as the industry.

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The UK government recently announced that it is partnering with German firm BioNTech to test vaccines for cancer and other diseases.

The project aims to build on the mRNA vaccine technology that BioNTech became famous for developing and which has been so successful at preventing serious illness and death from COVID.

The goal of this new project is to deliver 10,000 personalized therapies to UK patients by 2030. With trials potentially starting as soon as this autumn.

Until recently, cancer has been treated with surgery (cutting out cancerous cells), radiotherapy (akin to burning cancer cells), and chemotherapy (stopping cancer cells from dividing by directly killing them).

The latter is well-known for its harsh side effects. In the last decade, though, we've seen the emergence of newer treatments, such as immunotherapy. Immunotherapy usually works by blocking receptors (proteins with names such as CTLA-4, PD1, or PDL1) on the surface of cancer cells.

Our immune system already knows how to fight cancer, but these proteins are used by the cancer cells to turn the immune system off.

By blocking these receptors, the immune system can recognize cancer as an enemy and kill it – like removing the cloak on an intruder.

Although these drugs have their own side effects, they're usually much less severe than chemotherapy. And when they work, they can be continued for many months or even years.

Over a decade ago, scientists noticed that they work especially well in melanomas, an aggressive form of skin cancer.

Since then, we have seen that they also work in many different cancers, from lung cancer to bladder cancer, in cancers with lots of PDL1 on their surface, to those with many mutations in their DNA.

But they don't work in every cancer and often don't work at all. Like other cancer drugs, they can also work for some time and then stop working.

Recent success with mRNA cancer vaccine

In December 2022, the drug companies Moderna and Merck reported positive results with a personalized cancer vaccine. The patients in the ongoing trial had stage 3 melanoma, meaning the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes near the cancer.

The normal course of action would be surgery to remove the tumor and surrounding lymph nodes and then give infusions of an anti-PD1 drug (typically Merck's Keytruda).

In this new personalized vaccine approach, the scientists took the patients' melanoma samples and looked at the letters in their DNA.

They took up to 34 of the most mutated parts of the DNA, so-called neoantigens, and put them into a strand of mRNA – which can be thought of as the software in cells between the DNA (the hard drive) and the protein (the hardware).

This mRNA was then given to patients as a personalized vaccine. It's personalized because everyone has different neoantigens, so everyone in the study received slightly different vaccines with up to 34 different mutations encoded into just one strand of mRNA.

Just like the mRNA COVID vaccines, that mRNA made a little bit of the cancer inside the patients, and their immune systems reacted against it to give them protection.

The results from this mid-stage study showed that the addition of the personalized cancer vaccine reduced the risk of the cancer returning (or death from the cancer) by 44 percent compared with the standard approach (surgery followed by anti-PD1 immunotherapy).

And there were no extra side effects over and above that of the existing immunotherapy.

While these results are potentially game-changing, we need to see results in other cancers in larger trials too.

It's incredibly exciting that one of the larger mRNA companies, BioNTech, is going to partner with the UK to develop a research hub in Cambridge, looking at these approaches and giving them to 10,000 patients on the NHS either routinely or in trials.

Advances in medicine are usually made in small steps, but this cancer vaccine – a new form of personalized, targeted medicine – could be a giant leap, just like the anti-PD1 or anti-PDL1 immunotherapies.

It's exciting that the UK will be central to that journey to help turn cancer not only into a chronic disease we can live with but one we can cure.

Justin Stebbing, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University

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

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Old mining towns might see new investments with this method. Image Credit: J M Ritchie/Shutterstock.com

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, so producing and storing electricity is all about clever transformations. Some seem more out there than others – like the idea to give new life to abandoned mine pits and turn them into giant batteries. The only thing they need is sand (or an equivalent heavy enough material).

The approach is wonderfully simple and uses already-established technology. Things that are high up have potential energy. By bringing them down to a lower level, you can transform the potential energy into kinetic energy. That energy is usually what’s extracted. In the case of a gravity battery, sand would be placed in a lift that will go down a shaft, and energy extracted using regenerative braking.

Regenerative braking is used in many cars to charge batteries, with electric and hybrid vehicles even using the approach to charge the batteries that power their engine. They don’t completely emulate friction breaking, but they are effective at slowing down the car over a longer distance and getting energy out. It is also used in public transport, for example, the trains in the London Underground system. The sand will be deposited at the bottom and the lift is sent back up empty, costing a much smaller fraction of the electricity generated.  

“To decarbonize the economy, we need to rethink the energy system based on innovative solutions using existing resources. Turning abandoned mines into energy storage is one example of many solutions that exist around us, and we only need to change the way we deploy them,” co-author Behnam Zakeri, a researcher at the International Instituto of Applied Systems Analysis, co-author in a statement

Many renewable power plants do not supply a continuous amount of electricity as they depend on factors like the weather. Batteries are needed to store that energy. When the electricity is abundant and cheap, sand can be brought up from the storage deep in the mine to storage on the surface (or near enough). When extra energy is needed, the sand is sent back down.

There are likely millions of mine pits in the world, and not all of them can be turned into Dark Matter detection facilities. Finding approaches to reuse in a sustainable way can be good for the environment and the local communities.  

“When a mine closes, it lays off thousands of workers. This devastates communities that rely only on the mine for their economic output. UGES would create a few vacancies as the mine would provide energy storage services after it stops operations,” says Julian Hunt, a researcher in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program and the lead author of the study. “Mines already have the basic infrastructure and are connected to the power grid, which significantly reduces the cost and facilitates the implementation of UGES plants.”

A paper describing this approach was published in the journal Energies.

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How about if I lobbied the homeowner association in my high-rise condo to skip the 22nd floor, jumping from the 21st to 23rd?

It’s highly unusual to fear 22 – so, yes, it would be appropriate to see me as a bit odd. But what if, in just my country alone, more than 40 million people shared the same baseless aversion?

That’s how many Americans admit it would bother them to stay on one particular floor in high-rise hotels: the 13th.

According to the Otis Elevator Co., for every building with a floor numbered “13,” six other buildings pretend to not have one, skipping right to 14.

Many Westerners alter their behaviors on Friday the 13th. Of course, bad things do sometimes happen on that date, but there’s no evidence they do so disproportionately.

As a sociologist specializing in social psychology and group processes, I’m not so interested in individual fears and obsessions. What fascinates me is when millions of people share the same misconception to the extent that it affects behavior on a broad scale. Such is the power of 13.

Many elevators do not have a floor numbered 13 because of common superstitions about the number.

Origins of the superstition

The source of 13’s bad reputation – “triskaidekaphobia” – is murky and speculative. The historical explanation may be as simple as its chance juxtaposition with lucky 12. Joe Nickell investigates paranormal claims for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a nonprofit that scientifically examines controversial and extraordinary claims. He points out that 12 often represents “completeness”: the number of months in the year, gods on Olympus, signs of the zodiac and apostles of Jesus. Thirteen contrasts with this sense of goodness and perfection.

The number 13 may be associated with some famous but undesirable dinner guests. In Norse mythology, the god Loki was 13th to arrive at a feast in Valhalla, where he tricked another attendee into killing the god Baldur. In Christianity, Judas – the apostle who betrayed Jesus – was the 13th guest at the Last Supper.

Leonardo Da Vinci, The Last Supper, Restored.

 

But the truth is, sociocultural processes can associate bad luck with any number. When the conditions are favorable, a rumor or superstition generates its own social reality, snowballing like an urban legend as it rolls down the hill of time.

In Japan, 9 is unlucky, probably because it sounds similar to the Japanese word for “suffering.” In Italy, it’s 17. In China, 4 sounds like “death” and is more actively avoided in everyday life than 13 is in Western culture – including a willingness to pay higher fees to avoid it in cellphone numbers. And though 666 is considered lucky in China, many Christians around the world associate it with an evil beast described in the biblical Book of Revelation. There is even a word for an intense fear of 666: hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

Social and psychological explanations

There are many kinds of specific phobias, and people hold them for a variety of psychological reasons. They can arise from direct negative experiences – fearing bees after being stung by one, for example. Other risk factors for developing a phobia include being very young, having relatives with phobias, having a more sensitive personality and being exposed to others with phobias.

Part of 13’s reputation may be connected to a feeling of unfamiliarity, or “felt sense of anomaly,” as it is called in the psychological literature. In everyday life, 13 is less common than 12. There’s no 13th month, 13-inch ruler, or 13 o’clock. By itself, a sense of unfamiliarity won’t cause a phobia, but psychological research shows that we favor what is familiar and disfavor what is not. This makes it easier to associate 13 with negative attributes.

Superstitions, once ingrained, are notoriously difficult to dispel.

 

People also may assign dark attributes to 13 for the same reason that many believe in “full moon effects.” Beliefs that the full moon influences mental health, crime rates, accidents, and other human calamities have been thoroughly debunked. Still, when people are looking to confirm their beliefs, they are prone to infer connections between unrelated factors. For example, having a car accident during a full moon, or on a Friday the 13th, makes the event seem all the more memorable and significant. Once locked in, such beliefs are very hard to shake.

Then there are the potent effects of social influences. It takes a village – or Twitter – to make fears coalesce around a particular harmless number. The emergence of any superstition in a social group – fear of 13, walking under ladders, not stepping on a crack, knocking on wood, etc. – is not unlike the rise of a “meme.” Although now the term most often refers to widely shared online images, it was first introduced by biologist Richard Dawkins to help describe how an idea, innovation, fashion or other bit of information can diffuse through a population. A meme, in his definition, is similar to a piece of genetic code: It reproduces itself as it is communicated among people, with the potential to mutate into alternative versions of itself.

The 13 meme is a simple bit of information associated with bad luck. It resonates with people for reasons given above, and then spreads throughout the culture. Once acquired, this piece of pseudo-knowledge gives believers a sense of control over the evils associated with it.

False beliefs, true consequences

Groups concerned with public relations seem to feel the need to kowtow to popular superstitions. Perhaps owing to the near-tragic Apollo 13 mission, NASA stopped sequentially numbering space shuttle missions, dubbing the 13th shuttle flight STS-41-G. In Belgium, complaints from superstitious passengers led Brussels Airlines to revamp its logo in 2006. It had been a “b”-like image made of 13 dots. The airline added a 14th. Like many other airlines, its planes’ row numbering skips 13.

Because superstitious beliefs are inherently false, they are as likely to do harm as good – consider health frauds, for example. I’d like to believe influential organizations – perhaps even elevator companies – would do better to warn the public about the dangers of clinging to false beliefs than to continue legitimizing them.

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Location of identified multi-species ecological linkages and wilderness areas and ungulate migratory routes that intersect linkages between Yellowstone and Glacier park assemblages in the northern Rocky Mountains; and between Mount Rainier and North Cascades park assemblages in the north Cascades mountain range. Credit: Newmark et. al. (2023) Scientific Reports

Corridors Between Western U.S. National Parks Would Greatly Increase the Persistence Time of Mammals

National parks play a crucial role in conservation efforts, however, increasing evidence highlights the limitations of many parks in terms of preserving long-term, self-sustaining populations and supporting critical ecological processes like large mammal migrations and natural disturbance regimes. These parks are often too small to accomplish these goals.

A new research study found that enhancing ecological connectivity, known as “corridors” or “linkages,” among several of the oldest and largest national parks in the Western United States would greatly extend the time that many mammal species populations can persist. The study was published on January 11, 2023, in the journal Scientific Reports. The authors analyzed the value of establishing ecological corridors for large mammals between Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks and between Mount Rainier and North Cascades National Parks. Their findings show that these corridors would not only enlarge populations, but also allow species to shift their geographic ranges more readily in response to climate change.

“Eliminating barriers of movement between parks and more carefully managing land use along these pathways are crucial for the survival of many mammal species,” said William Newmark, research curator at the Natural History Museum of Utah and lead author of the study. “Establishing an expanded protected area network based on identified mammal pathways and incorporating adjacent wilderness areas would greatly enlarge available habitat for mammal species. And this would have a very positive effect on species persistence time.”

Comparison of the extinction half-life of medium to large mammal communities in individual park assemblages versus protected area networks in western North America. The extinction half-life is the time expressed in terms of number of generations that one-half of all species will eventually become extinct. Credit: Newmark et. al. (2023) Scientific Reports

 

The authors found that linking Yellowstone National Park with Glacier National Park, and Mount Rainier National Park with North Cascades National Park would increase the long-term persistence time of mammal species by a factor of 4.3 relative to the persistence time of species in fragmented, individual parks. 

The proposed corridor network would cross two- and four-lane highways, which would require multiple ecological bridges over and under the roadways. Fortunately, highway authorities in the Western U.S. and Canada are beginning to construct such over- and underpasses for wildlife. 

“However, a much greater effort will certainly be required if we are to reduce the known adverse impacts of highways on species movement and dispersal,” said Paul Beier, professor emeritus of Northern Arizona University and co-author of the study. 

It’s well supported that ecological corridors enhance population persistence of species, but most studies have been small-scale experiments. There are few assessments of the value of ecological linkages at large spatial scales. This study’s analysis drew heavily upon patterns of species loss over time in habitat fragments around the world. 

“The analytical approach presented in this paper can provide conservation planners and practitioners with a powerful method of prioritizing and quantifying the value of ecological linkages between protected areas,” said John Halley, professor at the University of Ioannina and co-author of the study.

Over the past two decades, there has been worldwide efforts to establish networks of reserves interconnected by protected corridors. One of the boldest visions was first articulated a quarter century ago by co-author Michael Soulé, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who passed away before this paper was completed. Soulé advocated to establish a protected area network that would extend from the top of Alaska down to the southern tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego. A more regionally-focused initiative to connect Canada’s Yukon territory to Yellowstone National Park in the northern Rocky Mountains has made considerable progress. 

The study’s analysis highlights the positive effects that large-scale conservation initiatives can have on biodiversity conservation. The authors note that enhancing ecological connectivity between protected areas in Western U.S. and Canada could serve as an important template for large-scale biodiversity conservation both nationally and worldwide in the 21st century.

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Chance favours the prepared mind. But it also favours the person who works twice as hard as everyone else because of a severe dose of impostor syndrome. At least, it did in the case of Jocelyn Bell. Fifty-five years ago, she discovered “pulsars”, which are the relics of stellar explosions that pack the mass of the Sun into the volume of Mount Everest and spin at up to 716 times per second.

Bell, now Dame Jocelyn Bell, is famous for being overlooked for the Nobel Prize for Physics, which went to her supervisor Anthony Hewish. She is also one of the rare scientists to have their discovery on a bank note: the Bank of Ulster £50 note. But her road to fame was a rocky one.

Born in Lurgan, a town in Northern Ireland, Bell had an interest in science, partly because her architect father had designed the Armagh Observatory. But girls at her school were expected to study domestic science only. Thankfully, her parents kicked up an almighty fuss and the policy was changed. It might have been expected that things would be better at the University of Glasgow. But for Bell, the only physics undergraduate in her year, entering a lecture theatre was not unlike walking past a building site, with the male students stamping their feet and wolf-whistling.

Radio astronomy appealed to Bell because she did not like doing astronomy at night. While at Glasgow, she had a summer job at the Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory near Manchester. It might have led to research towards a PhD had the observatory’s director Sir Bernard Lovell not taken against women. Resigned to going to Australia, an important centre of radio astronomy, she applied to Cambridge on the off-chance. To her amazement, she was accepted.

***

Cambridge was a daunting place. Not only was Bell a woman in a male environment but she was doubly disadvantaged by coming from provincial Northern Ireland. Convinced that she been admitted because of a bureaucratic mistake, she worked long and hard in the hope it would extend the period before she was, inevitably, “found out” by the university.

For two years, she helped build a very strange radio telescope at Lord’s Bridge, west of Cambridge. The brainchild of Hewish, it covered the area of 57 tennis courts and consisted of vertical wooden poles connected together by 120 miles of cable like myriad washing lines. It was designed to look for the recently discovered, and totally mysterious, “quasars”. However, on 28 November 1967 Bell spotted something very unexpected.

The output of the telescope was recorded by a pen on a rotating cylinder of paper. It was in the course of examining this that Bell noticed a “quarter inch smudge”. Magnifying it, she was amazed to see a signal peaking every 1.3 seconds, regular as clockwork. Hewish pooh-poohed it as almost certainly being man-made radio interference. But Bell, like a dog with a bone, refused to drop the matter. Used to examining 100 feet of pen recorder trace a day, she set herself the task of re-examining three miles of chart, recorded over the previous six months.

Her persistence was rewarded. She found a second source. Eventually she would find four. Given it was unlikely there were several similar man-made sources in different parts of the sky, she had proved Hewish wrong.

The first source, for obvious reasons, had been dubbed LGM-1, for “Little Green Man - 1”. But it was astronomer Fred Hoyle who guessed that it was a “neutron star”, the super-dense relic left after a star had blown itself apart in a “supernova”. Like a spinning ice skater who pulls in her arms, the core of a star would spin ever faster as it shrank down to create a tiny neutron star. Although too faint to be seen in normal circumstances, some neutron stars sweep a lighthouse beam of radio waves across the sky as they spin, making them detectable as pulsars.

Hewish, who died at the end of 2021, won the 1974 Nobel Prize, partly for the discovery of pulsars. And although three Nobel Prizes have now been awarded for pulsars, none has gone to Bell. Hewish once said that, when Columbus discovered the Americas, credit did not go to the first person who spotted land. But Bell was more than an inconsequential scientific deckhand. Having connected up every last cable of the Cambridge telescope, she knew the instrument far better than anyone else. And without her steely determination, born of all the adversity she had faced, the discovery of pulsars would not have been made at that time.

Marcus Chown is the author of many books on science. His most recent is “Breakthrough” (Faber & Faber, 2021)

This piece is from the New Humanist winter 2022 edition. Subscribe here.

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Everyone breathes. Most of the time we do it without even thinking about it. But those who consciously focus on each inhalation and exhalation could reap some impressive health benefits, especially for those that struggle with meditation.

A new randomized controlled study among 108 participants found over the course of a month, five minutes of daily breath techniques provided similar benefits to mood and anxiety as five minutes of daily mindfulness meditation.

In fact, in some respects, participants designated to the breathing technique group were even better off.

Conducted by researchers from Stanford University in California, the study suggests breathing exercises may be a more "potent and acute" mental health tool than meditation, which can itself rival antidepressants in its treatment of anxiety.

"If you're looking to improve sleep and reduce daytime stress, recover from intense work, life and/or training, then interventions that facilitate autonomic control (and indeed you can control it), brief (5 minutes) structured breathwork is among the more powerful (and zero cost) tools," neuroscientist and co-author Andrew Huberman wrote on Twitter.

Each day in the current experiment, participants reported on their mood and vital signs including heart rate, breathing rate, and sleep. Those who spent five minutes working on their breath each day showed the most stress relief at the end of the month, with day-on-day improvements in their mental and physiological health.

What's more, the current study tested three different breathing techniques, and one of them seemed to perform the best.

Participants who were asked to practice cyclic sighing – when exhalations are pronounced and prolonged – showed greater improvements than those who were asked to practice box breathing – when inhalation, a pause, and exhalation all match in duration – or cyclic hyperventilation – when inhalations are longer and exhalations are shorter.

To be clear, each of the breathing techniques and the mindfulness techniques in this study showed benefits. However the breathing technique groups reported a higher increase in positive affect than the mindfulness meditation group.

There's something about controlled breathing that seems to set it apart, at least according to this one experiment.

Previous breath studies have shown that inhalations generally increase heart rate while exhalations decrease it. Perhaps that's why cyclical sighing is so effective. It might calm the body and mind by placing emphasis on breathing out.

Box breathing, on the other hand, is often used by military personnel to remain calm under stressful situations. And controlled hyperventilation is sometimes used to help alleviate anxiety or panic.

Meditation's positive effects tend to take longer to show up.

"There are several ways in which voluntary controlled breathing exercises differ from the practice of mindfulness meditation," the researchers write.

"Controlled breathing directly influences respiratory rate, which can cause more immediate physiological and psychological calming effects by increasing vagal tone during slow expiration. While mindfulness meditation might decrease sympathetic tone in the long run, that is not its primary purpose or an expected acute effect."

More research is needed to tease apart the differences between controlled breathing and passive meditation, but there's something about an intentional mindset that seems to hold more immediate health benefits.

As humans, we never fully have control over our bodies, and sometimes that can be a really scary reality. Exerting a moment of control, even just to sigh, could be just what the doctor ordered.

The study was published in Cell Reports Medicine.

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Heartburn is a key symptom of reflux disease, but the disease is much more than that.

"Gastroesophageal reflux disease, is when you get acid and chemical damage to the lining of the esophagus," Dr. East says. Some with reflux disease might feel a lump in the throat, have difficulty swallowing, have chest pain, a cough, or have worsening asthma-type symptoms.

"Complications of reflux disease include esophagitis, inflammation in the bottom of the esophagus," Dr. East says. "If this is persistent, you can develop scarring and a stricture," or narrowing of the esophagus.

If it is persistent and heals, the lining of the esophagus can change to a more acid-resistant form, known as Barrett's esophagus, a fairly common complication of reflux disease, Dr. East says.

Barrett's esophagus is a condition in which the lining esophagus becomes damaged by acid reflux, which causes the lining to thicken and become red. Over time, the valve between the esophagus and the stomach may begin to fail, leading to acid and chemical damage of the esophagus. In some people, reflux disease may trigger a change in the cells that line the lower esophagus, causing Barrett's esophagus.

While frequent heartburn may be a sign, many people with Barrett's esophagus have no symptoms. Having Barrett's esophagus does increase your risk of developing esophageal cancer. Although the cancer risk is small, it's important for people with Barrett's esophagus to have regular checkups to check for precancerous cells.

Those at highest risk for Barrett's esophagus include:

•     White men over the age of 50.

•     People with family history of Barrett's esophagus or esophageal cancer.

•     People who smoke.

•     People with excess abdominal fat.

•     Patients with long-standing reflux lasting more than five years.

"If you have three of those risk factors, then you should have a screening endoscopy for Barrett's esophagus," Dr. East says. To screen for Barrett's esophagus, a lighted tube with a camera at the end, called an endoscope, is passed down the throat to check for signs of changing esophagus tissue. A biopsy is often done to remove tissue and confirm the diagnosis.

Treatment for Barrett's esophagus depends on the extent of abnormal cell growth in your esophagus and your overall health. Treatments in the early stages can include lifestyle measures and medications to help reduce acid reflux and therefore, the esophageal acid exposure.

Barrett's esophagus affects 10% to 15% of people with reflux disease, Dr. East says. A much smaller group faces another risk.

"About 1 in 200 patients with Barrett's esophagus per year will develop esophageal adenocarcinoma," Dr. East says. "The stomach is well designed to handle highly acidic conditions. But the esophagus is not designed to cope with acid. And so when acid comes up, that acid reflux damages the cells, replacing them with more acid-resistant cells that develop into Barrett's esophagus."

There are innovative treatments for reflux disease and medications, like proton pump inhibitors. But first, avoid triggers, like coffee, alcohol and smoking.

"If you have severe or frequent reflux disease, you should seek medical advice," Dr. East says.

Provided by Mayo Clinic

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In late 2022, a high-profile study made a splash when it claimed that meditation may work as well as a common drug named Lexapro for the treatment of anxiety. Over the past couple of decades, similar evidence has emerged about mindfulness and meditation's broad array of health benefits, for purposes ranging from stress and pain reduction to depression treatments to boosting brain health and helping to manage excessive inflammation and long COVID-19.

Despite the mounting body of evidence showing the health benefits of meditation, it can be hard to weigh the science and to know how robust it is.

I am a neuroscientist studying the effects of stress and trauma on brain development in children and adolescents. I also study how mindfulness, meditation and exercise can positively affect brain development and mental health in youth.

I am very excited about how meditation can be used as a tool to provide powerful new insights into the ways the mind and brain work, and to fundamentally change a person's outlook on life. And as a mental health researcher, I see the promise of meditation as a low- or no-cost, evidence-based tool to improve health that can be relatively easily integrated into daily life.

Meditation requires some training, discipline and practice—which are not always easy to come by. But with some specific tools and strategies, it can be accessible to everyone.

What are mindfulness and meditation?

There are many different types of meditation, and mindfulness is one of the most common. Fundamentally, mindfulness is a mental state that, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn a renowned expert in mindfulness-based practices, involves "awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally."

This means not ruminating about something that happened in the past or worrying about that to-do list. Being focused on the present, or living in the moment, has been shown to have a broad array of benefits, including elevating mood, reducing anxiety, lessening pain and potentially improving cognitive performance.

Mindfulness is a skill that can be practiced and cultivated over time. The goal is that, with repetition, the benefits of practicing mindfulness carry over into everyday life—when you aren't actively meditating. For example, if you learn that you aren't defined by an emotion that arises transiently, like anger, then it may be harder to stay angry for long.

The health benefits of meditation and other strategies aimed at stress reduction are thought to stem from increasing levels of overall mindfulness through practice. Elements of mindfulness are also present in practices like yoga, martial arts and dance that require focusing attention and discipline.

The vast body of evidence supporting the health benefits of meditation is too expansive to cover exhaustively. But the studies I reference below represent some of the top tier, or the highest-quality and most rigorous summaries of scientific data on the topic to date. Many of these include systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which synthesize many studies on a given topic.

Stress and mental health

Mindfulness-based programs have been shown to significantly reduce stress in a variety of populations, ranging from caregivers of people living with dementia to children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meta-analyses published during the pandemic show that mindfulness programs are effective for reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and depression—including the particularly vulnerable time during pregnancy and the postnatal period.

Mindfulness-based programs also show promise as a treatment option for anxiety disorders, which are the most common mental disorders, affecting an estimated 301 million people globally. While effective treatments for anxiety exist, many patients do not have access to them because they lack insurance coverage or transportation to providers, for instance, or they may experience only limited relief.

In addition to improving mood and lowering stress, mindfulness has been shown to elevate cognitive performance, cut down on mind wandering and distractibility and increase emotional intelligence.

It's important to note, however, that for those affected by mental or substance use disorders, mindfulness-based approaches should not replace first-line treatments like medicine and psychotherapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Mindfulness strategies should be seen as a supplement to these evidence-based treatments and a complement to healthy lifestyle interventions like physical activity and healthy eating.

How does meditation work? A look into the brain

Studies show that regular meditators experience better attention control and improved control of heart rate, breathing and autonomic nervous system functioning, which regulates involuntary responses in the body, such as blood pressure. Research also shows that people who meditate have lower levels of cortisol—a hormone involved in the stress response—than those who don't.

A recent systematic review of neuroimaging studies showed that focused attention meditation is associated with functional changes in several brain regions involved in cognitive control and emotion-related processing. The review also found that more experienced meditators had stronger activation of the brain regions involved in those cognitive and emotional processes, suggesting that the brain benefits improve with more practice.

A regular meditation practice may also stave off age-related thinning of the cerebral cortex, which may help to protect against age-related disease and cognitive impairment.

Limitations of meditation research

This research does have limits. These include a lack of a consistent definition for the types of programs used, and a lack of rigorously controlled studies. In gold-standard randomized controlled trials with medications, study participants don't know whether they are getting the active drug or a placebo.

In contrast, in trials of mindfulness-based interventions, participants know what condition they are assigned to and are not "blinded," so they may expect that some of the health benefits may happen to them. This creates a sense of expectancy, which can be a confounding variable in studies. Many meditation studies also don't frequently include a control group, which is needed to assess how it compares with other treatments.

Benefits and wider applications

Compared with medications, mindfulness-based programs may be more easily accessible and have fewer negative side effects. However, medication and psychotherapy—particularly cognitive behavioral therapy—work well for many, and a combination approach may be best.

Mindfulness-based interventions are also cost-effective and have better health outcomes than usual care, particularly among high-risk patient populations—so there are economic benefits as well.

Researchers are studying ways to deliver mindfulness tools on a computer or smartphone app, or with virtual reality, which may be more effective than conventional in-person meditation training.

Importantly, mindfulness is not just for those with physical or mental health diagnoses. Anyone can use these strategies to reduce the risk of disease and to take advantage of the health benefits in everyday life, such as improved sleep and cognitive performance, elevated mood and lowered stress and anxiety.

Where to get started?

Many recreation centers, fitness studios and even universities offer in-person meditation classes. For those looking to see if meditation can help with the treatment of a physical or mental condition, there are over 600 clinical trials currently recruiting participants for various conditions, such as pain, cancer and depression.

If you want to try meditation from the comfort of your home, there are many free online videos on how to practice, including meditations for sleep, stress reduction, mindful eating and more. Several apps, such as Headspace, appear promising, with randomized controlled trials showing benefits for users.

The hardest part is, of course, getting started. However, if you set an alarm to practice every day, it will become a habit and may even translate into everyday life—which is the ultimate goal. For some, this may take some time and practice, and for others, this may start to happen pretty quickly. Even a single five-minute session can have positive health effects.

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Scientists have scanned a section of the North Atlantic and revealed the remnants of what had been a huge pulse of hot rock that initiated a rapid climate warming event 56 million years ago.

 

The climate event, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), warmed the already-hot climate of the time by about 5.6° C due to a jump in atmospheric CO2. Levels of that greenhouse gas rose from about 1,120 parts per million to about 2,020 ppm—much higher than today’s 417 ppm. Although it didn’t trigger a major extinction, it still exterminated some deep-sea creatures and tropical plants. Scientists want to understand the PETM better, because it’s an example of how the Earth reacted to a rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 a bit like we’re currently experiencing, albeit starting from a hot, ice-free climate.

Finding a cause

Although the cause of PETM has been debated since it was discovered in the 1990s, more and more evidence has accumulated that points to massive quantities of CO2 and methane emitted due to volcanic activity in the North Atlantic as the primary cause. This activity created what’s now known as the North Atlantic Igneous Province— the same kind of enormous volcanic phenomenon linked to climate disruption and extinctions at other times in Earth’s past, like the end-Triassic, the end-Permian, the early Jurassic, and others.

 

But there’s a problem with that explanation. The jump in temperatures at the start of the PETM took between 3,000 and 10,000 years, whereas the igneous activity lasted far longer, from about 63 to 54 million years ago. If the volcanic activity was responsible for the PETM, then something extraordinary must have happened at the time of the warming to distinguish it from the volcanism that preceded and followed. That extraordinary event seems to have been a geologically quick surge of magma that invaded oil-rich sediments and boiled off CO2 and methane. A paper published in 2019 showed how a huge pulse of hot mantle rock from a “mantle plume” could have supplied that magma as it spread out beneath the crust.

 

In December, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Chicago, the same team of scientists behind the 2019 paper presented preliminary evidence that there had been a huge pulse of hot mantle rock, based on what it left behind in the North Atlantic.

 

“The initial modeling is showing that it's got the crustal structure we would expect for thickened oceanic crust that has formed in response to really hot mantle temperatures,” said Hazel Knight, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham, UK, “So it's very nice to have—that the initial results are really supporting our hypothesis.”

 

That evidence was gathered from the seabed below the stormy waters of the North Atlantic in May 2021 by scientists from the UK, Ireland, and Denmark. They recorded a 400-kilometer-long cross-section through Earth’s crust created using shockwaves in the ocean made with compressed air and recording the echoes of those shockwaves reflected off layers of rock within the crust to make a “seismic section.” That technique doesn’t penetrate deep enough to image the whole crust, so they also deployed special microphones onto the seabed, called “ocean bottom seismometers,” to record vibrations that traveled through the lower part of the crust. When the two kinds of seismic scans are combined, they show the layers of seabed sediment draped over volcanic rocks, and they show how thick that volcanic crust is above Earth’s mantle.

Baked crust

Thicker crust indicates the mantle was hotter when that crust formed: “If it's really hot, more stuff is going to melt, then that will be erupted and solidified to form thicker oceanic crust,” said Knight.

 

And, because the crust in the seismic section is younger in the west and older in the east, it provides a record of the mantle’s temperature change over the time leading up to the PETM and afterward. It shows a big bulge of thick crust, named the Eriador Ridge, that matches the time of the PETM, and supports the idea that a pulse of hot rock occurred at the right time to trigger the climate event.

 

The real value of the work, however, will come once the dates along the line of the seismic section are refined using magnetic data that the 2021 expedition recorded: “this will be really, really precise aging because it's exactly along the [seismic] profile,” said Knight.

 

Those precise dates will tell the team how quickly the hot mantle pulse mushroomed away from where it initially breached the crust—near where Iceland is today—out to Eriador Ridge 700 miles (1,000 km) away. “It took some time for this pulse to spread out, and the rate of that is… another really important thing for our estimates of how fast the carbon was released,” said Knight. “If this pulse spreads out really slowly, the same amount of carbon will be released over a long time; versus if it spreads out really fast, all of that carbon will be released very quickly.”

 

The significance of this is that up till now, the amount of carbon released to generate the PETM has been calculated from the aftereffects of the emissions—things like changes in ocean chemistry recorded in fossils of plankton that lived at the time. But Knight’s colleagues at the University of Birmingham will be able to approach the calculation of emissions from the other end, working out how much CO2 was actually emitted by the lavas and the magma-baked sediments.

 

“We're estimating carbon release directly from the source rather than estimating carbon released from the effect it had on things that have been changed,” explained Knight.

New imaging finds trigger for massive global warming 56 million years ago

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Astronomers have already used the new James Webb Space Telescope to reveal some marvels of the universe, including possible glimpses of the first galaxies. But Amber Young is looking forward to the next generation of space telescopes. She hopes they’ll identify the worlds in our cosmic neighborhood most likely to host aliens—at least of the microbial variety.

Young and her colleagues have formulated a decision tree—basically a flowchart—that researchers can use to hunt for particular sets of features on other planets, to prioritize those with the most promising biosignatures, or potential signs of life. And they’re learning from Earth’s history how to do it. 

“We’ve outlined a strategy to search for Earth-like exoplanets, and we’re not just limiting ourselves to life as we know it today, right here and now,” says Young, a North Arizona University astronomer who presented her team’s findings at the American Astronomical Society conference in Seattle yesterday. “There are several eras in Earth’s history in which life existed, when the atmosphere was very different, which tells us about the breadth of life that could exist on other worlds.”

For example, she cites Earth’s Archean era, about 2.5 to 4 billion years ago, when microbial life began spreading on our world thanks to—or perhaps despite—the abundant methane and carbon dioxide filling the atmosphere. That was followed by the Proterozoic era, when oxygen levels began to rise, and larger and more complex organisms began to flourish. 

Today, most astronomers consider atmospheric water vapor and oxygen to be the top two indicators that a planet could host life. (Methane and not-too-daunting levels of CO2 are usually next on the list, sometimes along with nitrous oxide and sulfur gases.) If an alien astronomer had been scanning our own planet’s atmosphere back in the Archean era, they would have seen signs of water and methane, but no oxygen. They could have easily overlooked Earth’s budding life and its potential of becoming even more life-friendly. That’s why Young has built her flowchart: to search for signals from exoplanets that might be at any stage in their multibillion-year evolution, even if their atmospheres are not like present-day Earth’s.

“Oxygen may not have been detectable for more than 2 billion years beyond its initial production [on Earth]. That’s a quintessential false negative,” agrees Tim Lyons, an astrobiologist at UC Riverside, who likes the flowchart concept. And neither methane nor oxygen might have been plentiful enough to be detectable from a vast distance during the Proterozoic era, he points out.

Lyons’ own research takes a similar perspective to Young’s: He investigates whether an alien astronomer observing Earth could have correctly discerned that it’s a life-friendly place. That means inferring the contents of our atmosphere throughout the past 4 billion or so years that our world has hosted life, and then determining whether the levels of biologically derived gases would be detectable from space. (Another team has tried to suss out whether beings on other planets could spot us by using the technique we use to find rocky exoplanets in other solar systems. With the right vantage point, these researchers think, aliens could detect Earth as it transits in front of the sun, briefly dimming its light and offering a clue to our presence.)

Currently, when evaluating the life-friendliness of an exoplanet, scientists first examine its host star to make sure it’s not spewing lots of stellar flares. Then they check its orbit, to assess whether it’s stable and in a “Goldilocks zone” that’s neither too hot nor too cold to allow liquid water on the surface. 

Then the harder part begins. With Young’s decision tree, astronomers would try to see whether there’s a significant amount of water vapor in the atmosphere—a sign there’s actually water down below. That means using a spectrograph, like the one carried on the JWST, to scan a planet’s atmosphere at infrared wavelengths.

Next, they’ll use the spectrograph to try to find key molecules like oxygen or methane. How much they find of each determines what they’ll look for next, like carbon dioxide or ozone. (Photosynthesis, which could arise on other worlds, produces oxygen. Organisms that use oxygen typically produce carbon dioxide and water, while some kinds of microbes, like bacteria, produce methane.)

It’s best to estimate all of these potential biosignatures, if possible, and not just one. But depending on the wavelength range a telescope’s spectrograph is sensitive to, it will be able to measure the abundance of some molecules better than others. Charting all these paths on Young’s decision tree will tell astronomers whether they’re looking at a world resembling modern Earth, or a past version of our planet, or something else entirely. 

You might be wondering why the search for alien life is so focused on … well, Earth, rather than, say, gas giants like Jupiter or ocean worlds like Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, or its sibling satellite, Enceladus. “Strategically, it makes sense to look for life as we know it. We only have one example of an inhabited planet, despite tantalizing hints here and there,” says Ken Williford, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle. 

He works with NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is searching for signs of past life on Mars and will later be headed for what scientists think is the shore of a former body of water. If Mars was anything like ancient Earth, the remnants of a shallow marine environment could give the rover a shot at digging up a fossilized “microbial mat,” a layered community of microorganisms.

But, inevitably, anyone who follows Young’s flowchart will find some planets that return ambiguous results: some encouraging signs but also uncertainties. It’s important to avoid false positives, if the apparent life-friendly signatures are actually due to nonbiological origins, such as methane-generating volcanoes, says Maggie Thompson, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz who also presented her work at the astronomy conference this week. 

For example, Titan has an atmosphere smogged with methane, but it’s probably lifeless, thanks to its frigid temperatures and lack of water. (That’s just a “probably,” though. Titan could conceivably host really weird microbes we’ve never seen before, capable of surviving in methane lakes, eating acetylene, and breathing hydrogen rather than oxygen. But we won’t know more until NASA sends its Dragonfly rotorcraft to investigate.)

Nevertheless, methane could still be a key biosignature on more hospitable exoplanets, especially warmer ones with water. “The exciting thing about methane is that it could be a relatively simple thing that life uses and produces,” Thompson says. The Webb telescope, which just spotted its first exoplanet, will prove useful in this endeavor, thanks to its near-infrared spectrograph. “Methane is one of the few gases that JWST can actually detect, but JWST alone probably won’t find a planet with a definitive biosignature,” she says. 

Young’s looking ahead to Webb’s successor, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which will be tasked with searching for signs of life on Earth-size planets around sun-like stars. (So far, it has been easier for astronomers to find gas giant planets orbiting more dangerously active red dwarf stars.) In December, NASA chief Bill Nelson announced plans to develop the observatory in the 2030s. Depending on exactly how sensitive the new telescope is, Young’s modeling shows that it could scope out dozens of Earth-like worlds.

She’s also keeping an open mind for life as we don’t know it. The decision tree includes branches for planets that don’t seem to resemble any stage of Earth history. “We want to be prepared for surprises, the weird cases that we might not be able to categorize,” she says. “Let’s put those in the ‘ambiguous planet’ category, and flag them as interesting targets.”

Why the Search for Life in Space Starts With Ancient Earth

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I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months—in Manhattan

It was just another package among millions flowing through the Heathrow Airport system. Except this one was radioactive. On December 29, 2022, a detector at the London airport flagged the package, and staff took action to isolate it. They soon found out that it contained uranium—a naturally occurring element that, after a complex process of enrichment, can be used in nuclear reactors and weapons.

The uranium was found among scrap metal in a shipment from Pakistan destined for a UK address associated with an Iranian business, according to reports. The Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command branch is now investigating. Pakistan’s foreign ministry has denied that the uranium originated in the country.

What you might not realize is that detections of undeclared radioactive material at transport hubs and ports of entry happen multiple times every year in the United Kingdom alone. All over the world, security teams screen for radioactive material on the move. This monitoring takes many forms, including covert detectors hidden in the walls at airports that silently scan passengers. Customs officials wave handheld radiation-sniffing devices over boxes. And drones, loaded with sensors, can fly across wide areas while searching for lost radioactive objects.

Even so, some potentially harmful material can slip through the net, as the uranium did—until it got to Heathrow.

“I want to reassure the public that the amount of contaminated material was extremely small and has been assessed by experts as posing no threat to the public,” Commander Richard Smith of London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement. He added that the uranium did not appear to be linked to any direct threat. No arrests have been made so far.

The uranium almost certainly posed no danger, says Bahram Ghiassee of the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank that focuses on anti-extremism. “Uranium in its natural form, or enriched, poses very little threat to public health,” he explains, noting that it is a relatively weak radioactive material.

Ghiassee, who published a report last year on the threat of radiological terrorism, also criticizes suggestions in some news coverage that the uranium found at Heathrow could have been intended for use in a dirty bomb: “For dirty bombs, you need highly radioactive material … and uranium is not suitable at all.”

Nonetheless, British ports of entry screen for all kinds of radioactive substances. However, members of the public often don’t realize that some airports are able to detect even tiny amounts of radioactivity in buildings or cargo-processing areas. 

Marco Panniello is the sales director for Arktis, a company that makes radiation-detection devices and has offices in Switzerland, the US, and the UK. The firm’s gadgets are used in various facilities, including several airports. Panniello declines to say which but notes that Arktis does not supply Heathrow.

“We provide systems that are completely invisible to the public,” says Panniello, describing how the company’s detection devices can be used alongside X-ray machines at airport security areas or hidden in the walls of terminal buildings. “It can be easily covered by advertisements or canvas,” he explains. “They are there, but you don’t see them.”

Arktis’ detectors can also be installed in doorways or used in luggage-handling locations. They work entirely passively but are different from Geiger counters, the best-known radiation detectors. Special material inside Arktis’ devices reacts when it is exposed to the subatomic particles emitted by radioactive substances. This reaction produces a tiny amount of light—scintillation—which is measured by sensors and subsequently processed by computer algorithms. 

Because different radioactive substances prompt distinct emissions of light, it’s often possible to tell immediately what kind of material has been detected—an isotope of uranium or cobalt, say. Panniello explains that his company can integrate notifications into security systems so staff receives automated alerts on their smartphones when radioactivity is found nearby. Detections could also be flagged at central security hubs, where an appropriate response can be coordinated.

His firm also makes a drone equipped with a radiation sensor. That’s not so useful at airports, but it could help investigators scan a wide area to locate discarded radioactive material.

From smoke alarms to industrial gauges to medical teletherapy machines, there are many examples of objects and devices that contain radioactive material. Not all present a risk of harm, but some do. And there is concern that some landfill sites or waste piles have been contaminated by people carelessly throwing away more dangerous sources of radioactivity. 

A report published last year by Zenobia Homan, who is at King’s College London, and colleagues noted the challenges some South Asian countries face, for example, in ensuring careful disposal of radioactive substances. “There’s people who hunt for this specifically, they might try and steal it, or smuggle it to sell the material,” she says. In May 2021, investigators discovered a scrap dealer in India who had reportedly collected 7 kg of uranium. Officials arrested two men who had allegedly been trying to sell the uranium online.

When radioactive matter is improperly discarded and later discovered like this, the consequences can be chilling . Take the Goiânia accident. In 1987, two men in Brazil stole parts of a teletherapy machine from an abandoned radiotherapy institute in the city of Goiânia. They suffered radiation sickness almost immediately, experiencing vomiting and diarrhea, among other symptoms, but continued to dismantle the machine, which unbeknownst to them contained the highly radioactive isotope Caesium-137. A few days later, they sold some of the machine’s parts to a scrapyard.

The owner of the scrapyard found a glowing blue powder inside one of these parts, which he and members of his family extracted and handled, completely unaware of the dangers. His 6-year-old niece, Leide das Neves Ferreira, even played with the powder, painting it on her face. She and three other people died as a result of radiation exposure. Around 250 people were contaminated in the incident.

There are other similarly bizarre and tragic examples. In Kramatorsk, Ukraine, lost Caesium-137 from a measuring instrument at a quarry ended up in concrete and subsequently the wall of an apartment building. Successive residents in the 1980s were exposed to radiation as a result. At least two children died before the source was discovered.

Given that there are many sources of radiation, of varying strengths, out in the wild, constant vigilance is required. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency published a report on the theft of a teletherapy machine in Mexico in 2013. The machine contained Cobalt-60 and was removed from its shielding before being left in a field. A member of the public who found the machine suffered radiation injuries to their left shoulder and right leg.

Both Homan and Ghiassee say that international regulations and monitoring protocols for radioactive materials have improved greatly over time, especially at national borders—the result being discoveries like the one made at Heathrow in December. Yet there are still gaps in these defenses. Certain countries don’t have the capabilities to detect the movement of radioactive and nuclear material across borders, says Ghiassee.

Panniello says that some nations ought to be more proactive in screening for radioactivity at airports. “The UK is one of those countries where there is the right amount of attention to those things,” he says. “But it is an exception.”

How Airports Catch Illicit Radioactive Cargo

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