As man-made climate change continues to cook the planet, experts are predicting that catastrophic weather events will become normal.

Scientists anticipate widespread droughts, increasingly frequent wildfires and soaring fatalities as heat waves become commonplace. Even if the world's nations come together to meaningfully limit carbon emissions, it is unlikely that all of the impending crises can be averted.

Now, a new study by University of Oxford's School of Geography underscores the need to try to limit the damage to the greatest extent possible. Specifically, the study found that 90% of the humans alive in the near future will experience these problems. That remarkably high percentage reveals the ubiquity of the reach of climate change.

In an analysis published for the scientific journal Nature Sustainability, Oxford's Professor Louise Slater and Wuhan University's Dr. Jiabo Yin explain that as the planet's temperature continues to rise, there will be "compounding hazards" — one heat-related environmental problem after another after another. This is because of a specific climate phenomenon known as a compound drought–heatwave, one in which the lack of water feeds into rising temperatures and vice versa. The authors of the study that much of the human community will be impacted by this problem; more than 9 out of 10 people on the planet inhabit areas that will be hit hard by compound drought–heatwaves — "with more severe impacts in poorer and more rural areas."

In a public statement, Slater explained how much the scientists emphasize that "understanding compounding hazards in a warming Earth is essential for the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG13 that aims to combat climate change and its impacts."

In related news, a United Nations-backed panel of scientists announced on Monday that they believed at least one important piece of the puzzle of fighting climate change is now in place. In a collaborative effort including contributions from NASA and the European Union, the UN-backed report revealed that emissions of an ozone-destroying chemical known as CFC-11 had significantly declined in 2022 compared to its 2018 levels. China has been the primary culprit of CFC-11 emissions, particularly factories in its northeastern provinces. The CFC-11 emissions, like other chlorofluorocarbon emissions, would break apart ozone molecules in the stratosphere resulting in an increasingly thin ozone layer. Meg Seki, the executive secretary of the United Nations Environment Programme's Ozone Secretaria, attributed the new success to the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty signed in 1987 to phase out the use of ozone-destroying chemicals.

While these updates are welcome in terms of slowing existing trends regarding carbon emissions, it does not mean that all of the consequences of climate change can be averted. As the authors of the study note, their conclusions account for a wide spectrum of potential scenarios — worst-case (humanity does nothing to curb emissions) to best-case (the negative impact of the damage done so far is limited). The most dire possible outcome for humanity would be if heavily populated areas experience a so-called "wet bulb temperature" of higher than 95 °F (35 °C) or higher, it kills healthy human beings within a few hours. This is significant because wet bulb temperature is determined by measuring the temperature of a wet thermometer in the shade while water evaporates off of it. A wet bulb temperature of 95 °F (35 °C) is not like a regular temperature of 95 °F (35 °C), where a human being can under certain circumstances survive it. Once the wet bulb temperature in any area reaches 95 °F (35 °C) or higher, the combined increases in both temperature and moisture will be so great that all human bodies in those areas will not be able to remove heat fast enough. Within hours, they will die.

It remains unclear if/when things will get that bad. As the new Nature Sustainability makes clear, however, heat waves do not have to reach extinction-level proportions to inflict considerable pain on humanity.

"Over 90% of the world population and GDP is projected to be exposed to increasing compounding risks in the future climate, even under the lowest emission scenario," explain the study's authors.

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Netflix cancels a lot of shows. Like a whole lot of shows. The list of Netflix shows canceled of the last year alone is pretty sizeable, and the streamer wasted no time before brandishing its cancelation axe once again when it confirmed that mystery-thriller series 1899 is done after 10 episodes just days into the new year. 

It’s an issue that has personally frustrated for me quite a while. And based on the other reactions I've seen to 1899 being the first canceled Netflix show of 2023 I’m far from the only subscriber that is getting fed up with the streamer’s trigger-happy approach. 

Making matters worse is that Netflix typically hides its rationale for canceling shows. For example, 1899 made the No.1 spot, and racked up close to 80 million viewing hours in its first week. That appeared to be more than enough to guarantee a second season. I’ve often wondered what does it actually take to be considered a success by Netflix?  

On the surface Netflix certainly appears to cancel shows indiscriminately regardless of their performance or critical reception. However, an interesting theory has resurfaced online this week which suggests there may actually be a method to Netflix’s seeming madness. And your favorite show being axed could actually be your fault...

We’re thinking about Netflix cancelations all wrong 

Netflix's (opens in new tab)page tracks viewing hours on the streaming platform week-to-week. And looking at the raw data it can be hard to understand why 1899 got canceled. 

As noted, it pulled 79 million viewing hours in its first week and a further 87 million in its second. Granted, it dropped quite significantly in its third week but did still clock up another 44 million viewing hours —  how is that not enough for Netflix? 

(Image credit: Netflix)

The answer may lie in a different metric entirely: Completion rates. In case the name doesn’t give it away, this means the percentage of Netflix accounts that began watching a show and then actually continue through all the available episodes.

Essentially this can be boiled down to the number of viewers that Netflix can reasonably expect to watch the next season should it be made. After all, if you didn’t finish 1899 season 1, are you going to tune back in for season 2?  

Using data from U.K.-based analytics company Digital i(opens in new tab) (via Whats On Netflix(opens in new tab)), it appears that 1899 had a very steep drop off, especially between episode 1 and episode 2. The data-tracking company suggests that only around 32% of Netflix accounts that started the show actually followed through and finished the season. That pictures a pretty gloomy picture for a potential 1899 season 2. 

Another great example of a canceled show that appeared to start strong that has a low completion rate is First Kill. According to Digital i (again via Whats on Netflix(opens in new tab)) this steamy teen vampire series had a 66% drop-off between its first and second episodes and only 43% of viewers actually committed to watching it through to its cliffhanger conclusion. With that sort of completion rate is it really any surprise that Netflix opted to cancel First Kill just weeks after it premiered? 

 (Image credit: Netflix)

I should caveat the above data with the acknowledgment that Digital i is a third-party company and Netflix has never publicly released completion rate information for any of its shows. But even if these numbers aren’t wholly accurate, the idea that completion rates are dictating whether or not a show survives cancelation appears to hold quite a lot of water.  

More than just a wild theory  

The above shouldn’t just be dismissed as a unsubstantiated theory either. Not only is it logical, but Neil Gaiman, author of the graphic novels upon which the Netflix fantasy series Sandman is based, gave this theory extra credence last summer during the prolonged period where the fate of Sandman season 2 seemed to be in the balance.  

When a viewer tweeted that they were enjoying watching the series with their spouse at a slower pace, Gaiman replied(opens in new tab) that he hoped they could “finish it within the requisite 28 or 30 days.” Strongly implying that the show’s first month completion rate was an important metric for Netflix. 

And if all that wasn't enough evidence for you, Gaiman spelt things out further when a fan asked if the show would look "more popular if we binge-watch it all at once" saying, "It does, yes. Because they are looking at "completion rates". So people watching it at their own pace don't show up."

Gaiman is not the only well-placed source to reveal that viewership numbers in the first month is of significant importance to the streamer. Michael Green, a screenwriter and producer who has worked with Netflix, posted on Twitter(opens in new tab) earlier this month that "the only way to keep a show on the air at Netflix is to rack up hours viewed in THE FIRST MONTH from its release." 

Netflix’s binge model could be to blame 

So if we accept that a show’s completion rate, particularly in its first 30 days on Netflix, is a critical metric, then the next question has to be, why are some shows getting such a low compilation rate? 

The obvious answer would be a lack of interest from viewers perhaps because of an unengaging pilot episode, or perhaps poor word of mouth or a weak critical reception puts viewers off finishing. However, Netflix’s own release model could also be partially to blame for some shows’ suffering from low completion rates. 

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

I have pretty mixed feelings about binge-watching in general. A lot of the time I feel it distracts from what makes the television format special, but there are a select few shows that I believe are enchanted by being consumed in rapid succession. But unlike its rivals such as Disney Plus and HBO Max which favor dropping new episodes weekly, Netflix pretty much universally drops whole seasons in one go. 

This strategy could be causing viewers to burn out on a new series too quickly. After all, watching half a dozen episodes in a matter of days, sometimes even in just a single day, is probably enough to make anybody crave something different for a while.  

Then you have subscribers such as myself who often self-regulate and consume shows over a matter of weeks, if not months. To Netflix, I’d be judged as somebody who wouldn’t be interested in more episodes just because I’ve not polished off the entire drop within the designated 30-day window. 

Netflix isn’t giving shows a fair shot 

The problem with only looking at a show’s first 30 days on the service when judging its success is that it doesn’t allow for a slow burn. Not to mention, it entirely discounts viewers who arrive on the scene a little later. Most shows, even beloved ones, start out with fewer viewers than they end with, and yet it almost seems like to Netflix if you don’t watch in the first 30 days your interest doesn’t really count. 

Take the universally acclaimed AMC show Breaking Bad. When it premiered in January 2008 it pulled in around 1.41 million viewers for its pilot episode. But by the time the debut episode of its final run rolled around in 2013, it scored almost 6 million viewers. Even the best shows of all time need time to find their audience and grow in popularity. 

if you want to see a Netflix show continue, make sure to finish it fast

Netflix is one of the best streaming services out there, and also the biggest worldwide, so despite all the criticism it's faced in recent months, it’s clearly doing something right. But at the same time its ever-growing list of canceled shows, many of them after just a single season, continues to sully its reputation with some viewers. 

There is almost certainly a logical explanation for which shows Netflix choses to renew and which it opted to cancel, but that still doesn’t stop the persist problem from being a major frustration for thousands of subscribers. Going forward, just remember, if you want to see a Netflix show continue, make sure to finish it fast.   

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Picture the scene: you’ve huffed and puffed your way to the top of the local trig point as part of your New Year's resolution. While the view from the top is worth the effort, the summit of the footpath is also covered in loads of stacked rocks, or cairns.

The word “cairn” comes from the Scottish Gaelic word meaning “heap of stones”. Despite featuring on all those hot-girl-walk Instagram accounts, what are they, and why are they there?

Usually, these kinds of rock cairns are built to show hikers the way on particularly confusing routes; you can find them dotted all throughout famous trails like the Camino de Santiago. However, recently cairns have been popping up all over hiking trails, often in groups, usually by particular features or rest stops. 

Cairns can foster a sense of community between those on the same path, and even help those with a less-than-brilliant sense of direction find the right route. However, the National Park Service suggests that the ornamental ones can confuse those not familiar with the area, often leading people down the wrong path. The practice of building cairns goes against a key principle of being out in the natural world: Leave no trace. 

If you move a rock from one place to the next you may have inadvertently disturbed the home of a tiny critter living beneath it. Moving stones can also contribute to soil erosion or destroy the delicate microhabitats plants and animals need to survive.

Also, moving a rock to add to the top of a cairn could cause the whole thing to come down, rather defeating the object. 

Those on the other side of the coin suggest that cairns are beneficial, as they keep hikers on the right track, preventing people from getting lost and trampling over protected areas. However, the number of unauthorized cairns has increased so much that The National Parks department suggests walkers are becoming confused by the would-be navigation signs. Those planning to do lots of hiking should always carry wayfinding tools such as GPS or maps to navigate. 

Cairns are thought to have been started by Waldron Bates, who was the lead author of an island path map published in 1896. He was devoted to the maintenance of hiking trails and wrote a handbook to establish standards of how things should be done. He also established how cairns should be built in a style now known as the Bates cairn, quite different from the simple stacks we see today.

An example of a Bates cairn. Image Credit: Monika Salvan/Shutterstock

While you might think that building a rock cairn is harmless fun, take into consideration that the National Parks across America received over 297 million recreational visits in 2021 – that is a whole lot of potential for damage even if every visitor was to move just one stone. 

So what should you do if you see a rock cairn? Well, the advice from the National Parks Service is to leave them well alone, no tampering, building, or adding to existing ones. Don't be tempted to kick them over either. If that won't convince you, maybe the law will: the practice of moving the rocks could be seen as vandalism which is illegal.

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Along the Little Colorado River, in the Navajo Nation of Arizona, sits an enormous waterfall that appears to be churning out pure chocolate. Looking like a scene straight out of Willy Wonka’s factory, the Grand Falls, also known as the Chocolate Falls, is a disappointingly inedible 57-meter (187-foot) tall wall of water that appears following spring snowmelt and monsoon rains.

Having formed during the late Pleistocene era, a volcanic eruption at the Merriam Crater caused a lava flow that diverted the course of the Little Colorado River, the natural dyke created by the lava formed what is now the Grand Falls.

Fed by waters from 225 kilometers (140 miles) southeast in Mount Baldy, the state’s second highest mountain, the waters’ journey down the Little Colorado River creates a heavy silt build-up which gives the Chocolate Falls their striking and delicious-looking appearance.

The falls, however, are not visible year-round and instead spend much of their time as a slow drizzle. They’re best viewed in all their glory in spring, between March and April, when the water levels are fed with snowmelt from the White Mountains.

They can also be seen when monsoon season hits northern Arizona between late June through to September. Heavy rains, storms, and flash floods brought about by the season can cause large volumes of water to pass through the falls, but water levels are less reliable.

Once the water has passed through the Grand Falls, it carries on its journey 544 kilometers (338 miles) northwest to the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon. By this point in its adventure, the once muddy water has had all the silt filtered out and the remaining minerals transform the water’s color into a pale turquoise.

If you plan to visit the Chocolate Falls, it's recommended to go when the water level gauge reading is above 200 per cubit feet. The reading can be checked ahead of time on the United States Geological Survey (USGS) website.

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Ancient Mesoamerican cultures were using complex 260-day calendars based on knowledge of the solar system far earlier than previously realized. Understanding how these early cultures kept track of time has proved tricky due to the lack of written sources from the time, but researchers discovered the use of this advanced calendar system by looking at the astronomical orientations of hundreds of ceremonial structures. 

In a new study, archaeologists looked at data from aerial laser LiDAR scanning that was able to peer through the dense overgrowth of Central America to reveal the presence of long-lost structures. Among the 33,935 architectural complexes they sifted through, 478 were ceremonial complexes that belonged to the ancient Olmec and Maya civilizations between 1100 BCE to 250 CE.

This was a time when Mesoamerican civilizations were in their childhood. People were starting to shift from a constantly on-the-go hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more sedentary settled style of living fuelled by maize agriculture.

The complexes were often rectangular in shape, featuring a flat plaza surrounded by rows of mounds, elongated structures, and pyramids. Like many of the Mesoamerican structures of this time, the buildings were carefully constructed to align with the Sun, Moon, and even the planets of our solar system. 

One of these sites in the research is Aguada Fénix, the largest building in the entire pre-hispanic history of the Maya area that’s believed to have been used as an astronomical viewing platform.

Amazingly, this new research shows that many of the structures are oriented in line with the solstices, quarter days, or lunar cycles in the 260-day year. For instance, a number of the structures are positioned in a way that corresponds with the sunrises on February 11 and October 29, separated by 260 days.

The site of Buenavista on the day of sunrise alignment. Image credit: Takeshi Inomata

These findings represent the first clear evidence that the Maya possessed sophisticated knowledge of the stars dating back to at least 1100 BCE. It’s also the earliest known evidence of the 260-day calendar.

In the 260-day cycle, 20 day names run from one to 13, totaling a cycle of 260 days. It is a calendar system that’s believed to be unique to the Mesoamerican culture. 

No one is certain why they used this number of days in a cycle, but theories range from some kind of numerological significance, agricultural scheduling, or even the human gestation period (since 260 days is almost 9 months). 

“For the Maya and other Mesoamerican groups, numbers 20 and 13, associated with human body parts, particular deities, and cosmic levels, were particularly important. Although our data are not enough to resolve the origin of the 260-day calendar, they lead us to favor two alternative scenarios, each combining the numerology and the scheduling of rituals,” the study authors write. 

Both of these scenarios involve agriculture and the seasons and would require some fairly advanced knowledge of the solar system's cycles. It’s notable that most of the structures are linked to dates in February and March, the height of the dry season. This was a period of the year when horticulturalists were freed from their work in cultivation fields and took part in activities like aggregation, collective ritual, and construction activity. 

Perhaps, the researchers suggest, the rise of the 260-day calendar has some kind of connection to the advent of agriculture and the cultures’ growing understanding of the celestial kingdom above us. 

 The new study was published in the journal Science Advances. 

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A freshly released map is believed to mark the spot where Nazi soldiers hid a treasure trove of gold and jewels potentially worth millions of dollars. The World War 2-era document was recently released to the public by the National Archives in the Netherlands as part of their annual Open Access Day. 

The map suggests that the treasure is buried in the ground at a location near the small Dutch village of Ommeren. It's thought the loot consists of four large boxes filled with diamonds, rubies, gold, silver, and jewelry that were stolen by Nazi soldiers during an explosion at a bank in the nearby city of Arnhem around August 1944.

By April 1945, Allied forces were close to liberating Arnhem so the soldiers supposedly frantically buried the spoils near Ommeren. The Dutch state even brought a former Nazi soldier back to the Netherlands after the war in a bid to uncover the stolen objects, but they were never found.

"It's worth several million," Annet Waalkens of the National Archives told Omroep Gelderland.

"Of course, it stimulates the imagination," added historian Joost Rosendaal. "It hardly happens. The fact that there is such a specific map is special." 

While there’s no certainty that the valuable objects are still there, amateur treasure hunters didn’t waste any time attempting to find the loot with dozens of people reportedly flocking to the area. 

The situation became so overwhelming for the village that the Municipality of Buren released a statement to explain that people aren’t allowed to dig for treasure using metal detectors without their permission. Furthermore, all archaeological discoveries have to be declared, so people will not be allowed to take the treasure for themselves. 

Gold, jewels, and artwork captured by the Nazis hidden in a salt mine beneath Merkers, Germany. Image credit: Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com

The Netherlands was one of the many countries in Europe that fell under German occupation during the Second World War. As part of the misery inflicted on these territories, the Nazis held a policy of looting the riches of their victims to help fund the war effort. Gold, silver, and currency were frequently plundered, but they were also known to steal objects of cultural significance, such as fine art, ceramics, books, and religious treasures.

So-called “Nazi gold” has attracted a huge amount of interest since WW2, not least because some of the stolen objects remain undiscovered.  One of the most mysterious stories speaks of a Nazi gold train, or Wałbrzych gold train, that was hidden within a tunnel somewhere in Poland during the dying days of World War II. This armed train carriage is said to be loaded with gold and other valuable relics. 

In recent years, interest in the Nazi gold train was reignited when ground-penetrating radar revealed a promising discovery near Walbrzych in southwestern Poland. Although excavations were carried out, they ultimately found nothing. Many still hold out hope that the train carriage will be unearthed someday, but others are starting to believe the story is nothing more than wartime rumor and urban folklore.

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John Deere relents, says farmers can fix their own tractors after all

Around 1.8 billion years ago, in a distant galaxy, two vast black holes spiraled into each other, and their cataclysmic merger sent ripples through the very fabric of the universe. On August 14, 2017, those ripples in spacetime—called gravitational waves—washed over Earth, where they were detected by a newly upgraded facility in the Italian countryside.

The Virgo interferometer is an observatory for gravitational waves, set among Tuscany’s rolling hills. Three days later, it captured another ripple, this time from the merger of two neutron stars. With help from LIGO—a pair of similar interferometers in the United States—scientists were able to pinpoint where the merger happened in the sky and point their regular observatories in the right direction to eyeball the event across the electromagnetic spectrum. 

It was the dawn of a new era of “multi-messenger” astronomy, in which it’s now possible to observe powerful cosmic events not just through the light that reaches us from space, but also through other “messengers,” including gravitational waves. “We had spent years making presentations to colleagues saying we will open a new window on the universe, but nobody really believed it,” says Giovanni Losurdo, a physicist who has been involved in Virgo since 1992. “Several times I was discouraged—it seemed too difficult—so when this happened, it was just a fantastic reward.”

Gravitational waves begin as a surge that weakens the farther it spreads, like the diminishing ripples made by a stone thrown into a pond. By the time they reach Earth, their signals are minuscule, which means detecting them is a monumental challenge. To meet it, Virgo, LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), and Japan’s KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) all employ the same ingenious technique.

One of the detection benches suspended in a vacuum chamber, hosting photodetectors that measure Virgo’s output light.

 Photograph: R. Bonnand/Virgo Collaboration/LAPP

A laser beam is fired at a beam splitter, which sends two identical beams down two identical tunnels, laid out at a right-angle to each other in an L-shape. At the end of each tunnel there’s a mirror that sends the beam right back to the splitter, where the light combines and can be measured by photodetectors. 

When a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it causes space itself to stretch in one direction and compress in the other, so the two “arms” of the detector actually grow and shrink by tiny amounts. This means each beam of light travels a slightly different distance, which shows up in the recombined laser light pattern as a spike in frequency called a “cosmic chirp”—this is the gravitational wave signal. 

To measure it, Virgo relies on state-of-the-art equipment. The mirrors at the end of each tunnel are made of a synthetic quartz so pure it absorbs only 1 in 3 million photons that hit it. It’s polished to an atomic level, leaving it so smooth that there is virtually no light scattering. And it’s coated with a thin layer of material so reflective that less than 0.0001 percent of laser light is lost on contact. 

Each mirror hangs beneath a superattenuator to protect it from seismic vibrations. These consist of a chain of seismic filters that act like pendulums, encased in a vacuum chamber inside a 10-meter tall tower. The setup is designed to counteract the Earth’s movements, which can be nine orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational waves Virgo is trying to detect. The superattenuators are so effective that, in the horizontal direction at least, the mirrors behave as if they were floating in space.

A more recent innovation is Virgo’s “squeezing” system, which combats the effects of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a weird feature of the subatomic world that says that certain pairs of properties of a quantum particle cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time. For example, you cannot measure both the position and the momentum of a photon with absolute precision. The more accurately you know its position, the less you know about its momentum and vice versa.

Inside Virgo, the uncertainty principle manifests as quantum noise, obscuring the gravitational wave signal. But by injecting a special state of light in a pipe that runs parallel to the main vacuum tubes and then overlaps the main laser field at the beam splitter, researchers can “squeeze,” or reduce, the uncertainty in the laser light’s properties, reducing quantum noise and improving Virgo’s sensitivity to gravitational wave signals.

Since 2015, nearly 100 gravitational wave events have been recorded over the course of three observing runs by Virgo and its US counterpart LIGO. With upgrades to both facilities, and KAGRA joining the party, the next observing run—which starts in March 2023—promises much more. Researchers hope to gain a deeper understanding of black holes and neutron stars, and the sheer volume of expected events offers the tantalizing prospect of building a picture of the evolution of the cosmos through gravitational waves. “This is just the beginning of a new way of understanding the universe,” says Losurdo. “A lot will happen in the next few years.”

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

How to Measure Ripples in Spacetime

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I’ve watched the first half of a billion movies. This is how a typical movie night goes for me: After eating too many fries from Rocketbird and washing it down with a couple of beers, I’m swaddled in a plush blanket, horizontal on the couch, and zonked out long before Michelle Yeoh reaches the hotdog finger scene in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Maybe your schedule is hectic, but you still want to catch every twist and turn in the Glass Onion movie. Or perhaps your significant other’s date-night selection seems like a snoozefest, and you're attempting to roll credits on Morbius. Whatever your reason is to stay awake, keep the following advice in mind the next time you’re streaming something at home.

Save the Hard Drinks for Another Night

That six-pack of beer may need to spend another evening chilling in the fridge if you’re dedicated to not dozing off during movie night. Aric Prather, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UC San Francisco, points out the soporific effects of alcohol. “If you have that extra glass of wine while you're watching a movie at night, and you're not moving, and you're sleepy?” he says. “Wow, it better be a thriller to keep you awake.”

Instead of Takeout, Try Charcuterie for Dinner

OK, so I’m now sipping on a whiskey and Coke (hold the whiskey). What about my takeout? A big, greasy pizza or a delicious mountain of Indian food is probably not ideal if you want to keep those eyes open. “Your body does have this relaxation response that can happen after eating a large meal,” says Brittney Jones, a psychologist who is an insomnia specialist at a telehealth company called DrLullaby. “So, I would say to opt for something smaller, whether it's a snack or a small meal, like a charcuterie board.” It’s a fantastic suggestion, although she’s clearly never seen just how much cheese and crackers I can put back while devouring a charcuterie board.

Your Couch Could Be a Little Too Cozy

If you enjoy taking naps on the same couch where you’re trying to watch a movie, your body may be trained to recognize the location as a prime spot to power down. “A person might want to watch it at their partner's house or a friend's house instead. Or sit in a chair that's not as comfy in your living room instead of the comfy couch,” says Jones.

Your Bed Is Definitely Too Cozy

As tempting as it appears, your bed is probably the worst place in your home to stream movies. “So, we want to try to make the bed a shrine to sleep,” says Prather. “Sleep and sex.” Do you have trouble holding down a regular sleep schedule? Movie nights in bed are definitely not the way to go. “For people who have a tendency toward sleep problems, or they already have sleep problems, it can help perpetuate those,” he says. “Your body gets a bit confused about what it's supposed to be doing.”

Face Your Overall Sleep Deficit

“If a person is sleep deprived, and then they want to watch a movie at night? You might not make it even 30 minutes into the movie,” says Jones. She suggests trying to rest up the night before, as well as addressing any root causes behind your lack of sleep.

Keep the Remote Nearby to Press Pause

Get your blood pumping again with frequent breaks during the movie, and not just when you need to use the bathroom. Feel like you’re on the precipice of falling asleep? “That might be a cue to press pause, get up, get some popcorn, get a beverage, move around a little bit,” says Jones.

Give Into the Decadent Bliss of Sleep

“I would not try to stay awake,” writes Christine Blume, a sleep scientist at the Centre for Chronobiology in Switzerland, over email. “Give your body what it obviously, desperately needs.” She has a point! If you’re exhausted after an energy-depleting week, cutting movie night a little bit short is a healthy decision.

Keeps Happening? Consider Talking to a Physician

Habitually falling asleep while watching movies could potentially be a sign of undiagnosed sleep apnea, Prather says, “if it's happening constantly and it's happening in other settings, particularly in the daytime after what you think is an OK night of sleep.” Does this apply to you? Think about reaching out to your primary care provider to have a conversation about sleep issues.

How to Stop Falling Asleep on the Couch During Movies

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On the morning of 27 December 2022 at the Amazon DEN4 warehouse in Colorado Springs, Colorado, 61-year-old Rick Jacobs died on the job after experiencing a cardiac event, right before a shift change. What happened next has angered his former colleagues.

Witnesses say a makeshift barrier around the deceased worker using large cardboard bins was used to block off the area on the outbound shipping dock where the incident occurred, and workers criticized the response and lack of transparency about the incident. Amazon denied boxes were used to cordon off the area, but said managers stood around to make sure no one came near for privacy and security.

As workers arrived for their day shift, they say they were not notified about what was going on and continued working as usual while a deceased colleague remained in the facility and emergency responders awaited the arrival of a coroner.

“Finding out what had happened after walking through there had made me feel very uncomfortable, as there is a blatant disregard of human emotions at this facility. Management could have released those employees affected by offering [voluntary time off], so that they did not need to use their own time, but nope, that did not happen,” said an Amazon employee at the warehouse who works the day shift. They requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

“No one should have been told to work alongside a dead body, particularly after witnessing it. Day shift comes in at 7am or 7.30am, and we were never informed until we arrived to where it had occurred. No warnings before walking into the building. No on-site counselor. Simply a flyer put out days later informing us of how to receive mental health counseling.”

In a phone call, an Amazon spokesperson said Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) laws and privacy concerns for the family of the deceased meant the company was not able to disclose details about the individual or the incident. They disputed claims that anyone was working near the body or that boxes were used to cordon off the area. They declined to comment on the record citing privacy and respect for the deceased.

Amazon did not follow up with a comment in regards to what, if any, protocols the company has for these incidents or what resources were provided to workers immediately after the event or subsequently.

Another worker at the Amazon warehouse said that when they arrived to work that morning there were police and fire trucks at the warehouse, but no explanation as to why. Later, she found out from colleagues that a worker had died on the previous shift.

“Instantly I was pissed that we’re all business as usual and there’s a human being lying dead in the outbound area and I have to hear about it in the break room,” said the worker, who also requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “Why is it that we are still working as usual when someone is dead downstairs? I was angry that they think that our lives don’t matter, that they’re going to sweep me out of the way to get a package out.”

Workers criticized the lack of transparency and the response from management, as they weren’t provided any information until a week after the incident, and the lack of standard operating procedures for incidents such as these, given other worker deaths have occurred at Amazon warehouses before.

A week after the incident, the worker said management finally addressed it at a standup meeting on 4 January. They left feeling dissatisfied with the explanation and lack of responsibility taken from management.

“What gets me is the lack of respect for human life. We shut down for maintenance. Do you think we could not have had a little respect and shut down long enough to at least get the body out of the facility and clean up after him before people are milling around like nothing’s happening?” the worker said.

“It’s not the first death at an Amazon facility. Amazon is a huge corporation. There should be protocols. It doesn’t matter if this is the first death or the 10th death. There should be protocols on how you handle that. Maybe while the investigation is going on, you don’t let the day shift in, you postpone it until at least until the body’s gone.”

Numerous worker deaths have been reported at Amazon in recent years, including three deaths in New Jersey and one in Pennsylvania over summer 2022. Amazon has faced intense scrutiny over working conditions due to the company’s high injury rates, mishandled human resource errors and high employee turnover.

Another worker at DEN4 said they were supposed to work the day after the incident, but used their personal time off after hearing about what happened from other workers.

“I refused to work due to circumstances and out of respect for the gentleman that had passed,” the worker said. “It wasn’t handled fairly at all.”

Source

COVID-19 is defined as a respiratory infection, but the effects of the novel coronavirus are certainly not confined to any one organ.

Dozens of recent autopsies show persistent evidence of SARS-CoV-2 throughout the body, including in the lungs, the heart, the spleen, the kidneys, the liver, the colon, the thorax, muscles, nerves, the reproductive tract, the eye, and the brain.

In one particular autopsy, remnants of the novel coronavirus were found in the brain of a deceased patient 230 days after they first started showing symptoms.

"Our data indicate that in some patients SARS-CoV-2 can cause systemic infection and persist in the body for months," conclude the authors of the study, led by researchers at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH).

In the past, autopsies on those who have contracted COVID-19 have shown preliminary signs of multi-organ spread, with genetic remnants of the virus showing up in a myriad of tissues, organs, and fluids.

In July of 2020, further autopsies showed evidence of blood clots in nearly every vital organ of those who had contracted COVID-19.

The new research from the NIH now replicates and confirms these results in greater detail than ever before.

The researchers suggest their newest findings are the most comprehensive analysis to date on the cellular persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in the human body.

The study involved 44 autopsies, in which researchers carefully detected and quantified the level of messenger RNA from SARS-CoV-2 in 85 locations and fluids. This genetic information is indicative of where the virus might have been replicating during a person's life.

From autopsies carried out in April 2020 to March 2021, researchers found older, unvaccinated individuals who died from COVID-19 showed abundant signs of SARS-CoV-2 replication in a total of 79 locations and body fluids.

What's more, some of the changes were apparent within two weeks after symptoms first began to appear.

Interestingly, while the lungs showed the most inflammation and injury, the brain and other organs did not often show significant tissue changes "despite substantial viral burden".

The authors aren't sure why that is. It could be, for example, that the human immune system is not as good at targeting these other locations compared to the lungs.

In later stages of COVID-19 recovery, researchers found evidence that the lungs were less infected than they were at first, while other locations did not show nearly as much improvement.

"Our results show that although the highest burden of SARS-CoV-2 is in respiratory tissues, the virus can disseminate throughout the entire body," the researchers conclude.

How the virus spreads so far and wide is another mystery that needs to be solved. The autopsies in the current study did not often show detectable viral remnants in blood plasma, which suggests the pathogen may be traveling around via other means.

Understanding the way in which SARS-CoV-2 spreads and persists in the human body could reveal a lot about why some patients suffer from long-haul COVID-19.

The NIH study did not experiment with long COVID patients specifically, but the results are relevant to possible treatment plans.

Antivirals, like Paxlovid, for instance, could help the human immune system clear viral cells from tissues, organs, and fluids that may be otherwise difficult to reach.

Perhaps, in turn, that can help reduce lingering symptoms.

"We're hoping to replicate the data on viral persistence and study the relationship with long COVID," says one of the authors, Stephen Hewitt, from the National Cancer Institute.

"Less than a year in we have about 85 cases, and we are working to expand these efforts."

The study was published in Nature.

Source

Provincial official Kan Quancheng revealed the figure - amounting to about 88.5 million people - at a press conference.

China is battling an unprecedented surge in cases after abandoning zero-Covid policies in December.

The move followed rare protests against lockdowns, quarantines and mass tests.

Mr Kan did not specify a timeline for when all the infections happened - but as China's previous zero-Covid policy kept cases to a minimum, it's likely the vast majority of Henan's infections occurred in the past few weeks.

He said visits to fever clinics in Henan province peaked on 19 December "after which it showed a continuous downward trend".

The Henan provincial figures are in stark contrast to Covid figures from the central government

According to official data, just 120,000 people in the country of 1.4 billion have been infected and 30 died since the shift in Covid policy.

Meanwhile on Sunday, authorities reported three Covid deaths in mainland China, one more than the day before.

However, with the definition of Covid deaths narrowed and mass testing no longer compulsory, government data is no longer reflective of the true scale of the outbreak.

Other local and provincial officials have also been providing very different data to that from the central government. On Christmas Eve, a senior health official in the port city of Qingdao reported that half a million people were being infected each day. Those case figures were swiftly removed from news reports.

Meanwhile Chinese health officials said they would not include Pfizer's antiviral Covid medicine Paxlovid in its basic medical insurance schemes as a result of the high price quoted by the US firm.

The drug, temporarily covered by China's broad healthcare insurance scheme until 31 March, has seen a sharp increase in demand since China's Covid cases surged last month.

Pfizer would continue to collaborate with the Chinese government and all relevant stakeholders to "secure and adequate supply" of the medicine in China, the company said in a statement.

On Sunday, Beijing also lifted mandatory quarantine for all international arrivals and opened its border with Hong Kong.

In the first wave of pre-holiday travel, official data showed that 34.7 million people travelled domestically on Saturday. This represented an increase of more than a third compared to last year, according to state media.

Infections are expected to soar as the country celebrates Lunar New Year later this month, with millions expected to travel from big cities to visit older relatives in the countryside.

Overall, more than two billion individual journeys are expected to take place, officials have said.

Source

Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories.

“It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all,” said Sam Ling, an associate professor of neuroscience and director of the Visual Neuroscience Lab at Boston University. Could our memory of a beautiful forest glade, for example, be just a re-creation of the neural activity that previously enabled us to see it?

“The argument has swung from being this debate over whether there’s even any involvement of sensory cortices to saying ‘Oh, wait a minute, is there any difference?’” said Christopher Baker, an investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health who runs the learning and plasticity unit. “The pendulum has swung from one side to the other, but it’s swung too far.”

Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they can’t be exactly the same. “People don’t get confused between them,” said Serra Favila, a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University and the lead author of a recent Nature Communications study. Her team’s work has identified at least one of the ways in which memories and perceptions of images are assembled differently at the neurological level.

Blurry Spots

When we look at the world, visual information about it streams through the photoreceptors of the retina and into the visual cortex, where it is processed sequentially in different groups of neurons. Each group adds new levels of complexity to the image: Simple dots of light turn into lines and edges, then contours, then shapes, then complete scenes that embody what we’re seeing.

In the new study, the researchers focused on a feature of vision processing that’s very important in the early groups of neurons: where things are located in space. The pixels and contours making up an image need to be in the correct places or else the brain will create a shuffled, unrecognizable distortion of what we’re seeing.

The researchers trained participants to memorize the positions of four different patterns on a backdrop that resembled a dartboard. Each pattern was placed in a very specific location on the board and associated with a colour at the center of the board. Each participant was tested to make sure that they had memorized this information correctly—that if they saw a green dot, for example, they knew the star shape was at the far left position. Then, as the participants perceived and remembered the locations of the patterns, the researchers recorded their brain activity.

The brain scans allowed the researchers to map out how neurons recorded where something was, as well as how they later remembered it. Each neuron attends to one space, or “receptive field,” in the expanse of your vision, such as the lower left corner. A neuron is “only going to fire when you put something in that little spot,” Favila said. Neurons that are tuned to a certain spot in space tend to cluster together, making their activity easy to detect in brain scans.

Previous studies of visual perception established that neurons in the early, lower levels of processing have small receptive fields, and neurons in later, higher levels have larger ones. This makes sense because the higher-tier neurons are compiling signals from many lower-tier neurons, drawing in information across a wider patch of the visual field. But the bigger receptive field also means lower spatial precision, producing an effect like putting a large blob of ink over North America on a map to indicate New Jersey. In effect, visual processing during perception is a matter of small crisp dots evolving into larger, blurrier, but more meaningful blobs.

Serra Favila, a researcher at Columbia University, and her colleagues studied how the neural representations of perceptions and memories of images differ. The escalating sizes of the “receptive fields” of the neurons in the visual cortex seem to hold the key. Courtesy of Serra Favila

But when Favila and her colleagues looked at how perceptions and memories were represented in the various areas of the visual cortex, they discovered major differences.

As participants recalled the images, the receptive fields in the highest level of visual processing were the same size they had been during perception—but the receptive fields stayed that size down through all the other levels painting the mental image. The remembered image was a large, blurry blob at every stage.

This suggests that when the memory of the image was stored, only the highest-level representation of it was kept. When the memory was experienced again, all the areas of the visual cortex were activated—but their activity was based on the less precise version as an input.

So depending on whether information is coming from the retina or from wherever memories are stored, the brain handles and processes it very differently. Some of the precision of the original perception gets lost on its way into memory, and “you can’t magically get it back,” Favila said.

A “really beautiful” aspect of this study was that the researchers could read out the information about a memory directly from the brain, rather than relying on the human subject to report what they were seeing, said Adam Steel, a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College. “The empirical work that they did, I think, is really outstanding.”

A Feature or a Bug?

But why are memories recalled in this “blurrier” way? To find out, the researchers created a model of the visual cortex that had different levels of neurons with receptive fields of increasing size. They then simulated an evoked memory by sending a signal through the levels in reverse order. As in the brain scans, the spatial blurriness seen in the level with the largest receptive field persisted through all the rest. That suggests that the remembered image forms in this way due to the hierarchical nature of the visual system, Favila said.

One theory about why the visual system is arranged hierarchically is that it helps with object recognition. If receptive fields were tiny, the brain would need to integrate more information to make sense of what was in view; that could make it hard to recognize something big like the Eiffel Tower, Favila said. The “blurrier” memory image might be the “consequence of having a system that’s been optimized for things like object recognition.”

But it’s not clear “whether it’s a feature or a bug,” said Thomas Naselaris, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. He was not involved in the new study, but he came to a similar conclusion that perception and memory look very different in the brain in a 2020 study. He favors the idea that the difference is advantageous, perhaps in helping to differentiate perceptions from memories. “A person whose mental imagery had all of the detail and precision of their scene imagery could get confused easily,” he said.

The blurriness could also help to prevent storage of unnecessary information. Maybe the important thing isn’t to remember where each pixel sits in the field of vision, but that the pixels belong to a family member or a friend, Favila said.

“It’s not like the visual system is incapable of generating highly detailed, vivid, and precise imagery,” Naselaris said. People have reported very vivid visual images, for example, when they’re in the “hypnogogic” state between sleep and wakefulness. The brain “just tends not to do it during waking hours.”

Favila and her team are hoping to explore whether similar processing happens with other aspects of a visual memory, such as shapes or colours. They are especially eager to examine how these differences in perception and memory guide behaviors.

Perception and memory “are different; our experience of them is different, and pinning down exactly the ways in which they’re different will be important to understanding how memory is expressed,” Favila said. The differences were “lurking in the data the whole time.”

How Your Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions

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How California could save up its rain to ease future droughts

Monday, January 9

• The first mission we have on Monday will see SpaceX launch a Falcon 9 carrying OneWeb satellites to orbit. For those who read last week’s edition of TWIRL, this is the same mission that was reported then but it looks like it was delayed. OneWeb is similar to SpaceX in that it’s establishing a constellation of internet-beaming satellites, however, it doesn’t have the rockets to orbit satellites so it relies on other governments and companies who do, like SpaceX. The mission will launch from Cape Canaveral at 4:55 a.m. UTC and will be available to stream on SpaceX’s website.
• The second mission of the day will launch just five minutes after the last but from the other side of the world. The private Chinese firm, Galactic Energy, will launch its Ceres-1 rocket carrying a number of satellites including Xiamen SciTech 1. The mission will be known as Give Me Five and launches at 5:00 a.m. UTC from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.
• Finally, Virgin Orbit will perform an air launch of LauncherOne from its Boeing 747 called Cosmic Girl. It’s carrying a number of payloads to orbit but what’s really notable about this mission is that it’s taking off from Cornwall in the UK. Talk of a UK spaceport has been going on for years but it looks like launches are now finally taking place. The launch is due between 10:16 p.m. UTC and 12:16 a.m., and tickets for the event are sold out according to BBC News. The launch could be viewable on Virgin Orbit’s website.

Friday, January 12

• The last mission of the week will see SpaceX launch its Falcon Heavy carrying the USSF-67 mission for the US Space Force. The mission will see the launch of the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM (CBAS 2) military communications satellites and the LDPE 3a rideshare satellite which hosts several experimental payloads. The mission takes off from Florida from 10:30 p.m. UTC and might be streamed on SpaceX’s website.

Recap

• The only launch we got last week was a Falcon 9 from SpaceX carrying several SmallSats as part of the Transporter-6 rideshare mission.

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

TWIRL 99: Virgin Orbit to perform air launch of LauncherOne from the UK

"We are confident that the early archeological sites from Brazil may not be human-derived but may belong to capuchin monkeys," wrote archaeologist Agustín M. Agnolín and paleontologist Federico L. Agnolín in an article published in the peer-reviewed science journal The Holocene in November.

The article said that archeologists uncovered what they believe to be ancient stone tools, made from locally occurring quartz and quartzite cobbles during past excavations at Pedra Furada – a collection of over 800 archeological sites in Piauí in northeastern Brazil.

The oldest of the stone tools discovered appear to be up to 50,000 years old, according to the article, which led to some academics theorizing that it provided evidence of early human habitation of the region.

Unexpected findings from 2016, however, posed a challenge to that theory.

The findings showed that capuchin monkeys in northeastern Brazil are capable of making and using a large variety of stone tools.

This raised the possibility, as was first suggested in 2017, that monkeys – not humans – could be responsible for producing the Pedra Furada discoveries.

And according to Agnolín and Agnolín, the researchers behind The Holocene article, there is now a convincing amount of evidence to suggest that the tools weren't human-made.

"Our review of the evidence suggests that the ancient sites in Brazil do not actually belong to the first Americans, but are actually the product of monkey activity," Federico L. Agnolín told Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET).

The researchers compared the tools found at Pedra Furada to those that capuchin monkeys make today.

"The result was surprising: There was no difference between the supposed human tools from 50,000 years ago and those produced by monkeys today," Agustín M. Agnolín told CONICET.

The researchers looked to past research and observations of capuchin monkey populations which show that the primates use small stones as hammers and large, flatter rocks as anvils to crack open nuts and seed pods.

"The result is that the rocks used often break, generating rock fragments that are very similar to those produced by humans when carving stone tools," said Agustín M. Agnolín, per CONICET'S news release.

In addition to this, the researchers said in The Holocene article that there wasn't evidence to suggest a trace of human presence, noting the lack of hearths or traces of dietary remains.

"Our study shows that the tools from Pedra Furada and other nearby sites in Brazil were nothing more than the product of capuchin monkeys breaking nuts and rocks some 50,000 years before the present," Federico L. Agnolín told CONICET.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

Source

The comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first spotted it passing Jupiter in March last year.

After travelling from the icy reaches of our Solar System it will come closest to the Sun on January 12 and pass nearest to Earth on February 1.

It will be easy to spot with a good pair of binoculars and likely even with the naked eye, provided the sky is not too illuminated by city lights or the Moon.

The comet "will be brightest when it is closest to the Earth", Thomas Prince, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology who works at the Zwicky Transient Facility, told AFP.

Made of ice and dust and emitting a greenish aura, the comet is estimated to have a diameter of around a kilometre, said Nicolas Biver, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory.

That makes it significantly smaller than NEOWISE, the last comet visible with an unaided eye, which passed Earth in March 2020, and Hale–Bopp, which swept by in 1997 with a potentially life-ending diameter of around 60 kilometres.

But the newest visit will come closer to Earth, which "may make up for the fact that it is not very big", Biver said.

While the comet will be brightest as it passes Earth in early February, a fuller moon could make spotting it difficult.

For the Northern Hemisphere, Biver suggested the last week of January, when the comet passes between the Ursa Minor and Ursa Major constellations.

The new moon during the weekend of January 21-22 offers a good chance for stargazers, he said.

"We could also get a nice surprise and the object could be twice as bright as expected," Biver added.

Prince said another opportunity to locate the comet in the sky will come on February 10, when it passes close to Mars.

'Rare visitor'

The comet has spent most of its life "at least 2,500 times more distant than the Earth is from the Sun", Prince said.

Biver said the comet was believed to have come from the Oort Cloud, a theorised vast sphere surrounding the Solar System that is home to mysterious icy objects.

The last time the comet passed Earth was during the Upper Paleolithic period, when Neanderthals still roamed Earth.

Prince said the comet's next visit to the inner Solar System was expected in another 50,000 years.

But Biver said there was a possibility that after this visit the comet will be "permanently ejected from the Solar System".

Among those closely watching will be the James Webb Space Telescope. However, it will not take images, instead studying the comet's composition, Biver said.

The closer the comet is to Earth, the easier it is for telescopes to measure its composition "as the Sun boils off its outer layers", Prince said.

This "rare visitor" will give "us information about the inhabitants of our Solar system well beyond the most distant planets", he added.

© 2023 AFP

Source

Ancient Roman concrete could self-heal thanks to “hot mixing” with quicklime

On July 19, 2022, the UK experienced a taste of the weather to come. Temperatures reached 40.3° Celsius—soaring past the previous record by more than one-and-a-half degrees.

Dozens of homes in east London were destroyed by fires, while elsewhere in the country, the heat pushed the power grid close to the point of failure. The Office for National Statistics estimates that there were more than 2,800 excess deaths among over-65s during the summer heat waves of 2022, making it the deadliest year for heat since 2003.

Before the temperatures had even peaked, Friederike Otto was in her office in Imperial College London, getting ready to answer the question that she knew would be thrown at her countless times in the following week: Was climate change to blame?

When an extreme weather event strikes, Otto and her small team of climate scientists—most of them working in their spare time—are the people the world looks toward to tell them whether climate change has made the weather more severe or more likely to be. “I think it’s important to get a more realistic picture of what climate change means,” says Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the cofounder of the World Weather Attribution initiative. “For some types of events, like heat waves, climate change is a real game-changer, and we see events that we have never seen before.”

Every week, a contact at the Red Cross sends Otto and her colleagues at World Weather Attribution a list of floods, heat waves, and other extreme weather events across the globe. Often there are six or eight crises listed in the email—far too many for Otto’s small team to tackle—so the scientists narrow their focus to weather that is impacting millions of people, selecting roughly one event every six weeks, from storms in Europe to flooding in Pakistan.

Once the scientists have picked a subject for their analysis, they move fast, digging into historical records and running climate models in order to figure out what role—if any—climate change played in a disaster. The final report is usually published within days or weeks of an extreme weather event. This is a huge departure from the normally glacial pace of academic publishing, where it can take years for a scientific paper to finally end up in a journal, but quick answers are the whole point of World Weather Attribution. By releasing studies while an extreme event is still dominating headlines and political agendas, the scientists fill a void that might otherwise be occupied by climate change denial. In the case of the UK heat wave, World Weather Attribution was ready with its report just nine days after temperatures reached their peak.

The findings revealed the unprecedented scale of the record-breaking temperatures. Otto’s team estimated that climate change had made the UK heat wave at least 10 times more likely, and that in a world without global warming peak temperatures would have been about 2° Celsius lower. The weather was so unusual that, in a world without climate change, it would have been statistically impossible to reach such high temperatures in two out of the three weather stations the scientists studied. In the world of climate attribution science, this is about as close as you get to a smoking gun. “People always want the number, and sometimes you can’t give a very satisfactory number,” Otto says. This time, however, Otto had no shortage of numbers to share with the reporters who were ringing her up.

But attribution science can do a lot more than tell us how climate change influences the weather. Otto wants to use her attribution reports to hold polluters to account for extreme weather events. “We have started to do a lot of work with lawyers, to basically bridge this knowledge gap between what we can say scientifically and what has so far been used in terms of evidence,” she says. With legal cases underway in Germany and Brazil, attribution science is moving into the courtroom.

The beginnings of WWA

Otto cofounded World Weather Attribution in 2014 with the oceanographer Heidi Cullen and climatologist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. At first, Otto—who has degrees in physics and philosophy—thought that the main role of weather attribution was to untangle the complexity of weather systems to quantify how much climate change was influencing extreme weather. Other scientists had established how to use climate models to attribute weather events to climate change, but no one had tried to use the science to produce rapid reports on recent disasters.

World Weather Attribution’s first real-time study was published in July 2015. It found that a heat wave in Europe earlier that month was almost certainly made more likely thanks to climate change. Other studies followed on floods, storms, and rainfall, each one published within weeks of the disaster. But attribution studies aren’t just about understanding past events—they can help us prepare for the future, Otto says. “I see attribution now as a tool that helps us disentangle drivers of disasters and helps us use extreme events as a lens in society to see where we are vulnerable.”

Pakistan’s devastating 2022 monsoon season is one example of this. Otto and her colleagues agonized over the wording of their report, as there were so few similar events in the historical records that their models struggled to simulate the extreme rainfall accurately. They knew that rainfall in the area was much more intense than in the past, but they couldn’t put a firm number on how much of that increase was due to climate change. “It could be that all of it is climate change, but it could be that [the role of] climate change is much smaller,” Otto says. Even though the cause couldn’t be pinpointed, the report highlighted just how vulnerable Pakistan is to severe flooding, highlighting the proximity of farms and homes to flood plains, poor river management systems, and poverty as major risk factors. “Vulnerability is what makes the difference between an event having basically no impact or it being a catastrophe,” says Otto.

World Weather Attribution’s work tends to make headlines when it concludes that climate change makes extreme weather more likely, but the opposite result can be even more useful to regions facing disasters. One investigation into a long drought in southern Madagascar found that the chance of low rainfall hadn’t significantly increased due to human-induced climate change. Knowing this gives agency back to countries, says Otto. “If you think it’s all to do with climate change, then there’s nothing you can do unless the global community gets its act together. But if you know that climate change is not actually playing a big role, or none at all, then that means everything you do to reduce your vulnerability actually makes a huge difference.”

Taking it to court

It’s not only governments that are extremely interested in the results of attribution studies. Courts are starting to pay attention, too. In August 2021, an Australian court ruled that the New South Wales Environment Protection Agency had not fulfilled its duty to protect the environment from climate change, in a case brought by bushfire survivors. One of Otto’s attribution studies into the 2019-20 bushfire season was used in a report commissioned by the court, but she found out about it only when one of the lawyers involved in the case emailed her after the verdict had been declared. “This is really nice to see, when a study that we did has real-world impact,” she says.

If attribution studies can tell us that a disaster was made more severe because of climate change, they also point toward something else: Who might be held responsible. Richard Heede, a geographer from California, has spent decades delving through archives to estimate companies’ carbon emissions all the way back to before the Industrial Revolution. The result is known as the Carbon Majors: a database of the world’s biggest polluters up to the present moment. The 2017 Carbon Majors report found that half of all industrial emissions since 1988 could be traced to just 25 corporate or state-owned entities. The state-owned fossil fuel firm Saudi Aramco alone is responsible for 4.5 percent of the world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1988 and 2015.

This data is extremely useful for people trying to bring legal cases against fossil fuel firms. In May 2022, a group of scientists and lawyers traveled to the Peruvian Andes to inspect a giant glacier that looms over the crystalline waters of Lake Palcacocha. If the glacier collapses into the lake, scientists fear it could submerge the nearby city of Huarez. Peruvian farmer Saúl Luciano Lliuya thinks that polluters should foot the cost of defending the city from floodwater as global warming has shrunk glaciers around Lake Palcacocha, increasing the risk of dangerous flooding. The target of the lawsuit is the German energy firm RWE, which was responsible for 0.47 percent of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1751 and 2010, according to Heede’s data. Lliuya is suing for just 14,250 pounds ($17,170)—that’s 0.47 percent of the cost of protecting Huaraz.

If Lliuya wins the case, it could set a precedent that polluters can be held legally responsible for the effects of their emissions anywhere on the planet. “That would really change this narrative that we’re operating in,” Otto says. It would also make the work of weather attribution even more critical. If scientists know that climate change had made flooding in an area twice as severe as it would have been, for example, they can use that evidence to estimate how much individual companies and states contributed to that disaster. One of Otto’s students is already working on a legal case in Brazil that involves weather attribution. “We have seen a huge interest in that. It’s not just journalists calling and wanting to know, but also lawyers,” Otto says.

Despite the booming interest in the field, World Weather Attribution is still almost entirely run by scientists working for free in their spare time. Eventually, Otto hopes that the task of weather attribution could become a routine part of weather services, which would give her more time to focus on the science of hurricanes and droughts, which are much more difficult to analyze. But for now, her main focus is making her attribution studies more useful to lawyers and helping achieve some justice for the people most affected by climate change. “Climate change will never be a catastrophe for those who are rich. And I think that’s why it’s ultimately a justice issue, because those who pay are the ones who are the most vulnerable in society.”

Source

GENESIS GLOBAL TRADING, one of crypto’s oldest and most storied institutions, is in dire straits. In November, in the wake of the implosion of the crypto exchange FTX, the company’s lending unit was forced to freeze customer withdrawals—never a good sign. Almost two months later, Genesis is reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy.

Although Genesis has not said publicly that bankruptcy is imminent (Derar Islim, interim CEO, says he remains “focused on finding a solution”), the firm is reported to have laid off 30 percent of its workforce this week—the latest sign of its financial ill-health.

Founded in 2013, Genesis has become central to the crypto industry’s day-to-day operations. In 2021 alone, the company issued $131 billion in loans and set up $116.5 billion in trades. To fund these loans, Genesis borrows from individuals and institutions that own large quantities of coins, also known as whales, who receive a cut of profits in return. 

While the crypto hype train barreled on unchecked, Genesis was on a hot streak—but its luck ran out in 2022. The lender has been in trouble since July, when hedge fund Three Arrows Capital collapsed, taking with it $1.2 billion of the $2.36 billion it had borrowed from the firm. Genesis again found itself on the wrong side of a collapse in the autumn; when FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11, the firm lost $175 million stored with the exchange.

Digital Currency Group (DCG), parent company of Genesis, swooped in with bailouts on both occasions. Despite the assistance, the “unprecedented market turmoil” created by the FTX situation forced Genesis to freeze withdrawals and begin to hunt for emergency funding. But just like FTX, a rescue package for Genesis has not materialized.

The frothiness of the crypto market in 2021 spread fear of missing out among investors that attracted huge sums of money. But that FOMO is now long gone, replaced by a suspicion of both the promises and accounting practices of large crypto companies in light of the allegations of fraud at FTX.

Venture capital investment in crypto is drying up, according to a recent paper released by market data house PitchBook. After a “breakout year” in 2021, in which $21 billion of capital flooded into the industry, appetite for crypto investment is collapsing rapidly. By Q3 2022, funding was down 34.3 percent year-on-year, and the volume of deals had fallen to a two-year low.

In Genesis’ case, investors have been put off by a lack of clarity over the size of the cash injection necessary to plug the hole, says David Bailey, CEO at Bitcoin Magazine, who also leads an activist group that represents the interests of investors in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, a DCG subsidiary. He describes the shortfall as “massive and unknown in scope.”

Brad Harrison, who leads the team behind decentralized lending protocol Venus, paints a similar picture. A Genesis bankruptcy would come as no surprise in the aftermath of the “tectonic” events that shook the crypto industry over the past year, he says. But as for the specifics, “we’re all just guessing what happens behind closed doors.”

Bailey also claims potential white knights have been spooked by the murky financial relationship between Genesis and DCG. Specifically, the “inappropriate intercompany loans” that were “only disclosed after everything went sideways.” These loans mean that “DCG has direct exposure to Genesis,” he explains. The parent company is “on the hook,” making it “tough to raise the funds it needs.” (DCG has been approached for comment; Silbert has previously suggested these intercompany loans are nothing out of the ordinary.) Genesis declined to comment.

Also “on the hook” is Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The company’s yield farming service, which allows customers to earn interest on their crypto, sits on top of the Genesis platform. But when the lender halted withdrawals, $900 million of Gemini customers’ assets were left stranded—and will remain so if Genesis declares bankruptcy.

On January 2, having grown frustrated with the lack of progress, Cameron Winklevoss delivered an ultimatum to Barry Silbert, founder of DCG. In an open letter published on Twitter, Winklevoss accused Silbert of “engaging in bad-faith stall tactics” and implored him to “commit to working together to solve this problem by January 8.” Silbert fired back, asserting that Winklevoss had misrepresented the situation, but did not acknowledge the ultimatum. Neither Gemini nor Winklevoss returned a request for clarification over what might happen if this deadline is missed.

Back in November, Max Galka, founder of blockchain analytics company Elementus, told WIRED that Genesis is “an order of magnitude less intertwined than FTX” with other large industry players. The implication was that the ripple effects of a bankruptcy would be less severe, and fewer regular people would be caught up. But he also warned that the FTX fallout would not end with Genesis.

His prediction was confirmed yesterday when the NYSE-listed Silvergate Bank revealed in early quarterly filings that it was forced to offload $8.1 billion in assets to cover a surge in withdrawals triggered by the FTX debacle. The bank, which stores funds for many crypto companies—including FTX and its subsidiaries—said it had suffered losses of $718 million as a result of the forced sale. It will also have to “substantively reduce its workforce” in order to mitigate its new “economic realities.”

US regulators have made unsympathetic noises since the implosion of FTX. In an unprecedented joint statement on January 3, the US Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency told banks they serve cryptocurrency customers at their own peril.

The trio pointed to risks from “fraud and scams” to the potential for crypto firms to misrepresent their financial health. They also claimed that tokens stored on decentralized networks are “highly likely to be inconsistent with safe and sound banking practices.”

Genesis has tangled itself in its own financial gymnastics, while Silvergate has been caught in the crypto crossfire—and tarnished by association. The plight of both suggests that few in the crypto industry will escape the FTX saga unscathed. “Whenever there’s a hole like this,” Bailey says, “someone has got to eat shit.”

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Just four days after heavy rain hit California, the state was drenched with another atmospheric river on January 4 and 5, 2023. A plume of moisture from the tropical Pacific interacted with a low-pressure system that rapidly strengthened over the northeast Pacific, producing a storm that caused flooding, toppled trees, and downed power lines.

According to the National Weather Service, coastal areas of California saw wind speeds of 40 to 80 miles per hour. On the evening of January 4, wind speeds exceeded 100 miles per hour near Lake Tahoe. About 1 to 3 inches of rain fell on communities near Santa Cruz and San Francisco on the evening of January 4, but the storm continued to drop rain on the Bay Area as it moved east on January 5. Some areas south of Big Sur saw 6 to 8 inches of rain in 24 hours.

This map shows the total precipitable water vapor in the atmosphere at 5:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 4, 2023. Precipitable water vapor is the amount of water in a column of the atmosphere if all of the water vapor were condensed into liquid. Dark green areas on the map indicate a narrow band of moisture flowing from the tropical Pacific toward the West Coast, making this atmospheric river an example of a “Pineapple Express.” The image was derived from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System, Atmospheric Data Assimilation System (GEOS ADAS), which uses satellite data and models of physical processes to calculate what is happening in the atmosphere.

The series of atmospheric rivers drenching California in recent days could be seen as a welcome relief to the state’s persistent drought. Atmospheric rivers occur regularly in wintertime, and they account for up to 50 percent of all rain and snow that falls in the western United States. However, the rapid succession of atmospheric rivers leaves communities more susceptible to flooding and could cause landslides.

January 4, 2023

 

The image above was acquired on January 4, 2023, at 1:20 p.m. Pacific Standard Time by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-20 satellite. It shows the storm as it was intensifying, which contributed to the high wind speeds. When air pressure in a mid-latitude cyclone rapidly drops and winds intensify, these storms can undergo a process meteorologists call bombogenesis. Storms with central pressures that fall an average of least 1 millibar per hour for 24 hours are sometimes called “bomb cyclones.”

Downed power lines contributed to leaving over 170,000 homes without electricity as of the morning of January 5, according to PowerOutage.us. Most of the outages were seen in coastal counties such as Mendocino, Sonoma, and San Mateo.

Atmospheric rivers are among the most damaging storm types in the middle latitudes, especially with regard to the hazardous wind they produce, according to research led by Duane Waliser at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Waliser and colleagues examined the most destructive windstorms of the last 20 years—the top 2 percent in terms of wind speeds near Earth’s surface—and found that atmospheric rivers were associated with up to half of these storms.

As Californians cleaned up from this latest storm system, the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center expected more atmospheric rivers to reach the state on January 7 and 9, 2023.

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The European Union is sick of talking about climate change; now it wants to act. The world’s second-largest economy is attempting to become the first climate neutral continent by 2050 while slashing its emissions 55 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. To reach these milestones, the bloc’s executive arm, the European Commission, unveiled the Green Deal in 2019—a proposal to radically redesign Europe’s energy, food, and transport systems. “This is Europe’s man on the moon moment,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. 

Crucially, the Green Deal is still a proposal, not a concrete plan. Large parts have yet to be passed into law, and some member states need convincing that the associated costs will be worth it. The Commission has said the plan will require around €1 trillion ($1.05 trillion) in sustainable investments. Even targets already agreed upon aren’t binding. One EU official, Thierry Breton, suggested that a recently agreed-upon law to phase out fossil fuel cars by 2035 could be delayed if it proves unrealistic. 

Years of political battles stand between the Green Deal and its proposals becoming reality. But the plan does offer a vision of how a modern economy can be overhauled to fit a world that takes climate change seriously. If it succeeds, this is what a new, greener future for Europe might look like.

Sea Power

The Green Deal plans to accelerate investment in renewables, especially offshore wind, tidal energy, and other power sources that would take advantage of the bloc’s 68,000-km coastline. But the Green Deal is not all about renewables. Hydrogen is also expected to be a key replacement for natural gas.

Electric Avenue

Imagine a future where highways are lined with electric charging points, cycle lanes criss-cross cities, and it’s easier to travel by high-speed rail. That’s the Green Deal vision for transport’s zero-emission future. But the proposal doesn’t spell the end for other forms of transport. Instead the plan is for planes and ships to run on sustainable fuels.

Renovation Wave

Europe is famous for its picturesque buildings; think Copenhagen’s multicoloured waterfront or the iconic rooftops of Paris. But the Commission has branded roughly 75 percent of them as energy inefficient. That’s why the Green Deal proposes a mass renovation of existing residential, commercial, and public buildings to ensure all existing buildings are zero emission by 2050.

Future Forests

Europe’s forests and woodlands are facing increasing threats from human activity, disease, and forest fires. Yet healthy forests are critical for carbon storage and sequestration. That’s why the Green Deal aims to improve both the quality and quantity of Europe’s forests, partly by planting 3 billion trees by the end of the decade.

Farm to Fork

The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy aims to reduce the environmental footprint of the bloc’s food system by slashing pesticide use and cutting sales of antimicrobial medicines, such as antibiotics, for farmed animals by 50 percent. It also proposes to boost organic farming and find ways to increase the number of bees on agricultural land.

Blue Economy

More than 4 million people work in Europe’s marine industries, and the Green Deal wants to reduce the environmental footprint across this “blue economy.” Alongside decarbonizing marine transport, that will mean finding ways to reduce microplastic pollution, reverse biodiversity loss, improve ship recycling, and incentivize fishers to collect litter and fishing gear lost at sea.

Science Superpower

Much of the success of Europe’s Green Deal will rely on the green alternatives that can replace fossil fuels or solve industries’ problems with waste. That’s why the EU is channeling huge amounts into funding new ideas. So far, the €1 billion Green Deal research call has supported projects that aim to produce green hydrogen in Germany or predict forest fires in Spain.

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

Europe’s Plan to Become the First Climate-Neutral Continent

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Half the planet’s glaciers will have melted by 2100 even if humanity sticks to goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, according to research that finds the scale and impacts of glacial loss are greater than previously thought. At least half of that loss will happen in the next 30 years.

Researchers found 49% of glaciers would disappear under the most optimistic scenario of 1.5C of warming. However, if global heating continued under the current scenario of 2.7C of warming, losses would be more significant, with 68% of glaciers disappearing, according to the paper, published in Science. There would be almost no glaciers left in central Europe, western Canada and the US by the end of the next century if this happened.

This will significantly contribute to sea level rise, threaten the supply of water of up to 2 billion people, and increase the risk of natural hazards such as flooding. The study looked at all glacial land ice except for Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

If temperature increases are limited to 1.5C of warming, average sea levels would increase by 90mm (3.5in) from 2015 to 2100, but with 2.7C of warming, glacial melt would lead to around 115mm of sea level rise. These scenarios are up to 23% more than previous models had estimated.

Glacier 3000 ski resort in the Swiss Alps shows the Tsanfleuron pass in September 2022 free of the ice that has covered it for at least 2,000 years.

Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty

Mountain glacier melt is believed to contribute to more than a third of sea level rise. A lot of this loss is unavoidable, but the magnitude of loss is directly related to temperature increases, so acting on the climate crisis is key. Researchers wrote in the paper: “The rapidly increasing glacier mass losses as global temperature increases beyond 1.5C stresses the urgency of establishing more ambitious climate pledges to preserve the glaciers in these mountainous regions.”

The team used two decades of satellite data to map the planet’s glaciers with greater precision than ever before. Previous models had relied on measurements of specific glaciers, and that information was then extrapolated, but now researchers could get data points on each of the planet’s 200,000 glaciers. For the first time, this gave them insight into how many would be lost under different climate change scenarios.

The study’s lead author, Dr David Rounce, a civil and environmental engineer from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said: “This is the first time we have isolated the number of glaciers that will be lost – before it was the total mass loss.” Most of the glaciers that will be lost are small, currently less than 1 sq km. Although they contribute less to the total volume, they are most vulnerable to change. This is why the total loss of mass is less – so, for example, under the 2.7C scenario 68% of glaciers will be lost but the relative mass is less – projected to be 32%.

Small glaciers are an important source of water and livelihood for millions of people. Rounce said: “When we think about the locations where most people see and visit glaciers, it’s really in locations where they’re accessible, like in central Europe, or in high mountain Asia. In these regions there are a lot of smaller glaciers. They’re really at the core of the societies and economies of those locations.”

Lower mountain ranges such as the Alps and the Pyrenees are among those worst affected. In the Alps, for example, by 2050, glaciers are expected to be on average 70% smaller, many of the smaller ones would have already disappeared, with snow tops replaced by bare rock in some locations, and with significant losses in biodiversity as a result. Alpine flowers could become extinct after glaciers disappear as more competitive species colonise terrain higher up the mountain. Proglacial environments are highly sensitive to global heating, and mountain species are subject to the “escalator to extinction”.

This is not the first research to project sea level rise from glacial melt, but the projections are more accurate than previous models. It follows research from 2021 that found the speed of glacial melt had doubled in the past two decades, contributing more to sea level rise than either the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets.

Prof Antonio Ruiz de Elvira, from the University of Alcalá, who was not involved in the paper, said all existing evidence was consistent with the results. He said: “The study makes much of the earlier partial data more concrete.”

In emphasising the importance of glaciers, he said: “In California, the water needed to sustain agriculture comes from glaciers directly from the end of July. In Spain, the disappearance of the Sierra Nevada glaciers means an almost complete reduction in water availability there from that time onwards, and the same applies to the glaciers in the Pyrenees. In India and China, they depend crucially on the Himalayan glaciers.”

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