A recent meta-analysis published in Nature Immunology has shed light on the biological reasons why some people’s immune systems respond differently to vaccinations. These findings have significant implications for the development and distribution of vaccines globally.

As part of a series of studies for The Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC), a network of national research institutions studying the range of responses to different infections and vaccinations, Emory University researchers analyzed the molecular characteristics of 820 healthy young adults who were immunized with 13 different vaccines to identify specific biomarkers that generate antibody response to vaccines.

The participants were separated into three endotypes, or groups with a common gene expression, based on the level of inflammatory response prior to vaccination — a high-inflammatory group, a low-inflammatory group, and a mid-inflammatory group.

After studying the immunological changes that occurred in participants following vaccination, researchers found the group that had the highest levels of inflammation prior to the vaccine had the strongest antibody response.

“We were surprised because inflammation is usually depicted as something that is bad,” says Slim Fourati, Ph.D., bioinformatic research associate at Emory University and first author on the paper. “These data indicate that some types of inflammation can actually foster a stronger response from a vaccine.”

Fourati, Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sekaly, professor and senior author of the paper, and the HIPC team identified specific biomarkers among this group and cellular features that characterized the pre-vaccination inflammatory signature, information that can be used to predict how well an individual will respond to a vaccine.

“With the knowledge we now have about what characteristics of the immune system enable a more robust response, vaccines can be tailored to induce this response and maximize their effectiveness,” says Fourati. “But we still have more questions to answer.”

More research is needed to determine the cause of this inflammation in otherwise healthy adults. Additionally, Fourati suggests future studies should look at how these biomarkers facilitate vaccine protection in older age groups and among populations who are immunocompromised.

Published simultaneously with three other HIPC studies by researchers at Yale’s School of Medicine, Stanford University, University of Cincinnati, Harvard Medical School, and Columbia University Medical Center, these findings can serve to improve vaccine response across all individuals. A better understanding of how various pre-vaccine immune states impact antibody responses opens the possibility of altering these states in more vulnerable individuals. For example, scientists may give patients predicted to have a weaker immune response an adjuvant with the vaccine to trigger the inflammatory genes associated with greater protection.

This work will help enable improved, more efficient clinical trials for the development of new vaccines.

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In China 600 million people, or 40% of the 1.4 billion population, have been infected by the coronavirus over the past one month while the number will probably reach 1.1 billion in the coming weeks, said some medical experts.

There are disagreements over how to count Covid-caused deaths. However, since China relaxed its Covid rules on December 7, funeral services in major cities have strained facilities.

More than 80% of the 22 million people in Beijing and 70% of the 25 million people in Shanghai have been infected by the coronavirus so far while many other key cities have passed the 50% level, they said.

Zeng Guang, a Chinese epidemiologist and the former chief scientist and doctoral supervisor at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said as most Chinese cities reported that 50% of their people had tested positive, it was reasonable to estimate that about 40% of the country’s population on average could have been infected.

While China failed to announce its numbers of serious and death cases, Chinese columnists estimated that there could be about 5 million serious Covid patients in the country. Airfinity, a London-based health data firm, said about 9,000 were dying each day from Covid-19.

Cao Yunlong, a biochemist and an assistant professor at Peking University, said the lethality of the Omicron strains was underestimated in China. He said the pathogenicity of Omicron BA.1 was lower than that of Delta but its latter version BA.5, the most prolific one in China, saw a rebound in pathogenicity.

On Tuesday, China’s CDC said the country had recorded 4,804 new Covid cases and three death cases. It said last month that it would only report Covid cases with symptoms.

Jiao Yahui, director of the Bureau of Medical Administration of the National Health Commission, said on December 29 that there were two main methods of counting the Covid death tolls in the world. She said since 2020, China had chosen to count the death cases directly caused by Covid-related respiratory failure while some other countries included all those who died within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus.

Liang Wannian, a Chinese epidemiologist and the former lead of the Chinese National Health Commission’s Covid Response Expert Team, said it is very difficult to calculate the death rate of the current epidemic, which is still in a fast virus-transmission period. Liang said an accurate figure will be available only after this epidemic ends.

Yin Li, party secretary in Beijing, on Monday called on all frontline medical staff to use all methods to reduce serious and death cases in the capital city, but he did not disclose the figures.

Zeng said the speed of virus transmission in China was faster than expected. He said usually only 30% of the population would be infected in an epidemic wave but about 80% of people in Beijing had been infected over the past one month.

He added that more than 600 million people in China could have been infected as of December 29.

An internal document of the CDC said about 248 million people were infected by the coronavirus between December 1 and 20. As of now, the total number of Covid infections has reached 665 million globally while 6.69 million people have died.

Zhang Wenhong, chief of the Infectious Diseases Division at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, said about 80% of China’s 1.4 billion people will get infected by January 22, the first day of the Lunar New Year. Zhang said people should avoid having gatherings with more than a hundred people.

The People’s Daily said the Wuhan Union Hospital had received 16,358 Covid patients since December 7,of whom 5,414 or 33% were serious patients. It said 97% of the serious patients could be rescued.

However, a Hebei-based columnist said the admission of 5,414 serious patients in a single hospital in Wuhan showed that China could have seriously underestimated the pathogenicity of the Omicron strains.

In an article published on Sunday, Yin Shuaijun, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tried to estimate the number of serious and death cases in China.

With the number of hospital beds and some public figures, Yin estimated that there were about 70,000 serious Covid patients in Wuhan, or 0.51% of the city’s 13.6 million people. He said there were 48,700 serious Covid patients in Qingdao, or 0.48% of the city’s 10.1 million people. He added that there could be about 5 million serious patients in China.

Biochemist Cao Yunlong said it was arbitrary to conclude that the Omicron’s pathogenicity was weakening. Cao said the BA.5 variant was actually more pathogenic than its previous version BA.1. He said new Covid strains seemed to be less pathogenic only because of the rising vaccination rates and the herd immunity in the world’s population.

As it remains unclear whether any new deadly virus has emerged in China, many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan, have relaunched Covid tests for incoming Chinese travellers. The Chinese government said it would allow more people to travel overseas on January 8.

Mao Ning, a spokesperson of China’s foreign ministry, said Tuesday that it was unacceptable that some countries tried to achieve their political goals by imposing travel restrictions on Chinese travellers. Mao said the implementation of these rules lacked scientific grounds and were unnecessary as any places could have new Covid mutants. She said China would launch countermeasures.

In a meeting on December 30, Chinese health officials briefed the World Health Organization on China’s epidemic situation, according to a WHO press release. Chinese scientists will present detailed data on viral sequencing to WHO on Tuesday.

Malaysia’s Health Minister Zaliha Mustafa said Monday that China had passed some data about its Covid-19 variants and sub-variants to the WHO, some relating to strains that had been detected in Malaysia. Media reports said they might include the highly infectious Omicron BF.7.

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Mindfulness scholars and teachers like me call resolutions "habit breakers," as they can overcome patterns that no longer serve individuals. However, research suggests that many resolutions fail by the end of January.

But a key to ensuring that resolutions stick is to choose one that will make a meaningful difference in your life. Seeing a real, tangible benefit can provide inspiration to keep going when all of life is telling us to let things go back to how they were before.

Living more mindfully is a common New Year's resolution. This year, try gifting it to others.

The meaning of mindfulness

Mindfulness has been shown to have a number of meaningful health benefits—it can help reduce anxiety and promote healing in those suffering from long-term chronic illness.

The practice is based on an insight first described by ancient Buddhist texts that human beings have the capacity to observe experience without being caught up in it. This means, simply and wonderfully, that it is possible to observe ourselves having a craving, or a happy thought, or even a scary emotion, without reacting in the moment in a way that amplifies the feeling or sends the mind spiraling off into thinking about old memories or anticipating events.

This practice can help calm the mind and the body as we learn not to react to experience with likes and dislikes or judgments of good and bad. It does not make us cold or apathetic but more fully present.

Mindfulness in a distracted world

One of the challenges of practicing mindfulness in our contemporary world is that there has been a profound transformation in human attention.

The artist Jenny Odell argues that in our "attention economy" human attention has been transformed into a commodity that big corporations buy and sell. This economy rests on a technological revolution of mobile phones and social media that makes it possible for corporations to reach us with content that can capture and monetize our focus, at every moment, every day, and no matter where we may be.

The needy little devices most people carry in their pockets and wear on their wrists, incessantly beeping and buzzing and chirping, are a perpetual diversion from the present moment. The result is that it can feel as though our ability to focus, and be fully present, has been stolen.

But mindfulness can help us resist the attention economy and savor the things that make life special, like being together with those we love.

The gift of mindfulness

While most mindfulness research focuses on the individual benefits of the practice, scholars like me argue that we not only practice mindfulness for ourselves but that we can also practice it for others. It can help us build stronger, healthier relationships.

The sad truth is that living in the attention economy, most of us have become bad listeners. However, just as it is possible to watch ourselves having an experience without reacting, it's possible to watch another person have an experience without getting tied up in reactivity and judgment. It's possible simply to be present.

The gift of mindfulness is a practice of listening with compassion to another person describe their experiences. To give this gift means putting away your phone, turning off social media, and setting aside other common distractions. It means practicing being fully present in another person's presence and listening to them with complete attention, without reacting with judgment, while resisting the urge to make the interaction about you.

If we judge the value of gifts based on how much they cost, this gift may seem worthless. But in a distracted world, I argue, it is a precious one.

It is not a gift that you will wrap, or put inside a card; it's not one you will have to name as a gift or draw attention to. It's something you can do right now.

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The framework needed to deploy the hardware worked on Earth, so it's time to test it in space.

Caltech/Momentus

 

Solar power has become the lowest-cost way to generate electricity on Earth. But building it on Earth places some significant limits on how much power it can generate, with the darkness and clouds that often get in the way. So there have always been a few people who liked the idea of putting solar panels where they could produce electricity around the clock: space.

 

While that would get you near-24/7 power production, it comes with a collection of very obvious drawbacks: high launch costs, inability to service the hardware, and the challenge of getting the power back down to where it's needed. How these trade-offs play out in the energy marketplace has been difficult to determine, partly because the energy market is changing so rapidly, and partly because we don't really know what the space-based solar hardware would look like.

 

Thanks to some funding from a private donor, however, California Institute of Technology researchers have quietly been working on developing the technology needed to get space-based solar to work. And they're apparently ready to subject some test hardware to the rigors of space, thanks to this morning's successful Falcon 9 launch.

What do we need?

The Caltech team's intended design for a space-based power plant is shaped by simple economics: the biggest cost will be the trip to orbit, where weight is the key factor. So getting the most power out of a given weight is central to its planning. The design limits weight partly by minimizing the support structure for the functional hardware, including the wiring. It does so by making its "panels" self-contained, having their own structural support and power transmitter. These individual panels will be assembled like tiles to form a larger surface but will operate independently.

 

That design dictates what the Caltech team needs to test: a lightweight power transmitter, a thin membrane that can be deployed in space, and different photovoltaic materials that can be placed on the flexible membrane. And that's exactly what's now in space on their test hardware.

 

The hardware includes MAPLE (Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment), which is a set of lightweight, flexible microwave transmitters that are capable of the precise timing needed to make a large collection of transmitters all transmit to a single receiver. MAPLE has two different receivers on board so that the ability to direct transmission can be tested.

 

DOLCE is the Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment, and it will extend once in orbit to cover a surface area of roughly four square meters. It's meant to test the framework used to extend and support the solar array in space.

 

Caltech isn't saying what ALBA stands for, but it will be a collection of 22 different photovoltaic materials and will be used to determine which of these holds up well to space.

 

All of the hardware is attached to a commercial orbital transfer vehicle, used to carry smaller satellites to their intended orbit. Tests of DOLCE, which largely consist of determining whether it successfully unfolds, should happen relatively quickly, with the results captured by onboard video cameras and streamed back to Earth. By contrast, they expect that tests of the photovoltaic materials will require about six months in orbit to produce clear results.

First steps

It's not hard to see why this was done by a university team rather than a private company. Space is expensive, and we're not even sure which technologies would work for producing and transmitting power from orbit. This would be a very high-risk pursuit for a private company, especially given the rate at which the cost of Earth-based renewable power has been dropping. Based on where we are with testing, it's likely to be a considerable amount of time before we can deploy an operational space-based solar plant.

 

But in some ways, that timing may be appropriate. Current estimates are that we can get to very high percentages of renewable power—in the neighborhood of 70 percent—without too much difficulty. Decarbonizing the power grid from that point on, however, becomes progressively more difficult, as issues like seasonal changes and rare weather events that dramatically cut power production become increasingly difficult to manage.

 

Very few places on the planet are close to that 70 percent point, and very few places have committed to fully decarbonizing their power grid. So it's likely we won't face the difficult challenges for decades. So, there's a chance that space-based solar power will be sorted out by roughly the same time we'll need to be taking the most difficult and expensive steps toward decarbonization.

 

Space-based solar power hardware ready for actual testing in space

A new law makes porn sites liable for content deemed “harmful to minors” if it doesn’t install age verification technology for anyone accessing them in Louisiana—and it’s already affecting how people in the state access Pornhub.

The law, which was signed by Louisiana’s Democratic governor John Bel Edwards in June, became effective on January 1, 2023.

The law, passed as Act 440, states:

 “Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable if the entity fails to perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”

A “substantial portion” is 33.3 percent or more material on a site that’s “harmful to minors.”

Material that’s harmful to minors, according to the act, is defined as appealing to prurient interests, and that consists of “pubic hair, anus, vulva, genitals, or nipple of the female breast; Touching, caressing, or fondling of nipples, breasts, buttocks, anuses, or genitals; Sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation; flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions, or any other sexual act,” and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” for someone under 18 years of age.

It also states that any commercial entity in violation will be liable “to an individual for damages resulting from a minor's accessing the material.”

Motherboard confirmed, through a virtual private network, that Pornhub is showing people visiting the site from a Louisiana-based IP address a page that requires identity verification before entering. “Louisiana law now requires us to put in place a process for verifying the age of users who connect to our site from Louisiana,” the page says.

When Motherboard tested the verification, Pornhub directed us to AllPassTrust, a third-party identity verification site, which connects to LAWallet, a digital driver’s license for Louisianans. Pornhub guarantees that Pornhub doesn’t connect data during this process.

Other major adult sites, including XVideos and XHamster, are still accessible from Louisiana as normal. OnlyFans’ site hangs on the loading page that only displays its logo when accessed from a Louisiana IP, and eventually times out before loading the site. Pornhub, OnlyFans, XHamster, and XVideos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It was introduced by Representative Laurie Schegel, who recently supported legislation that banned transgender athletes from competing on girls and women's sports teams in Louisiana. According to local news outlet WAFB, Schegel also works as a counselor who sees patients for “sex addiction” treatment.

“Pornography is destroying our children and they’re getting unlimited access to it on the internet and so if the pornography companies aren’t going to be responsible, I thought we need to go ahead and hold them accountable,” Schlegel told WAFB. Sex addiction as a diagnosis is highly contentious among clinicians; there’s no evidence that sex addiction affects one’s brain in the same ways that addiction to substances does, for example. Online porn and sex addiction have been controversial topics for decades, and it’s been blamed, erroneously, for everything from mass shootings to sexual assault.

Similar age verification proposals have been made in Australia, as well as in the UK, where the Online Safety Bill has been debated, modified, killed and revived since 2021. Sex workers have denounced this and similar attempts at over-broad age verification are harmful to their livelihoods and represent an attack on the industry as a whole.

In December, Republican Sen. Mike Lee from Utah introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), which seeks to “establish a national definition of obscenity that would apply to obscene content that is transmitted via interstate or foreign communications,” as well as the Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net, or SCREEN Act, which would require porn sites to use age verification technology.

Advocates for the adult industry say that Lee’s proposed act and those like it are part of a broader push to censor sexual speech online.

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Cash transactions in the Nordic country have become virtually obsolete, with Danes increasingly opting to use cards and smart phones for payments.

The Danish bank employees’ union on Tuesday welcomed the news that 2022 had been robbery-free.

“It is just amazing. Because (robberies) put an absolutely extreme strain on the affected employees every time (they) happened,” spokesman Steen Lund Olsen said in a statement.

Finance Denmark, the banking sector’s association, said only about 20 bank branches across the country have cash holdings. But then the number of bank branches has fallen from 219 in 1991 to 56 in 2021, it said.

News reports noted that cash withdrawals in Denmark have been dropping by about three-quarters every year for the past six years.

In 2000, 221 bank robberies were recorded, Finance Denmark said. In 2021, there was just one.

Initially, robbers switched their attentions from bank branches to Automatic Teller Machines, with such attacks peaking at 18 in 2016. But those too have come down to zero amid better surveillance and technical protection, the industry association said.

Finance Denmark said criminals in recent years have turned to defrauding people online.

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Deputies responded to a home Saturday after a 911 call was made but nobody spoke, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said. At the home, the deputies concluded that nobody lived there, but they found a male suspect and his girlfriend inside the home after entering it through an unlocked door.

Deputies had been searching for the male suspect after identifying him from security video as a burglar at a Dollar General store in Poinciana, Florida, where several items were stolen earlier in the day, the sheriff’s office said in a statement. Poinciana is about 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of Orlando.

While talking to deputies, the female suspect told them that she had called 911 for the purpose of having law enforcement help them move their belongings from the house they were burglarizing. They also wanted to get a ride to the airport so they could spend the weekend in New York, the sheriff’s office said.

“Deputies DID help them with their belongings, and DID give them a ride, but it wasn’t to the airport … it was to the Polk Pokey,” the sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post. “And they are welcome to stay there all weekend long. The Polk Pokey is much better than New York anyway.”

The male suspect was charged with burglary and theft related to the store and also burglary of a residence. The female suspect was charged with burglary of a residence, according to the sheriff’s office.

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FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTUU) - Patrick Holland said 2023 is starting off much better than the end of 2022. On Dec. 22, after only three weeks on the active wait list, the 57-year-old transplant candidate got a call that a new heart — described as a perfect match — was available for him in a Seattle hospital.

“It’s just not common to have it that fast,” Holland said. “So I really wasn’t prepared for it when I should have been. You know, miracles do happen — and one did happen. And I missed it.”

Holland was unable to fly to Seattle after an unprecedented ice storm in Washington cancelled flight after flight. The window for his new heart closed, going instead to another person on the transplant list.

Holland was left with his faith and his family, and the desire to live for his wife and seven children. He decided to relocate to Seattle so that next time he would be ready, only he didn’t have a place to stay. Much to Holland’s surprise, strangers who heard his story started reaching out.

“Just people all over the world sending me good vibes and prayers. It’s been pretty good,” Holland said.

“We’ve had some nice people step up and say, hey we can take you for a month, and we’ve had someone else say hey, we can take you for another month, so we’re just going to see where that takes us and I think I’m going to be fine now.”

Holland said it’s odd to be asking for help when he is more used to giving it, but said he feels blessed by people’s generosity. He made a promise to whomever his donor might be that he will put his new donor heart to good use.

“I will help as many people as I can,” Holland said. “I will definitely chase after my kids — and of course my wife too. I will go back to shoveling snow for seniors and chopping wood, and I’ll do everything that I can — everything that’s been taken away from me, for sure.”

Holland said doctors can’t tell him if a new heart will be available soon, but he plans to head to Seattle in the near future so he’ll be ready just in case.

“This way if there’s a storm, I’ll walk through it if I have to,” Holland said.

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Yet, just minutes after that first smoke-free breath, your body starts to change for the better. And with all the healthy breaths you take in the weeks and months that follow, the benefits only multiply.

The health benefits of quitting smoking is the first and biggest reason to quit, according to the American Lung Association (ALA).

"Even persons who have smoked for many years or who have smoked heavily can realize health and financial benefits from quitting smoking," Dr. Robert Redfield, then director of the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in a forward to the 2020 U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking cessation.

"Although the benefits of quitting are greater the earlier in life that an individual quits, this report confirms that it is never too late to quit smoking," he added.

Quitting will be hard, but worthwhile

Here's what happens when you stop smoking: Withdrawal symptoms of quitting smoking include cravings, irritability and restlessness. Some will also have issues with concentration, trouble sleeping, hunger, weight gain and feelings of depression, anxiety or sadness, according to the CDC.

The health benefits of quitting smoking start about 20 minutes after the last drag. That's when a smoker's heart rate and blood pressure both begin to decline, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS).

It takes a few days for blood carbon monoxide levels to normalize. In two weeks to three months, circulation begins to improve and lung function increases, according to the ACS.

More gradually, that smoker's cough goes away as mucus leaves the lungs. This is because the "cilia," tiny hair-like structures in your lungs, have begun to heal.

While it can't reverse lung scarring, quitting can help prevent the symptoms of lung disease from worsening, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' smokefree.gov.

Over time, your risk of pneumonia and lung cancer also decrease, according to the ALA.

A stronger body is just one of the benefits of quitting

This newfound strength includes a reduced risk of bone fractures later in life, according to smokefree.gov. A more robust immune system will help you stay healthy, while your muscles will get stronger because of more availability of oxygen in your blood.

And this doesn't even get to the more serious advantages to becoming a nonsmoker, which include a lowered risk for heart disease, stroke and certain cancers.

A person's risk of having a heart attack drops dramatically in one to two years, according to the ACS.

In one study, presented recently at a meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, Dutch researchers found that quitting smoking appeared to work as well as taking three medications to prevent heart attacks and strokes in patients who had either a heart attack or a procedure to open blocked arteries.

"The benefits of smoking cessation are even greater than we realized," study author Dr. Tinka van Trier, of Amsterdam University Medical Centre, said in a news release on the study.

Some fertility issues even resolve as estrogen levels return to normal, according to smokefree.gov.

Quitting smoking also reduces the risk of developing 12 types of cancer. The risk of certain cancers is cut in half in about five to 10 years, according to the ACS.

In another study published in the journal JAMA Network Open recently, researchers from the ACS and others found that smoking was associated with at least twice the all-cause death rate of never smoking. Quitting, especially at younger ages, was associated with a significant decline in relative excess deaths.

Quitting smoking makes you look better

Among the beauty improvements of quitting are clearer skin and less wrinkling, smokefree.gov notes.

As your teeth and fingernails stop yellowing, your breath will be fresher, and your hair and clothes won't smell like smoke anymore, according to the ACS.

Some other tangible benefits are better-tasting food and a better sense of smell.

It's better for brain health, too

Mental decline was also lower for those who quit, especially if they gave up tobacco by middle age, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

The researchers used a one-question self-assessment survey to gauge subjective thinking declines among 136,000 current and former smokers.

"The association we saw was most significant in the 45-to-59 age group, suggesting that quitting at that stage of life may have a benefit for cognitive health," said study author Jeffrey Wing, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Ohio State University.

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China has important decisions to make at a time of spiking tensions with the United States. Image: Settimana News

For almost 20 years, the US bet on China first offering to be a responsible stakeholder and then being a member of the G2. Yet, according to the US, China turned down both suggestions, and now the bilateral trust is gone.

Once trust is gone, it’s gone forever, or at least for a long time. How can China recover the confidence of America, which props up general trust from the world? The US apparently feels right or wrong; it doesn’t need to have China’s faith since it has that of the world.

But what about China: Can China do without trust? When there is no trust, there’s some kind of conflict and attrition that can slip into war. This, in a tiny nutshell, is China’s predicament.

Moreover, China wants wealth but it needs a real capitalist market to have it.

No country has created a market economy as efficient as the US, at least so far. Both Japan and Germany tried to beat the US economy, and both failed. Japan challenged the US in the 1980s, starting a tech race at the height of the Cold War —and it lost.

In the past 20 years, Germany tried a three-pronged platform to de facto challenge US supremacy: the EU as the home market and currency, Russia’s cheap gas and China’s market and industrial base. It flopped because Russia went mad by invading Ukraine, China went off the US course and thus became less reliable, and the EU remained split.

Neither Japan nor Germany exploded, but they had to revise their ambitions. The failure of their models also means that state leading business companies, as happened with Japan and Germany, can’t be trusted.

These countries need a different destiny that starts from their geopolitics. In the past 200 years, Japan went through several phases of change in the region. In the second half of the 19th century, it was the “Western nation in Asia.”

Japan’s Special Defense Forces could become more offensive with a change of the constitution. Image: Facebook

Starting in the 1920s, it followed the path of Italy, feeling betrayed by the World War I victory, and it challenged the American and European presence in Asia. Then after World War II, it became the US proconsul in Asia, challenging US tech and failing.

For some 20 years, after the 1980s, it was undecided whether to choose China or the US as the main partner, while the US was switching towards China. Then because of clashes with China over the Senkaku islands, Japan turned against China.

Now Japan is becoming the new chemical glue to bond Asia together against China. Japan, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Australia are a new geopolitical reality. South Korea is the only odd piece in the puzzle because of its old controversies with Japan.

But this can and will be managed because Seoul fears Pyongyang, supported by Beijing, more than Tokyo. South Korea is the US’s insurance against Japanese second thoughts.

Russia’s likely loss against Ukraine could open new spaces in the Siberian Far East, and Japan could move in as a new stabilizing force.

A similar destiny is with Germany. After the war in Ukraine, a new Europe could be powerful, coalescing around Poland, the Baltics, Romania, and Ukraine, the countries that immediately sided against Russia.

Germany could either be squashed by it or accommodate it and become the new glue of Europe, holding the continent together and leading the transformation of Eastern Europe. This leaves space for China.

US President Trump’s 2018 proposal for a sudden market opening was impossible to accept for Beijing. An abrupt market opening could bring a market crash and then a political upheaval.

Chinese protesters air their views on the government’s ‘zero-Covid’ restrictions. Image: Screengrab / BBC

Chinese politics has to be fixed first, and China needs to have democratic structures that can sustain the possible push of an open market with a fully convertible currency.

Will China do it? Past experiences would suggest Beijing will be very cautious, but the recent move of dropping the drastic Covid lockdowns proves that China is willing to take huge bets.

The end of the Ukrainian war could be critical to pushing China in one direction or another. If Russia loses badly, China could do a lot of soul-searching and we don’t know what will happen next.

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Enlarge / Revelers celebrate New Year’s Eve in Times Square on January 1, 2023, in New York City. This year's New Year's Eve returned to pre-COVID-19 pandemic numbers, with around 1 million people estimated to fill Times Square.

A new omicron coronavirus subvariant dubbed XBB.1.5 now accounts for an estimated 40.5 percent of all US COVID-19 cases amid a winter wave that is driving up hospitalizations, particularly in places where XBB.1.5 is most prevalent.

Nationwide, new reported cases are hovering around 59,000 per day, which is still relatively low compared with previous waves. But case data has become murkier over the 3-year-old pandemic, with fewer testing sites available now and the results of common at-home tests going unreported. Additionally, data reporting generally lags around end-of-year holidays, meaning case reports may jump in the coming days as backlogged data rolls in.

Hospitalizations, however, are clearly rising, with an average of around 45,000 hospitalized per day, according to data tracking by The New York Times. National hospitalization rates now rival those from the peak over this past summer driven by bygone omicron subvariants, federal data shows. Some of the areas seeing the large upticks in hospitalizations are those where the new subvariant, XBB.1.5 is most prevalent. For instance, in the Northeast (federal health region 1), XBB.1.5 has the highest regional proportion, accounting for 75 percent of cases, and hospitalizations have risen 16 percent over the prior seven days, the largest region-specific rise, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Wave factors

This does not mean XBB.1.5 is causing more severe disease than previous variants. There is a variety of reasons why hospitalizations may be increasing as a yet more transmissible subvariant takes off. That includes waning immunity and the abysmal uptake of the bivalent booster, particularly among older adults, who are most vulnerable to severe disease. Currently, only 15 percent of Americans aged 5 and over have gotten their bivalent shot, and only 37.5 percent of people aged 65 and over have been boosted. In December, the CDC quietly expanded access to the bivalent vaccine to children aged 6 months to 5 years, but just 3 percent of that population has completed a primary series.

Meanwhile, people are traveling, gathering, and spending more time indoors amid holidays and cold weather—all things that can boost transmission. Some places where XBB.1.5 has yet to take off are also seeing rises in hospitalizations. For instance, in the South (health region 4), XBB.1.5 only accounts for about 19 percent of cases, with BQ.1.1 still accounting for 41.5 percent. Hospitalizations in the region have increased by nearly 14 percent over the past week's data.

XBB.1.5 has a clear transmission advantage over other omicron subvariants and is expected to continue spreading throughout the country. The virus is a sublineage of omicron XBB, which is a combination of two BA.2-sublineages that merged: BJ.1 (BA.2.10.1.1) and BA.2.75. XBB.1.5 has three additional notable mutations compared with the original XBB.

Though early research has suggested that XBB.1.5 is even more immune-evasive than its predecessors, data published late last month in the New England Journal of Medicine offered some good news in regard to vaccine protection. The data indicated that people boosted with the BA.5-targeting bivalent vaccine used in the US had stronger neutralizing antibody activity against XBB than those who had only received the original booster.

Source

The Elon Musk-owned Twitter is facing another lawsuit alleging that it failed to pay its bills.

The plaintiff in the latest case is Columbia REIT-650 California, LLC, the landlord of the 650 California Street office tower in San Francisco. Exhibit A in the lawsuit is a lease between Columbia REIT and CrossInstall, a mobile ad company purchased by Twitter in May 2020. All of CrossInstall's 70 employees joined Twitter at the time.

The lease was made in September 2017 for a period of seven years and covered 15,500 square feet, the entire 30th floor of the building. The annual rent started at $1.29 million, and the lease had automatic increases throughout the seven-year term.

The breach-of-contract lawsuit says Columbia REIT served a notice of default to Twitter on December 16, 2022, "stating the amount of Rent due in the estimated sum of $136,260.00 and notifying Tenant that it was in default of the Lease if it failed to pay that sum within five (5) business days after service of the Default Notice."

The lawsuit says Twitter failed to comply by the required date and asks the court for damages of at least $136,260. The lawsuit was filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco County on December 29, 2022. We contacted Twitter about the lawsuit today and will update this article if we get a response, but the company reportedly eliminated its communications department after Musk took over.

Two other lawsuits allege nonpayment

Columbia REIT's lawsuit against Twitter was filed just 16 days after software vendor Imply Data sued Twitter for an alleged breach of contract in the same court. Imply Data's lawsuit said Twitter failed to pay a $1,092,000 invoice in a software contract that doesn't expire until late 2024 and that Twitter apparently intends to stiff the vendor on another $7 million worth of payments.

Additionally, a private jet provider sued Twitter in US District Court in New Hampshire on December 9, alleging it refused to pay $197,725 for "private air charter passenger transportation services" provided to Twitter Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland on October 26 and 27, 2022. Musk completed his Twitter acquisition on October 27, and Berland was among the many executives who left shortly after.

Before the lawsuits, a New York Times report on November 22 said Twitter began stiffing some vendors after Musk took over. The report said Twitter "executives had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel invoices that the social media service planned to pay" but that Musk "refused to reimburse travel vendors for those bills." Musk "issued an order to slow or in some cases halt transfers of funds to Twitter’s vendors and contract services" and "declined to pay for the travel services incurred by the former Twitter executives," the NYT report said.

Another NYT report on December 13 said Twitter had stopped paying rent at multiple offices. "To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said," according to the article.

Twitter sublease included in exhibits

CrossInstall, the original party in the lease with Columbia REIT, was dissolved well before Musk bought Twitter. Twitter renamed CrossInstall to MoPub Acquire after the 2020 purchase and said it "completed the wind down of MoPub Acquire (formerly known as CrossInstall)" in December 2021. Twitter also sold MoPub, a different ad company it bought in 2013, to AppLovin in January 2022.

But with Twitter still on the hook for the lease at 650 California Street, it signed a sublease with Dentsu International Americas on October 5, 2022, a few weeks before Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter. Dentsu is not a party in the breach-of-contract case, but the sublease is one of the exhibits submitted by Columbia REIT.

The sublease, which runs through January 31, 2025, describes Twitter as the sublandlord and successor in interest to CrossInstall. It shows that Dentsu's monthly payments to Twitter start at $91,980 a month, covering most but not all of what Twitter allegedly owes Columbia REIT.

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Windows 11

• Click start/settings/display

• Click “Night light settings”

• From here you can turn it on and also schedule Night light. This allows you to have it turn on at night and off in the morning

Windows 10

• Click start/settings/display

• Here you can just flip the switch and turn it on or you can click “Night light settings” for more options.

• From here you can also turn it on and schedule it too. This allows you to have it turn on at night and off in the morning.

Happy Sleeping!

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Cross-section of the fulgurite with the melted powerline in the center. Image Credit: Luca Bindi et al., PNAS, 2022

Nuclear bombs and meteor strikes are emblematic of extreme conditions, leaving open the question of whether quasicrystals can form naturally in more placid environments. Lightning strikes are not exactly tranquil, but everything is relative, so the finding of a quasicrystal near Hyannis, Nebraska, widens the list of possibilities for quasicrystal formation at least a little.

The fulgurite in which the quasicrystal was found is about 2 meters (7 feet) long but never more than 8 centimeters (3.2 inches) across. It also contains a regular crystal composed of the same five elements as the quasicrystal – manganese, silicon, nickel, chromium, and aluminum – in different abundances.

Both the manganese and the aluminum are thought to come from the powerline, with the other elements being present in the local sand.

The 12-fold symmetry (known as dodecagonal) means every 30-degree rotation brings the quasicrystal to the same state. This occurs for each of the equally spaced atomic layers. Even in lab-made quasicrystals, decagonal (10-fold) symmetry is more common than the dodecagonal type seen here. Besides this exact form of quasicrystal being new, the discovery suggests powerful electrical discharges could be a new tool for quasicrystal formation.

The paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

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XBB is a subvariant of Omicron. Image credit: FOTOGRIN/Shutterstock.com

As COVID cases surge in China and other countries worldwide, yet another new variant is on the rise: XBB. A subvariant of Omicron, XBB emerged in India back in August and has since spread across the globe.

A large number of US COVID-19 cases are now caused by XBB and its cousin XBB.1.5. But what exactly is this variant, which experts have suggested “could be the new variant to watch out for ... in 2023.”?

XBB is a subvariant of our old friend Omicron. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is “a recombinant of BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75 sublineages”, meaning it contains genetic information from both versions of the virus.

 XBB.1.5, meanwhile, is a mutated version of XBB.

Early research in hamsters, which is yet to be peer reviewed, suggested XBB may have developed resistance to immunity and could be capable of evading antibodies, resulting in breakthrough infections. In October, the WHO echoed this, citing “early evidence pointing at a higher reinfection risk, as compared to other circulating Omicron sublineages.” 

“The current data do not suggest there are substantial differences in disease severity for XBB* infections,” they went on to say. Claims that the mortality rate of XBB is higher than that of the Delta variant, or that the new subvariant is more “toxic” have also been disproved.

Where has XBB been found?

Initially popping up last summer, XBB has gone on to cause surges of COVID-19 in parts of Asia, including India and Singapore. 

More recently, the strain has spread further afield: a total of 74 countries have reported incidences of XBB.1, according to outbreak.info. These include Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and Pakistan. The variant has also reached Europe and the US, as well as Australia.

As of December 19, 2022, 8,638 sequences of XBB.1 had been detected worldwide, more than 1,500 of these in the US. Forty-three states have reported the subvariant.

For the week ending December 31, 2022, XBB itself accounted for 3.6 percent of total cases in the US. XBB.1.5, however, was responsible for 40.5 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The omicron subvariants are particularly dominant in the northeast of the country, where more than 75 percent of cases are linked to XBB.1.5.

Across the Atlantic, the new subvariants are less prevalent but appear to be on the rise. In the UK, around 4 percent of COVID cases were caused by XBB.1.5 for the week ending December 17, figures from the Sanger Institute show.

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If you’ve ever thought your children in elementary school were “smarter” than you, or at least quicker at taking up new skills and knowledge, new research published in the journal Current Biology confirms that you were correct. According to the new study, there are differences in the brain messenger GABA between kids and adults, which may explain why kids often seem to be more capable of learning and retaining new information. 

“Our results show that children of elementary school age can learn more items within a given period of time than adults, making learning more efficient in children,” said Takeo Watanabe of Brown University.

According to the study, children experienced a rapid increase in GABA during visual training, which lasted even after the training ended. In contrast, GABA concentrations in adults remained constant during training. These findings suggest that children’s brains are more responsive to training, allowing them to quickly and efficiently consolidate new learning.

“It is often assumed that children learn more efficiently than adults, although the scientific support for this assumption has, at best, been weak, and, if it is true, the neuronal mechanisms responsible for more efficient learning in children are unclear,” Watanabe said.

Changes in GABA in the brains of children and adults. Credit: Current Biology/Frank et al.

 

Differences in GABA were one obvious place to look for answers. While previous studies already had, the researchers noted that GABA in kids had only been measured at one time-point. It also wasn’t measured at a time that had any special significance in terms of learning.

So, they set out in the new study to see how GABA levels change before, during, and after learning. They also wanted to see how that differed between kids and adults.

The study examined visual learning in elementary school-age children and adults using behavioral and state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques. It found that visual learning triggered an increase of GABA in children’s visual cortex, the brain area that processes visual information. That GABA boost also persisted for several minutes after training ended.

What they saw in adults that were offered the same visual training was notably different. In adults, there were no changes in GABA whatsoever.

The discovery predicts that training on new items rapidly increases the concentration of GABA in children and allows the learning to be rapidly stabilized. Further experiments also supported this.

“In subsequent behavioral experiments, we found that children indeed stabilized new learning much more rapidly than adults, which agrees with the common belief that children outperform adults in their learning abilities,” says Sebastian M. Frank, now at the University of Regensburg, Germany. “Our results, therefore, point to GABA as a key player in making learning efficient in children.”

The findings suggest that children are likely to acquire new knowledge and skills more rapidly than adults, they say. It should add further encouragement for teachers and parents to give children many opportunities to acquire new skills, whether that’s learning their times tables or riding a bike.

The findings also may change neuroscientists’ conception of brain maturity in children.

“Our results imply that children exhibit highly efficient inhibitory, GABAergic processing in spite of inhibitory failures that have been observed in other domains such as cognitive control or attention,” Frank said. “This implies that GABAergic processing involved in different aspects of cognitive function might mature at different speeds.”

“Although children’s brains are not yet fully matured and many of their behavioral and cognitive functions are not as efficient as in adults, children are not, in general, outperformed in their abilities by adults,” Watanabe added. “On the contrary, children are, at least in some domains such as visual learning, superior in their abilities to adults.”

They say such differences in maturation rates between brain regions and functions should be examined in detail in future studies. They also want to explore GABA responses in other types of learning, such as reading and writing.

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Beijing has criticised recently imposed testing requirements on passengers from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved.

“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a briefing.

“We are firmly opposed to attempts to manipulate the Covid measures for political purposes and will take countermeasures based on the principle of reciprocity.”

The comments were China’s sharpest to date on the issue as Australia and Canada this week joined a growing list of countries requiring travellers from China to take a Covid test before boarding their flight.

China is experiencing a nationwide outbreak of the coronavirus after abruptly easing restrictions that were in place for much of the pandemic.

Other countries including the US, UK, India, Japan and several European nations have announced tougher measures on travellers from China amid concerns over a lack of data on infections in China and fears of the possibility that new variants may emerge.

The French prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, defended the tests. Starting from Wednesday, anyone flying from China to France will have to present a negative virus test taken within the previous 48 hours and be subject to random testing on arrival.

“We are in our role, my government is in its role, protecting the French,” she told France-Info radio.

China, which for most of the pandemic adopted a “zero-Covid” strategy that imposed harsh restrictions aimed at stamping out the virus, abruptly eased those measures in December.

Chinese authorities previously said that from 8 January, travellers would no longer need to quarantine upon arriving in China, paving the way for Chinese residents to travel.

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On Dec. 29 at about 12 p.m. local time, police spotted a Tesla driving down Autobahn 70 leaving Bamberg, Germany, and heading toward Bayreuth, according to a news release from Bavarian police.

Officers attempted to stop the Tesla, but the vehicle did not pull over. The car was traveling at about 70 miles per hour and did not slow down or speed up during the attempted traffic stop, officials noticed.

The Tesla "kept the same distance from the patrol car in front" as they traveled down the autobahn, police said.

Officers pulled up next to the Tesla’s driver’s side window and noticed the driver, only identified as a 45-year-old male, reclined in his seat with his eyes closed and his hands off the steering wheel.

"This strengthened the suspicion that he had left the controls to the autopilot and had fallen asleep," police said.

The driver eventually woke up after 15 minutes into the pursuit and followed police instructions to pull over.

Police also believed that the driver was under the influence of drugs.

Further investigation revealed that the driver had placed a "so-called steering wheel weight in the footwell" of the car’s driver’s side.

"This device is attached to the steering wheel to trick the vehicle's safety system by pretending that your hand is on the wheel," the news release said.

The driver is being investigated for criminal endangerment of traffic, and his license has been suspended pending a formal hearing.

This story was reported from Los Angeles.

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“We are done with hope and promise. We are at the point between having promise and realising it”, says the director of the Institute for Aging Research at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

He plans to run a huge flagship trial to test whether a cheap generic diabetes drug — metformin — can extend lifespan by years, after a promising UK study of real world patients.

If regulators approve metformin to target ageing, he believes large pharmaceutical companies and biotechs would jump into the “longevity” field. “Once we prove it, I think it will be an earth-shattering moment for everyone”, he says.

The fantasy of living forever has endured for centuries, from finding renewal in a fountain of youth to gaining immortality from a philosopher’s stone.

Although we are still unable to elude death, we have learnt to forestall it: science has improved life expectancy significantly, initially with more mundane measures such as sewers and vaccines, and then with new drugs to tackle chronic conditions such as heart disease. In the UK, life expectancy at birth almost doubled between 1841 and 2011.

But as many people now spend their last decades in poor health, scientists like Barzilai are on a quest to further increase not just lifespan but also healthspan: the number of healthy years we live.

Longevity researchers reject the hype that they are “curing death” but their vision still has the potential to ease some of the biggest problems of our time: soaring healthcare costs for a population whose health is creaking as it ages, and lacklustre productivity as people become too sick to work.

And yet Barzilai is still searching for money to fund the trial, which could take four or six years and cost $50mn to $75mn. So far, he has $22mn, including $9mn from the US National Institutes of Health. “It is terribly upsetting but we are now on the hunt for the rest of the money”, he says.

Finding the key to prolonging life would benefit us all, but money to fund the search is hard to come by. Healthcare investors typically want to see short-term returns — unlikely, in metformin’s case, since its patent has long expired. Governments, meanwhile, prioritise research into diseases.

Into this gap have stepped tech billionaires including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Israeli entrepreneur Yuri Milner, and through Alphabet, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are funding new models that aim to combine the best of business and academia without the pressure for short-term returns. Barzilai hopes to pitch to some of this class of investors at an upcoming longevity conference.

The billions being made available to longevity researchers could be a gift to a humanity too distracted by today’s problems to fund a long-term revolution in healthcare. Their interest could be a “win-win”: billionaires tempted by the idea of living ever longer fund a longevity field that would not thrive without them.

But critics worry that if wealthy individuals dominate, future advances could create an elite not of designer babies but of designer elderly.

Christopher Wareham, a bioethicist at Utrecht University who studies the ethics of ageing, says advances in longevity science risk widening the gaps between the rich and poor in health, wealth and power, including concerns that dictators could extend their lives.

“Suppose, for example, we had a kind of vaccine for the pandemic of age”, he hypothesised. “This is going to potentially exacerbate all the kinds of existing inequalities that we have . . . The longer you’re around, the more your wealth compounds, and the wealthier you are, the more political influence you have”.

Turning back the biological clock

As the field of longevity research began to expand, scientists convened to ask the most fundamental question: what is ageing? In 2013 an influential group laid out the “nine hallmarks of ageing”, genetic and biochemical processes that lead to impaired function and vulnerability to death.

Eric Verdin, chief executive of the Buck Institute for Research and Aging in California, says scientists have completely changed how they think about ageing, from presuming it was a passive process — if you wait long enough, things fall apart — to learning how to modify it.

Eventually, a breakthrough could simply prevent us reacting to the chronic illnesses that kill. “The biggest risk factor of all diseases is ageing: It is not cholesterol or smoking, it is your age”, he says.

James Peyer, chief executive of Cambrian Biopharma, which incubates and invests in longevity companies, says the “north star” for the field is creating a new generation of preventive drugs, which he believes will have as much impact on human health as vaccines and antibiotics.

Before developing drugs, scientists have to investigate what is happening on a cellular level. One important discovery was that the biological clock on cells can be turned back, using “rejuvenation factors” that create the potential to reverse disease.

Another was that senescent cells build up in older people — ageing, not dividing, but refusing to die — causing health problems. Scientists at the US Mayo Clinic discovered that if you engineer mice so the senescent cells die off, they became healthier and live 20 to 30 per cent longer.

But so far, the majority of these discoveries have been in animals, not humans. “It’s a great time to be a rich mouse. And you could live for a long time as a rich mouse, but I think we want to have human beings that live healthier”, jokes Vijay Pande, general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invests in longevity start-up BioAge.

Testing these hypotheses in humans presents huge challenges. It would take too long to wait to see whether humans on a drug live longer. So scientists must find “biomarkers”: signals that track the ageing process to see if it slows.

Researchers also have to contort their trials into the existing regulatory framework, which does not define ageing as a disease. They must target specific diseases, even though some hope the drugs will have broader applications.

While Barzilai thinks metformin has the potential to extend life, his trial will aim to show that the drug delays a basket of diseases, including stroke, heart failure, cancer and dementia, as well as death.

But by far the biggest hurdle is getting enough money to fund large trials, to accelerate this exploration, and find other factors that influence ageing.

Funding ‘engines of discovery’

When Rick Klausner began to raise money for Altos Labs, he created a deck for investors like no other. Instead of coming to potential shareholders with a list of projects and a timetable of milestones, the former director of the US National Cancer Institute hoped they would invest in what he called an “engine of discovery”.

His pitch was that Altos would hire the best minds in the business — including the former GSK chief scientific officer Hal Barron as chief executive — and set them free. Working in a way he hopes will be more collaborative than academia, they will tackle the big problems around rejuvenating cells with the ambition of reversing diseases.

The approach paid off: the company raised $3bn, a life sciences industry record, in a round led by Arch Venture Partners, and reportedly including funds from Bezos and Milner, the cofounder of Mail.Ru and founder of tech investment firm DST Global.

Barron says the money will allow them to fail multiple times in pursuit of their goal: an “incredibly novel way of thinking” about reversing disease. Pursuing such a “complicated, disruptive idea” needs $3bn, he adds.

“If you had a typical $60mn or $100mn investment, it wouldn’t really be thoughtful to try to tackle this problem”, he explains.

Altos, which launched at the start of 2022, is now the best known of the well-funded experiments trying to turbocharge anti-ageing science. The first was Calico Life Sciences, an Alphabet company, founded in 2013, where Barron used to lead research.

Klausner and Barron criticise the academic funding model for creating an environment that doesn’t encourage tackling the biggest questions.

Instead of putting pressure on their researchers to publish in the best journals, or placing a premium on being the first author on a paper, they will be judged on whether they are working on the hardest problems.

“It’s an experiment, but I think it is an experiment that’s worth all of us committing the rest of our careers to”, Klausner concluded.

Robert Nelsen, co-founder at Arch Venture Partners, says the company only wanted very long-term investors. His group can hold shares in Altos for 10 to 15 years if necessary, though he believes other investors will see the value long before it lands on a “Holy Grail”.

“If this works, it doesn’t matter if we’ve waited. If you cure disease in my business, you are going to make money”, he says.

Jonathan Lewis, chief business officer at Calico, says a “chunk of funding” from Alphabet, then known as Google, allowed the company to focus on early biology when it launched in 2013.

But since then, it has attracted funding from the pharmaceutical company AbbVie. The partnership has been renewed twice, and Alphabet and AbbVie have now both committed to investing $3.5bn.

The money is significant for the 275-person organisation, but small fry for Alphabet, with its $1.2tn market capitalisation, and AbbVie, at $292bn.

Now, Calico has three potential drugs in early clinical trials.

More conventional venture capitalists are entering the field, but they focus on companies that are testing broader principles of anti-ageing science in specific trials that could produce drugs more quickly. However, the step-by-step approach could be slower, and if the first trial fails, a company may suffer, potentially undermining its larger vision.

The ethics of private research

The well-funded new kids on the block have ignited debates about whether governments have their scientific priorities right, and the consequences of shifting more early stage science into private institutions.

Government funding is growing but is still nowhere near matching the investment raised by organisations like Altos. The US National Institutes of Health has an ageing division, but a rise in its budget in the past decade was mainly devoted to Alzheimer’s. The UK has begun to take notice, but the money is spread thinly: the government’s national research funding body, UK Research and Innovation, spent £2mn setting up 11 networks.

James Wilsdon, director of the Research on Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, says public funds need to be directed where they can deliver benefits more immediately.

“The need is great enough as it is, without then taking on much longer term, more speculative questions”, he says.

He added that there is a suspicion that those who stress the need for “long-termism” are actually dressing up their “individual, narcissistic, selfish desires to find ways of extending their own life as long as possible”. “You can paint as much lipstick on a pig as you want, but it is still a pig of an argument for allocating health funding”, he says.

Wareham, the bioethicist, says we need to get away from the “disturbing image of these kinds of vampire-like billionaires, concocting extension potions and experimenting on themselves”, and realise that even if they are self-interested, they can “afford to make a lot of mistakes”, which governments cannot.

Governments are also contributing in less obvious ways. Lewis describes the UK as “prescient” for setting up the UK Biobank, a genetic and health information database of half a million participants. This proved so useful that Calico is helping fund more scans to improve its understanding of how disease progresses in older adults.

Within the field, some envy peers who no longer have to fill out endless funding applications. Lynne Cox, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who specialises in ageing science, spends most of her time “scrambling around for little pots of money”. Even basic resources like pipettes can be in short supply.

She contrasts this with a colleague who recently joined Altos. “He has the freedom to do science the way science should be done”, she says.

Cox has taken funds from Jim Mellon, a British former fund manager who also co-founded Juvenescence, a biotech devoted to longevity, who she describes as a “one of those ideal donors” who does not micromanage.

Others worry that the private companies engaging in early research could restrict access to innovations. While Altos researchers will be free to publish their findings, and Calico declares itself “pro-publishing”, some suspect they are less free than in academia.

The pharmaceutical industry already guards its intellectual property closely, and has been accused of setting drug prices too high. As anti-ageing science gets closer to market, there will be big ethical questions about how fairly treatments are distributed.

Mehmood Khan, chief executive of Hevolution Foundation, a non-profit devoted to longevity research backed by the Saudi royal family that has pledged $1bn a year in investment, says its vision is to “extend healthy lifespan for the benefit of all humanity”, to ensure it doesn’t exacerbate the gap in life expectancy between the rich and poor. He says Hevolution is only funding work that could be “democratised”.

“If this is going to be a gazillion-dollars’ worth of treatment for a handful of people, it is of no interest”, he says.

Altos says it wants to help as many patients with serious medical needs as possible, and is committed to working with the healthcare ecosystem on access and equity.

To speed innovation and encourage wider access, governments have usually been the main contributors to fundamental science, answering essential questions, which do not lead directly to products.

Ronald Kohanski, director of the division of ageing biology at the US National Institute on Aging, says that while in the Renaissance scientists relied on wealthy people’s pockets, in modern times western governments have supported open science.

“Not everybody who was offered the large salaries by Altos went. Some prefer to stay in academia”, he says.

He adds that people with private funding are not subject to the same “compulsion” as those with government money: to ensure their findings are accessible, and that any positive consequences are available to everyone.

“If you’re doing something to make money, you’re going to optimise your profit. That’s capitalism in a nutshell”, he says.

Source

 The extreme warm spell followed a record-warm year in many parts of Europe and provided yet another example of how human-caused climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of such extraordinary weather events.

On New Year’s Day, at least seven countries saw their warmest January weather on record as temperatures surged to springtime levels: Latvia hit 52 degrees (11.1 Celsius); Denmark 54.7 degrees (12.6 Celsius); Lithuania 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius); Belarus 61.5 degrees (16.4 Celsius); the Netherlands 62.4 degrees (16.9 Celsius); Poland 66.2 degrees (19.0 Celsius); and the Czech Republic 67.3 degrees (19.6 Celsius).

Those who track worldwide weather records described the warm spell as historic and could hardly believe its scope and magnitude.

Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who tracks global weather extremes, called the event “totally insane” and “absolute madness” in text messages to the Capital Weather Gang. He wrote that some of the high nighttime temperatures observed were uncommon in midsummer.

It’s “the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology,” Herrera wrote. “Nothing stands close to this.”

Guillaume Séchet, a broadcast meteorologist in France, agreed, tweeting that Sunday was one of the most incredible days in Europe’s climate history.

“The intensity and extent of warmth in Europe right now is hard to comprehend,” tweeted Scott Duncan, a meteorologist based in London.

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Have you heard the saying "water is life?" Well, it's true.

Water is an essential nutrient. Our body cannot produce sufficient water to live, so we need to consume water through food and fluids to survive.

Maintaining hydration is one of the most fundamental components of good health. But lots of people don't like drinking plain water much. The good news is there are many other healthy ways to help you stay hydrated.

Why hydration is important

Water is vital for many aspects of body functioning. About half our blood is "blood plasma", which is over 90 percent water. Blood plasma is essential for carrying energy, nutrients and oxygen to the cells in the body that need it most.

Water helps to remove waste products via the kidneys. It also helps keep joints lubricated, the digestive system functioning, the body's temperature controlled and skin plump and strong.

If you don't consume enough water, you may experience symptoms of dehydration such as headaches, dizziness, tiredness, low concentration, constipation and a dry mouth. Being severely dehydrated increases the risk of kidney stones and urinary tract infections.

If you feel thirsty, it means your body is already mildly dehydrated, so make sure you pay attention to what your body is telling you.

How much fluid do you need?

The amount of fluid we need changes as we age. Relative to our body weight, our needs decrease. So, a newborn baby has higher fluid needs (per kilogram body weight) than their parent, and older adults have lower fluid needs than younger adults.

Fluid requirements are related to metabolic needs and vary from person-to-person. The normal turnover of water in adults is approximately 4 percent of total body weight per day.

So, for example, if you weigh 70 kilograms (154 pounds), you'll lose about 2.5 to 3 liters of water a day (not including sweating). This means you will need to consume that amount of water from food and drinks to maintain your hydration.

Eight cups (or two liters) a day is often mentioned as the amount of water we should aim for and a nice way to track your intake. But it doesn't account for individual variation based on age, gender, body size and activity levels.

Alcohol is a diuretic, which means it dehydrates the body by promoting water loss through urine. This fluid loss is a key factor that contributes to the severity of a hangover. Always have a glass of water in between alcoholic drinks to help stay hydrated.

Caffeinated drinks (like tea and coffee) only have a mild diuretic effect. For most healthy adults, it's okay to consume up to 400 mg of caffeine a day – that's about four cups of coffee or eight cups of tea. If you drink more than this, it may impact your hydration levels.

To check your specific requirements, check out the Australian guidelines for fluid intake.

People who should take extra care

Some people are at greater risk of the harmful health effects from dehydration and need to pay special attention to their fluid intake.

The highest priority groups are babies, young kids, pregnant women, and older adults. These groups are at greater risk for many reasons, including relatively higher water needs per kilo of body weight, reduced ability to detect and respond to symptoms of dehydration, and barriers to consuming fluids regularly.

Family and friends can play an important role in supporting loved ones to maintain hydration, especially during warm weather.

Ten ideas for keeping fluids up

Download a water reminder app on your phone

This will help keep you on track during the day and give you digital "high fives" when you hit your water goals.

Add sugar-free flavoring

Try a sugar-free fruit infusion in your water to make it more appealing. Prepare a jug in the refrigerator and infuse it overnight so it's chilled for you the next day. Fill it up and take it everywhere with you!

Add some fresh fruit
Add some slices of lime, lemon, berries, pineapple or orange to your water bottle for some natural flavoring. If the bottle is kept in a fridge, the fruit will stay fresh for about three days.

Make a jug of iced tea (not the bottled stuff)

There are many great sugar-free recipes online. Tea contributes to fluid intake too. For green and black teas, brew in boiling water then cool overnight on the bench before refrigerating. Fruit teas can be made using cold water immediately.

Add a dash of cordial to your water
A small amount of cordial in your water is a healthier alternative to drinking a sugar-sweetened soft drink or fruit juice. Diet cordials have less added sugar again.

Make a fruit 'slushie'
Combine fresh fruit, ice and water at home in the morning and sip to increase your fluid intake for the day.

Buy a soda maker for your home
Some people find plain water tastes better with bubbles. Sparkling mineral water is great too, as long as there is no added sugar or sweeteners.
   

Before you eat anything, have a glass of water
Make it a rule with yourself to have a glass of water before every snack or meal.

Eat water-rich fruits and vegetables
Many fruits and vegetables have a high water content. Some of the best include berries, oranges, grapes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, spinach and melons. Keep a container full of cut-up fruit to snack on in your fridge.

Use a water bottle
Take it with you during the day and keep it by your bed overnight.

A tip on water bottles

Water bottles are everywhere and sometimes seem to offer emotional support as well as hydration.

Having a water bottle you enjoy using can go a long way in helping you keep up your fluids during the day.

    i don't know who needs to hear this, but please go wash your emotional support water bottle
    — Rio (@riomat7) August 28, 2022

Pay attention to the material of the water bottle and use one that helps you form good habits. Some people prefer metal water bottles as they can keep water cooler for longer (others feel like they are camping).

Some prefer glass bottles because the water isn't affected by any flavors from the container (others fear breaking the glass).

Consider the practical aspects, too: Will it fit in your bag? Will it be light enough to carry with you? Can you "chug" on it when you're exceptionally thirsty? Does the lid require screwing? How durable is it in preventing leaks? Do some homework on your water bottle, an essential accessory!

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

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A growing number of countries are worried about a lack of data and transparency surrounding China's outbreak.

Here is why it is sparking concern:

Unreliable data

Beijing has admitted the scale of the outbreak has become "impossible" to track following the end of mandatory mass testing last month.

The National Health Commission has stopped publishing daily nationwide infection and death statistics.

That responsibility has been transferred to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which will only publish figures once a month after China downgrades its management protocols for the disease on January 8.

China has only reported 15 COVID deaths since it began unwinding restrictions on December 7, shortly after which it narrowed the criteria by which deaths from the coronavirus are recorded.

This has stoked concerns that the wave of infections is not being accurately reflected in official statistics.

Authorities admitted last week that the scale of data collected is "much smaller" than when mandatory mass PCR testing was in place.

CDC official Yin Wenwu said authorities are now compiling data from hospitals and local government surveys as well as emergency call volumes and fever medicine sales, which will "make up for deficiencies in our reporting".

Chinese hospitals and crematoriums are struggling with an influx of patients and bodies, with rural areas hit particularly hard.

Several countries including the United States, Australia and Canada last week said they were imposing testing restrictions on arrivals from China because of a lack of transparency on infection data.

Piecemeal estimates

Last month, a few local and regional authorities began sharing estimated daily infection totals as the scale of the outbreak remained unclear.

Disease control authorities in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang said Tuesday that the number of new cases jumped one million in the past few days, and "the epidemic is expected to enter a peak plateau in January".

The Zhejiang cities of Quzhou and Zhoushan said at least 30 percent of the population had contracted the virus.

The eastern coastal city of Qingdao also estimated around 500,000 new daily cases and the southern manufacturing centre of Dongguan forecast up to 300,000.

Officials in the island province of Hainan estimated Friday that the infection rate there had surpassed 50 percent.

But top health official Wu Zunyou said Thursday that the peak had passed in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Tianjin, with Guangzhou city officials saying the same on Sunday.

A senior doctor at a Shanghai hospital estimated Tuesday that up to 70 percent of the city's 25 million population may have been infected in the current wave.

Leaked notes from a meeting of health officials last month revealed they believed 250 million people had been infected across China in the first 20 days of December.

Independent infection models paint a grim picture. University of Hong Kong researchers have estimated nearly one million Chinese may die this winter as a result of opening up.

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.

New variants?

Many countries have cited concerns over potential new variants as a reason to screen Chinese arrivals for COVID.

But there is as yet no evidence of new strains emerging from the current wave.

Top CDC official Xu Wenbo said last month that China was developing a national genetic database of COVID samples derived from hospital surveillance that would help track mutations.

Chinese health experts have said in recent days that the Omicron subvariants BA.5.2 and BF.7 are most prevalent in Beijing, in response to public fears that the Delta variant may still be circulating.

They said Omicron also remained the most dominant strain in Shanghai.

In many Western nations, these strains have been overtaken by the more transmissible subvariants XBB and BQ, which are not yet dominant in China.

Beijing has submitted 384 Omicron samples in the past month to the global online database GISAID, according to its website.

But the country's total number of submissions to the database, at 1,308, is dwarfed by those of other nations, including the United States, Britain, Cambodia and Senegal.

Recent samples from China "all closely resemble known globally circulating variants seen... between July and December", GISAID said Friday.

University of Hong Kong virologist Jin Dong-yan said on an independent podcast last month that people need not fear the risk of a deadlier new variant in China.

"Many places all over the world have experienced (large-scale infection) but a more deadly or pathogenic variant did not emerge afterwards," said Jin.

"I'm not saying that the emergence of a (more deadly) strain is completely impossible, but the possibility is very small."

© 2023 AFP

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At two hospitals in the city, AFP journalists saw hundreds of mostly elderly patients lying on gurneys in public areas as emergency wards filled beyond capacity.

Swaddled in blankets, coats and woollen hats, many were attached to intravenous drips, heart monitors or oxygen tanks, and were visibly struggling to breathe. A few appeared not fully responsive.

In one hospital, AFP witnessed an exchange between a woman and an older man, both jostling for a drip.

"I was here first," she said. "I'm here to get a needle too."

Beijing last month rapidly demolished key pillars of its zero-COVID policy, doing away with snap lockdowns, mass testing and state quarantines in a matter of days.

The reversal of three years of hardline curbs sparked relief nationwide, but has unleashed a torrent of infections on the country's patchy healthcare system and overloaded funeral homes and crematoriums.

Even in Shanghai, one of China's richest cities, the crisis is acute. Around 70 percent of the megacity's population—equivalent to around 18 million people—may have caught COVID since last month, according to state media reports.

Suffering in public

In a waiting area at Huashan Hospital—located a stone's throw from the site of anti-lockdown protests in November—a woman bent over a sickened man of around 80, a profusion of tubes springing from his emaciated hand.

Nearby, a young man stood sentry beside the bed of another elderly patient, shielding him from the crowds of people walking past.

At Tongren Hospital in the west of the city, a middle-aged woman in a facial mask gently lifted a flask to the parched lips of a man hooked up to an oxygen cylinder.

Nearby, a medical worker wearing blue scrubs and a face visor attended to a grey-haired woman in a red jumper as she shivered under a thick blanket.

Doctors and nurses at hospitals in multiple cities have told AFP they have continued to treat patients despite testing positive for the virus themselves.

In Shanghai, many also soldiered on, letting out the occasional dry cough as they flitted from patient to patient.

China's National Health Commission last month announced that it would no longer publish daily case figures, and a separate tally kept by the country's disease control body is widely considered inaccurate now that testing mandates have been scrapped.

The country has also narrowed the definition of what counts as a COVID death in a move that some experts say will underestimate the true number of fatalities due to the disease.

© 2023 AFP

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Surprisingly, it's a question most researchers have ignored until now. But in a series of recent studies, we asked people "where in your day to day life do you think psychological tactics are being used to manipulate you unconsciously?"—and investigated what that meant for their belief in free will.

In a 2018 study across four countries (Australia, Canada, U.K. and the U.S.), responses to the question above were remarkably similar. In fact, they cut across age, gender, religiosity and political affiliation.

Approximately 45% of the examples people gave of psychological manipulation referred to marketing and advertising—especially "subliminal advertising" (using images or sounds to entice or persuade people that they aren't consciously aware of). The next most common (19%) was research (such as using placebos), then political campaigning (7%), social media (4%) and hypnotherapy (4%).

People typically described methods that subtly change mood, emotions and thoughts in such a way they that they persuade us into choosing or doing things that we have not consciously consented to. For instance, shops can pipe the smell of fresh baked bread outside it to entice people in. In a speech, a politician may emphasize specific words to persuade people to support them. Despite knowing such a thing could happen, we typically can't be sure when we were being manipulating in this way.

But do methods such as subliminal messaging actually work? Psychological research has not settled on an answer to this. But it is interesting to ponder how all this affects our belief in free will.

Rating scenarios

We set out to investigate this topic over the past two years. Across eight studies we presented 1,230 people with scenarios based on the earlier examples people had volunteered in the study conducted in 2018. The scenarios were from a range of contexts (marketing/advertising, research, political campaigning, social media, therapy).

For each scenario people had to rate the extent to which they believed there was unconscious manipulation (from none at all to complete manipulation), and the extent to which free choice would be maintained (from none at all to complete free choice).

Each person had to give ratings of free choice and ratings of unconscious manipulation several times over because they had to do this for each of the scenarios they were presented with. Totaling up all the ratings given across all eight studies across all 1,230 participants generated over 14,000 of each of the two ratings. A total of 3.7% of the 14,000 ratings of free choice were "0" (no free choice at all) and 8.4% were "10" (complete free choice)—with the remainder being somewhere in the between.

These are crude indicators, but they give a reasonable impression that even where manipulation was described to be occurring, there was proportionally more attributions of complete free choice than of absolutely none. For ratings of unconscious manipulation, 3.4% were "0" (no unconscious manipulation) and 9% were "10" (complete unconscious manipulation). So overall, people were more likely to think they had complete free choice than not at all, but they are also more likely to believe they were sometimes being manipulated than not at all.

We had expected to find what researchers call a negative correlation. That is, the more people think they are being manipulated, the less they believe they have free will. But this isn't what we found. In the majority of the studies, there was no reliable correlation between the two. How can this be?

Justifying beliefs

One reason for this is how we think of the manipulation methods. Chances are we don't think they'll work very well on us, personally—leaving people to believe they remain in charge of their choices.

We did, however, find a difference when people were giving ratings from an impersonal point of view and when they are asked to imagine themselves in the scenarios. The more vividly people imagined the possibility of being manipulated, the more they saw this to impinge on their free choice. But chances are we are biased to think of others as more manipulated than ourselves.

The scenarios weren't equal either. Some people don't especially care that there might be manipulation going on. If marketing tactics and advertising steer us into selecting one cheap brand of toothpaste compared to another, then as long as we are saving money, it doesn't matter. So people justify their belief in free will by assuming manipulation only happens for situations they don't care about or that they are actively choosing to be manipulated—they are letting it happen.

That might be a reasonable approach to advertising. But if we are going into a voting booth, we will want to claim that it is our free choice who we vote for, and not a combination of psychological tactics that meddled with our unconscious. In such a situation, we are more likely to believe there's no manipulation going on, or that we are somehow immune to it.

What the findings from our work tells us is that on a fundamental level we want to preserve a belief that we are free to choose. But how much we maintain the belief seems to depend on what is at stake.

While this may seem irrational, it is actually rather helpful and healthy. Ultimately, the world as we know it would totally collapse if we refused to believe we are responsible for our own actions.

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Stress is a normal physical and psychological response to the everyday demands of life. Small amounts of stress can motivate you to face daily challenges. But when stress becomes too much to manage, it can be unhealthy.

Everyone experiences stressful times, but can you tell when stress is becoming toxic?

"I think some key signs are when we're not able to do our important life activities, like if we're not able to remember our appointments or work, procrastinating on important things like paying our bills or buying groceries, or attending to our family matters," says Dr. Beth Rush, a Mayo Clinic neuropsychologist.

When stress reaches a point where a person no longer can function in a meaningful way, it might be a sign of something more severe, says Dr. Rush. And you should see a health care provider.

"Something serious may be going on, like anxiety or depression, which needs to be treated and evaluated."

She says stress can be unpredictable, and it's important to take care of yourself.

"Sleep, eat well, make sure you're exercising," says Dr. Rush. "Look for signs of stress in yourself. Manage your emotions. Give yourself a timeout if you need to from activity or stimulation, or interaction."

Provided by Mayo Clinic.

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